The Pittsburgh Promise provides scholarships to Pittsburgh Public School Students for postsecondary education, as well as other services and programs to assist students in making college and career decisions. EFL has several lines of work with the Promise.
Annual indicators for Scholar retention, persistence, and degree attainment. This ongoing, biennial work involves the comprehensive descriptive analysis of district, Promise administrative, and National Student Clearinghouse data to understand patterns and trends in college-going among Pittsburgh Public Schools students that both use and do not use the Pittsburgh Promise scholarship. These analyses are used to identify problems of practice or areas in need of additional intervention, including the performance of higher education institutions. Key partners: Saleem Ghubril and Danny Jackson
Impact studies of Pittsburgh Promise on enrollment, persistence, degree attainment and workforce participation. Using rigorous quantitative methodologies, we evaluated the causal impact of the Promise scholarship on postsecondary enrollment and persistence into the second year of college. Generously funded by the Lumina Foundation, this work has been completed and published in Education Finance and Policy. Currently, our team is evaluating the impact of the Promise on longer-term degree completion and workforce outcomes. This work is being conducted in collaboration with the US Treasury Department. Key partners: Lindsay Page, Jason Cook, and Aizat Nurshatayeva
Indicators framework for place-based scholarship programs. This was a development project funded by the Lumina Foundation in which the annual indicators work for the Pittsburgh Promise and the broader literature on predictors of postsecondary readiness and success were used to codify a framework of potential indicators in three key outcome areas of Promise programs: PK-12 education systems, postsecondary enrollment and attainment, and community/economic well-being that can be used by practitioners and researchers affiliated with place-based college scholarship programs. The framework has been disseminated and used nationally by other place-based scholarship programs to build their monitoring and evaluation plans. Key partners: Michelle Miller-Adams
This network of 40 precollege STEM programs was established and studied through a $10 million NSF INCLUDES award. The network built the first-ever umbrella organization for precollege STEM programs and engaged them in systems change work using a networked improvement community model.
The STEM PUSH Network is a (formerly NSF-funded) alliance of precollege STEM programs, STEM and culturally responsive pedagogy experts, formal and informal education practitioners, college admissions professionals, the accreditation sector, and other higher education representatives. It established a powerful collaborative improvement space using the networked improvement community (NIC) model and a "next generation" accreditation model that serves as a mechanism for communicating the power of precollege programs to admissions offices. To achieve its shared vision and goals, the Alliance had four key objectives: (1) establish and support a national precollege STEM program networked community, (2) develop a standards-based precollege STEM program accreditation system for broadening participation, (3) test and validate the model within the networked improvement community, and (4) spread, scale, and sustain the model through its backbone organization, the STEM Learning Ecosystem Community of Practice. The data infrastructure developed through this Alliance provided an unprecedented opportunity to advance scholarship in the fields of networked improvement community design and development, the efficacy of STEM precollege programs, and effective practices for broadening participation pathways from high school to higher education.
Equitable access to dual enrollment in the Western Pennsylvania region. This project funded by Pitt's Institute of Politics examined efforts to improve equitable enrollment in College in the High School (CiHS) programs at two Western Pennsylvania high schools. The work involved the development of interview and focus group protocols and resulted in two case studies of district-level improvement efforts. Findings were presented at an Institute of Politics event that brought together policymakers, state department of education staff, dual enrollment providers, and high school partners, and will be used to pursue further interventions to expand access to and improve the quality of dual enrollment programs in Western Pennsylvania.
The Free College Handbook. This handbook developed through a Kresge Foundation grant and edited by Michelle Miller-Adams and Jen Iriti, synthesizes evidence-based learnings around place-based scholarship (promise) programs in a clear, jargon-free format intended for practitioners and key decision-makers developing their own promise programs. The EFL team contributed chapters alongside researchers from multiple institutions across the country.
Classrooms Without Borders (CWB) is a Pittsburgh-based non-profit that provides experiential professional development opportunities for teachers and educational leaders. The EFL team has conducted external evaluations of their Poland Personally seminar and in-school programming.
