Here are some examples of PSE’s projects:

• Establishing Rigorous Standards-Based Curricula in Districtwide Reform Efforts. PSE has worked with thousands of teachers in urban, suburban, and rural school districts in over 15 states to develop and implement K–12 curricula in all school subjects in order to improve student learning districtwide—from Savannah (Georgia) to Geyserville (California) to Cleveland (Ohio) to Del Valle (TX) to Greenwich (Connecticut) to Grosse Pointe (Michigan) to Haysville (Kansas) to Littleton (Colorado). This work is based on a careful translation of national and state standards to the local schools. In addition, PSE has created matching local criterion-referenced testing programs to evaluate the success of the reform efforts.

• Developing State Curriculum Products. PSE has created state curriculum products to be used by local districts as a basis for creating their own local curricula. PSE’s state products are based on state standards, the reports of various national curriculum commissions, and PSE’s own work on site in local districts nationwide. For example, PSE created Texas School Steps as a set of 7,500 curriculum objectives in English, math, science, and social studies, which has been used in over 100 Texas school districts as a starter set of curriculum objectives. Texas School Steps took Texas’s state standards and restated those standards in greater detail in grade-by-grade statements so that they could be made more useful to classroom teachers.

• Developing Parallel Tests for State Assessments. PSE developed the Ohio Parallel Proficiency Tests—a series of tests in reading, citizenship, mathematics, and science for grades 4, 6, 9, and 12—for school districts in Ohio to use to prepare students for Ohio’s statewide tests. Similarly, PSE developed the Michigan Diagnostic Series—an item bank of thousands of test questions matched to Michigan’s core curriculum standards for grades 2–10 in mathematics, science, and reading—for use by Michigan school districts in monitoring the learning of their students.

• Providing Technical Assistance to New Small Schools in New York City. Working for the National Academy Foundation, which supports hundreds of career-themed high schools nationwide, PSE provided on-site management and instructional assistance to six Gates Foundation-supported high schools that were opened as part of New York City’s small schools initiative. PSE also assisted in the creation and development of two new high schools that were opened in 2009, with career academies in engineering, information technology, and finance.

• Evaluating the New Orleans Kids Partnership. Sponsored by America’s Promise, the New Orleans Kids Partnership (NOKP) was a consortium of community agencies—United Way for the Greater New Orleans Area, Louisiana Children’s Museum, Communities in Schools, City Year, and more—working together to provide educational and support services to New Orleans students in the aftermath of Katrina. PSE served as the formative and summative evaluator of these efforts, working closely with the governing board of NOKP and looking at the effects of NOKP’s programs on students returning to school in the lower ninth ward.

• Involving Parents in Their Children’s Education. PSE has worked with parents in Georgia, Texas, California, Ohio, and New York through two products it has created and customized in local school districts: (1) parent checklists, which list the specific, detailed curriculum objectives used by the teachers; and (2) parent handbooks, which provide explanations and at-home activities for teaching the curriculum objectives. These products have been universally well received by parents, regardless of their own educational backgrounds, and have also been used by local community organizations to provide additional support for children at risk in the public schools.

• Evaluating MetroVision’s School-to-Career Partnership in New Orleans. Sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce and with the help of federal grant money and Baptist Community Ministries foundation support, MetroVision worked in conjunction with Johns Hopkins University in selected high schools in New Orleans to institute small learning communities, with a career focus and intensive remedial work in English and mathematics. PSE served as the formative and summative evaluator of the programs being implemented in area high schools. As part of that effort, PSE developed new data collection forms to gather student behavior and performance information more reliably, including student attendance, course passing rates, and suspensions and expulsions.

• Creating and Monitoring the Decentralization and Administrative Reorganization of the Cleveland (Ohio) Public Schools. PSE created the decentralization plan used to pass administrative authority from the central office to the six cluster offices (and their community councils) and to the 90 individual school buildings (and their community councils) and set benchmarks against which to judge the plan’s effectiveness. The work entailed writing policies for the Cleveland Board of Education on some 200 topics and deciding what authority could be given to the clusters and to the school buildings for each topic. PSE also was hired to train community council members and to evaluate the success of those councils. In addition, PSE was retained by the Ohio State Department of Education to monitor the decentralization plan to ensure that the Cleveland Public Schools were carrying it out effectively. Further, PSE developed the administrative organization for the Cleveland Public Schools, wrote job descriptions for over 200 administrative and supervisory positions, and created the administrative/supervisory performance review system.

