Caitlin Howley - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Caitlin Howley
Journal of Research in Rural Education, 2013
AEL is a catalyst for schools and communities to build lifelong learning systems that harness res... more AEL is a catalyst for schools and communities to build lifelong learning systems that harness resources, research, and practical wisdom. AEL serves as the Regional Educational Laboratory
Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research, 2021
In rural West Virginia, the First2 Network aims to improve STEM persistence by including students... more In rural West Virginia, the First2 Network aims to improve STEM persistence by including students in creating solutions to STEM attrition. A research program for rising first-year students in STEM majors is discussed here. The authors assessed students’ STEM education and career plans, identity, efficacy, and sense of school of belonging before and after the program. Students’ STEM identity, efficacy, and school belonging improved after participation.
Many college students in West Virginia hail from rural communities and are the first in their fam... more Many college students in West Virginia hail from rural communities and are the first in their families to pursue an undergraduate degree. Research indicates that first-generation college students can face particular barriers to their postsecondary persistence, as can rural students. However, data on the persistence of first-generation college students who are also from rural places is scant. To better understand—and help remove—the barriers confronting such young people interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), the FIRST TWO Project ( https://first2network.org/ ) brings together community college and university faculty, administrators, national laboratory professionals, and rural education experts. The FIRST TWO pilot program integrates early STEM experiences via internships, a support network for rural first-generation STEM students, and STEM skills development through a discovery-based "principles of research and development" college seminar ...
American Journal of Evaluation, 2016
In an era of ever-deepening budget cuts and a concomitant demand for substantiated programs, many... more In an era of ever-deepening budget cuts and a concomitant demand for substantiated programs, many organizations have elected to conduct internal program evaluations. Internal evaluations offer advantages (e.g., enhanced evaluator program knowledge and ease of data collection) but may confront important challenges, including credibility threats, conflicts of interest, and power struggles. Thus, demand for third-party meta-evaluation may be on the rise to offset such limitations. Drawing on the example of a moderately large and fairly complex five-year program to build state department of education capacity to implement federal education law, this article explores the development and use of external responsive meta-evaluation (RME) to build evaluator capacity, enhance the evaluation’s quality, optimize evaluation use, and minimize conflict. After describing RME, the authors discuss its activities, strengths, and limitations through the case example of the Appalachia Regional Comprehen...
ABSTRACT Available: http://www.districtadministration.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=2875
Icf International, Aug 24, 2012
This paper explores how contemporary neoliberal policy has transformed public education instituti... more This paper explores how contemporary neoliberal policy has transformed public education institutions serving the poor into sources of profit for private enterprise, with a focus on the incursion of such practices into Appalachia. The schooling of impoverished people ironically provides many opportunities for wealth creation, eagerly seized upon by education entrepreneurs and the well-financed reformers who wrought such transformations. This paper theorizes the operation of schooling on these terms, and demonstrates its main points with empirical illustrations. Examples of the extraction of capital from the poor, and from the public funds established in part to serve them, include charter schools, education management organizations, supplemental education services, credentialism, for-profit colleges, and exponentiating student education debt. This program is justified by an ideology of personal entrepreneurial responsibility in which the marketplace is the natural framework for human interaction, and ensures that the schooling of poor students at once broadcasts their alleged failures and demonstrates the “need” for market-based interventions. But the narrative in Appalachia also tends to reinforce stereotypes about the region, while the practices it rationalizes further impoverish the area’s people and places.
Because of their remote locations, rural schools stand to benefit enormously from the capabilitie... more Because of their remote locations, rural schools stand to benefit enormously from the capabilities of broadband technology, but many rural facilities and institutions remain underserved or unserved by broadband providers. Available http://www.icfi.com/insights/white-papers/2012/broadband-rural-education
DESCRIPTION Although the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center's approach to technical ass... more DESCRIPTION Although the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center's approach to technical assistance is not exclusive to Appalachia, it is intentionally responsive to the region. Capacity building avoids the deficit perspectives of other technical assistance models that might cast the region as underdeveloped or otherwise lagging, and it acknowledges that the sorts of challenges faced by state education agencies (SEAs) are not simply technical. This approach moreover takes into account that, although technical assistance providers are well-positioned to serve as external “critical friends” or as process facilitators, they are not experts on the internal organizational or structural dynamics that enable or constrain SEA capacities; as a result, ARCC staff present themselves as partners rather than authorities. And finally, our emphasis on capacity building ensures that we engage meaningfully—rather than superficially—with SEAs in the region, and draw upon their funds of local and...
