Research

The Alliance for Education Solutions (AES) is an improvement facilitating non-profit organization that for thirty-one years has functioned as a “learning organization” working to get better at getting better in improving the life chances of young people and the functioning of our youth serving systems.

Solving complex social and environmental problem such as how best to improve our youth developing processes requires a strong commitment to get better at getting better by continually generating empirical guidance to drive improvement – not just technical solutions but “actionable understanding” about “how to get there from here.” Collective impact allows for adaptive problem solving by encouraging multiple stakeholders to look for resources and innovations to solve common problems, enabling rapid learning through continuous feedback loops, and coordinating responses among participants.

To this end, we are fortunate to be able to continue our years long working relationship with an improvement research team headed by Dr. Mariah Kornbluh, a nationally known expert in youth-led participatory action research, who has agreed to collaborate with us in an expansion of our adaptive problem solving work. On this site you can learn about the various research project and findings conducted related to our work.

Youth Excel Initiative
Office of Mayor Darrell Steinberg

Recently Alliance for Educational Solutions (AES) conducted a grant based research project to survey and hold listening sessions for youth throughout underserved areas within Sacramento California regarding their vocational and career aspirations. A short report was produced reflecting: the youth AES engaged with, their hopes, dreams, and career goals, opportunities and barriers to pursuing such careers (with a particular focus on STEM), as well as recommendations for city programming efforts moving forward. Research was conducted May 2023 – July 2023.