A cross the nation, more than 8,000 new schools have been created this century in an effort to broaden educational opportunity (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2016). New school developers come from every sector of society, from venture capitalists to grassroots community organizations, from educators to university researchers. New school development policies, from charter school laws to local autonomy initiatives, are intersecting with a larger civic responsibility movement in higher education to produce a new generation of university-partnered K-12 schools (Benson, Harkavy, & Puckett, 2007). Unlike the laboratory schools of previous generations, these public schools are designed to disrupt persistent patterns of inequity and prepare low-income students of color to flourish in college. As they do so, these new schools are poised to take on our field's long-standing struggle to better marry research and practice (National Research Council, 2012) by providing a unique and fertile context for research-practice partnerships (RPPs). RPPs are defined as "long-term collaborations between practitioners and researchers that are organized to investigate problems of practice and solutions for improving schools and districts" (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013, p. 48). In their recent call for more research on RPPs, Coburn and Penuel (2016) portrayed the field as diverse, including different types of partners and a wide variety of problems of practice. They identified prominent RPPs, such as the Chicago Consortium for Chicago School Research and the Strategic Education Research Partnership, but noted that RPPs of all types are proliferating-fueled by new funding streams as well as "researchers' and practitioners' desire to find new models of research that make a difference in public schools in more tangible ways" (Coburn & Penuel, 2016, p. 49). Absent from their review, however, is any mention of university-partnered single-school RPPs within a new school policy context. We think this is an oversight, perhaps based on the perception that university-partnered schools are exceptional and unscalable. To the contrary, we argue that these schools provide a promising context for marrying research and practice to bring about fundamental change in schools, with potential for spread of innovation to districts and universities. We represent four of the University of California (UC) research campuses-partnered with districts and linked through a UC Network of College-Going Schools-that have developed 703947E DRXXX10.
