Exploring the Role, Challenges, and Promise of Internal and External Evaluation in Juvenile Justice Education

• In Event: Education Inside the Juvenile Justice System: Leveraging Data, Research, and Evidence to Drive Improvement in a System Under Tension

Abstract

Internal evaluation within the Collaborative for Educational Services’ (CES) DYS Education Initiative has actively guided administrator decisions around curriculum resources, program structures, professional development design, and populations in need of greater attention for over a decade. Guided by positive youth development principles, the administrative team (including the internal evaluator) consistently value, seek out, and endeavor to amplify youth voice, agency, and ownership of their educational and career preparation experiences. With a ground-level perspective on who our youth are and the structural constraints of the juvenile justice system and settings in the Commonwealth, the administrative team is routinely responsible for focusing our attention on our population’s greatest needs–academic and emotional, for they’re often intertwined–using the best research available, while operating in an often mercurial and security-conscious environment.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, congregate care settings like DYS’s had different requirements for health and safety than public schools, requiring extended quarantines for youth in their bedrooms, where there was no access to devices. Additionally, the juvenile justice population tends to have a more fraught relationship with school in the best of times: in a pandemic, it was even easier to disengage or be enrolled in schools that struggled to make classes available. CES noted the increasing difficulties of our transient student population and, along with our peers in public schools, landed on accelerated learning as a possible solution. Internal evaluation of our students has long demonstrated greater difficulty with math than reading (though literacy is certainly a challenge for many youth); since math is one of the core content areas assessed at the state level, and one cannot receive a high school diploma without passing the state test, we began our focus on that in school year 2022-23. To introduce accelerated learning strategies is a challenge in our system, structured as it is to have two-teacher schools, where the math teacher may or may not be licensed in math. Professional development must therefore build content knowledge simultaneous with pedagogical content knowledge, but also maximize student time on learning; there is precious little time to pull teachers out to provide them with math instruction.

How can CES know we’re pursuing the right approach in this early effort to accelerate learning, making it more likely that youth receive grade-level instruction that moves them closer to their educational attainment goals? While the internal evaluator regularly engages in traditional evaluation activities, the role necessarily also comprises targeted needs assessment processes, grant and funder accountability reporting, project management, and administrative data management and cleaning, as is often true for internal evaluators at smaller organizations. The partnership with the external evaluator, with its team of researchers and evaluators, enables a full-scale iterative evaluation of the initiative, drawing as needed on the internal evaluator’s expertise on DYS youth and data, collecting richer, more robust data than would otherwise be possible about student, teacher, support staff, and administrator experiences, offering new insights that the DYS/CES partnership alone doesn’t have the capacity to generate.

Author

• Gwynne Ellen Morrissey, Collaborative for Educational Services