This midterm evaluation report is intended to summarize the progress to date of the BHP Foundation's Education Equity program, identify lessons learned, and recommend potential ways to strengthen the program going forward. The authors' evaluation is designed to assess the program's impacts, share formative insights to inform its continuous improvement, and provide recommendations related to its strategy and theory of change.

The BHP Foundation's Education Equity Program

Midterm Evaluation Findings (2018–2022)

Benjamin K. Master, Elaine Lin Wang, Brian Phillips, Rebecca L. Wolfe, Harold D. Green

ResearchPublished Jun 29, 2023

This midterm evaluation report is intended to summarize the progress to date of the BHP Foundation's Education Equity (EE) program, identify lessons learned, and recommend potential ways to strengthen the program going forward. In its first funding window, the program has supported five partner organizations (partners), whose efforts span diverse country contexts and target learners both within and outside formal educational systems. The authors' evaluation is designed to assess the program's impacts, share formative insights to inform its continuous improvement, and provide recommendations related to its strategy and theory of change. The authors also present stand-alone case studies that dig deeper into specific strands of the program's work.

These analyses of program impacts are organized around the program's initially established goals and theory of change, though the authors recognize that the program strategy continues to evolve. The report also presents an update on the next steps currently being considered by program leaders, and it outlines the potential implications of lessons learned to date for the broader field.

The results should also be interpreted with consideration of disruptions caused by the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which delayed or forced adaptations to some of the school- and place-based activities initially envisioned by program partners. The primary audiences for this report include the BHP Foundation and its EE partners, as well as other actors who may be engaged in similar evidence-to-practice initiatives worldwide.

Key Findings

  • Program investments have resulted in meaningful enhancements to the body of evidence and tools available to decisionmakers seeking guidance on how to adopt and scale effective educational practices. They have also specifically contributed to a substantial scale-up of the UN Women's Second Chance Education (SCE) program worldwide and to the expansion of various practitioner and decisionmaker networks.
  • Partners have seen clearest evidence of progress with respect to, and have converged on promising practices around, evidence curation and dissemination. Such practices are grounded in providing timely, embedded, and demand-driven insights and recommendations to educational and policy leaders.
  • However, widespread mobilization of evidence to affect decisionmaking in specific local systems, advocacy to successfully influence policymakers, and purposeful leveraging of the potential of partners' networks to facilitate improvements in educational practice remain nascent and, in some cases, have fallen short of initial forecasts. This suggests that the systemic reforms being championed by the program at a minimum may take more time to reach fruition and may prove more difficult to achieve than initially envisioned.
  • In some instances, the ability to gauge the depth and significance of partners' achievements has been limited by the quality of the available indicators and their orientation toward partners' own implementation efforts rather than changes in audiences' behaviors.
  • While partners have sought to address issues of equity in various ways, the program's overarching equity agenda remains unclear.

Recommendations

  • Clarify standards for what types of evidence the program considers sufficiently actionable and capable of improving learning outcomes.
  • Set clearer goals around equity, coupled with monitoring the portfolio's collective emphasis on addressing those goals.
  • Further articulate intended audiences and engagement models if the program aims to promote systemic change in particular local or national contexts.
  • Enhance the rigor of program evaluation activities by identifying targeted opportunities to assess the program's pathways toward impact.
  • Articulate a learning agenda tied to the program's hypothesized pathways to impact to help focus evaluation activities on those proof points that are most relevant to the program's strategy and to the field as a whole.

Topics

Document Details

  • Copyright: BHP Foundation
  • Publisher: RAND Corporation
  • Availability: Web-Only
  • Year: 2023
  • Pages: 68
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.7249/RRA239-6
  • Document Number: RR-A239-6

Citation

Chicago Manual of Style

Master, Benjamin K., Elaine Lin Wang, Brian Phillips, Rebecca L. Wolfe, and Harold D. Green, The BHP Foundation's Education Equity Program: Midterm Evaluation Findings (2018–2022). Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2023. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA239-6.html.
BibTeX RIS

The research described in this report was sponsored by the BHP Foundation and conducted by RAND Education and Labor.

This publication is part of the RAND research report series. Research reports present research findings and objective analysis that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. All RAND research reports undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity.

RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.