Job Details

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's mission is to catalyze transformational change in education, so that every student has the opportunity to lead a healthy, dignified, and fulfilling life. Over the last century, the Foundation's work has had a profound and positive impact, including creating the Carnegie Unit (the credit hour), TIAA-CREF, Pell Grants, ETS, the Flexner Report (shaping U.S. medical education), the Carnegie Classifications, and Improvement Science. Today, the Foundation is focused on two intersecting fronts with strong connection to our legacy: transforming the American high school and evolving postsecondary education into a more effective engine for social and economic mobility.

The Carnegie Foundation's Impact Lab leverages analytics and builds evidence about the most promising learning tools, models, and partnerships for K-12 transformation and postsecondary innovation. These include efforts to explore new measures and tools for assessing, documenting, and credentialing learning; discover and incubate practical models for scaling alternatives to the Carnegie Unit focused on competency-based learning, and identify successful programs and practices for educational institutions to advance long-term social and economic mobility.

Position Purpose

To support these efforts, the Foundation is seeking a Director, Research Engagement (“Director.”) The Director plays a critical role in advancing the Foundation's mission by supporting the generation and use of research in service to the Foundation's high school transformation efforts.

The Director has a strong analytic background, demonstrated approaches to creative and interdisciplinary research design, a commitment to using evidence to drive meaningful transformation in education, and deep experience in developing and exchanging knowledge through publications, presentations, and direct engagement with diverse audiences.

The Director has multiple areas of focus in their work:

• Leads collective engagement with and ongoing maintenance of a national research and development agenda to advance educational transformation by partnering with multiple audiences about its use, reviewing existing literature, and updating it with additional evidence and emerging questions.

• Builds a network of research-practice partnerships to facilitate the generation and use of evidence aligned to the research and development agenda across a range of populations and contexts.

• Leads codification of learnings and outcomes across diverse sites of learning as they implement innovative tools and practices, with particular attention to systems-level conditions and processes.

• Represents the Foundation in thought leadership opportunities to disseminate learnings including regional and national conferences, publications and media opportunities.

Essential Responsibilities

Builds, leads and facilitates complex partnerships with academic, policy, practitioner, and community audiences to formulate productive research questions and plans contributing to a coherent research program, critically evaluate evidence, and explore implications for action.

• Convenes leaders across different roles and backgrounds to build alliances around shared interests and priorities.

• Builds relational trust and nurtures partnerships that honor the strengths of different forms of professional expertise and lived experience, elicits diverse perspectives and equitable participation.

• Exemplifies a service orientation; models humility with data.

• Employs outstanding active listening skills to sensitively explore and understand diverse concerns.

• Facilitates constructive dialogue to balance power dynamics among education practitioners and leaders, researchers, and community partners.

Designs, conducts, interprets, and supports the use of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods analyses. Develops study designs appropriate to the research question and context . Utilizes a range of participatory methods (e.g., user-centered design, community-based participatory research), as appropriate to the context, to include local students, families, educators, staff, and other community members in gathering, analyzing, and interpreting evidence to inform decision-making. Collects data through surveys, structured and semi-structured interviews, focus groups, observations, assessments, artifacts, and documentation of decision-making processes. Codes, scores, visualizes, analyzes, and integrates qualitative and quantitative data (e.g., content analysis, thematic analysis, factor analysis, regression).

Partners to develop research designs to evaluate the implementation, impact, and sustainability of innovative programs and tools, such as skills-based assessments, instructional resources, early postsecondary access, and work-based learning programs. A particular focus will be on evaluating distribution of opportunity and outcomes, including traditional measures of academic attainment as well as belonging and engagement, transferable/ durable skills, and long-term economic mobility.

• Examples of potential studies include: effectiveness evaluations that capture changes in competencies and attitudes as outcomes; implementation studies that assess individual and organizational conditions and processes and sustainability; and participatory evaluations anchored in community priorities that examine partnership dynamics and long-term impact.

Builds and integrates evidence from multiple sources (e.g., external research, local evaluation and improvement projects, organizational process and outcome data, interest holder perspectives) to inform system improvement and transformation, as well as new research needs.

• Synthesizes and summarizes relevant research literature through rapid reviews;

• Guides teams in collaborative articulation of priorities and rationale for investigations (needs analysis, theory of action, priority-setting, targets), valid interpretation of evidence, and joint decision-making integrating shared values, theory, and evidence;

• Reviews, critiques, and recommends revisions for research and evaluation proposals based on both relevance and rigor;

• Recognizes synergies across projects that motivate new partnerships and innovative approaches to advance transformative change; and

• Applies systems thinking by analyzing relationships, root causes, and potential consequences to identify emerging research needs and intervention opportunities.

Presents results clearly in oral and written form, including a variety of knowledge products. Represents the Foundation at professional conferences and with leading academics and practitioners in the field. Produces timely reports to guide practical application, as well as high-quality research reports for peer-reviewed academic journals and makes significant contributions to the education field's knowledge base.

Leads, mentors, and supports direct reports; manages team workload and collaboration effectively and fosters an inclusive, high-performing work environment.

Required Education & Experience

• Ph.D. in education or a related social science field with a focus in education.

• Professional experience in formal (PK-12 and/or postsecondary school systems) or informal learning settings.

• Strategic leadership and management experience such as managing research-practice partnerships or research networks, preferably in a K-12 or postsecondary educational setting.

• Evidence of and accomplishment in working with educators to identify and use measures and related analytics to reflect on performance.

• Demonstrated success functioning as a knowledge broker across diverse roles, perspectives, and forms of expertise, including education practitioners, leaders, and policymakers; students, families, and other community members; and researchers.

• Evidence of and accomplishment in education-related research

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Strong leadership skills to align team efforts with organizational goals.

• Proficiency in traditional educational research methods paired with flexibility in adapting those methodologies in service of meaningful outcomes in schools and systems..

• Thorough knowledge of educational systems (including organization, structure, governance, and social contexts) and key challenges they face.

• Strong mixed-methods research skills to design, conduct, interpret, and evaluate studies using exploratory and explanatory methods to generate hypotheses, elucidate causal mechanisms, and develop and test theories.

• Demonstrated ability to select and apply a range of qualitative and quantitative techniques appropriate to the research question and context including experience using analytic packages such as NVivo, R, Stata, etc.

• Experience conducting formative and summative evaluations for external interest holders.

• Perspective-taking skill to understand the types of measures, analyses, evidence, visualizations, reports, etc. that are useful in practical settings for students, staff, communities, and institutions.

• Ability to work with multiple constituencies including post-secondary education administrators, institutional researchers, K-12 practitioners and administrators, program leads, policymakers, and the public.

• Highly collaborative and flexible with ability to work in a fast-paced environment while being proactive in decision making and time management.

• Strong problem-solving and organizational skills as well as the ability to manage multiple work streams simultaneously.

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.

• Demonstrated ability to actively seek, provide, and effectively incorporate constructive feedback

Compensation & Benefits

• The salary for this position is $180,308 annually
• Benefits include full medical, dental, vision, life and long-term care insurance, as well as employer subsidized flexible spending plans
• A retirement savings plan, including employer contributions of up to 12% of base pay after one year of service
• Generous time-off benefits and 8 weeks of paid parental leave
• Matching Gift program to benefit charitable organizations
• Educational Assistance to further your professional development