We know that students who fall behind in reading by third grade are more likely to struggle academically and have social and behavioral issues throughout their educational journeys. Our Future Forward early elementary literacy program is designed to intervene before this critical benchmark, by providing one-on-one tutoring integrated with family engagement for kindergarten through third grade students struggling with reading. We reach children through a multi-tiered model that draws upon students’ home and learning communities to establish a collaborative system of support. Future Forward has proven more effective than any one approach or intervention on its own, and its evidence-based approach has emerged from years of on-the-ground experience, careful program evaluation, and strategic expansion to standardize the central elements that have rendered the program so successful for so many students.

At EA, we believe that the key to maximizing the impact of Technical Assistance (TA) is to know the content, know the context, and know the stakeholders. Given the goal of TA is to assist partner organizations in strengthening their capacity to address a specific challenge (or set of challenges), the TA provider needs not just subject matter expertise, but also a proven track record of implementing research-based strategies in that domain. Effective TA must also be tailored to the specific needs of the partner organization, adjusting to fit the service area context where the organization operates and the life cycle of the specific program or policy the TA is provided for. Policy implications and implementation challenges differ at each level of the educational system, so EA prioritizes working with our partners to identify and incorporate all stakeholders at all relevant levels to personalize the TA, maximize its uptake, and build trust in the TA process and end product.

We partner with organizations that are eager to know if the time and resources invested in a particular educator preparation program or professional development opportunity are having a measurable and positive impact on student learning. But this isn’t as straightforward to untangle as one might think, since we can’t randomly assign students to be taught by a particular teacher, and we can’t randomly assign teachers to participate in educator preparation programs. At EA, we design custom evaluation projects that take into account differences among the students who are taught by educators who participated in a program with educators who did not, as well as differences among the educators themselves. By considering how data are related across multiple levels of the educational ecosystem, we aim to ensure that any estimates of program effectiveness are interpreted as causal impacts of a program only when appropriate. This requires effective communication to stakeholders about under what conditions it is appropriate to draw causal conclusions from the data we receive and from the analyses we conduct.