Poland Personally evaluation. The Poland Personally seminar is one of CWB's signature programs. As external evaluators, we evaluated the experience that participants had on the seminar and how that experience shaped them as teachers, administrators, community change makers, or students. The EFL team's evaluation of this program collected pre- and post-seminar surveys and interviews with seminar participants to capture changes in individual knowledge, pedagogical practices, and educator-reported student engagement and learning. As a part of the evaluation, we also helped bolster CWB's internal data collection processes. Findings were used by program leadership and the organization's board to stengthen program design and implementation.
In-school programming. CWB operates a robust program that brings highly regarded and knowledgeable scholars to schools to work directly with educators and students. The EFL team conducted a one-year evaluation of this programming to assess to what degree this program advances CWB's core tenets, to strengthen CWB's internal data collection practices, and to identify opportunities to expand the program to underserved schools and students.
City Charter High School is a charter school located in downtown Pittsburgh. City High aims to prepare students for post-secondary education, training, or employment and utilizes innovative practices such as a year-round 4-day school week schedule and "looping" teachers. This ongoing evaluation of City Charter High School involves annual surveying of teachers, students, and parents to assess school climate and wellbeing, as well as analysis of administrative data to examine trends in student outcomes. Findings are presented annually to teachers and the board of trustees to support evidence-based decision-making. The evaluation has introduced more sophisticated analyses into City High's evaluation processes, including the identification of early indicators of academic struggle and opportunities for proactive student support. Current work also includes an evaluation of City High's 4-day school week model on student and staff outcomes.
The University of Pittsburgh, under leadership from Vice Provost Amanda Godley, Assistant Vice Chancellor Jennifer Iriti, and Graduate Studies Director Alydia Thomas, became a site for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Center for System Change. The work focuses on strengthening the culture and practices across STEM departments with doctoral programs to reduce barriers for students, especially those underrepresented in advanced STEM fields.
This two-year seed grant brough together STEM departments from the Swanson School of Engineering and the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences to develop inclusive practices for recruitment, selection, support and mentoring to reduce barriers for underrepresented doctoral students. The EFL team built the measurement infrastructure and the design of a networked improvement community that was the basis for the larger subsequent implementation proposal. During this seed grant, the NIC was established and operated one cycle of improvement testing resulting in improved practices around mentoring evaluation, student-led recruitment efforts, and identifying and address student concerns during the transition to graduate school.
This 3-year grant supports the continued development and implementation of the systemic change effort launched during the seed grant and adds resources to support 18 Sloan Scholars. The EFL team in partnership with the BE STEM Center continues to design, implement, and assess the networked improvement community across the participating 11 departments to drive sustainable practice and policy improvements. Each year, participating department representatives will engage in disciplined problem identification, solution generation, testing, and refinement. Ultimately, we examine student enrollment, persistence and completion rates as evidence of our impact.
Allegheny Health Network (AHN)'s Chill Project provides comprehensive behavioral health services to school communities in Pittsburgh and across the United States. Their work includes videos to support childhood emotional development and in-school interventions to provide preventative services and decrease mental health stigma.
School-based Chill Project. The EFL team studied the early in-school deployment of the Chill Project within a set of participating schools. The study sought to understand the barriers and enablers to effective implementation and student outcomes. The study produced an implementation "playbook" to support Chill Project leadership in scaling the initiative.
Cai & Kate. Cai & Kate is a video series produced by the AHN's Chill Project. These videos are intended to support children's understanding and regulation of emotion. Our one-year evaluation of the video series focused on the perceived value of the Cai & Kate videos for childhood socioemotional learning and opportunities to strengthen or extend the program. We collected surveys and interviews from teachers and therapists that use these videos in their practice to capture the experience of these videos for practitioners and students.
Chill Mobile. Chill Mobile is a preventative program offered in partnership with the Pittsburgh Pirates. The program is a retrofitted RV that travels to elementary schools in Allegheny County to teach students about evidence-based coping skills. The EFL team conducted an evaluation of the pilot year of Chill Mobile to assess the quality of program implementation and the impact of the program on participants.
