Regional Needs  |  Projects

Northeast & Islands: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire,
New York, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont, & Virgin Islands

REL-NEI serves a geographically large and demographically diverse region that includes more than 5.3 million students, 11,000 schools, and 2,600 districts across the six New England states, New York, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The region encompasses many isolated school systems in economically distressed rural regions as well as several of the largest districts in the country. Despite this diversity, the P–20 education systems of all nine jurisdictions struggle with similar issues, including improving low-performing schools, preparing students for college and careers, and increasing educator effectiveness. Each jurisdiction also is seeking to build more innovative and equitable educational opportunities during a time of significant budgetary stress.

Research Alliances

Research alliances in REL NEI include:

• Northeast Educator Effectiveness Research Alliance: This alliance provides research to support states' and districts' educator evaluation systems and to build states' and districts' capacity to evaluate their own systems.
• Northeast Rural Districts Research Alliance: This alliance provides research to support rural schools' and districts' efforts to ensure student success; to understand their local capacity to support these efforts; and to build capacity to understand data specific to related programs and initiatives.
• Urban School Improvement Alliance: This alliance helps to build capacity among its local education agency (LEA) members to use and access data to address questions around improving low-performing schools. Members are interested in examining school performance in conjunction with larger social, organizational, and instructional contexts.
• Early Childhood Education Research Alliance: The broad vision of this alliance is to bring together the region's early childhood stakeholders in the united pursuit of improving early childhood programming and children's outcomes through research- and evidence-based practices. The alliance will co-create a research agenda that focuses on standards, practices, and assessment in early childhood education.
• English Language Learners Alliance: This alliance collaborates with states, districts, and schools on the use of data to understand the diversity of their ELL populations and explore the programs and services that best meet their diverse needs.
• Quality Education to Meet the Diverse Needs of English Language Learners Research Alliance: This alliance collaborate with states, districts, and schools on the use of data to understand the diversity of their ELL populations and explore the programs and services that best meet their diverse needs.
• Northeast College and Career Readiness Research Alliance: This alliance provides research to support the work of seven northeastern states as they assess and enhance secondary-school initiatives designed to increase graduation rates and ensure students' readiness for college-level work and the workforce.
• Puerto Rico Research Alliance for Dropout Prevention: This alliance will collaborate to support the goal of preventing and reducing the number of students dropping out of school by providing applied research and analytic technical support on how to best utilize available data to both establish robust early warning systems and to identify interventions to help improve outcomes for students at risk.
• U.S. Virgin Islands College and Career Readiness Research Alliance: This alliance supports the Virgin Islands Department of Education (VIDE) in its efforts to prevent and reduce the number of students dropping out of school by providing applied research and analytic technical support on how to best utilize available data to both establish robust early warning systems and to identify interventions to help improve outcomes for students at risk.

Corporate Experience

Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), the prime contractor for REL Northeast & Islands since 2006, has been providing research support and technical assistance to schools, districts, and state education agencies (SEAs) across the region for more than 50 years. The company has established extensive networks and relationships with educators and policymakers.

Lab Director:
Jill E. Weber
Governing Board