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2017-05-01
Police Executive Research Forum;
One recent development in the battle against gun violence has shown promise, however. That involves the use of technology to streamline and support police enforce-ment and investigatory efforts against criminals who carry guns. This report examines one of these promising technology-based applications: the Crime Gun Intelligence Center (CGIC) model. CGICs are an interagency collaboration among local police departments, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and other partners such as state and local prosecutors, to identify perpetrators of gun crime for immediate inves-tigation, apprehension, and prosecution. CGICs combine state-of-the-art analytical technology, data processing systems, and good old-fashioned detective work to help police agencies more quickly analyze ballistic evidence, establish connections among seemingly unrelated crimes, and build criminal cases targeting both gun traffickers and trigger-pullers.
2017-03-28
Jobs for the Future;
How many people work in green infrastructure? What are the jobs? What level of compensation do they offer? What are the educational requirements? How much potential is there for job creation as green infrastructure investments increase? How is the green infrastructure workforce within the six U.S. cities examined for this report similar to—or different than—that in the nation as a whole?
This issue brief attempts to answer these and other questions about current and emerging workforce trends related to the rise in green infrastructure activities. It summarizes the results of research conducted by Jobs for the Future (JFF) as part of NatureWORKS, a national initiative to understand the jobs, careers, skills, credentials, and potential of the U.S. green infrastructure workforce. The study was funded by the U.S. Forest Service's National Urban and Community Forestry Grant Program as recommended by the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council, NUCFAC.
The research focused on occupations involved in the direct installation, maintenance, and inspection (IMI) of the green infrastructure (GI) and their first-line supervisors. This report describes the GI-IMI involvement of occupations whose work includes green infrastructure activities. It also discusses the emerging movement to certify green infrastructure workers in the stormwater management field as a way to both raise the quality of GI work and promote green infrastructure implementation, thereby expanding the workforce.
2016-10-03
Denver Foundation;
This past summer, you received an Impact Report on our work in the areas of Education and Economic Opportunity which highlighted The Denver Foundation's Common Sense Discipline and Impact Investment programs. Now we're sharing an Impact Report on progress in The Denver Foundation's Basic Human Needs and Leadership & Equity objective areas. The Community Navigator and Nonpro fi t Internship programs are innovative approaches that wouldn't be happening without the support of The Denver Foundation.
2016-07-27
Wallace Foundation, The;
At one time, finding an assistant principal for a public school in Denver entailed a search through "a gajillion résumés," in the words of one local school district administrator. Even then, some ideal candidates likely fell through the cracks. Those days are over, owing to the development by Denver Public Schools of a "leader tracking system," a database of information about the training, qualifications and performance of principals and aspiring principals.
This Story From the Field examines how Denver and five other school districts have constructed and are using these systems as they seek to better train, hire and support school principals. All six districts are taking part in the Principal Pipeline Initiative, a Wallace Foundation-funded effort to help the school systems develop a large corps of strong school principals and generate lessons for the field.
In addition to aiding district officials in identifying strong principal and assistant principal candidates and matching them to the right schools, the leader tracking systems are helping in efforts to forecast job vacancies, pinpoint principal training topics and spot potential principal mentors. The districts are also beginning to use the systems to share aggregate information about the performance of principals with the preparation programs from which the principals graduated.
The publication makes clear that developing a leader tracking system takes time and effort. It describes, for example, how determining what information to collect, and then finding it, proved to be a key but time-consuming task, not least because essential data could be housed in different niches of the school bureaucracies.
2015-12-08
Manhattan Institute;
As charter schools continue their rapid expansion in America's cities, questions related to equitable access to these schools of choice have jumped to the forefront of the policy conversation. Indeed, the proportion of students in charters with classifications that suggest that they are difficult to educate -- such as students with disabilities, those who are not proficient in English, and those who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch -- is often substantially below their respective proportions in traditional ("district") public schools.
This paper uses longitudinal data from Denver to measure whether adoption of common enrollment increased the proportion of disadvantaged students enrolled in that city's charter elementary schools. It finds that Denver's adoption of common enrollment substantially increased the proportion of students enrolling in charter kindergartens who are minority, eligible for free/reduced-priced lunch, or speak English as a second language. Importantly, this paper considers only one specific effect of common enrollment on the charter-school sector. While policymakers should take a more expansive measure of the merits of common enrollment before adopting it, this paper suggests that an effective way to boost disadvantaged students' enrollment in charters is to make applying to them easier.