• Conducting Educational Goals Surveys. In conjunction with the National School Boards Association, PSE developed and conducted the Educational Goals Survey (EGS) for over two decades in many school districts across the U.S. from Seattle (Washington) to Jackson (Mississippi) to Naperville (Illinois) to Winston-Salem (North Carolina) to Bemidji (Minnesota) to Lake Luzerne (New York). EGS has surveyed tens of thousands of high school students, school staff, local residents, and recent high school graduates about what students should know and be able to do by the time they graduate from high school.

• Evaluating the Effectiveness of Statewide Reform Efforts in Mississippi. PSE worked with state education officials to develop a survey to use with all principals in Mississippi to evaluate the effectiveness of the local implementation of the State’s curriculum and assessment system. PSE collected data from hundreds of school principals, analyzed the data, and prepared a report for state education officials on the strengths and weaknesses of Mississippi’s reform efforts.

• “Charting the Challenges” for Education in the State of Ohio. Working for the State Board of Education and the State Superintendent, PSE supervised the surveying of citizens and professional educators by telephone and through group meetings throughout Ohio to get their thoughts on these topics: Ohio public high school graduation requirements (skills to be demonstrated and procedures to use for judging the attainment of those skills); the most effective administrative means for operating schools and the most effective instructional means for teaching students in them; methods of financing public schools; and criteria to be used for judging and designating “excellent” and “deficient” school districts.

• Conducting Community Assessment Programs. In conjunction with the College Board during the past several decades, PSE has designed and conducted Community Assessment Programs (CAPs) in over 150 postsecondary institutions across the U.S. CAPs look at supply of and demand for college programs among adult students returning to college. CAPs seek to increase the marketability of a college’s programs and, thereby, to increase its share of the adult learning market.

• Conducting Survey Research for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. PSE surveyed foreign language teachers nationwide on various curricular and instructional topics in order to assess the status of the foreign language teaching profession and then followed up with a special survey preceding the ground-breaking adoption of oral proficiency standards by ACTFL. PSE also surveyed local school districts to find and catalogue exemplary elementary and secondary foreign language programs for publication by ACTFL.

• Developing and Testing a Model for Policy Information for Advisory Councils on Vocational Education in New York State. Working for the New York State Advisory Council on Vocational Education, PSE developed handbooks of goals, policies, processes, and outcomes of vocational education that could be used by local advisory councils and the State Advisory Council in order to make more informed decisions about their vocational education programs. Pilot tested in New York City, Utica, and the Madison–Oneida BOCES, the handbooks displayed statistical data in graph form as a way of setting benchmarks for and judging the successes of local and state vocational education programs.

• Planning the Future for Research for Better Schools (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). PSE served as the technical assistant to Research for Better Schools (RBS), the federally funded educational research and development laboratory that served the Mid- Atlantic states. PSE assisted RBS staff in choosing the future directions for the lab by structuring work sessions on key issues about systemic educational reform and on how RBS could best serve its client states and school districts in carrying out that reform. PSE also prepared documents for the RBS board of trustees and its funding agency about those future directions. Finally, PSE assisted RBS in choosing a new administrative structure for increasing its effectiveness in following those new directions.

• Developing Policies and Benchmarks for the Richmond (Virginia) Public Schools. Under a grant from the Danforth Foundation, PSE worked with the Richmond School Board and administration to develop a series of curriculum policies with matching process and outcome reports. The reports represented actual statistical data on topics addressed in the policies—including reading programs, mathematics programs, and vocational education programs—as well as benchmarks against which to judge those data.

• Evaluating an Urban Youth Employment and Training Program. PSE served as the formative and summative evaluator of New York City’s Youth Employment and Training Program (YETP) aimed at reducing youth unemployment, particularly among the disadvantaged. PSE conducted face-to-face interviews with participating students, conducted telephone interviews with their employers, analyzed mail questionnaires to their English teachers to identify behavior changes in school, and reviewed students’ school records to gather information on their grades and attendance before and after participation in the program. PSE also prepared profiles of students whose lives had changed significantly because of their involvement with YETP.

• Evaluating Federally Funded Career Education Programs. PSE served as the formative and summative evaluator for over three years for over 20 federally funded career education programs. These programs were scattered across the U.S. in all kinds of school districts with all kinds of special emphases— from providing school-to-career linkages for special education students to reducing sex-role stereotyping in career choices of secondary students to training teachers to involving business leaders to supporting statewide initiatives. No organization evaluated more of these federally funded programs than PSE.