Projects

S-BYE leads an initiative to further innovate the model for practicing participatory budgeting in schools. Participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation strategy currently utilized around the world. It empowers everyday citizens to have direct say over the use of parts of a local government budget. The United States lags behind in embracing PB. Through the SSIP, we are not only expanding the implementation of PB, but we are using field experimental designs to test a new model.

S-BYE is one of the leading spaces for the study of American school boards. The SBDP is a large-scale data collection effort to help improve the measurement of how democratic school boards behave. The project also features field experimental designs that assess the impact of strategies that could improve public engagement.

S-BYE is developing and testing new technology tools that can enhance engagement between school district leaders and the parents and students of the schools they serve.

Through a multi-university collaboration, S-BYE is developing and testing a technology-enabled experiential approach to deepening civic education in the high school social studies curriculum. The capstone experience at the center of our curriculum module is an online deliberative town hall meeting that engages students and teachers directly with their sitting member of Congress. This powerful, direct and authentic experience with democracy in practice will be embedded in a rigorous social studies curricular unit where high school students study a controversial topic that is of interest to them – and one that policymakers at the national level are grappling with – and then discuss the issue first with students from a different part of the state, and then with one of those very same policy makers.This project is funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES).