This coming school year, Generation Citizen will grow to serve 6,000 students in Boston, Providence, and New York City – 2,250 more students than 2011-2012. Growth is both exciting and a challenge – our staff and budget need to increase accordingly. The trick is to grow while actually increasing the effectiveness of our program.

And that requires a better understanding of precisely how GC empowers students – and how we can do better. So to supplement our quantitative evaluation, GC recently commissioned a qualitative study by two experienced independent evaluators, Rebecca Casciano and Jonathan Davis.

The study utilized extensive student, teacher, and Mentor interviews to better understand how our program inputs (teachers, Mentors, curriculum, etc.) lead to student outcomes (civic knowledge, skills, motivation/dispositions). I won’t regurgitate the report here, but in case you need a teaser, here is just one of many student quotes on the power of GC to empower students and put them on a path to future civic engagement:

“All of us can really relate to problems that happen outside [the school], but we didn’t know that everyone was having these problems. When we found out it was happening to a whole bunch of people, we thought it was a really big issue and we wanted to fix it. We started doing more research which made us more interested.”

The report also offers us several suggestions to improve our action civics course in the future – food for thought as we work to revise our curriculum and trainings this summer.

You can download the study here to learn more.  Please consider reading it today, and letting us know your thoughts.

– Daniel Millenson, Managing Director