In popular imagination, rural places are enduring bucolic havens, harkening back to a simpler era... more In popular imagination, rural places are enduring bucolic havens, harkening back to a simpler era of cohesive communities, family farming, and a slower paced life. But today’s rural communities are far from immune to contemporary economic and social dynamics. Globalization has sent industry overseas, with many rural towns losing manufacturing plants to lower production costs in China, India, or Mexico. The farm crisis of the last quarter of the 20th century decimated family farms and the associated businesses supporting smaller-scale agriculture. Coupled with economic forces such as the recent recession, the loss of rural jobs and industries has led to diminishing tax bases—further damaging the stability of rural communities. In this context, rural youths across the nation face a dilemma about their adult lives. If they hope to pursue postsecondary education, many must leave their local communities. After finishing school, many find that they are overqualified for jobs in their home...
This study analyzes average rates of college enrollment and first- to second-year college persist... more This study analyzes average rates of college enrollment and first- to second-year college persistence among rural and nonrural regular public high schools in Pennsylvania for the 2009/10 and 2010/11 high school graduation cohorts. It describes the association of student-, school-, and college-level factors with enrollment and persistence outcomes. Key findings include: • Rural schools had higher average college enrollment and persistence rates than city schools but lower rates than suburban and town schools. • Rural–fringe schools had higher average college enrollment and persistence rates than rural–distant or rural–remote schools. • Most graduates of high schools in all locales went to public four-year colleges and in-state colleges. • Rural schools with a larger population of economically disadvantaged students had lower college enrollment and persistence rates than rural schools serving a smaller population of economically disadvantaged students—even after controlling for other ...
This white paper examines how rural schools can confront the many challenges associated with thei... more This white paper examines how rural schools can confront the many challenges associated with their locale and how rural communities can leverage their numerous strengths to prevent students from dropping out of school. For students in many rural areas, the choice to complete high school and attend college is also a choice to move away from home permanently. With limited opportunities available to students with advanced degrees, rural communities may lose young talent, which in turn hinders local economic viability. Rural schools can mobilize the tightly knit social fabric and abundant opportunities for active learning in rural communities to engage and retain students and possibly prevent dropout—even in resource-poor environments.
Neoliberalizing Educational Reform, 2015
Because the US is, for the moment, among the wealthiest of global powers, its poor confront “uniq... more Because the US is, for the moment, among the wealthiest of global powers, its poor confront “unique” opportunities to serve national purposes—not so much as citizens, but more as revenue sources and consumers. In international context, the poor in this wealthy nation possess comparatively more disposable income, generating revenue streams throughout American society.
American Journal of Evaluation, 2022
In this article, we reflect on our experience applying a framework for evaluating systems change ... more In this article, we reflect on our experience applying a framework for evaluating systems change to an evaluation of a statewide West Virginia alliance funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve the early persistence of rural, first-generation, and other underrepresented minority science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students in their programs of study. We begin with a description of the project and then discuss the two pillars around which we have built our evaluation of this project. Next, we present the challenge we confronted (despite the utility of our two pillars) in identifying and analyzing systems change, as well as the literature we consulted as we considered how to address this difficulty. Finally, we describe the framework we applied and examine how it helped us and where we still faced quandaries. Ultimately, this reflection serves two key purposes: 1) to consider a few of the challenges of measuring changes in systems and 2) to discus...
