Evaluation of Children’s Aid Society Community Schools

Abstract

Evaluation has been a central part of the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) community schools work since the opening of the first school. From 1993 through 1999, a collaborative team from Fordham University’s Schools of Education and Social Services conducted process and outcome evaluations of the CAS work, with a focus on the first two schools, Intermediate School (IS) 218 and Primary School (PS) 5. Subsequently, CAS hired ActKnowledge, an independent research firm affiliated with the Center for Human Environments at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), to continue the evaluative work by building on the Fordham findings while using a different (theory of change) approach. Concurrent with the hiring of Act Knowledge, CAS contracted with a technical group called CitySpan Technologies to provide a data management system designed to organize accurate and current information for both program improvement and evaluation. This chapter will review the approach and findings of the earlier Fordham evaluation and then describe the current community schools evaluation, with a focus on its data management system and theory of change approach. CAS began evaluation at the start of implementation because they believed then, as now, that community schools are a model for education reform and that sustainability depended on learning lessons from the start.