The Houston Education Research Consortium is a research partnership between Rice University and 11 Houston-area school districts — including HISD — to guide data-driven, equity-minded policy.

The Houston Education Research Consortium (HERC) aims to produce research that is relevant, timely and useful for school district decision-making to address educational inequality in Houston and beyond.

Diverging from the traditional academic research model, HERC uses a partnership research model with the following features:

• a jointly developed research agenda that involves both university researchers and district leaders;
• a long-term, rather than project-based, collaboration that works to solve longstanding problems;
• a research agenda based on local questions and embedded in the local context and a focus on informing education decision-makers directly.