Technical assistance (TA), and more recently, capacity-building, have been fundamental components... more Technical assistance (TA), and more recently, capacity-building, have been fundamental components of federal calls for education reform for at least the last 40 years. Nonetheless, TA and capacity tend to be underspecified and to operate from tacit, sometimes competing, epistemologies of organizational change. In this essay, we begin with a brief history of TA to support educational change and discuss common understandings of TA and capacity. We then describe the Van der Ven and Poole (1995) framework for distinguishing types of organizational theory and apply it to the example of a federally-funded TA center designed to improve the capacity of state education agencies (SEAs), ultimately suggesting that TA providers tend to rely on teleological and life-cycle theories that neglect the generative benefits of conflict and to over-privilege rationality. We propose potential reasons for this preference and its limitations in our case example, and conclude with a discussion of implicatio...
Journal of Research in Rural Education, 2013
AEL is a catalyst for schools and communities to build lifelong learning systems that harness res... more AEL is a catalyst for schools and communities to build lifelong learning systems that harness resources, research, and practical wisdom. AEL serves as the Regional Educational Laboratory
Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research, 2021
In rural West Virginia, the First2 Network aims to improve STEM persistence by including students... more In rural West Virginia, the First2 Network aims to improve STEM persistence by including students in creating solutions to STEM attrition. A research program for rising first-year students in STEM majors is discussed here. The authors assessed students’ STEM education and career plans, identity, efficacy, and sense of school of belonging before and after the program. Students’ STEM identity, efficacy, and school belonging improved after participation.
Many college students in West Virginia hail from rural communities and are the first in their fam... more Many college students in West Virginia hail from rural communities and are the first in their families to pursue an undergraduate degree. Research indicates that first-generation college students can face particular barriers to their postsecondary persistence, as can rural students. However, data on the persistence of first-generation college students who are also from rural places is scant. To better understand—and help remove—the barriers confronting such young people interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), the FIRST TWO Project ( https://first2network.org/ ) brings together community college and university faculty, administrators, national laboratory professionals, and rural education experts. The FIRST TWO pilot program integrates early STEM experiences via internships, a support network for rural first-generation STEM students, and STEM skills development through a discovery-based "principles of research and development" college seminar ...
American Journal of Evaluation, 2016
In an era of ever-deepening budget cuts and a concomitant demand for substantiated programs, many... more In an era of ever-deepening budget cuts and a concomitant demand for substantiated programs, many organizations have elected to conduct internal program evaluations. Internal evaluations offer advantages (e.g., enhanced evaluator program knowledge and ease of data collection) but may confront important challenges, including credibility threats, conflicts of interest, and power struggles. Thus, demand for third-party meta-evaluation may be on the rise to offset such limitations. Drawing on the example of a moderately large and fairly complex five-year program to build state department of education capacity to implement federal education law, this article explores the development and use of external responsive meta-evaluation (RME) to build evaluator capacity, enhance the evaluation’s quality, optimize evaluation use, and minimize conflict. After describing RME, the authors discuss its activities, strengths, and limitations through the case example of the Appalachia Regional Comprehen...
ABSTRACT Available: http://www.districtadministration.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=2875
Icf International, Aug 24, 2012
This paper explores how contemporary neoliberal policy has transformed public education instituti... more This paper explores how contemporary neoliberal policy has transformed public education institutions serving the poor into sources of profit for private enterprise, with a focus on the incursion of such practices into Appalachia. The schooling of impoverished people ironically provides many opportunities for wealth creation, eagerly seized upon by education entrepreneurs and the well-financed reformers who wrought such transformations. This paper theorizes the operation of schooling on these terms, and demonstrates its main points with empirical illustrations. Examples of the extraction of capital from the poor, and from the public funds established in part to serve them, include charter schools, education management organizations, supplemental education services, credentialism, for-profit colleges, and exponentiating student education debt. This program is justified by an ideology of personal entrepreneurial responsibility in which the marketplace is the natural framework for human interaction, and ensures that the schooling of poor students at once broadcasts their alleged failures and demonstrates the “need” for market-based interventions. But the narrative in Appalachia also tends to reinforce stereotypes about the region, while the practices it rationalizes further impoverish the area’s people and places.
