Community Schools Evaluation Toolkit

Welcome to the Community School Evaluation Toolkit. This toolkit is designed to help community schools evaluate their efforts so that they learn from their successes, identify current challenges, and plan future efforts. It provides a step-by-step process for planning and conducting an evaluation at your community school site(s). The toolkit is a practical, hands-on guide that makes it possible for you to improve your community school’s effectiveness and to tell your story. Equally important, it offers a menu of data collection tools (i.e. surveys, public databases) for evaluating whether and how your school is achieving results.

Download the four-page brief or the entire Toolkit and share with others, or bookmark this page to access individual Steps and/or Tables. As the Coalition strive to continuously improve tools for the field, we would love to hear your feedback! Please give us comments, suggestions, and ideas on how we can continue to improve the Evaluation Toolkit for your use. In addition to this Toolkit, click here to access more resources on evaluation and data collection from the field. You should also check out the Coalition's Rationale for Results Framework.

[By: Shital C. Shah, Coalition for Community Schools at the Institute for Educational Leadership;
Katrina Brink, Rebecca London, Shelly Masur, and Gisell Quihuis at the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University]

Generous support for the creation of the Evaluation Toolkit was provided by JP Morgan Chase.

Preface

Introduction

Overview
About Community Schools

Part 1 - Before you Start: Begin with the End in Mind

Step 1: The Community Schools Logic Model.

By focusing their work around results, community schools can position themselves to identify partnerships, secure funding, and achieve selected results. The toolkit is organized around the Community Schools Logic Model (LM) to provide community schools nationwide with common language for assessment.
Table A: Community Schools Logic Model
Table B: Results and Corresponding Indicators
Access more resources (e.g. planning tools, community school case studies, etc.)

Step 2: Have what you need to conduct a successful evaluation.

Part 2 - Get Ready: Prepare to Evaluate

Step 3: Know what you want to evaluate.

Table C - Common Language
Table D - SMART – Tips for Choosing Results

Step 4: Align your evaluation to the Community Schools Logic Model

Part 3 - Get Set: Designing the Evaluation

Step 5: Develop the questions you want to answer in your evaluation.
Step 6: Decide what data to collect.

There are a variety of data sources you can access to answer your evaluation questions. Many questions can be answered using data already collected by your school, district, county, or other partner agencies. However, some evaluation questions may require additional data. This toolkit includes surveys designed to complement administrative data and to cover the components of the RBLM.

Table E - Recommended Results, Indicators, and Data Collection Strategies for Students, Families, Schools, and Communities.

To see how these surveys can complement administrative data sets and align with the RBLM see Tools for Short Term and Long Term Results.
Surveys for RBLM data collection

Part 4 - Go!: The Evaluation Process

Step 7: Collect data
Step 8: Making sense of your data
Step 9: Use your findings

Appendices

Appendix A - List of Evaluation Advisory Team
Appendix B - Data Collection Surveys
Appendix C - Community School Funding Sources: Data Collection Matrix