To create and maintain continual improvement, school leaders must set goals, create strategies to reach the goals, and use checklists and rubrics in combination with regular communication between the district office and schools to ensure that everyone is staying on track. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

From 2004-2008, capacity to conduct program evaluation was built among the "Network for a Healthy California's" 48 largest local partners. Capacity building was done within a framework of Empowerment Evaluation and Utility-Focused evaluation. Tools included: a Scope of Work template, a handbook, a compendium of surveys, an evaluation…

School improvement is much sought and often claimed. However, it is questionable whether overall achievement in countries such as the USA or England has improved by any significant amount over thirty years. Several school improvement programmes have been claimed as successful, but evaluations, even where they exist, are generally poor: based on…

Project Even Start is an intergenerational literacy project that promotes adult literacy, trains parents to support the educational growth of their children, and prepares children for school. The program is designed to facilitate joint participation by parents and children. It includes home-based instruction and child care, and it is integrated…

The five-year Georgia Head Start Quality Initiative was founded in 1994 to provide training and technical assistance (consisting of monthly group training sessions and individual on-site consultation) for Georgia Head Start administrators as they pursue National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) accreditation. This document…

This book brings together sources of material on poverty and family health and makes it accessible to health and welfare teams working with families with young children. It draws on a wide range of disciplines and uses both "hard" and "soft" data to provide facts and figures and first-hand accounts of how poverty affects family…

To guide the development of teacher education programs at the University of Western Sydney Macarthur (Australia), a "Starting Teacher" questionnaire and the Graduate Career Council of Australia survey were administered to 48 early childhood and 168 primary teacher education students at their graduation ceremony in April 1993. These…

In spring 1992, a group of faculty and staff at East Central College (ECC) in Union, Missouri, met to reconsider the school's orientation process, which had had limited success since its inception in 1987. The group developed a list of objectives for the orientation process and grouped them under the headings of skills, awareness, involvement, and…

In fiscal year 1989, the Illinois community colleges conducted the first review of the general education component of their baccalaureate/transfer degree programs. This review, to be performed every 5 years, involved an extensive and diverse range of activities, and many colleges had difficulty completing the first review in a year's time. As a…

This document reports the findings of the 1990-91 process evaluation of the Saginaw, Michigan Early Childhood Education Preschool (MECEP) program for 4-year-olds at risk of academic failure. As of January 18, 1991, a total of 285 pupils were participating in the program at 8 sites. The overall goal of the program is to provide 4-year-olds with an…

Because of a perceived lack in the development and use of evaluation procedures for vocational education in Illinois, a new evaluation system was begun in 1984. It required that at least 20 percent of funded vocational programs be evaluated annually, in compliance with requirements of the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act. The evaluation…

This report examines current state practices and procedures for assessing vocational education programs in light of the evaluation requirements of the 1976 Vocational Education Act Amendments. The report is based on information obtained through personal and telephone interviews with vocational education administrative personnel in the states,…

A synthesis is provided of the information collected between September 1984 and April 1985 by Operational Program Review (OPR) teams regarding 22 California community college Extended Opportunity Programs and Services (EOPS) programs. Chapter 1 explains the purposes and evaluation methods of OPRs, and outlines the general characteristics of the…

According to an evaluation symposium, the David Thompson University Centre (University of Victoria) pilot program in rural education, which includes a 14-week early field experience designed to help education students understand the relationship between rural communities and their schools, is "substantial and outstanding." Faculty,…

The 1982-83 school year was the second year of the New York City (New York) Public Schools Promotional Gates Program. Under this program students in grades four and seven who failed to attain their promotional criteria (in both reading and mathematics) were retained for a year of intensive remedial instruction. This report is the result of a…