Projects and Partners

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CORE Community Partners

CORE Campus Partners

Active Playful Learning (APL)

CORE is serving as the local lead for a national study examining guided play in early learning settings. The multisite study will examine coaching strategies to support early childhood and early elementary teachers in providing APL instructional techniques in the classroom and resulting student outcomes.

Big Thought - Dallas City of Learning

Big Thought’s Dallas City of Learning initiative is helping to coordinate a network of out of school time providers to enhance the number and variety of learning opportunities available to youth. As a long-term evaluation partner, CORE is conducting ongoing evaluation, collaborating with Big Thought to envision long term outcomes and co-creating emerging knowledge about informal learning ecosystems.

Child Care Associates

CORE provides comprehensive early learning assessment, reporting, and evaluation services to Child Care Associates (CCA), located in Fort Worth, Texas. CCA provides high-quality early learning experiences to young children, delivers child care financial assistance and other vital resources to parents, and offers professional development opportunities to educators. CORE has been partnering with CCA since 2016. CCA is an innovating and learning organization, seeking to consistently improve implementation & outcomes. CORE provides twice-annual CLASS assessments and reporting for CCA classrooms, evaluates program impact on students, and provides general consultation and evaluation of innovations being implemented by CCA. In 2019, CORE was named the recipient of the CCA North Texas Early Childhood Leadership Award.

Child Poverty Action Lab

CORE serves as a formal thought partner and evaluation consultant to CPAL as they work to implement a risk terrain modeling project in Dallas aimed at preventing child maltreatment.

CLASS – Regional Data Partner

CORE serves as a data partner to multiple early childhood organizations utilizing the CLASS tool to improve classroom instruction. CORE trains observers on the CLASS™ observation system, maintains secure data, and develops formative reports and presentations for the district, feeder patterns, individual schools and individual teachers as well as non-profit partners and funders. Partners on this multi-faceted project include DallasISD, RichardsonISD, MesquiteISD, Early Matters Dallas/the Commit partnership specific to the TEA RECESS grant, Child Care Group, Child Care Associates, the Early Learning Alliance and Ft. Worth ISD, Uplift Charter Schools, and the Community Action Corporation of South Texas. CORE serves as a data partner to community organizations using the CLASS tool, and is also conducting federally funded research about the effects of high-quality instruction on student outcomes and on effective strategies for achieving high quality instruction at scale.

CLASS in DallasISD

DallasISD’s Early Learning Department and CORE are engaged in a longitudinal research-practice partnership aimed at supporting quality early childhood educational experiences. CLASS observations are conducted by CORE, and rapid feedback of actionable data is allowing the Early Learning Department, instructional specialists and campus leadership to provide targeted coaching to early elementary teachers (PreK to 2nd grade). This ongoing data collection also allows CORE to document how quality is changing semester over semester and year over year and to document the longer-term implications of sustained early childhood quality for student outcomes.

Clayton Youth Enrichment Services

CORE is working with Clayton Youth Enrichment Services to develop an evaluation of their afterschool program with a social-emotional learning focus. The study will investigate the links between professional development and support offered to staff, program implementation, and student social-emotional outcomes. The evaluation is being piloted during the 2021-2022 school year, and the anticipated launch of the full evaluation study is the 2022- 2023 school year.

Dallas Afterschool

CORE and Dallas Afterschool have maintained a longstanding evaluation partnership that has evolved over multiple years of collaboration. Initially, CORE and DAS worked to establish impacts of quality afterschool programming on students’ academic, social & emotional wellbeing. Together, we added to the existing evidence showing positive impacts from afterschool for student academics. Currently, CORE and DAS continue to collaborate to disseminate knowledge about what works for promoting quality OST programming. DAS and CORE are partners along with Big Thought and DallasISD on the Expanded Learning Information System.

Dallas College

CORE is working in partnership with Dallas College's School of Education (DC-SOE) to conduct a multi-year evaluation of the early educator workforce development pipeline. DC-SOE's innovative teacher preparation pipeline is the state's first community college to be certified in providing a four-year bachelor's degree. This evaluation, supported by a Moody MPACT grant, features key questions designed to understand what works, for whom, and under what circumstances.

Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum

CORE is partnering with the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum as they investigate learning and attitudinal impacts resulting from student field trips provided as part of their redesigned educational programming and their new museum space.

Expanded Learning Information System

CORE is partnering with Big Thought, Dallas Afterschool and Dallas ISD to develop and pilot the Expanded Learning Information System (ELIS), a shared data system that streamlines data collection and data exports from after and summer school sites across the city of Dallas. In 2022, ELIS was expanded to include DallasISD’s Expanded Learning Office (ELO) district-run sites.

Forest Forward

CORE serves as an evaluation consultant to Forest Forward as they build out their strategic plans for transforming areas of South Dallas. In the initial stages of the work, CORE and Forest Forward are engaging in planning sessions to forecast long term outcome data needs, to strategize data access, to build data infrastructure and evaluation capacity, and to operationalize strategic plans so that key elements of the initiative are measurable.

The George W. Bush Institute

CORE is engaged in a long-term evaluation partnership with the George W. Bush Institute related to their Presidential Leadership Scholars program. CORE’s major efforts involve ongoing monitoring and reporting of survey data from active scholars as well as alumni and collaboratively refining the PLS theory of change and evaluation strategy to accommodate sustainability and additional attention to race, diversity, inclusion and equity.

