Giving Compass' Take:

• Stacey Childress and Jason Atwood share insights from their first year of working with schools to develop more complete evaluation methods. 

• How can philanthropy help to expand this research? 

• Learn about the need for accountability in education philanthropy.

Our team at NewSchools has been wrestling with a challenge. While there is growing consensus that schools should focus on more than reading and math scores, the field lacks agreement on which additional indicators are most important and how to measure them. Which competencies and school culture/climate factors are most important? How can they best be measured and cultivated in schools? How do academic and social emotional development work together to support long term success?

Two years ago, we launched a partnership with schools in our portfolio and Transforming Education (TransformEd) to find answers. And, we are now ready to share some of our lessons from the first year of the project. We are releasing what we’ve learned in an insight brief, the first in a series.

Four Insights from Year One:

  1. Get started and commit to learning as you go. But get started.
  2. Social emotional competencies support improved academic development. And, school culture/climate factors create the conditions for both.
  3. Students’ development of some social-emotional competencies may not be demonstrated by ever higher scores.
  4. Our measures work. Researchers, educators, and funders should feel confident using our surveys to assess progress on this set of indicators in similar contexts.

Read the full article about tracking student progress by Stacey Childress and Jason Atwood at Medium.