Research and Evaluation Capacity Building & School-to-Career Progress Measures
With support from the National School-to-Work Office‚ the National Institute for Work and Learning (NIWL) and MPR Associates‚ Inc. delivered a variety of technical assistance designed to enhance state and local practitioners’ capacity to evaluate school-to-work efforts and use evaluation data for program improvement.
The School-to-Work (STW) Progress Measures were established to meet the School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA) of 1994’s mandate for creation of a performance measurement system. In partnership with MPR Associates‚ Inc.‚ NIWL worked with a task force of federal staff and state officials to identify appropriate measures and develop the survey instrument used to collect data about state progress in building STW systems. NIWL co-authored the annual progress measures reports as well as a five-year retrospective analysis of the impact of STWOA and its innovative performance measurement system. This latter document was subsequently excerpted in a special 2002 edition of Phi Delta Kappan.
The STW Research and Evaluation Capacity-Building Project enabled NIWL and MPR to use a variety of technical assistance strategies to improve state and local collection and use of STW data. NIWL helped organize a series of institutes and forums that brought together teams of state and local practitioners to develop data collection plans with the assistance of project staff and content experts. In addition‚ NIWL and MPR staff provided customized technical assistance in more than a dozen states and local communities‚ with services ranging from evaluation design to case study training. NIWL and MPR also conducted a ground-breaking study of state and local capacity to collect the data required to meet the mandates of the STWOA. Published in 1998 as The Data Dilemma: Putting Progress Measures Data to Work for Federal‚ State‚ and Local Decision Makers‚ this study documented substantial differences in federal‚ state‚ and local perspectives on data collection and explored the risks associated with expecting a single data collection system to meet both federal reporting and state/local program improvement needs.