2015-11-01
Mission Spark;
During March 2015, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA) and Denver Public School District Senior Administration (Admin) engaged third party consultant Mission Spark, LLC, to engage teachers and special service providers around their perspectives on and experiences with the District's compensation system, commonly known as ProComp. Senior representatives from each organization worked collaboratively to identify critical topics to explore based on past engagement efforts, to select schools for participation, and to group teachers and special service providers (SSPs) for focus groups. In addition, the Mission Spark team conducted 11 interviews with primary stakeholders involved in the design and evaluation of the ProComp system to promote continuity between evaluative and engagement efforts.
This final report, geared at an internal (not public) audience, provides more detailed insight into participant perspectives, implications of those insights, shares teacher-generated ideas for improving ProComp, and finishes with recommendations for both further exploration and considerations for the renegotiation of ProComp 3.0.
2015-11-01
Informing Change;
The Initiative leaders invested in evaluation from the start of the work together in order to learn along the way about what works and what needs adjustment, and to document the impact of the Initiative overall. Informing Change was invited to evaluate the first three years of the Initiative, beginning with facilitating the development of the Initiative's Theory of Change. We then designed a mixed-methods evaluation that includes surveys of teens and parents involved with Initiative programs; interviews with Jewish youth professionals; interviews with grantees, funders and other community stakeholders; and a review of grantee reports and other materials.
During the Initiative's first year, teen participants from the three grantee programs that were operational—JSC, Moving Traditions and BJTI—were invited to participate in a survey about their experiences in these programs and their involvement in Jewish life in their communities more broadly. JSC used a survey that it administers to all teens in its groups nationally. Informing Change designed surveys for Moving Traditions and BJTI with items from the Cross-Community Evaluation as well as those specifically for Denver-Boulder and their unique programs. These surveys were launched very close to the end of the school year, and later than originally intended, largely due to the coordination with the Cross-Community Evaluation. Due to low survey response rates, the data collected from each program is limited. Only 2 teens from BJTI, 16 teens from Moving Traditions and 44 teens from JSC programs completed surveys. Note that these counts only include respondents who completed a survey and indicated that either they are Jewish or someone in their family is Jewish.
Similarly, our parent surveys included items from the Cross-Community Evaluation and customized items for Denver-Bounder and also had low rates of completion. This is an important limitation to consider when interpreting the parent data in this report. Also, it only includes parents of teens in Moving Traditions and BJTI; 21 parents representing 22 teens from Moving Traditions and 5 parents representing 6 teens from BJTI completed surveys.
The survey data provides insight into the teens' experiences from two self-reported perspectives: teens and parents. However, due to the low response rates, these baseline survey data should be viewed as illustrative rather than as representative in nature.
Informing Change also conducted 34 interviews with a range of informants who were both directly and indirectly involved with Initiative programs. These interviews typically lasted about 45 minutes and were conducted by telephone or in person. They included 2 interviews with local and national funders of the Initiative, 7 interviews with staff of Initiative grantees' staff, 4 interviews with national staff of local grantees, 21 interviews with youth professionals in jHub, 4 interviews with local program advisors or volunteers, and 2 interviews with local stakeholders not directly involved with the Initiative. Please note that there was some overlap among these categories (i.e., grantee staff who were also jHub participants), which is why the total appears greater than the number of interviews conducted.
Informing Change also reviewed mid-term and end-of-year grant reports from each of the five Initiative grantees. Mid-year grant reports were submitted and reviewed in February 2015, and final Year 1 grant reports were submitted and reviewed in August 2015. These reports provided information on grantee progress that was outside the scope of the evaluation's interviews and helped provide a complete picture of grantees' Year 1 accomplishments and challenges.
2015-01-21
Policy Studies Associates, Inc.;
Six urban school districts received support from The Wallace Foundation to address the critical challenge of supplying schools with effective principals. The experiences of these districts may point the way to steps other districts might take toward this same goal. Since 2011, the districts have participated in the Principal Pipeline Initiative, which set forth a comprehensive strategy for strengthening school leadership in four interrelated domains of district policy and practice:
Leader standards to which sites align job descriptions, preparation, selection, evaluation, and support.
Preservice preparation that includes selective admissions to high-quality programs.
