As senior director of NCDPI’s Office of Research & Promising Practices (ORPP), Shaun Kellogg leads a team that helps North Carolina’s public schools make evidence-based decisions and elevate strategies that measurably improve student outcomes. ORPP’s portfolio spans rigorous evaluations, statewide data infrastructure and a clearinghouse that spotlights practices educators can adopt for their own classrooms.
For those new to ORPP, what is your mission and where do you sit within the agency?
Our mission is simple: serve our public school by providing the research and support they need to make evidence-based decisions that improve educational outcomes. We’re housed within the Division of Accountability, and our research team has extensive expertise in educational research, policy and program evaluation. In addition, we’re all former classroom teachers, which helps us bridge the gap between research and practice.
What are your top priorities for the 2025-26 school year?
On the research side, we’re focused this year on launching North Carolina’s Skills for the Future initiative, advancing our statewide longitudinal data system and building out a cross-sector postsecondary outcomes dashboard. These efforts are funded by the U.S. Department of Education and focus on measuring students’ durable skills such as collaboration and critical thinking, as well as leveraging National Student Clearinghouse data to track college enrollment, persistence and completion.
On the promising practices side, our goal is to elevate and scale what’s working well in our public schools. Using an asset-based approach called “positive deviance,” we’re currently working on identifying “bright spot” schools that have been effective at reducing chronic absenteeism despite facing similar constraints as other schools. In the coming school year, we’ll work closely with educators to translate insights gained from these schools into practical strategies, and then pilot and assess these promising practices across a network of schools.
What qualifies as a “promising practice?”
We look for three things: documented need; measurable improvement in outcomes or implementation fidelity; and portability, meaning other districts can adopt the practice with minimal or reasonable support.
How do you decide where to focus research efforts each year?
First off, we are using NCDPI’s new strategic plan as a starting point. We then prioritize research efforts that 1) affect large numbers of students, 2) have clear decisions or timelines attached (i.e. budget, legislative, or strategic plan milestones) and 3) can feasibly generate actionable evidence within the school year. We also reserve capacity for answering rapid-response questions from agency leadership, public school units and our State Board of Education.
How do ORPP’s efforts align with the agency’s new strategic plan?
We’re helping to turn the plan into action under several pillars. To help prepare each student for their next phase in life (Pillar 1), we’re piloting new methods for assessing durable skills and will be making National Student Clearinghouse data more accessible and insightful so districts can see their impacts on students post high school.
Under Pillar 4, our chronic absenteeism push is front and center. In the coming academic year, we’ll be lifting up bright-spot practices and developing data feedback loops so schools can move the needle during the year, not just look back in June.
And under Pillar 6, we’re forming new researcher-practitioner partnerships to develop models for addressing pressing problems and sharing promising practices to assess them.
How does ORPP make research actionable for educators and leaders?
We start with the “so what” and end with the “now what.” That means aligning research to the needs of educators, providing recommendations for action along with key research findings and packaging results into usable formats like research briefs, practitioner guides and data dashboards. We also use networked improvement communities where educators test changes in practice and share feedback rapidly. All this is designed to ensure that useful evidence doesn’t sit on a shelf or behind the paywall of an academic journal.
What partnerships are critical to this work?
Good and useful research is truly a team sport. Inside NCDPI, we work closely with various program offices, while also collaborating with prior NCDPI leadership to build upon their excellent work. Outside the agency, we partner with public schools, the UNC System, state agencies and national research partners like ETS and the Carnegie Foundation.
In my prior role as director of research and evaluation at NC State University’s Friday Institute, I learned that if research is going to deliver results for schools that are both rigorous and relevant, then researchers, practitioners and policymakers need to be working closely together.
How do you think about data ethics and privacy as you expand research and reporting?
Trust is non-negotiable. We follow strict governance, minimize data collection burden and emphasize transparency in methods and limitations. The goal is to provide decision-quality information while protecting students, educators and communities.
What does success look like for ORPP?
When a teacher or principal can find a proven strategy on Monday and implement a stronger approach by Friday. When a district or state leader uses our data to assess progress and target resources more effectively. And when we can show, with evidence, that students are better served because North Carolina invests in what works. That’s success.
What keeps you up at night and what keeps you optimistic?
The pace of needs versus the capacity in schools. The reality is that urgent demands like persistent and chronic student absenteeism, staffing gaps and new mandates arrive faster than many schools, especially small and rural ones, have the time, people or tools to respond.
What keeps me optimistic is that educators are the most resourceful and committed group of professionals I know; they adapt quickly and when given evidence that’s trustworthy, timely and practical, they can move the needle even further on outcomes that matter for students.
What advice would you give district research leads?
Start with the decision you need to inform and work backward, collaborate closely with stakeholders on key questions and metrics, and plan on how you intend to communicate your findings on day one. A clear dissemination plan is just as important as a clean dataset.