Because of their remote locations, rural schools stand to benefit enormously from the capabilitie... more Because of their remote locations, rural schools stand to benefit enormously from the capabilities of broadband technology, but many rural facilities and institutions remain underserved or unserved by broadband providers. Available http://www.icfi.com/insights/white-papers/2012/broadband-rural-education
DESCRIPTION Although the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center's approach to technical ass... more DESCRIPTION Although the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center's approach to technical assistance is not exclusive to Appalachia, it is intentionally responsive to the region. Capacity building avoids the deficit perspectives of other technical assistance models that might cast the region as underdeveloped or otherwise lagging, and it acknowledges that the sorts of challenges faced by state education agencies (SEAs) are not simply technical. This approach moreover takes into account that, although technical assistance providers are well-positioned to serve as external “critical friends” or as process facilitators, they are not experts on the internal organizational or structural dynamics that enable or constrain SEA capacities; as a result, ARCC staff present themselves as partners rather than authorities. And finally, our emphasis on capacity building ensures that we engage meaningfully—rather than superficially—with SEAs in the region, and draw upon their funds of local and...
In popular imagination, rural places are enduring bucolic havens, harkening back to a simpler era... more In popular imagination, rural places are enduring bucolic havens, harkening back to a simpler era of cohesive communities, family farming, and a slower paced life. But today’s rural communities are far from immune to contemporary economic and social dynamics. Globalization has sent industry overseas, with many rural towns losing manufacturing plants to lower production costs in China, India, or Mexico. The farm crisis of the last quarter of the 20th century decimated family farms and the associated businesses supporting smaller-scale agriculture. Coupled with economic forces such as the recent recession, the loss of rural jobs and industries has led to diminishing tax bases—further damaging the stability of rural communities. In this context, rural youths across the nation face a dilemma about their adult lives. If they hope to pursue postsecondary education, many must leave their local communities. After finishing school, many find that they are overqualified for jobs in their home...
This study analyzes average rates of college enrollment and first- to second-year college persist... more This study analyzes average rates of college enrollment and first- to second-year college persistence among rural and nonrural regular public high schools in Pennsylvania for the 2009/10 and 2010/11 high school graduation cohorts. It describes the association of student-, school-, and college-level factors with enrollment and persistence outcomes. Key findings include: • Rural schools had higher average college enrollment and persistence rates than city schools but lower rates than suburban and town schools. • Rural–fringe schools had higher average college enrollment and persistence rates than rural–distant or rural–remote schools. • Most graduates of high schools in all locales went to public four-year colleges and in-state colleges. • Rural schools with a larger population of economically disadvantaged students had lower college enrollment and persistence rates than rural schools serving a smaller population of economically disadvantaged students—even after controlling for other ...
This white paper examines how rural schools can confront the many challenges associated with thei... more This white paper examines how rural schools can confront the many challenges associated with their locale and how rural communities can leverage their numerous strengths to prevent students from dropping out of school. For students in many rural areas, the choice to complete high school and attend college is also a choice to move away from home permanently. With limited opportunities available to students with advanced degrees, rural communities may lose young talent, which in turn hinders local economic viability. Rural schools can mobilize the tightly knit social fabric and abundant opportunities for active learning in rural communities to engage and retain students and possibly prevent dropout—even in resource-poor environments.
Neoliberalizing Educational Reform, 2015
Because the US is, for the moment, among the wealthiest of global powers, its poor confront “uniq... more Because the US is, for the moment, among the wealthiest of global powers, its poor confront “unique” opportunities to serve national purposes—not so much as citizens, but more as revenue sources and consumers. In international context, the poor in this wealthy nation possess comparatively more disposable income, generating revenue streams throughout American society.
American Journal of Evaluation, 2022
In this article, we reflect on our experience applying a framework for evaluating systems change ... more In this article, we reflect on our experience applying a framework for evaluating systems change to an evaluation of a statewide West Virginia alliance funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve the early persistence of rural, first-generation, and other underrepresented minority science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students in their programs of study. We begin with a description of the project and then discuss the two pillars around which we have built our evaluation of this project. Next, we present the challenge we confronted (despite the utility of our two pillars) in identifying and analyzing systems change, as well as the literature we consulted as we considered how to address this difficulty. Finally, we describe the framework we applied and examine how it helped us and where we still faced quandaries. Ultimately, this reflection serves two key purposes: 1) to consider a few of the challenges of measuring changes in systems and 2) to discus...