Jubilee Park & Community ��ý

CORE is partnering with Jubilee Park & Community ��ý, Dallas ISD, and the Consortium on Educational Research and Evaluation (CERI) on a nearly $1 million Promise Neighborhoods Grant from the U.S. Dept. of Education. CORE will evaluate the initiative and provide frequent formative data to inform the planning process.

Journey Forward Mentoring Program

The ��ý on Research and Evaluation (CORE) is working with Journey Forward Mentoring Program (JFMP) – a high school and college mentoring program. CORE has launched a pilot phase evaluation, following an initial evaluation planning phase. CORE and JMFP (formerly Leadership Forward) in this pilot phase, will test the theory of change and logic model and gather evidence about how the intervention is being implemented. Based on this pilot, a recommendation will be made to either continue piloting the evaluation of the intervention or recommend a multi-year outcome evaluation if there is sufficient evidence that the intervention is being implemented consistently, with quality and fidelity.

Lena Pope

��ý CORE is engaging with Lena Pope to plan an expansion of their flagship early childhood center as well as to develop a comprehensive evaluation approach for long term monitoring, continuous improvement, and outcomes evaluation.

The Morris Foundation Literacy Project

CORE is serving as an evaluation partner to The Morris Foundation (TMF) to examine associations between literacy enrichment programming and student outcomes for Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD) students in the early grades (K-3). Using student-level data from FWISD as well as dosage and other programming data from the literacy programs, the resulting series of reports for TMF will contextualize student literacy development for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years.

Principal Impact Collaborative at UNT Dallas (PIC)

CORE is working with Principal Impact Collaborative at UNT Dallas to refine an existing evaluation of their principal professional development program, with the goal of increasing the level of available evidence for impact. The evaluation aims to identify improvements in wellbeing and leadership skills among participating principals, as well as distal effects on school culture and student achievement. CORE and PIC staff are working collaboratively to refine an existing logic model, to build out additional data collection strategies and to articulate a multi-phase approach to building evidence.

Read Up

CORE is serving as a data analysis partner with Communities Foundation Texas (CFT) and Read Up, a collaborative of four non-profit organizations that provide local literacy interventions. The Read Up collaborative includes: Beacon Hill Preparatory Institute, Catch Up and Read, Readers 2 Leaders, and Reading Partners. Using student-level data from Dallas ISD and Read Up attendance as well as other program data, the resulting reports will provide DISD and Read Up with rigorous insights about associations between Read Up programming and student literacy outcomes in the early grades (K-3).

Teach For America

CORE is a long-term research, evaluation and thought partner for Teach for America. CORE conducted an initial impact evaluation of Teach for America’s impact in Texas sites in 2019. CORE and TFA have leveraged those data to provide technical assistance to Texas regions, and to support a number of strategic initiatives. CORE and TFA have added a Post-Doctoral Fellow for the ongoing multi-year Texas Impact Study.

Texas Partnership for Out of School Time

CORE initially partnered with the Texas Partnership for Out of School Time (TXPOST) to conduct an initial landscape analysis to determine how providers across the state of Texas conceptualize and measure quality of OST programs and student outcomes. CORE continues to serve as a thought partner, connecting local and statewide OST evidence and opportunities for improvement. CORE now serves as an ongoing thought partner and valuation consultant to TXPOST.

VolunteerNow

CORE is partnering with VolunteerNow, a nationally recognized non-profit capacity building organization, to support the design of programming intended to improve the emotional health and well-being of nonprofit employees. CORE will provide evaluation consultation services to assist VolunteerNow in initial evaluation planning, logic modeling and data collection planning.

Walton Family Foundation

CORE is engaged with the Walton Family Foundation to launch The Advancing Evaluation in Philanthropy (AEP) Fellowship program which focuses on the intersection or research and evaluation, and philanthropy. The two-year-long fellowships will focus on developing professionals of color and utilizing more culturally responsive evaluation designs. With the support of the Walton Family Foundation, CORE will be able to help Fellows gain rigorous and real-world experience in research and evaluation in philanthropy. The inaugural Fellowship, launching in 2022, will have five key components: guided supervision, mentorship, project work, conference presentations, and an individual capstone project.

College Access

CORE partners with the Simmons School’s College Access program to build evaluation capacity and data interoperability as well as to evaluate outcomes of key programs. This collaboration is aimed at increasing College Access’s ability to conduct rigorous analyses as a supplement and extension to existing evaluation activities and to build research infrastructure within the center as part of ��ý’s overall Road to R1 status.

LIME

CORE is collaborating as an evaluator with the Simmons School of Education and Human Development’s ��ý on Research in Mathematics for the LIME (Leaders Investigating Mathematics Evidence) project, funded by the Office of Special Education Programs to create the next generation of researchers and leaders with PhDs in special education with a focus on mathematics. The LIME grant provides tuition and stipend support, travel to conferences, and research support for twelve scholars for four years of doctoral studies. The program will be hosted at three universities: University of Texas, Austin; ��ý Methodist University; and University of Missouri.

West Dallas STEM School

CORE serves a critical operations and support role for the West Dallas STEM School project, a signature collaboration between Simmons School of Education and Human Development, DallasISD, and the Toyota Foundation to plan, implement and support a PreK-8 STEM School in West Dallas. This work is supported by grants from Toyota USA Foundation, the Truist Foundation, the Constantin Foundation, and Carter Creech. CORE’s Executive Director has served in a strategic leadership role, helping to shape the collaboration from its inception. CORE’s primary role on WDSS is supporting data access and data collection, ensuring that the research, evaluation and continuous improvement activities of the partnership are supported.

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