Selective hiring, and placement based on a match between the candidate and the school.
On-the-job evaluation and support addressing the capacity to improve teaching and learning, with support focused on needs identified by evaluation.
The initiative also brought the expectation that district policies and practices related to school leaders would build the district's capacity to advance its educational priorities. The evaluation of the Principal Pipeline Initiative has a dual purpose: to analyze the processes of implementing the required components in the participating districts from 2011 through 2015; and then to assess the results achieved in schools led by principals whose experiences in standards-based preparation, hiring, evaluation, and support have been consistent with the initiative's requirements. This report addresses implementation of all components of the initiative as of 2014, viewing implementation in the context of districts' aims, constraints, and capacity.
2014-12-15
Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE);
A growing number of cities now provide a range of public school options for families to choose from. Choosing a school can be one of the most stressful decisions parents make on behalf of their child. Getting access to the right public school will determine their child's future success. How are parents faring in cities where choice is widely available? This report answers this question by examining how parents' experiences with school choice vary across eight "high-choice" cities: Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Our findings suggest parents are taking advantage of the chance to choose a non-neighborhood-based public school option for their child, but there's more work to be done to ensure choice works for all families.
2014-09-15
Annie E. Casey Foundation;
This report tells how four tax-preparation programs are breaking the mold and tackling the world of health care enrollment. Readers will learn the challenges and opportunities associated with such a move, which has the potential to help millions of low-income Americans take a critical first step toward a healthier future.
2014-09-01
Denver Public Schools;
The Design Team for Compensation and Career Pathways is a group of teachers, and school and central office leaders selected by the Denver Public Schools (DPS) and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA). They were charged with engaging in a learning process to determine if there were ways to strengthen the compensation, career pathways and related structures to support recruitment and retention of strong teachers and increase career satisfaction and success within DPS. They undertook this process in anticipation of the need to renew the agreement that governs the district's nationally renowned Professional Compensation System for Teachers (ProComp) as well as upcoming contract negotiations between DPS and DCTA.
Over four months the Team met nine times. Its work involved reviewing research studies, examining compensation and career progression examples from other school districts and selected non-education industries, reviewing teacher and principal focus group and survey results, and engaging in deep discussion around design principles and possible frameworks that could be used to strengthen ProComp and career opportunities for teachers. This report is the product of their work.
2014-06-05
Cultural Policy Center at The University of Chicago;
Supported in part by Arts Alliance Illinois, and with the cooperation of several local arts agencies, including Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special events, and of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.
This study compares the direct public dollars received by organizations and artists in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Denver, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland (OR), San Diego, and San Francisco from 2002-2012.
Often, studies of public funding for the arts look at appropriations made on the national and state levels and estimates of local expenditures, but this report delves more deeply using grant-level data to examine the dollars received by organizations and artists resident in each city or region.
Key findings:
In 2012, Chicago arts organizations received $7.3 million in public dollars via competitive grants from local, state, and national public arts agencies combined. Only three of the 13 regions studied received more total dollars in 2012.Though Chicago arts organizations receive among the greatest amounts of public funding in total, a relatively small portion comes from the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Of the competitive arts grants dollars received in Chicago in 2012, 59% came from the Illinois Arts Council, 24% from the National Endowment for the Arts, and 17% from the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. For most cities/regions in our study, excluding Chicago, the majority of public grant dollars received by not-for-profits in the area for arts programming came from their local arts agency in 2012. For example, in 2012, San Diego received 93% of its public funding from the local level, 2% from the state level, and 4% from the federal level.DCASE's funding levels have been among the lowest of the 13 cities/regions studied on both a per capita basis, and in terms of total dollars, over the past decade (2002-2012). In 2012, Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events awarded $1.2 million in grants, which is $0.44 per capita. Of the 13 local agencies analyzed, only Phoenix, Boston, and Baltimore spent less in total dollar or per capita terms in 2012.Over the past decade, DCASE annually awarded among the highest total number of grants compared with other regions' local agencies. In 2012, DCASE awarded 520 grants in total -- 305 to organizations and 215 to individuals. In 2012, it awarded competitive grants to approximately 31% of the arts and cultural organizations in the city.Aside from competitive grants, five of the 13 cities/metro regions included in this study provide support to select arts and cultural organizations through line-items, which serve as significant sources of general operating funds.
