Promising Opportunities for Black and Latino Young Men: Findings from the Early Implementation of the Expanded Success Initiative. Technical Appendices

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By bhadmin February 2, 2021

This appendix describes the data collection and analytic processes used to develop the findings in the report “Promising Opportunities for Black and Latino Young Men.” A central challenge was creating an analytic framework that could be uniformly applied to all schools, despite the individualized nature of their Expanded Success Initiative (ESI) plans. Thus, the authors selected methods that would illuminate educators’ perspectives on the initiative overall and highlight broad themes from the first year of implementation across ESI schools. The data collection started in the summer before the 2012-2013 school year, but primarily entailed school visits to 38 ESI schools in the spring of 2013, during which the authors conducted interviews and focus groups with principals, ESI design team leaders, and 9th grade teachers. They also administered a structured questionnaire to principals to collect information about the specific ESI programs at each school. Finally, they sought to contextualize this school-based fieldwork by interviewing members of the Department of Education’s ESI team. This multi-layered qualitative research design was inspired first and foremost by an understanding of ESI as a schoolwide initiative. Each stakeholder type they focused on had a different role to play in ESI: Principals maintained budgetary oversight and provided the last word on high-level decisions related to ESI in their school; design team members developed the ESI plan and worked to ensure that all the pieces fit together; and teachers implemented specific programs. The interviews and focus groups were designed to elicit a range of perspectives on ESI’s roll out and early implementation from individuals who were engaged in the work on a day-to-day basis. This paper describes the steps that were taken to collect and code data, identify prominent themes, and connect these themes to the larger goals of the initiative.

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