City Year: Year 1 Evaluation Report, 2013-2014

City Year is an education-focused nonprofit organization that partners with high needs public schools to enhance the quality of the learning environment in the areas of attendance, behavior, and course performance. This is achieved by deploying teams of City Year corps members to the schools. The expectation is that students who receive support from City Year corps members in the areas of English, math, attendance, and behavior will show growth in their academic and behavioral outcomes. With funding from the William Penn Foundation, City Year is being implemented in 11 high needs public schools within The School District of Philadelphia (SDP or District); targeted support is provided to at-risk students in grades 6 to 9. The Office of Research and Evaluation (ORE) is currently evaluating City Year's effectiveness in meeting the above goals for the 2013-2014 school year (SY) – Year 1— and extending into the 2014-2015 SY – Year 2

Research-Practice

Recent attention on partnerships between researchers and practitioners highlights the potential of these relationships to provide high-quality usable knowledge for improving schools. But how do we translate guiding partnership principles into specific actionable steps? How do we build and maintain an effective partnership? How do we reconcile and integrate multiple partnership frameworks to establish a coherent set of partnership activities? How do we evaluate partnership progress and outcomes? Building on the recent insightful work on partnerships, we offer a framework for planning, building, implementing, and monitoring partnerships, based on the literature and our experiences in a partnership between a university-based school of education at a major research university and the research office of a big-city school district. Using a theory describing attributes that define a policy’s strength, we propose an organizing framework to transform insights about partnerships into concrete activities and mechanisms to help achieve the potential of these partnerships to use research to improve schooling