Trusted, equity-focused, & community-engaged education researchers and policy experts.

Research for Action is a nonprofit education research organization. We use field-driven insights to advance equity in opportunities and outcomes for underserved students and their families along the early childhood to postsecondary education pipeline.

Unleash the Power of Data: Researching Education's Biggest Issues

RFA partners with a wide range of organizations to tackle critical questions in education. We evaluate programs, analyze policies, and conduct research on everything from early childhood development to the latest reform movements. Explore our current and past projects to see the impact we're making.

New Research Positions Open

Are you a researcher who envisions a just education system that supports all students, families, and their communities? Consider joining our team.

Educational Opportunity Dashboard

Built with data from the 2017-18 federal Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), this interactive tool from RFA allows users to compare disparities in access to educational opportunity for students in all 50 states and the nation. Visit the Dashboard to examine the data on your home state and review RFA’s reports about educational opportunity in the nation and in Pennsylvania.

Visit the Dashboard

Top 5 Insights from RFA's Community Research Partnership

Becoming a Community-Engaged Research Organization

We know that research is better and more impactful when communities are engaged throughout the research process. But how can research organizations become community-engaged? To document the “how,” Research for Action launched a Community Research Partnership, and after its first year, we’re documenting our learnings through a brief and an audio-doc, which share five key insights we’ve drawn from embarking on this transformative journey.

Top 5 Insights

About Us

For 30 years, RFA has conducted research and evaluation to improve education policy and practice. Using culturally-responsive and equity-focused approaches to research studies, collaboration, and partnership, we work to advance racial and social justice so that all students, families, and their communities have the resources and supports to develop their potential and thrive.

Featured Projects

Research for Action joined forces with KnowledgeWorks to examine personalized, competency-based learning in Arizona school districts. The goals were to deepen the data collection and analysis already underway through the development of summative implementation and outcomes analyses and case studies of a cohort of school districts in Arizona.

The OST Ecosystem study examines how these systems responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and the long-standing and new equity concerns in the OST system, as well as the value of these responses to other system-level leaders, OST providers, and caregivers.

Using mixed methods, RFA will assess the fidelity of the Relationships First program components, identifying key factors influencing implementation and sustainability. The goal is to provide SDP with actionable feedback for continuous improvement. Relationships First (RF) is a multi-tiered schoolwide restorative model that addresses disciplinary, academic, and social-emotional outcomes for K-12 students by fundamentally shifting relationships among and between adults and students in schools.

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Our Approach

A hallmark of RFA’s research and evaluation work is our responsive and collaborative approach to partnerships. Our research directly addresses the information needs of our partners and key stakeholders, knowing that education policies and contexts can shift, and important decisions need to be made to seize the moment to improve policy and practice.

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