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The States Leading States initiative — a Harvard Graduate School of Education program that aims to identify effective schooling policies by analyzing state education programs — announced its first cohort of partner states last month.

The group includes Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Texas. Data analysts with the SLS program will work with local government officials across all nine states to evaluate a range of education policies, from summer reading and math camps in Alabama to literacy programs for elementary students in Colorado.

“What we are hoping to do with this project is support state leadership, but also support learning about what’s actually working with state policy,” said Scott E. Sargrad, the senior director of the SLS initiative, which is housed under the Center for Education Policy Research at HGSE.

The program’s findings will be shared through annual reports, the first of which will be published this spring. Illinois State Superintendent of Education Anthony “Tony” V. Sanders said he was excited to receive data-backed solutions for improving educational outcomes in Illinois.

“This initiative gives us a powerful forum to exchange ideas, strengthen our data use and support continuous school improvement, so I’m looking forward to engaging,” Sanders said.

The SLS program will specifically evaluate his state’s policies for mitigating student cellphone use and improving its students’ math performance. Sanders said he hopes the HGSE program could help identify metrics for evaluating whether phone bans are effective.

“One of the things that we’ve also discussed with Harvard is, number one, how do we measure success around that?” Sanders said. “How do we explore and support districts in creating safe, focused learning environments that are cell phone free?”

The SLS initiative was launched in January. But Thomas J. Kane, a HGSE professor who serves as the faculty director of CEPR, said that he and his colleagues had been interested in forming such a program for nearly two decades.

According to Kane, Joel I. Klein, the then-Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, asked Kane and his colleagues in 2005 to evaluate aspects of the city’s education system. Klein told the researchers that the school system lacked the internal resources to run such an analysis, Kane said.

“Because he was saying he didn’t have the internal capacity to do this kind of work, we just thought, ‘Well gosh, if Joel Klein, the chancellor of the largest school district in the country, doesn’t have the capacity to do this, then nobody does,’” Kane said.

CEPR eventually raised funds to support the SLS initiative, including $10 million from the Walton Family Foundation that will sustain the program for the next four years. The center has also trained around 700 data analysts since 2008 through its Strategic Data Project, a HGSE program that focuses on using data to inform education policy. The SLS program will primarily draw on those analysts, Sargrad and Kane said.

Kane also said that the SLS program involves both conservative and liberal states, making the initiative bipartisan. He said that was an intentional attempt to focus on issues in education policy where there is more potential for bipartisan consensus.

“You could probably tell from the initial list of states that this includes both blue and red states,” Kane said. “Our plan is to stay away from culture war issues, where there are disagreements, and instead focus on initiatives to improve student achievement and to reduce absenteeism.”

Kane added that there has been a decade of falling academic achievement in U.S. schools, and that he hoped the SLS program could help provide insight into how education leaders could implement policies to reverse that trend.

“We’re a decade into this decline in achievement,” he said. “We’re really focused on trying to provide some answers on that in the next year.”

—Staff writer Mia F. Lupica can be reached at mia.lupica@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Jordanos S. Sisay can be reached at jordanos.sisay@thecrimson.com.