A recent review by The Hechinger Report highlights the challenges for educators in navigating claims about the effectiveness of ed tech products, which are especially critical now as schools pivot to online learning. Our Education Practice partners with schools and districts, helping them build the internal capacity to study the impact of a given product on their…
A Stronger Evidence Ecosystem is Vital for a More Equitable Recovery After the Pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic has transformed our world in a matter of weeks, and its effects on our communities, institutions, and systems will be felt long after the public health crisis subsides. In a recent editorial, Nick Hart of the Data Foundation and Dr. Nancy Potok, who served on the bipartisan Commission on Evidence-Based Policy Making,…
What the Federal Government Can Do to Address the Unprecedented Education Crisis Caused by Coronavirus
More than 50 million children and young adults have been affected by nationwide school building closures aimed at slowing the transmission of coronavirus. Students are facing the prospect of losing anywhere from weeks to months of schooling, and some states have warned that classrooms could remain shuttered for the rest of the academic year. This…
Winter 2020 Updates: Reflections, Milestones, and a Look Ahead
The Next Generation of Evidence Will Be Practitioner-Led After learning about a new data-sharing agreement between St. Paul’s schools and government, education justice advocate Marika Pfefferkorn became concerned. She felt that the agreement, which had gone into effect with little community involvement or awareness, had the potential to perpetuate racial disparities in Minnesota’s educational and…
The Next Generation of Evidence Will Be Practitioner-Led
After learning about a new data-sharing agreement between St. Paul’s schools and government, education justice advocate Marika Pfefferkorn became concerned. She felt that the agreement, which had gone into effect with little community involvement or awareness, had the potential to perpetuate racial disparities in Minnesota’s educational and criminal justice systems – specifically through predictive analytics…
Applying a Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Lens to Strengthen Evidence Building
For social sector leaders striving for equitable outcomes, incorporating a diversity, equity and inclusion lens for evidence building is critical — and often overlooked. Project Evident has been working to develop a structured process for promoting and integrating a diversity, equity and inclusion framework into the evidence building activities of an organization. The goal is…
Continuous Improvement and Evidence Building
Nonprofit organizations face high demand from communities for services, and increasing expectations from funders and policymakers for evidence of impact. For many years, traditional evaluations, such as randomized control trials (RCT), have been used to demonstrate the impact of programs. This evidence building method, if done prematurely, can often leave nonprofits with findings of minimal…
Fall 2019 Updates: Supporting Nonprofit-Led Evidence Building
The Role of the Practitioner in the Next Generation of Evidence In the next generation model for evidence building, we envision that practitioners become the drivers of their evidence agendas, equipped with the strategies, tools, and talent they need to rigorously evaluate their programs and strengthen outcomes for the communities they serve. We imagine an ecosystem less…
Empowering Practitioners to Drive the Evidence Train: Building the Next Generation of Evidence
The movement toward greater use of data and evidence in social programs is encouraging, and there is a widely shared commitment to achieving better outcomes for the vulnerable segments of society served by nonprofits. At the same time, the current paradigm for using evaluation to get those outcomes has faced challenges. It is time to…
Presentation to the Evidence Commission: A Funder’s Perspective
In 2016, Managing Director Kelly Fitzsimmons presented to the Commission on Evidence-based Policymaking (CEP) in order to help inform its strategy around the use of data and evidence in government policy and programs. Her presentation lays out existing constraints for using and building evidence – including limited innovation in evaluation, constrained data access and weak…