School-To-School International

Causes: Education

Mission: School-to-school international (sts) is an international development organization dedicated to improving the lives of girls, boys, and their communities worldwide through access to quality education. We focus on creating conditions of success for children around the world. In 2017, we partnered with individuals, government ministries, nongovernmental organizations, private foundations, and research institutions in 24 countries to assist with research, evaluation, curriculum, training, and strategic planning.

Programs: All children reading: a grand challenge for development (acr gcd) is a partnership between usaid, world vision, and the australian government that brings together global innovators to develop solutions to illiteracy. Sts worked closely with the grantee in morocco, local ministry stakeholders, and local and international disabiltiies experts to adapt the egra into a bilingual early grade reading and sign language assessment (egrsla) that tests students comprehension of modern standard arabic and moroccan sign lanuage. This was the first assessment developed to uniquely assess students who are deaf or hard of hearing in morocco and was administered by assessors who are deaf or hard of hearing. The egrsla was developed and pilot tested in 2016, and a final version was used to collect baseline data for the morocco project in 2017. Endline results will be collected in may 2018. Sts analyzed all assessment, and all available m&e and fidelity of implementation (foi) data, to calculate student reading gains from before and after the projects. M&e and foi data, as well as supplementary data from student questionnaires, were used to contextualize egra findings and identify key factors for success across projects. Sts wrote comprehensive end-of-project reports for each grantee that summarized quantitative findings, project implementation observations, cost analysis data, and scalability assessments. Further, sts synthesized findings from across projects into three final reports: a summary report (forthcoming), a report highlighting projects that served students who are low vision or blind, and a report highlighting projects that engaged families and communities.

accelere! 1 is a 5-year project that aims to improve educational outcomes for girls and boys in select sub-provinces within target educational provinces of the drc. It supports the government of the drc's goals for the education sector: access, quality and governance. Sts's contributions to date to this project consists of the creation of several assessment tools, training staff and the development of reports to help the project with the implementation of activities. Sts leads quarterly assessments each trimester by developing tools, training staff, supervising data collection, analyzing findings, and presenting results to inform the materials development teams and process. Sts has also completed an early grade reading assessment (egra) in several of the target provinces. Sts has led the theory of change/fidelity of implementation work on a project-wide scale. Sts is working toward developing foi tools for each component of the larger accelere! Project and training m&e and other staff to help collect data throughout the remaining years of the project. Sts leads and manages the technical and logistical aspects of the operations research agenda and works with accelere! And its partners to coordinate studies and provide technical guidance and quality assurance for all operations research studies.

the niger education and community strengthening project (necs+) is a two-year follow-on to the previous necs project. School-to-school international (sts) is a subcontractor to the prime implementer, plan international usa. Under this phase, the project continues to work with the ministry of education (moe) in niger to develop, finalize and implement grade 1 and 2 reading curriculum and materials and develop accompanying trainings for teachers, pedagogical coaches, and administrators to deliver the reading curriculum. The curriculum and training are rolled out from the moe, through the district and commune level into 160 schools, where the necs+ project also engages the community through reading competitions and community libraries. The full version of grade 2 materials have been completed and distributed for use in the 2017-2018 schoolyear. This includes a teacher's guide, student booklet, and a set of 12 decodable and leveled daily readers for both grades 1 and 2 in all four project languages. Sts has also trained pedagogical advisors and school inspectors on the grade 2 curriculum materials. Training focused on equipping advisors and inspectors with the skills necessary to train teachers on the curriculum, ensuring their understanding of the content and structure of the curriculum in both national languages and french. To enrich project classroom literacy environments, sts also produced color and black and white alphabet charts in all four national languages, as well as a sound chart in french. Sts also developed continuous assessment exercises for the previously developed grade 1 curriculum. Currently, sts is working on reducing the size of the grade 2 teacher's guides, to enable the ministry of education to reproduce the guides and scale up the project in a sustainable way. The ministry of education recently stated that the regional and departmental directors have requested the application of the main products of the project to be scaled up at national level and applied at all schools in the country. Sts is supporting the project's egra, including support to sampling methodology, training of enumerators, data analysis, and report writing. The baseline data collection was conducted in may 2017, and the endline assessment will take place in may 2018.

sts provides programmatic solutions and technical support to advance educational development worldwide. We deliver an integrated package of programs to schools in developing countries as well as technical expertise to development agencies and governments in the areas of training, curriculum development, assessment and evaluation. Our core program areas- improving educational access and outcomes, developing and assessing school standards, and building supportive learning environments and engaged communities - reflect our belief that all children deserve the opportunity to succeed in school. Our flagship project location is in guinea, west africa and tanzania, east africa.