Elev8 Evaluation and Research

Elev8 is being evaluated at a national level by Research for Action (RFA) and by local evaluators in each Elev8 community:

• Elev8 Baltimore: Carson Research Consultants
• Elev8 Chicago: Chapin Hall
• Elev8 New Mexico: Center for Education Policy Research
• Elev8 Oakland: Bright Research Group

The local evaluation teams craft research questions, in part, around local contextual issues, while the national evaluation team pulls together lessons from across the Elev8 initiative. Together, these studies are contributing to a growing body of knowledge about the power and potential of community schools.

In the early years of the initiative, Elev8’s evaluation focused on understanding and strengthening program implementation. We then developed a robust results framework, which identified 17 indicators of success, at the student, school and family/community level. One of the important lessons of our work is that while academic outcomes are important, other measures of student well-being must be taken into account as well, including health, behavior, and parental support for learning. We also look at the ‘health’ of the Elev8 sites overall, as it relates to fundraising, advocacy and sustainability planning.  Each Elev8 region has developed targets for the indicators included in our results framework. Over the next three years, we will be assessing Elev8’s impact on this full range of indicators.

We are also particularly interested in how well Elev8 prepares students for the critical ninth-grade transition. Starting in 2013, the local evaluators will follow cohorts of students from middle to high school to learn about how they plan for the high school transition, as well as what high schools and academic programs they end up attending. We will also examine high school academic achievement.