The Evaluation Team

Dr. Gary Miron will serve as project director for the evaluation of the Kalamazoo Promise. Dr. Miron has extensive experience in directing and leading large scale evaluations and research studies including statewide, national, and international studies. The bulk of his work has focused on evaluations of school reforms and education policies, which is of particular relevance to this evaluation.

Dr. Miron is a professor of Educational Leadership, Research and Technology at WMU’s College of Education. He has worked on a variety of evaluations of school reforms, including evaluations of charter schools in six states and a federally sponsored study of the correlates of success in American charter schools. Among the relevant projects that he is currently directing are a 5-year systemic initiative in North Central Louisiana and a scholarship program for 2,000 low-income Native Hawaiians. In the past he has evaluated a number of high stakes school reforms including a national voucher reform in Sweden and an evaluation of student achievement in schools operated by Edison Schools Inc. His project work has involved the development of research instruments, data collection and analysis, and report writing.

Dr. Miron has a diverse background as a teacher and researcher. In the early and mid-1980s he worked as a teacher and coach in middle and high schools. He has also taught at universities in China, Sweden, and the USA. As a researcher, he has held positions in Sweden and the USA where he has conducted both large scale and small scale evaluations of education policies and school reforms. He has researched and written on such topics as special needs education, educational evaluation, educational planning and policy, the strengthening of research capacity, multimethod research, restructuring of education, and school reform. Aside from a long list of technical reports, he has authored or edited 8 books and has published more than two dozen articles or chapters in books.

As project director, Dr. Miron is responsible for the conduct and successful completion of the evaluation. He works collaboratively with other team members to plan the design, methods, and data collection instruments. Dr. Miron is also involved in the analysis of data and the report writing for interim and final deliverables.

Stephanie Evergreen has worked in social justice and education for the past ten years, including research under a Fulbright-Hays Program. Her professional experience centers on curricular reform interventions and qualitative analysis. She consults nonprofit institutions on social justice issues and evaluation. Ms. Evergreen has served on projects funded by grants from the United States Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and Learn and Serve America, aside from numerous local and regional foundations. Ms. Evergreen holds a master’s degree in the sociocultural foundations of education, with an emphasis in education theory and policy. In her early career, she taught Head Start and acted as an adjunct faculty member in the College of Education at Western Michigan University.

She serves as the Project Manager for the Evaluation of the Kalamazoo Promise. Her main duties include data instrument design, implementation, and analysis, particularly in the areas of high school student surveys and interviews with key informants. She will also collaborate on preparing reports and final deliverables.

Dr. Jessaca Spybrook is a senior researcher at The Evaluation Center. Her research focuses on improving the design and analysis of large-scale evaluations of education interventions. She has consulted on the design of numerous evaluations and coauthored software that assists the researcher in the planning of experiments. Dr. Spybrook holds a master’s in applied statistics and a doctorate in education from the University of Michigan. Prior to earning her doctorate, Dr. Spybrook was a middle school math teacher.

Dr. Spybrook serves as the quantitative analyst for the evaluation of the Kalamazoo Promise. Her primary responsibility is to conduct quantitative analyses of the high school student surveys. She will also assist in preparing final reports.

Anne Cullen has more than seven years experience managing and evaluating community development programs in the areas of education, economic growth, and land use planning in the U.S. and internationally. Ms. Cullen currently works as project manager for The Evaluation Center at WMU where she is responsible for data and research analysis of education reforms in Louisiana, Delaware, and Hawaii. She coordinates many of the various data gathering and synthesis activities involved in these projects and produces user-friendly tools and resources to make sure tasks are done on time and to help clients achieve internal evaluation reporting capacity and knowledge. Ms. Cullen has extensive experience conducting interviews and facilitating focus groups. She earned a master’s degree in agricultural economics from Michigan State University and also holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and French from New York University.

For this evaluation, Ms. Cullen participates in an array of activities, although her primary focus is on conducting interviews with key informants and preparing the survey of high school students.

The core team from The Evaluation Center has been joined by faculty and staff from the Midwest Educational Reform Consortium (MERC) at Western Michigan University. Researchers from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research may also be involved in the evaluation.