With the combined efforts of the Eagle Academy Foundation, the New York City Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, the Young Men’s Initiative, and the New York City Department of Education, the Eagle Demonstration Project was implemented in nine New York City public middle schools to support young men of color. The project was designed to demonstrate the practices and strategies of the Eagle Model, and build the capacity of the participating schools to accomplish three main goals: increase student engagement, enhance a positive school culture and climate, and increase college and career awareness.

Why this matters

The goal of Urban’s process evaluation was to use data to document the implementation of the EDP, the services EAF provided, and the quality of coordination and collaboration of the strategic public-private partnerships between the project stakeholders in New York City. In addition, we sought through this evaluation to propose recommendations for the NYC partners and capture overall lessons learned.

Three research questions guided the evaluation:

1. How did schools leverage Eagle training, coaching, and mentoring?
2. How did schools recruit staff, create systems, and use other supports to implement the Eagle Model?
3. How did partners coordinate the public-private partnerships?

Key takeaways

Based on the information gathered, synthesized, and analyzed, the research team identified the key findings below.

1. School Solutions Teams found that EAF’s support was informative and helped them support young men of color in schools.
2. Some schools found employing Eagle Model practices and strategies easy whereas others found it more difficult.
3. EDP schools largely implemented the Eagle Model, even during the COVID-19 pandemic.
4. Coordinating strategic partnerships to implement the EDP involved collaborative problem-solving to get schools the resources they needed.
5. The EDP partnership was well positioned for successful implementation.
6. Partners were clear about each other’s roles and responsibilities and each partner had a distinct and necessary function, whether it involved focusing on delivering Eagle programming and services, overseeing the project operationally, or ensuring contracts were in place and followed.

How we did it

To document and examine the EDP implementation, we employed a collaborative approach in which we regularly engaged and drew on the expertise of project stakeholders. We collected input from those stakeholders in all phases of the research process, from evaluation design to dissemination of findings.

Urban’s mixed-methods process evaluation drew on qualitative and quantitative data, including project materials, semistructured interviews with project and school staff (e.g., principals, superintendents, and EDP staff) and community stakeholders, focus groups with current and past project participants, and school demographic data.