Justin Trager

Justin Trager is the Director of School Networks at Future Focused Education in Albuquerque, NM. The focus of his work has been facilitating the growth, learning, and innovation of the schools in the Leadership Schools Network. Justin has spent his 20 years in education working as a service learning coordinator, teacher, and administrator. Justin is a Deeper Learning Equity Fellow and is passionate about the power of public education to empower and transform individuals and communities.

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.