Deborah Good

Deborah Good is the Director of Organization Learning and Research at Future Focused Education, an education-focused nonprofit in Albuquerque. Previously, she served as a research scientist with University of New Mexico's Cradle to Career Policy Institute and the director of data and research for Mission: Graduate. In her studies and her professional life, Deborah has concentrated on the roles mixed-method research, evaluation, and data analysis can play in effecting positive change and continuous improvement in programmatic, policy, and practice decision-making. Prior to moving to New Mexico, she worked as an education researcher at Research for Action in Philadelphia.

AAPF19 Session

Where Are You Now?: Measuring Impact with Alumni Outcomes
​Do our schools really make a difference in our students’ lives? Are they any better off? To answer these questions, schools look at changes in their attendance, social-emotional learning, and positive relationships with adults. We watch their growth on academic outcomes and calculate alternative graduation rates. But where do our graduates go from there? What are they up to as adults?

The Leadership Schools Network (LSN) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has identified alumni outcomes as an essential performance measure. They want to know how many of their graduates are pursuing further education and training, how many are staying local, and how many are finding worthwhile employment. To keep track, the schools’ community engagement staff and volunteers do intentional and regular outreach to alumni, and use an Alumni Tracker application to collect and feed data on alumni into the LSN’s Integrated Data System. In this interactive workshop, participants will identify alumni measures meaningful in their settings and explore how they might engage and support their alumni. We will demonstrate the Alumni Tracker we developed to make data collection easy, and discuss how the story of alumni can help a school effectively tell its story of impact.