To promote prenatal health and improve birth outcomes, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) developed the Strong Start for Mothers and Newborns initiative. The Strong Start initiative is assessing several enhanced prenatal care approaches, including home visiting. As part of the Strong Start initiative, CMS, in partnership with the…

The Economic and Workforce Development Program (EWD) aims to support California's economy by aligning community college educational programs with workforce development needs. The program connects employers and community college educators through a network of workforce training resources and partnerships called "Doing What Matters for Jobs and…

California's dynamic economy depends on having a large and skilled workforce; consequently, the state must continually support and refine efforts to provide workers with employer-valued competencies. Given the wide range of regional and state needs across this vast state, ensuring that the workforce has the training to keep up with labor market…

Since 2010, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) has periodically administered the "Strong Foundations" survey, which documents the content, structure, and effective use of state postsecondary student unit record systems (PSURSs). This report highlights the results of the fourth administration of the survey,…

Students with diabetes deserve a school nurse who can effectively manage the disease. Tensions between the school and families sometimes emerge when a child with diabetes goes to school. To resolve these tensions in Colorado, stakeholders collaborated to implement a statewide program to meet the needs of students with diabetes. Colorado school…

The University of Missouri Extension needed to develop an annual program review process that collaboratively engaged county-level stakeholders. The results from the first 2 years highlight the results, challenges, and implications of the design process. The annual review process needs to be adaptive, responsive, and reflective from year to year…

Since the first child care Quality Rating System (QRS) was implemented in Oklahoma 11 years ago (in 1998), 16 additional statewide systems have been launched and numerous states are piloting or developing a QRS (Zaslow, Tout, & Martinez-Beck, forthcoming). As QRS stakeholders across the nation look ahead to the next decade, it is important to take…

The Consolidated Child Care Pilot Projects were established by the Colorado General Assembly in 1997, and designed to help local communities to address critical needs for full-day, full-year child care services in partnership with welfare reform. This report describes the context for the project, details the pilot programs, and profiles the 12…

The evaluation of Minnesota's Early Childhood Family Education program is described, and a dialog between one of the evaluators and an editor of this journal provides further insight into the evaluation process. Noteworthy in this evaluation, called exemplary by the American Evaluation Association, was highly motivated collaboration of evaluation…

Describes an evaluability assessment of the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA), a technology development program. Presents the steps involved in conducting an evaluability assessment, including development of an understanding of the program and its stakeholders. Analyzes and compares different methods by which the GRA could be evaluated. (SLD)

Discusses the roles played by participants and the processes involved in a provincial standards-setting exercise for a large-scale assessment of student skills. Offers perspectives of a policy maker outside the exercise and an insider participant. Describes alternate notions of representativeness, stakes, and significance. (SLD)

Evaluation of strategic planning programs is illustrated using the examples of statewide forest resource planning programs implemented by state governments in 1986. Client-based perspectives were studied via a survey of 216 officials affected by the forestry planning program. Considering planning's context, process, outputs, and performance helped…

This article promotes the use of contextual constructionism in evaluation research. The call for truth in sentencing in Tennessee (and across the country) is used to illustrate the conflict among stakeholders that arises from program evaluation and to show how their multiple realities make a contextual constructionist approach pertinent. (SLD)

New York State Tech-Prep is a joint-secondary-higher-education program with the objective of providing students with rigorous technical and academic skills. Currently 30 Tech-Prep consortia operate across the state. In 1996, the state commissioned an evaluation of its Tech-Prep programs. This report summarizes information from the first study that…