Dara Zeehandelaar Shaw, Director, DC Education Research Collaborative

Shubhangi Kumari, Research Analyst, Urban Institute

The DC Education Research Collaborative is a research-practice partnership that brings together researchers and the communities who will use and be affected by the research to improve student outcomes in DC public schools. An essential component of the Collaborative is our 21-member community Advisory Committee. Established as part of the Collaborative’s founding legislation, Advisory Committee members provide the expertise, experience, perspective, and context that researchers often lack. It holds the Collaborative accountable to the needs and preferences of the city’s students, their families and caregivers, and the educators and schools that support them. To systematically pursue equitable outcomes for students, Advisory Committee members need to have diverse, representative voices, and research needs to be set up to successfully include them.

Genuinely empowering Advisory Committee members to shape projects (rather than simply informing or consulting members) requires both committee members that represent DC’s community and clear, consistent processes for including their feedback. This piece will focus on the former.

At the end of 2024, the Advisory Committee was ready to fill seven vacancies for at-large members. At-large members may be parents, caregivers, students, alumni, educators, school staff members, advocates, or community members or leaders. The only requirement is to live or work in the District and to be active and interested members of DC’s public education community. At-large members represent a diverse set of perspectives reflective of experiences within the DC school system across race, class, ethnicity, gender, ability, city geography, and sector. (The Advisory Committee also has 11 institutional members who represent the city’s education providers, policymakers, and agencies.)

Over the past six months, the new members have more than filled their roles. Here’s what we learned from the process.

We established a low barrier to entry during recruitment. Recruitment began with a call for applicants using a simple, short online interest form. Multiple-choice questions asked whether the applicant lived or worked in the District, their current role within the education community, and basic demographic information. The form had one brief open-ended question asking why the applicant was interested in joining the Advisory Committee. The form also explained the Committee’s purpose and the time commitment and expectations of at-large members. It did not require a résumé, a personal statement, or any long-form responses, and it could easily be completed on a phone. By establishing initial contact with a form gauging interest, rather than with a time-intensive application, we created a no-pressure, easy access point for community members to join us. This expanded the pool of potential members who might be dissuaded by a formal process, allowed us to focus on an applicant’s interests rather than their credentials, and put the pressure on us to identify new members rather than on candidates to prove themselves.

We systematically sought and advanced applicants that brought missing or underrepresented perspectives. Our selection and recruitment process was driven by the question, “Whose voice can we elevate?” Our membership committee inventoried the Advisory Committee’s existing members and identified perspectives and demographic characteristics that were missing or underrepresented. We used our deep existing community networks to directly contact individuals or organizations who could fill the gaps, in addition to broadly sharing the interest form using general outreach. When we reviewed interest forms, we took their interests and their characteristics into account to make sure that the Advisory Committee members covered the city’s range of perspectives and communities. For instance, our membership committee sought candidates with experience working with students directly, so we prioritized teachers, school principals, program managers, and nonprofit staff members working directly with students. Other criteria included living or working in an area of the city that was underrepresented on the Advisory Committee, parenting or working with disabled students or speakers of languages other than English, and experience with education-adjacent topics like housing, health, safety, and youth engagement. 

We conducted flexible, conversational, human-centered interviews with candidates. During the interview, candidates shared their experiences, expressed their commitment to DC students, and explained how they saw the role of research in decisionmaking. Current Advisory Committee members met with applicants and asked them to share which segments of the education community they are most familiar with, which focus areas of the Collaborative’s research agenda they are most interested in, and their perspective on equity in education, a key pillar in the Collaborative’s work. Through this process, the interviewers learned about each candidate while gauging their willingness to hold the Collaborative accountable to actionable, relevant community-centered research and to steer it away from researcher-led work. This also helped candidates determine whether the opportunity was a good fit for them and helped us mutually see each other as complete people rather than individuals defined solely by our jobs or roles.

The Results

Seven individuals were invited to join the advisory committee in early 2025, all of whom accepted the role. Here are the results we’re seeing.

• Representation: The Advisory Committee has a range of experiences and vantage points from stakeholders that are both diverse and representative of DC’s varied public school community.
• Engagement: Advisory Committee members engage in conversations with depth, insight, meaningful collaboration, and respectful disagreements.
• Community and belonging: The Advisory Committee continues to align new members with the broader mission and core values of improving student outcomes and equity. This creates a genuine space for the entire Collaborative to listen, learn, agree, and disagree. 

The DC Education Research Collaborative will begin recruiting new Advisory Committee members for 2026 in November. Stay tuned for more.