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he following article is adapted from a general session at NIE2001 in Denver.
Is the glass half-full or half-empty? It’s a trick. That’s the wrong question. The right question? How full–or empty–is the glass? You wouldn’t go on a diet without consulting the scale. And you wouldn’t stay on the diet unless the scale showed results.
And yet we run NIE programs all the time without measuring results–or by asking the wrong questions about what constitutes results.
I want to stress two main points: First, that we must keep our eyes on educational outcomes as our primary purpose; and second, that we must be able to measure those outcomes.
I believe in measurement for a simple reason: It’s good economics. The most obvious economic inducement is cold hard cash: $5,000 in prize money for each of the winners of the NIE Innovators Award. Believe me, if I didn’t believe in measurement before winning that award last year, I certainly do now.
But the other economic inducement is just as valid, perhaps more so, because everyone who measures outcomes wins and saves the precious resources that money merely measures. Those resources are our time, energy, access to newsprint and our staffs. If you’re a one-person show, those resources are even tighter.
The single best way to determine whether a program is sound or whether you are wasting time, effort and newsprint, is to build objective, measurable evaluations into that program. When you have measurable outcomes, everyone wins: your customers, your sponsors and your newspaper.
Your teacher-customers will know you offer an educationally credible product. That helps them to choose when they are faced with an ocean of educational materials; it also makes them better able to defend the choice to their principals. Educational credibility is the cheapest and best marketing tool you’ll ever have.
Your sponsors have only so much money budgeted for public relations and community outreach and you’re competing with all sorts of good causes. Going in armed with objective proof that your program works will help them make the right decision.
You win because if you have a mission statement, it probably says something about promoting and supporting the education of your community’s children. You win because education is what NIE does.
Winning Ways
To win an NIE Innovators Award, the criteria is simple: Entries have to be collaborations between an NIE program and an educational partner AND they have to include measurable outcomes.
I worked with a local curriculum coordinator in Staten Island, Mary Beth McCarthy. We funded our project–called WaterWorks, it examined New York City’s water supply system from raindrop to passage through treatment facilities–by applying for a grant from the Catskill Watershed Corporation. This group’s purpose was to promote education about the watershed and to encourage communication between upstate communities in the watershed and the downstate communities that consumed the water.
If you’ve ever written a grant proposal, you know that you have to list the measurable outcomes. We did, too. We promised distribution of our message to at least 35 schools, and, because the ultimate goal was to help students develop science fair projects around water issues, we said that we’d have been successful if we got more science fair projects on water topics than we did the year before. Pretty simple to measure.
The key is to think the way teachers think–or the way they’re supposed to think. I know many of you aren’t educators, coming to NIE from marketing or circulation backgrounds, but I don’t think this will be entirely unfamiliar. Methods 101 says this about planning instruction: First, decide on your goals. What do you want students, teachers or perhaps parents to do? Everything else flows from the goals: How you sell the program, what you put in the paper, what you include in your teachers guide and how you measure results.
You wouldn’t take your temperature to see how well your diet is doing, and you shouldn’t try to measure the educational success of a program by counting how many papers you distributed.
If your background isn’t in education it can sometimes be tough to identify what are legitimate educational goals and what constitutes a valid educational program, content and skills. This is where teacher consultants, advisory boards and simply listening to your customers come in handy.
The best advice I can give you today would be to find a dozen or two of the best teachers in your circulation area and make them your best friends. Then use them to sample the effectiveness of your programs.
Of course, it also makes sense to keep your own ears to the ground and listen to the concerns teachers have:
• meeting standards;
• helping students pass high stakes tests;
• accountability;
• outcomes assessment;
• alternative assessment; and
• authentic problem-solving.
Keep it related to the project at hand.
Let me give you some quick tips on measuring outcomes. Keep it simple and objective. Focus on measurable results: changes in behavior, actions that can be verified, skills that can be tracked.
These are just a few ideas. The group of NIE innovators that met in Washington a couple weeks ago had a wide variety of projects and ways to measure success. What they all had in common was that the measurements were concrete and objective. At the extreme end academically were the folks from Austin who have been conducting intensive reading programs using the newspaper and measuring reading gains. In northeastern Pennsylvania, success was measured by the degree of student activity in support of a postage stamp honoring coal miners. In the Midwest, student participation and achievement in a geography bee became the yardstick of success.
None of the programs measured success by the number of papers distributed or by the funds raised. They measured the changes in students ... and with that kind of success, distribution and funding follows.
Maureen Costello is manager of the Newsweek Education Program.
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