Spotlight on Education Pioneers

On June 18th, we welcomed Education Pioneers Graduate School Fellow Caitlin Fitzpatrick to the Tutorpedia Foundation team as our Data and Impact Management Consultant. Caitlin has been working with us this summer to help us better track our impact on the students we work with and improve our ability to serve the Tutorpedia Foundation community.

Caitlin brings a wealth of knowledge to this project from her experience working as a corps member for Teach For America, a program manager for Teach For China, and a consultant for Ashoka Arab World. Caitlin's work ethic, analytical skills, and perspective have been invaluable to Tutorpedia Foundation thus far.

About Education Pioneers

Education Pioneers is a talent pipeline that exists to identify, train, connect, and inspire a new generation of leaders dedicated to transforming the education sector.  At least one year of graduate school is required, and Education Pioneers recruits from a wide variety of disciplines including business, social work, education, law, and policy. 

We asked Caitlin to tell us more about what brought her to Tutorpedia and Education Pioneers. Read on to learn more about her story and perspective.

Interest in Education Sector

My degree is in International Economic and Political Development and through my graduate program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, I had the opportunity to evaluate Nike-funded sports for girls empowerment programs in the Middle East.  One program, Al Tanweer, a league of girls’ soccer teams and public schools in rural Egypt, was particularly successful in improving girls’ confidence and discipline and in sparking change in how the community viewed girls’ abilities relative to boys.  The success of this program hinged largely on its use of the public school infrastructure. 

This project sparked an interest in the education sector, and I went on to teach elementary school in the Bay Area through Teach for America.  Since each Education Pioneer’s background and specialization is unique, it has been a very rich learning experience to participate in discussions on different topics in education throughout the summer at weekly workshops hosted by Education Pioneers.  Having worked within the Teach for All network for the past 4 years, first with Teach for America and then with Teach for China, many of my assumptions about best practices in education have been challenged by alternative perspectives and theories of change.

Tutorpedia Foundation’s Data and Impact Project

When I joined Education Pioneers, I was particularly interested in working on a project involving impact evaluation. I was interested in the project with Tutorpedia because this data project is seeking to do just that, identify observable outcomes of successful tutoring.  Grades are one piece of the puzzle, but good grades are a means to greater opportunity and fulfillment in life—not an end in themselves. 

Working with Teach for China

During my first year with Teach for China, I worked on a taskforce of staff and teachers to design Teach for China’s intended impact, our metrics for determining success.  Our taskforce devised ways to capture academic improvement, critical thinking, and culture of achievement through exams, surveys and observations.  There was much debate about what we mean by more abstract concepts like critical thinking and culture of achievement and how to place an objective measure on these things.  Even academic achievement is not entirely black and white because these measures are only as good as the tests upon which they are based. 

The Systemic Challenge

Measuring impact in education is difficult because a quality education equips a student with more than just content knowledge, but also with other outcomes of education such as critical thinking skills, mindsets, and character traits are difficult to capture in a quantitative goal statement.  However, while it may be impossible for entities in the education sector to craft the “perfect measure” of these more abstract effects of education, it is still important to set goals in these areas and evaluate progress against them because goals drive action. 

A major criticism of national test-based education policies is that they focus solely on one measure of education quality (i.e., content knowledge) and that the pressure to perform on this single measure is causing teachers to neglect efforts to develop students in other ways.  On the other hand, observable outcomes are necessary for accountability, so it is critical that education leaders develop and refine ways to quantify education outcomes beyond academic test scores.

Future steps

I look forward to sharing more of my thoughts at the end of the summer after the conclusion of this data and impact project. Moving forward with my work in impact evaluation in the education sector, I would like to consider and develop ways that evaluation systems can efficiently capture and analyze non-numeric information about program outcomes.