Evaluation

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 advance educational equity. 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.

The Bellwether evaluation team’s Equity Commitments ground how we show up as individuals and a team, how we design and do our work, and how we interact with clients, communities, and the field. They stem from our belief that too often evaluation perpetuates systemic inequity. Our intention is to leverage evaluation as a tool in service of equity.

Our Equity Commitments include to:

• Identify and interrupt bias. We consciously reflect on how our individual and team identities intersect with our work. We build structured opportunities for identifying (and, when necessary, interrupting) bias and the ways our beliefs, mindsets, and behavior may help or harm our pursuit of equity.
• Acknowledge power and positionality. We acknowledge that evaluation is not a neutral activity and understand that we hold a position of power as evaluators. We explicitly name the assumptions, values, and context in which our perspectives and recommendations are grounded. We cultivate decision-making practices that prioritize inclusivity and equity and look for opportunities to share power and address power imbalances.
• Use inclusive methods and approaches. We prioritize the use of methods and approaches that are responsive to community contexts and incorporate expanded definitions of truth, knowledge, and evidence. We elevate and center the perspectives and experiences of systemically marginalized individuals and communities in our research, analysis, and insights, and recommendations.
• Acknowledge the past, understand the present, and design for the future. We help our partners and clients examine how past and present systemic drivers of inequity at the local and national level affect their strategy and results. We also support them in leveraging equitable evaluation to reimagine systems and structures in ways that accelerate their impact.

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