In 2011, the New York City Mayor's Office, the Open Society Foundations, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and over 20 local agencies launched the Young Men's Initiative (YMI), a citywide effort to improve outcomes for Black and Latino young men in the areas of education, health, employment, and criminal justice. YMI is one of the single largest…

This appendix describes the data collection and analytic processes used to develop the findings in the report "Promising Opportunities for Black and Latino Young Men." A central challenge was creating an analytic framework that could be uniformly applied to all schools, despite the individualized nature of their Expanded Success…

In 2011, the New York City Mayor's Office, the Open Society Foundations, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and over 20 local agencies launched the Young Men's Initiative (YMI), a citywide effort to improve outcomes for Black and Latino young men in the areas of education, health, employment, and criminal justice. YMI is one of the single largest…

The Algebra Project DR K-12, funded by the National Science Foundation as a Research and Development Project, addressed the challenge of offering significant STEM content for students to ensure public literacy and workforce readiness. The project's primary purpose was to test the feasibility and effectiveness of a model for establishing four-year…

In this brief, a program evaluation is defined, address common concerns program managers and practitioners have regarding evaluation, and outline five major reasons why conducting a program evaluation can benefit an out-of-school time program. Program evaluation is a valuable tool for program managers who are seeking to strengthen the quality of…

This article elaborates on how the technical capabilities of virtual reality support the constructivist learning principles. It introduces VRID, a model for instructional design and development that offers explicit guidance on how to produce an educational virtual environment. The define phase of VRID consists of three main tasks: forming a…

This document is the second quarterly progress report for the evaluation of Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act (JJCPA) programs for the Los Angeles County Probation Department. The report covers the period from July 1, 2008, through September 30, 2008. The intent of the report is to provide Probation and the community-based organizations (CBOs)…

In fiscal year 2008, about 31 million children participated in the National School Lunch Program and more than 10 million children participated in the School Breakfast Program each school day. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) spent $11.7 billion on the school meal programs in that year. The majority of…

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 authorized the Secretary of Education to establish a $650 million Innovation Fund to expand the work of schools that have made gains in closing achievement gaps. With growing discussion and considerable money heading in the direction of innovation, Grover "Russ" Whitehurst provides recommendations…

The goal of the current study was to conduct a formative evaluation of a female adolescent empowerment program. Participants were recruited through a mail survey. A total of 32 school counselors (response rate 40%) participated. The following questions were investigated: (1) What do the school counselors perceive as the strengths and weaknesses of…

As part of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the federal Head Start and Early Head Start programs received a significant increase in funding. Head Start is the longest-running program to address systemic poverty in the United States. It is also one of the most heavily researched programs in the nation. Still, debate continues…

Extended learning opportunities (ELOs) provide safe, structured learning environments for students outside the traditional school day. ELOs include afterschool and summer learning programs as well as before-school, evening, and weekend programs. ELOs come in many forms and can include tutoring, volunteering, academic support, community service,…

The purpose of this review was to evaluate whether the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP), a group cognitive-behavioral intervention, is effective in targeting depressive symptoms in youths. We identified 17 controlled evaluations of PRP (N = 2,498) in which depressive symptoms had been measured via an online search of PsycInfo, Medline, ERIC, and…

Why does evaluation matter so much in school counseling? Most importantly, when school counselors evaluate their interventions and programs, they can be more certain that what they are doing is making a difference for their students. School counselors have a professional responsibility to show that what they are doing is effective. With evaluation…

The paper offers a retrospective evaluation of recent evaluative studies of bilingual programs in the Australian state of Victoria, in an attempt to determine how successfully the evaluation process met the dual criteria of external accountability and development. The programs in question were located in primary or secondary government schools and…