Collaborating with Georgia State University

Section 8 - Collaborating with Georgia State University

The first seven sections made an argument. This one answers the obvious challenge to it: can the third dimension actually be built and proven, or is it only a thesis? It can be proven — and the place to prove it is Georgia State University, because the team and the data already exist there, and have already worked together.

Inside one university sit the three capabilities an early-detection study needs. The Adult Literacy Research Center — led by Distinguished University Professor Daphne Greenberg, with Elizabeth Tighe and Iris Feinberg — supplies the reading and measurement authority. The Child & Family Policy Lab, inside the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies under economist David Ribar, supplies the cross-agency administrative-data infrastructure and the econometrics. And the Georgia Office of Adult Education, where Jackson Lilly directs research, owns the adult-learner data. They are not strangers to one another: through GPAER — a federally funded Institute of Education Sciences partnership — and a jointly authored postsecondary-outcomes report, these units have already published together. This is a collaboration to extend, not a coalition to convene.

That matters most for the one thing a new metric must survive: scrutiny. The oral-written delta is a claim about measurement, and a claim about measurement is only as good as the validation behind it. The scholar whose published specialty is the assessment of struggling readers — Tighe, the 2026 Tom Trabasso Young Investigator Award recipient — sits inside the same center. Her presence is both the asset and the test: she is exactly the co-author who can establish the metric’s validity, and exactly the researcher who will decline to endorse it if it does not hold. That is the right kind of partner for a measure meant to carry weight.

The metric asks nothing new of districts, because Georgia already collects both of its inputs. The written channel is the Georgia Milestones grade-3 English-language-arts score every third-grader already takes. The oral channel is the Speaking domain of ACCESS for ELLs, the annual English-proficiency assessment every English learner already sits. The delta is the distance between them. Pulled at the de-identified, individual level through GA•AWARDS, it costs a district nothing — no new test, no new platform, no new reporting line. The signal is already in the data. No one has computed it.

The proposed study — with Dr. Greenberg as prospective principal investigator and H-EDU as partner — does exactly that, and then follows the children forward. It takes Georgia’s third-grade cohorts from 2008-09 through 2012-13 and traces them across fifteen linked data elements: from the grade-3 reading profile and the oral-written gap, through the grades 4-8 trajectory, into high-school course-taking and graduation, on to postsecondary enrollment and completion, and finally into early-career quarterly wages. It is, literally, a study that connects the first day of school to the first day of work — and asks whether a gap visible in the third grade predicts the distance a child travels by twenty-five.

Here is why the collaboration needs H-EDU and not only the university. Every line of this group’s distinguished work points downstream — from adult learners forward into retention, postsecondary, and the workforce. None of it reaches back to the grade-3 origin, because that was never the question they were funded to ask. The upstream extension — beginning the arc at the third grade and the oral-written delta — is the one piece the assembled team does not already have, and it is precisely what H-EDU brings: the early-detection methodology, and the direction. The university supplies the rigor and the data machinery. H-EDU supplies the question that turns a downstream literature into a full-life arc.

And the timing is not incidental. The study rides the exact cross-agency spine — GA•AWARDS — whose governance Georgia is redrawing this year, as HB 1302 stands up a new Education Data Governance Board and renames the office that runs the warehouse. The moment a state rebuilds the governance of its longitudinal data is the moment to demonstrate what that data, read at child-level resolution, can actually reveal. A validated early-detection study is the most concrete possible answer to the question the new Board exists to ask.

So the third dimension is not speculative, and this is where that becomes provable. The instrument is computable from data Georgia already holds. The team to validate it and run the longitudinal arc already exists, already collaborates, and includes the foremost scholar of exactly the assessment question the metric raises. The only missing piece — the upstream direction — is what H-EDU brings. Collaborating with Georgia State University is how the argument of the first seven sections stops being an argument and becomes evidence.

Appendix: Acronyms & Terms

ACCESS for ELLs WIDA’s annual English-proficiency assessment for English learners; its Speaking domain is the oral channel for the oral-written delta.

ALRC Adult Literacy Research Center (GSU College of Education & Human Development): Greenberg, Tighe, Feinberg.

Child & Family Policy Lab Cross-agency data and econometrics unit within Georgia Policy Labs (Andrew Young School), led by David Ribar.

GA•AWARDS Georgia’s P-20W longitudinal data system (see Section 6); the source for the study’s linked, de-identified records.

Georgia Milestones (EOG) Georgia’s End-of-Grade summative assessments; the grade-3 ELA score is the written channel for the delta.

GOAE Georgia Office of Adult Education (within TCSG); owns the GALIS adult-learner data; Jackson Lilly, research lead.

GPAER Georgia Partnership for Adult Education and Research — the IES-funded GOAE-ALRC partnership.

GPL Georgia Policy Labs (GSU Andrew Young School of Policy Studies), led by Tim Sass.

IES Institute of Education Sciences — the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

oral-written delta The gap between a student’s oral comprehension and written production; the study’s second research question.

PI Principal Investigator.

Sources

Georgia State University — Adult Literacy Research Center (education.gsu.edu/research-outreach/alrc); Georgia Policy Labs and the Child & Family Policy Lab (gpl.gsu.edu).

GPAER (Georgia Partnership for Adult Education and Research) — IES award and GPAER Key Findings report (Jarrard, Greenberg, Tighe, Lilly).

GA•AWARDS Element Justification — draft study design (prospective PI Dr. Daphne Greenberg, GSU/ALRC; H-EDU.Solutions partner); third-grade cohorts 2008-09 through 2012-13, fifteen linked data elements.

Georgia Educational Databases — source reference: GA•AWARDS, ACCESS for ELLs (WIDA), Georgia Milestones, GALIS (compiled for H-EDU.Solutions, June 2026).