For more than 50 years, the RELs have collaborated with school districts, state departments of education, and other education stakeholders to help them generate and use evidence and improve student outcomes. Read more
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Regional Educational Lab (REL) Mid-Atlantic partners with key stakeholders in Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania to develop evidence that can inform consequential decisions about policy, programs, and practice. Key stakeholders include organizations with decision-making authority and the ability to influence education policy and practice, such as state and local education agencies, school boards, institutes of higher education, and student, family, and community organizations. RELs partner with these organizations on applied research and development; training, coaching and technical supports; and dissemination. Click here to learn more about the REL Program.
PARTNERSHIPS
OUR TEAM
REL Mid-Atlantic is led by Mathematica with support from the following partners:
GOVERNING BOARD
The REL Governing Board helps REL Mid-Atlantic prioritize the education needs of the region, provides strategic guidance on REL work to maximize local effectiveness, and leverages members’ regional networks to amplify and disseminate REL products. REL Mid-Atlantic Governing Board members represent diverse expertise and experience.
This TCTS project will focus on the new system’s observation component. The project will help the Delaware Department of Education (DDOE) collect and learn from data from the two pilot years of the new system (2021/22 and 2022/23) as DDOE prepares to implement the system statewide in 2023/24. REL staff will partner with DDOE to help them collect and make sense of data on teachers’ and school leaders’ perceptions of the system’s observation component, factors supporting and limiting effective implementation of the observation component, and needed changes or additional support.
REL Mid-Atlantic will conduct a study to support Delaware Department of Education’s (DDOE’s) learning from the pilot implementation of its new teacher observation tool in preparation for statewide implementation of the tool. In the short term, the goal of the project is to better understand teachers’ ratings using the new system by learning (1) how consistently the indicators in the tool measure each of the three performance areas (the tool’s reliability); (2) the extent to which ratings on each of the nine indicators and three performance areas vary across teachers; (3) how strongly teachers’ ratings are associated with their estimated contributions to student achievement growth (the tool’s validity); and (4) whether ratings differ based on the characteristics of teachers or their students (potential bias in the ratings). Next, a second short-term goal is to use the information about reliability, validity, variation, and bias to suggest changes needed to facilitate effective implementation so that DDOE’s evaluation system can support teachers in improving their instructional practices. The study will also support DDOE’s long-term goal of implementing a teacher observation tool that reliably and validly assesses teachers’ instructional performance and effectively distinguishes performance to help teachers improve statewide by 2025-26. The ultimate goal of this project is to improve student outcomes.
Under this project, REL Mid-Atlantic is providing the DC Public Charter School Board (PCSB) with technical support as it develops a new framework of school performance measures. We are advising PCSB about issues related to the reliability, validity, and robustness of measures; and exploring implications of different approaches for combining and weighting the measures—with particular attention to PCSB’s desire to promote equity in its framework. The project team will provide this feedback to DC PCSB over the course of 3 to 4 virtual sessions during the first half of 2023 as PCSB seeks to establish its new framework of school performance measures.
No projects at this time.
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