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Evaluation of the Texas High School Project

Reforming today's high schools to achieve better educational outcomes is at the top of most national, state, and local education agendas. With funding from the Texas Education Agency (TEA), the Community Foundation of Texas, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the Texas High School Project (THSP) constitutes one of the country's most ambitious statewide efforts to prepare college- and career-ready high school graduates. THSP is made up of several high school reform initiatives, including High Schools That Work, High School Redesign and Restructuring, Early College High Schools, New Schools and Charter Schools, Texas Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (T-STEM), and High School Redesign.

THSP's success will be crucial to the future of the state's secondary and postsecondary education. To provide policymakers and educators with objective, timely, and targeted information that will help ensure the progress and success of the high school reform initiatives, TEA, with support from THSP funders, has contracted with SRI International and its subcontractors to conduct a longitudinal evaluation of THSP. The evaluation team seeks to do the following:

• Provide annual formative and summative evaluations of THSP initiatives to TEA and THSP funders
• Design systems to compile demographic and assessment data
• Document the process and outcomes of educational change
• Identify factors that lead to success or pose challenges
• Analyze policy factors affecting success
• Synthesize lessons learned into best practices

The primary audiences for the evaluation are the THSP program staff and THSP-funded schools; however, the evaluation also has an external audience of policymakers, funders, and practitioners in the field of educational reform.

The research team's approach to the THSP evaluation is grounded in the simple proposition that what matters most in comprehensive reform is what happens in the schools—where teachers teach and students learn. The evaluation design also reflects THSP's complexity and multiple initiatives. Based on THSP's Theory of Change, the evaluation is designed to identify and understand the role of state and district policy, school reform networks and support providers, school conditions, and teacher and student activities in the implementation of THSP reforms. These factors will be studied through qualitative interviews and case studies, as well as quantitative surveys and other analyses. The team will track student outcomes such as attitudes towards academics, attendance, course-taking patterns, and achievement.

Data collection and analysis activities will concentrate on understanding the implementation and outcomes of the various initiatives at individual high schools. The evaluation team will examine change at the school level and then trace the contributions of the different support efforts to that change.

(Texas Education Agency, 2007-2011)

Key Staff

Principal Investigator: Nancy Adelman

Project Director: Viki Young

Staff: Katherine Baisden, Nancy Bier, Lauren Cassidy, Catherine Hall, Paul Hu, Daniel Humphrey, Kaeli Keating, Christine Padilla, C.J. Park, David Sherer, Victoria Tse, Haiwen Wang, Kaily Yee