When you work with The McREL Institute, you’ll get a dependable partner that listens to your needs, values your goals, and delivers evidence-based services and resources that support positive, enduring change for your teachers, school leaders, and students. 

We take a partnership-oriented approach with all our clients, listening to and understanding your contexts, goals, and needs before we design just the right services for you. We’ll honor your team’s expertise and capacities as we work together, adding our strengths and resources to yours to help you achieve your goals.

We emphasize continual learning. Curiosity, exploration, change, and reflection are vital to deep learning and lifelong fulfilment. As such, you can expect us to encourage your team’s professional curiosity and growth. That goes for us too. While delivering great service to you and your team, we know we’ll be learning from you too, discovering new insights together that lead to better results for all.

McREL was founded in 1966 as one of the country’s original nonprofit, nonpartisan Regional Educational Laboratories tasked with identifying and sharing evidence-based best practices for improving instruction, leadership, student learning, and school performance. Over the years, McREL operated several of the U.S. Department of Education’s REL and Comprehensive Center programs, and also provided high-quality research, evaluation, professional learning, and school improvement consulting to school districts, state departments of education, regional education service agencies, universities, foundations, and other organizations.

In 2025, McREL evolved and reconstituted its operations, merging its research and program evaluation capacities into the NORC at the University of Chicago and merging its professional learning programs, resources, and publications and school improvement consulting into the Education Service Center Region 13, based in Austin.

Today, operating as The McREL Institute at ESC Region 13, we’re entering a powerful phase of growth, expanding our reach and capacity to:

• Continue to deliver McREL’s deep expertise in instruction, coaching, and school improvement services, and trusted, proven programs such as Classroom Instruction That Works, Balanced Leadership, and the Six-Phase Model for Student Learning to schools everywhere.

• Leverage ESC Region 13’s infrastructure and expertise to develop new services and products for educators.

• Elevate our regional and national impact—building on ESC Region 13’s strengths to offer scalable solutions more efficiently.

Our approaches and strategies, while customized for each client’s situation, are founded on McREL’s highly regarded research-based frameworks and models, including:

• Balanced Leadership^®

• Classroom Instruction That Works^®

• Curiosity Works^®

• Learning That Sticks^™