William T. Grant Foundation Grants

Research for the Real World

More than $1.4 million in new grant funding helps UCI School of Education professors study solutions for dismantling inequity and racism in schools – and for creating better learning environments for minoritized students.

By Phillip Jordan

The past few years have yielded longsuppressed and much-needed conversations about racial equity and racial justice in America. There’s an awareness in the education community that schools need to be involved in addressing those issues, too, says June Ahn, a professor of learning sciences and research-practice partnerships (RPP) at the UC Irvine School of Education.

“But what’s not clear to most school systems and educational leaders is how they do that,” Ahn says.

To help supply some of those answers, Ahn secured a three-year, $600,000 grant (2021-2024) from the William T. Grant Foundation. The funding will support Ahn’s ongoing Anti-Racist Educations Partners for Action (AREPA) research project, a partnership between UCI’s Orange County Educational Advancement Network (OCEAN) – of which Ahn is the founding director – and UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies.

Collectively, their goal is to conduct research that leads to practical, actionable anti-racism solutions that educators can use to make positive changes in local schools. Ahn and his co-PI at UCLA, Kimberly Gomez, are using their Grant Foundation funding to develop and test two new research-practice partnerships.

Ahn’s team at UCI is working with a local teachers’ union in Orange County to provide tailored research that can inform the union’s anti-racism training for its members. Gomez’s UCLA team, meanwhile, is working with an L.A. County school on identifying the root of racism and exclusivism on its campus, and creating research-backed strategies for addressing those issues.

“What we’re not trying to do is just study the schools,” Ahn explains. “We received this funding specifically because they want us to answer the questions of how research can be useful to realworld partners. That’s our goal.”

For instance, in working with the local teachers’ union, Ahn’s team can provide research that identifies effective anti-racism messaging, anticipates potential backlash, and collects data

to help the union’s efforts moving forward.

“We want to really move the needle here,” Ahn says. “How can we scale up racial-awareness initiatives across school systems and teachers’ unions? How can we work with these groups to provide research that helps them shift resources, execute plans and create teacher-based or school-based change at scale?”

Ahn’s AREPA collaborative also plans to create a guide for how other research universities can similarly partner with schools in their communities.

“All of this is really about centering racial equity and trying to understand how each of us experiences race and racism,” Ahn says. “Then, together with our partners, we can co-design a research-informed system for solutions. It’s heavy, grounded work. But it’s invigorating to collaborate and see what brings people together and what makes our schools better places for all students to learn in.”

Reducing inequalities for English-Learning students

In 2017, Adriana Villavicencio was deputy director of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools at NYU. There, she co-led a William T. Grant Foundation-funded pilot project that evaluated the effectiveness of NYC’s Internationals Academies (IAs) for immigrant and refugee schoolchildren. IAs are specialized schools that deliver linguistically and culturally responsive teaching, along with tailored support to meet the socioemotional needs of multilingual students. IAs strive to meet a huge need. English learners, on average, graduate at much lower rates than their non-English-learning peers — nearly 20 percent less, in fact.

Villavicencio’s work revealed that IAs were more successful than traditional schools in raising attendance, graduation and college-entrance rates for English learners. The limitation, however, is that it’s not always easy for other school districts to replicate the IA model since it’s based on creating entirely new schools.

Since that study, Villavicencio returned to her native California as an assistant professor at UCI’s School of Education. Her research remains focused on educational policies and school practices that deepen or disrupt inequities for minoritized students and their families. And now she’ll have a chance to build on her previous IA research. This year, Villavicencio won a three-year $598,000 grant from the William T. Grant Foundation to study IA-created Learning Academies – new learning communities for English learners that are modeled after the successful IA network of schools but are nestled within existing schools.

“This study will help us understand if these Learning Academies achieve the same results,” Villavicencio explains. “If they are, I want to understand how and why they’re successful. What resources or infrastructure do you need to have in place?”

The aim of her research is not theoretical.

“The goal is to help replicate the outcomes of these schools in more communities across the country,” Villavicencio says. “This is research that’s driven by the needs of our partners and the communities they serve. We want to make real-world change that doesn’t just sit on a shelf somewhere. We want to disseminate what we find to superintendents, school boards and elected officials all over the country.”

The IA study is one strand of Villavicencio’s multi-pronged research approach to advancing equity and racial justice in schools. She also recently received a two-year, $250,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation to examine how racial justice programs in Southern California high schools can meaningfully nurture anti-racist cultures on their campuses.

“In all of this, I’m not just interested in documenting problems, but also in seeking promising areas of hope,” Villavicencio says. “I want to use my work to spotlight how more schools, districts and systems can do justice for young people who are historically the most underserved.”

June Ahn Adriana Villavicencio