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Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego
From Classroom Educators to District Leaders
The department’s reach does not end once educators enter the classroom. Through CREATE, the Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment and Teaching Excellence, UC San Diego supports K-12 students, teachers, families, schools, districts and community organizations in the San Diego and Imperial Valley regions. CREATE also helps UC San Diego faculty and students design and execute funded programming that responds to local K-12 education needs.
“CREATE serves in-service teachers and in-service leaders and provides a lot of professional learning opportunities,” Hopkins said. “There are a lot of ways we could use these partner sites to bring EDS and CREATE together more.”
That matters because the department is not only preparing future teachers; it is also supporting educators throughout their careers.
A student may begin as an undergraduate tutor, become a teacher candidate, enter the classroom, receive professional learning support, and later pursue advanced study or leadership training. The department’s EdD program prepares education leaders, many of whom are already working in San Diego schools and districts.
“Most, if not all, of our students are current educators in San Diego who then go on to higher-level leadership positions or have greater impact in their current positions,” Hopkins said. “We tend to attract people who want to make education better in San Diego.”
The department’s EdD alumni include six district superintendents and five assistant or deputy assistant superintendents, representing 11 graduates who have served or are serving in superintendent-level leadership roles across the region.
“Our program is designed to improve and expand educational opportunities in the region,” Hopkins said. “People we recruit into the program tend to be people who are working in San Diego and are committed to staying in San Diego and doing that work.”
Research That Solves Real Education Challenges
That regional commitment also shapes the department’s research. Hopkins said one of EDS’ defining strengths is its use of research-practice partnerships, or RPPs — long-term collaborations between researchers and practitioners or policymakers that are designed around real problems faced by schools, districts, state agencies or communities.
“We do research for and with communities, whether that is a school, district, state education agency or community organization,” Hopkins said. “We don’t just go in and say, ‘We want to collect this data and write a paper about it.’”
Instead, she said, EDS researchers ask partners what challenges they are facing, what issues they want to address and what they want to understand more deeply. Then they work together to define the research questions.
For Hopkins, that approach is not abstract. Her own work focuses on multilingual learners and the policies that shape their educational opportunities. She leads a research-practice partnership with staff in about 30 state departments of education across the country, helping leaders build capacity and produce evidence-based resources to support English learners. For example, she is working with the Massachusetts Department of Education on bilingual education policy and access for English learners.
Hopkins has received two nearly $1 million grants from the Institute of Education Sciences to study bilingual education policy and access for English learners in Massachusetts.
The first, a $993,000 IES-funded project, examined whether the expansion of bilingual programming in Massachusetts is supporting equitable access for multilingual learners — the students the policy was intended to serve. The newer three-year, $999,500 grant builds on that work by examining another challenge in the state: the nature and impact of bilingual teacher shortages over time.
Together, the projects reflect Hopkins’ broader research focus on multilingual learners, education policy and the systems needed to grow a strong bilingual teacher workforce.
That kind of work reflects what Hopkins sees as a throughline in the department: research that is collaborative, equity-focused and connected to real educational systems.
“It is also grounded in principles of equity,” Hopkins said, “in terms of whose voices are heard and valued in the research process.”
Why This Work Matters Now
The department’s work comes at a moment when education is under intense pressure — from teacher shortages to political division to widening debates over what schools should teach and how they should serve students.
For Hopkins, that makes the work of preparing teachers, leaders and education researchers even more important.
“The education system is the most important tool we have to create a civic-minded populace,” Hopkins said. “Having teachers and leaders who know how to design systems and who know how to design a classroom to support equitable interactions and meaningful exchange between students and talking across viewpoints — that’s important.”
The department’s commitment to helping prepare the people who tutor, teach, study, support and lead the region’s classrooms is unwavering, but its impact is not confined to one program or one district. It stretches from the border to North County, and through research partnerships and faculty work, far beyond San Diego.
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