Following the Data: Melissa Roderick’s Lasting Impact on Urban Education
By Crown Family School
Melissa Roderick, PhD, Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor, has spent a career following evidence and refusing to walk away. Her career began with a question that had not been fully answered. As a young researcher studying school dropout prevention, she was asked what causes students to leave high school and realized that the evidence simply did not exist. Rather than accept conventional wisdom, Roderick did what would become her signature approach: she followed the data, listened to students, and built research around real problems schools were struggling to solve.
“Everybody was pushing dropout solutions,” Roderick said. “But we weren’t working on the dropout problem.”
That instinct led Roderick to one of her most influential contributions to urban education reform: identifying the transition into ninth grade as a pivotal turning point in students’ academic trajectories.
In 1991, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) high school graduation rate was roughly 54 percent, according to data from the Kersten Institute for Urban Education’s Consortium on School Research. The graduation rate was significantly lower than the national public high school rate of nearly 74 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
“A focus on ninth grade put efforts at the epicenter of the dropout problem. Interventions that led to dramatic increases in 9th-grade On-Track rates and equally impressive increases in graduation rates four years later,” Roderick said.
Focus on Transitions and Early Warning Systems
After hand-copying hundreds of transcripts for her doctoral dissertation, Roderick found a sharp decline in grades as students entered high school, a divergence that predicted eventual dropout. At the time, virtually no research focused on this transition.
“Kids were going into high school looking fine, and they were really in trouble three months later,” Roderick said.
Her work helped shift national attention to ninth grade as a make-or-break year, laying the foundation for what became the “on track” indicator now widely used across school systems. Roderick realized from her early research that high school transitions were the point at which the careers of dropouts diverged from those of graduates.
“The convergence of administrative data, interviews from families and children, and observations of classrooms would sing to you when they were used together,” said Susan Stone, PhD, former student and Dean of Berkeley Social Welfare.
Taken together, this work reframed dropout prevention as a problem of timing, systems, and early response rather than individual failure.
“Melissa was doing things that we didn’t have names for at the time. All the elements of improvement science were present…in Melissa’s work well before we had anything like a codified body of improvement science," said Charles Payne, education researcher and Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Director of the Joseph Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Research at Rutgers University- Newark. “The iterative process, the close partnership with practitioners…what we would now call short data cycles and all of that was present in her work before we had anything like an organized body of thought around it, “Payne said.
Roderick played a significant role in helping people better understand the importance of transition points throughout K-12 education, Payne said.
Building Trust Through Research-Practice Partnerships
At the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, where Roderick spent more than 35 years as a faculty member, she found and helped shape a culture that valued research grounded in practice. The school supported scholarship that did not stop at identifying problems but pushed toward solving them.
“The Crown Family School… enabled me to be who I was, and if there was someone to write a sentence about me 20 years from now, it would be… she was a Crown faculty member,” Roderick said.
That supportive environment allowed Roderick to conduct long-term embedded work alongside educators, district leaders, and policymakers. Roderick believed that researchers should not just study people and walk away.
In 1991, Roderick joined the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, now the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, as an assistant professor, collaborating with school leaders and community partners to advance educational research and practice. She became a renowned researcher and Hermon Dunlap Smith professor at the Crown Family School.
“What distinguished Melissa’s work is her unwavering commitment to ensuring that research makes a difference where it matters most – in the lives of young people," said Deborah Gorman-Smith, Dean of the Crown Family School, Chief Strategist for Community Engagement and Partnerships, and Emily Klein Gidwitz Professor. “She didn’t just identify the importance of the ninth-grade transitions; she translated that insight into tools and practices that schools could use, changing how they support students and, in turn, changing trajectories for thousands of young people. That is the mark of a truly extraordinary scholar,” Gorman-Smith said.
