Evaluation
Rigorous research and analysis is key to pushing the education sector forward. That’s true for individual organizations, too: to achieve their goals for schools and students, they need to know what their data says about what’s working, why, and how to improve.
Our Work
Bellwether’s Evaluation team partners with clients to integrate evaluation into their existing planning and implementation efforts — delivering data-based insights that drive their efforts to support students. Our approach is grounded in developing mutual trust and offering ongoing, customized support across a range of services, including:
Program Evaluation: We offer both short- and long-term program evaluations, including experimental, quasi-experimental, correlational, and descriptive research in addition to developmental evaluations that can help organizations define, gather feedback on, and refine initiatives during the early stages of design.
Capacity Building: We build and strengthen organizations’ internal capacity to measure and evaluate their impact, which includes refining logic models, developing and supporting implementation of evaluation plans, developing a research agenda, and creating dashboards and reports to enable insight and facilitate decision-making for stakeholders, including funders.
Tailored Research: We offer rigorous and tailored research services to inform planning, implementation, and communications. Services include survey research, quantitative data analysis, focus groups, literature reviews, and social network analysis.
Our Impact
Bellwether’s Evaluation team partners with clients to integrate evaluation into their existing planning and implementation efforts — delivering data-based insights that drive their efforts to advance educational equity through program evaluation, capacity building, and tailored research.
Examples include:
Digital Promise
Bellwether partnered with Digital Promise, a global nonprofit, to conduct a developmental evaluation of its “inclusive innovation” work in eight school districts. We documented key processes of this equity centered approach to systems transformation and takeaways from the evaluation in a field-facing publication to inform similar efforts nationwide.
Education Forward DC and Youth Invest Partners
Bellwether partnered with Education Forward DC and Youth Invest Partners to analyze data from the Panorama Social Emotional Learning survey administered to students at a cohort of Washington, D.C., schools. We synthesized the data into a field-facing report providing insights on student well-being, with lessons for leaders in D.C. and beyond.
The Broad Center Social Network Analysis
Bellwether conducted a social network analysis to help the Broad Center understand the current state of alumni relationships within the network. Findings from Bellwether’s social network analysis showed that Broad Center alumni across race and gender were successfully maintaining the networks they developed while in the center and have leveraged them to advance their career.
Collegiate Academies
Bellwether has partnered with Collegiate Academies, a CMO based in New Orleans, LA, for the last five years to conduct a mixed-methods implementation and impact study of their federal Charter Schools Program grant. This long-running study includes 1:1 and focus group interviews with Collegiate staff, families, and students; surveys of Collegiate students; and a quasi-experimental study of the impacts of enrollment on student outcomes.
Utah State Board of Education (USBE)
Bellwether is conducting a three year study of the Check & Connect Mentoring program offered by the Utah State Board of Education to students receiving Youth-in-Care and Prevention services provided to all students in state custody (juvenile justice and child welfare). Bellwether began by helping USBE build a logic model and implementation fidelity framework to describe the program and is now collecting annual implementation data to assess progress towards program goals. This study will result in an interactive data dashboard grounded in the logic model and implementation fidelity framework allowing state agency staff to track program implementation and understand the impact that high-quality services have on the youth receiving mentoring.
Our Team
Katrina Boone
Senior Associate Partner, Policy and Evaluation
David Casalaspi
Associate Partner, Policy and Evaluation
Kristen Carroll
Associate Partner, Policy and Evaluation
Keya Elie
Senior Analyst, Policy and Evaluation
Daniela Torre Gibney
Senior Associate Partner, Policy and Evaluation
Melissa Steel King
Partner and Evaluation Leader, Policy and Evaluation
Ebony Lambert
Associate Partner, Policy and Evaluation
Priyanka Patel
Senior Analyst, Policy and Evaluation
Libby Schwaner
Senior Analyst, Policy and Evaluation
Jessica Slaton
Associate Partner, Policy and Evaluation
Nora Weber
Senior Analyst, Policy and Evaluation
Partner With Us
We partner with a wide range of clients — from large-scale foundations to school districts to nonprofits to mission-driven companies. Let's work together to transform education.
