Agency Description:
The New York City school system is the largest in the country, composed of approximately 1.1 million students and 75,000+ teachers in over 1,800+ schools. In January 2015, the Department of Education (DOE) launched Strong Schools, Strong Communities, a multi-year reform plan aimed at significantly improving student achievement to ensure that every child graduates from high school prepared for college, a career, and a future as a productive, critically-thinking adult.
This involves partnering with school leaders, staff, families, and community partners across the city to transform schools through the School Renewal Program; encouraging schools to share best practices through the Learning Partners Program; expanding high quality, full-day kindergarten through the Pre-K for All Program; creating more Community Schools that will partner with an organization to provide wrap- around services to the local community; providing better data and a holistic assessment of school performance through the School Quality Snapshots and Guides; streamlining school support; and expanding after-school programs for middle school students.
Office Description:
Research-based educational policy and data transparency are essential elements of the Strong Schools, Strong Communities plan. The Research and Policy Support Group (RPSG) is at the center of this effort by ensuring that policymakers have access to sound and timely research, analytics, and program evaluations. As part of this role, RPSG conducts its own research and program evaluations as well as serves as a bridge between the DOE and external research parties. We are looking to hire a graduate student to support this work.
Consultant Responsibilities:
- Evaluate educational research proposals from external organizations and work with them to provide data to support their research
- Provide guidance to external evaluators and researchers on work using DOE data
- Work with and manipulate large datasets for external and internal DOE partners
- Design and implement qualitative and quantitative evaluation activities in schools, including surveys, focus groups and quantitative outcome investigations
- Capture key stakeholder feedback to incorporate into evaluation and evaluation planning and implementation
- Assist in the construction of research designs/analyses to answer targeted policy questions
- Present and disseminate internal and external research results to the DOE, the broader educational community, and the public in a useful and understandable format
- Conduct analytics, through the use of both descriptive statistics and statistical modeling
- Other duties as assigned
Qualifications/Special Skills:
- Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Office software including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
- Experience manipulating large datasets using SPSS, Stata, or SAS
- Excellent interpersonal skills in dealing with education and non-education personnel, internal and external to the DOE
- Possess strong organizational skills
- Ability to prioritize tasks, work independently, and follow-up to get things done Balance multiple competing priorities simultaneously
- Excellent technical, research, and problem-solving skills.
- Graduate student preferred
Salary Range: $15-20/hour (TBD)
Work Schedule: 35 hours per week; minimum commitment of 3 months.
Application Process: Please email cover letter and resume to CLESTER2@schools.nyc.gov. Please include “Research and Analytics Summer Consultant – Application” in the subject line.