Technical assistance (TA), and more recently, capacity-building, have been fundamental components... more Technical assistance (TA), and more recently, capacity-building, have been fundamental components of federal calls for education reform for at least the last 40 years. Nonetheless, TA and capacity tend to be underspecified and to operate from tacit, sometimes competing, epistemologies of organizational change. In this essay, we begin with a brief history of TA to support educational change and discuss common understandings of TA and capacity. We then describe the Van der Ven and Poole (1995) framework for distinguishing types of organizational theory and apply it to the example of a federally-funded TA center designed to improve the capacity of state education agencies (SEAs), ultimately suggesting that TA providers tend to rely on teleological and life-cycle theories that neglect the generative benefits of conflict and to over-privilege rationality. We propose potential reasons for this preference and its limitations in our case example, and conclude with a discussion of implicatio...
American Evaluation Association, 2020
In this paper, we discuss several challenges associated with evaluating systems change in the Nat... more In this paper, we discuss several challenges associated with evaluating systems change in the National Science Foundation-funded First2 Network, a statewide multisector alliance striving to improve the persistence of rural, first-generation STEM college students. These challenges include 1) defining the evaluand when it encompasses various subsystems and 2) determining what constitutes positive systems change. Latham’s (2014) framework for evaluating change in human service delivery systems helps us parse these challenges. For instance, her framework conceptualizes systems as pathways (progression through school levels and STEM programs, in this case) and structures (such as state education policies, resource flows, and power dynamics). Positive systems change, then, involves improvements to pathways—such as increasing coordination between state K-12 and higher education subsystems to ensure that rural, first-generation students have adequate math preparation to succeed in STEM majors—and to structures—such as establishing incentives for using STEM instructional practices that increase persistence.
Rural Sociological Society conference, 2017
This article summarizes findings from a preliminary study of first-generation college students in... more This article summarizes findings from a preliminary study of first-generation college students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs of study in two West Virginia universities, data from which inform a project seeking to improve the persistence of rural first-generation students in STEM majors. Survey data suggest that rural and nonrural first-generation STEM students are interested in STEM for similar reasons and share similarly positive assessments of their capacity to perform well in STEM majors. On the other hand, asked about potential barriers to their ability to persist in STEM studies, rural respondents were significantly less concerned than nonrural students that their STEM classes would be more boring than expected. They were also less likely to perceive as barriers to persistence the possibility that they might not be able to afford to finish their degree, not know where to get assistance with coursework, feel lonely or homesick, or not feel safe on campus. Rural students reported moderate feelings of rural identity and place attachment, but large standard deviations suggest that these feelings vary among students. Additionally, rural first-generation STEM students reported that they were not particularly concerned that faculty or peers would underestimate their academic capabilities due to negative rural stereotypes.
Presenters: Doris Williams, Director of Capacity Building, The Rural School and Community Trust ... more Presenters:
Doris Williams, Director of Capacity Building, The Rural School and Community Trust
Jerry Johnson, Research Director, Center for Educational Research in Appalachia/Assistant Professor, Eastern Kentucky University, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies
Erin McHenry-Sorber, Managing Editor, Journal of Research in Rural Education
Rural schools and districts face unique opportunities and challenges by virtue of their rural circumstances. Recruiting and retaining teachers and administrators in rural schools, providing high-quality professional development, accommodating increased rural diversity, and ensuring adequate resource provision to economically challenged rural schools are among the issues. This webcast will describe how state departments of education and others can help rural communities capitalize on the advantages of rural places to address their particular education challenges.
Our panel will address questions such as these:
What current policies and issues affect rural education?
What are the implications of current policies for rural schools in Appalachia and across the nation?
What can educators do to meet the changing needs of learners in our rural schools?