“Roderick’s career exemplified the School’s mission to bridge research and practice, a commitment that shaped both her scholarship and teaching, from research methods and social policy to her signature course on urban adolescents, where she focused on preparing students to drive meaningful change in social institutions, public policy, and frontline practice,” said Julia R. Henly, PhD, Samuel Deutsch Professor, Deputy Dean for Research and Faculty at the Crown Family School. “More than any of my colleagues, Melissa has made clear that from her perspective, the value of social welfare and education research should be measured by its impact on policy and practice,” Henly said.
Those values carried beyond the university and into the daily work of one of the nation’s largest urban school systems.
“She actually left the traditional academy for a while and worked for CPS. That kind of deep respect for the relationship with practitioners is part of what made her work distinctive,” Payne said. Her partnership had a certain kind of depth that I think was rare then and is rare now. So, working in partnership with practitioners has always been a hallmark of her work.”
Her role, Roderick said, was always the same: To make sense of the system and build the capacity to improve. Her work with the Chicago Public Schools exemplified that approach. From evaluating the end of social promotion to building data systems that could follow students beyond graduation, Roderick consistently bridged quantitative analysis with qualitative insight. Listening to students revealed barriers others overlooked, such as failing a course for reasons unrelated to content knowledge or losing a college opportunity because no one helped them file a Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Quantifying those stories made systemic change possible and certainly unavoidable.
“She helped drive and engineer and push so many of the reforms that over the last three decades have substantially improved the Chicago Public School system from where it was to where it is today,” said Ron Huberman, former student and CEO of Chicago Public Schools (09-10), now CEO and co-founder of Benchmark Analytics.
Institutional Impact and the Network for College Success
Roderick’s work with principals led to the creation of the Network for College Success, an initiative housed within the Crown Family School designed to turn research into sustained practice. Founded in 2006, the Network works with schools to build the structures and leadership needed to support students through major educational transitions, from high school entry to college enrollment.
What began as a response to the needs of a practitioner has become a lasting program that continues today, helping scholars use data, collaboration, and problem-solving to improve graduation and college outcomes.
“Most of the work of the Network for College Success came from principals saying to me, ‘Melissa, stop studying me and give me some help here,” Roderick said of the school officials seeking support to improve graduation rates.
The Network reflects Roderick’s belief that effective reform depends on systems, not isolated programs.
“Melissa has continuously modeled a form of scholarship that takes practitioners’ expertise seriously,” said Shanette Porter, Learning and Development Group Director with the Consortium on School Research.
The outcomes of Roderick’s work were both measurable and enduring. Graduation rates in Chicago Public Schools reached historic highs, including substantial gains for Black and Latino students. Roderick said the work succeeded because educators acted early, with better information and clearer direction.
“…Melissa was like this force of nature,” said Arne Duncan, former CEO of CPS (’01-‘09), Secretary of Education, and now Managing Partner for Chicago CRED, describing Roderick’s intelligence, passion for kids, and integrity. Duncan describes Melissa as being, “…. tough and to the point and unvarnished and honest, that for me, was a real gift. You weren’t trying to guess what she was thinking. But why is she thinking that? And what was the data?... The analytics behind it. And so…clarity of thought for me is so important when…every day is urgent, you’re trying to get better, faster, not having to guess. “For me, it was really the fierce urgency of now,” Arne Duncan said, capturing the defining through line of her work in urban education. “Her legacy will live on through all of us. Forever,” Duncan said.
Across decades of education policy change, Melissa Roderick remained grounded in a simple principle: systems matter, transitions matter, and students cannot be abandoned. Her legacy at the Crown Family School and in urban education reforms is a testament to what happens when research stays close to the people it is meant to serve.
When asked what she would tell scholars at the Crown Family School or elsewhere who are following in her footsteps, and what advice she would offer about what the field is now and how to move forward, Roderick said the Crown Family School was extremely supportive of her and her work in education and public policy, but the academic landscape has drastically changed.
“I’m not sure it would be easy for me to do this work again. I couldn’t do anything fancy because I had to do it for everybody. It had to be sustainable, cheap, and reliable. It had to be… had to be something that could go on forever,” Roderick said. “And it did.”