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Session Title: Context-Sensitive Evaluation: Lessons Learned From Large-scale Education Initiatives
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Panel Session 464 to be held in Sebastian Section I3 on Friday, Nov 13, 9:15 AM to 10:45 AM
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Sponsored by the Cluster, Multi-site and Multi-level Evaluation TIG
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| Chair(s): |
| Ann House, SRI International, ann.house@sri.com
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| Discussant(s):
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| Jon Price, Intel, jon.k.price@intel.com
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| Abstract:
Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, a longtime Speaker of the House in the U.S. Congress, famously declared, "All politics is local." Although many policies and funding decisions are made at the larger state and federal levels, ultimately the impact of legislation is felt in the form of pothole repair, snowplowing, and a vast range of government functions. In the end, government must work for the people at home. The question we will address in this panel is a corollary to O'Neill's statement: when considering the challenges of implementing large-scale education programs in vastly different contexts, is all education local? How can a state-wide or global program work at the local level of a single school or a single classroom? What challenges do evaluators of these programs face? And what strategies do these programs use to make their programs work at the local level?
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Localization and Global Spread: Evaluating a Top-down Education Program
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| Ann House, SRI International, ann.house@sri.com
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As part of their ongoing work in education, Intel has committed to train more than 10 million teachers on the effective use of technology in the classroom, with the intent of helping students develop key skills needed for success in the global economy. Their education initiative is involved in over 50 countries, providing a top-down set of programs and activities disseminated through a train-the-trainer approach. While Ministries of Education can decide which programs they want to implement in their countries and have some say in localization, the programs and evaluation approach are not intended to be locally determined. The challenges to an external evaluator discussed in this presentation will center on how to provide a global overview regarding Intel's programs that also accounts for local uses and adaptations.
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Looking at a Locally Shaped Program Across The Globe: Evaluation Challenges and Solutions
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| Torie Gorges, SRI International, torie.gorges@sri.com
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The pilot of Microsoft's Innovative Schools Program has aimed to support 12 diverse schools around the globe - secondary schools and primary schools, private and public, schools in traditional systems and schools that are breaking the mold. What the schools have in common is a desire to prepare students for the 21st century. The program provides them with frameworks for making decisions about reform and opportunities to discuss their plans with each other and with education experts. Evaluating such a locally determined program presents unique challenges; what can we say about the program as a whole that will take into account each school's unique goals? In this presentation, we will describe our ground-up process of determining evaluation benchmarks, which involved discussion with all the schools, and our distributed model of evaluation, which allows for collection of data that are at once local and global.
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Evaluating a State-Wide Reform Effort: The Role of Models and Local Context
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| Viki Young, SRI International, viki.young@sri.com
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| Chris Padilla, SRI International, christine.padilla@sri.com
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The Texas High School Project is a public-private partnership, aimed to ensure all Texas students graduate high school prepared for college and career success. The THSP focuses on high-need schools and districts statewide, with particular emphasis on urban areas and the Texas-Mexico border. While the range of this program is located within a single state, the set of programs being implemented is quite complex, including both nationally established school models (e.g., High Schools That Work, Early College High Schools), as well as homegrown reform models developed by individual schools. The external evaluator of this project must look across school models, across their different goals, and across inner-city and rural locations, to identify how and why THSP is making changes in the schools. This presentation will describe the successes and challenges of evaluating an intricate reform effort as a whole while accounting for distinct school models, and provide some early learnings regarding the impact of local context on school reform.
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