The following resources may be useful as you gather information and plan your policy brief assignment. In them, you will find both examples of policy briefs and research about educational policy. This list is not exhaustive, but it is a great place to start.
- Johns Hopkins Education Policy LibGuide Johns Hopkins has an excellent collection of educational policy resources, including links to research centers, government and international agencies, preK-12 organizations, post-secondary organizations, and education policy associations.
- National Education Policy Center The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to provide high-quality information in support of democratic deliberation about education policy. Policy Briefs synthesize existing research knowledge on a policy or practice issue of importance. Written in language an interested non-expert would find accessible, policy briefs answer the questions: “What is the research evidence related to a given policy or practice option – and what policy recommendations follow from that evidence?”
- U.S. Government Accountability Office: K-12 Education Includes reports on K-12 Education from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). GAO examines how taxpayer dollars are spent and provides Congress and federal agencies with objective, non-partisan, fact-based information to help the government save money and work more efficiently.
- Center for Evaluation and Education Policy CEEP offers evidence-based insights from world-renowned researchers at IU and beyond—through media, outreach and individual engagement—so that research evidence better informs public and policy discussions of education issues.
- Consortium for Policy Research in Education Research conducted by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) is peer-reviewed and open access—allowing for the spread of new knowledge and allowing that knowledge to be built upon. Our Scholarly Commons portal, located within Penn Libraries, is a repository for the scholarly output of researchers from CPRE, The Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE), and the University of Pennsylvania.
- Opportunity Insights As part of our research studies, we put out publicly available datasets that can be used by other researchers and practitioners to support their own work. These datasets allow you to analyze social mobility and a variety of other outcomes from life expectancy to patent rates by neighborhood, college, parental income level, and racial background. You can search for datasets by geographic level (e.g., Census tracts), by topic (e.g., education), or by the title of the paper.
Guides to Writing Policy Briefs
These guides provide tips on the actual writing of a policy brief. They also explain the difference in method and purpose between academic writing and policy brief writing.
- How to Write Policy Briefs Tips for writing effective policy briefs from the writing center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- Policy Briefs 101 A video and short guide to writing policy briefs from the California Policy Lab, a research institute at the University of California.