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An initiative of Tulane University
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About

The Education Research Alliance for New Orleans (ERA-New Orleans) is a research center that collaborates with local education stakeholders to produce objective, rigorous, and useful research to inform the community’s understanding of how to improve students’ experiences in schools and beyond. ERA-New Orleans is housed in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University and supported by funding from Tulane's Murphy Institute.

The work of ERA is guid­ed by the fol­low­ing principles:

Guiding Principles

We believe that improving students’ experiences in school and beyond requires consideration of all the ways that schools affect students’ lives.

While test scores, col­lege, and oth­er aca­d­e­m­ic out­comes are impor­tant, we also want to under­stand, for exam­ple, the social and emo­tion­al well­be­ing of stu­dents and how schools affect their com­mu­ni­ties. This reflects the cen­tral role schools play in aca­d­e­m­ic, emo­tion­al, and social development.

We believe the issues that affect education are complex.

Research­ing these issues requires quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive analy­sis to bet­ter under­stand the imple­men­ta­tion and effects of edu­ca­tion poli­cies, hard-to-mea­sure aspects of edu­ca­tion, and how stake­hold­ers make sense of their schools and programs.

We believe that our work is most useful when we collaborate with partners and foster conversations that allow us to deepen our work and its impact through dialogue.

From the selec­tion of research ques­tions to the final draft of a pol­i­cy brief and pub­lic events, we work to ensure that the com­mu­ni­ty’s voic­es are reflect­ed in our work.

We strive for objectivity in our work.

We hope to achieve this by exam­in­ing issues from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives, sum­ma­riz­ing the main con­tours of edu­ca­tion debates and how our research informs those debates, and avoid­ing pub­lic advo­ca­cy for spe­cif­ic poli­cies and programs.

We believe that values are informed by experiences and vary from person to person.

We aim to avoid cen­ter­ing a par­tic­u­lar set of val­ues or expe­ri­ences in our work. In dis­cussing the impli­ca­tions of our work, we artic­u­late the val­ues implic­it in the programs/​policies we are study­ing and the extent to which those and oth­er val­ues are cap­tured in our analyses.

We strive for rigor in our work.

We hope to achieve this by start­ing our work with reviews of pri­or research by oth­er schol­ars, exam­in­ing data thor­ough­ly and using advanced research meth­ods, putting our drafts through exten­sive peer review process­es pri­or to release, and being explic­it about the lim­its of our analy­ses. We val­ue accu­ra­cy over speed and hold our­selves to the high­est aca­d­e­m­ic standards.

We believe racism, sexism, other forms of discrimination against marginalized groups, and systemic inequalities affect schools in many ways that we can address through our research.

This belief is infused in every­thing we do, includ­ing staff hir­ing and con­tract­ing, select­ing our advi­so­ry board mem­bers, how we treat every­one we inter­act with, the selec­tion of research top­ics, and how we car­ry out that research.