Designing Statewide Strategies & Programs

National Collaborative on Workforce and Disability For Youth
IV. Monitoring &
Accountability
In the current era of accountability
and using evidence-based
practices, it is critical to establish
an accountability system that enables
the state to verify whether and how engaging
in quality career development activities
provides a return on investment (ROI). ROI
measures include the degree to which quality
career development programs and activities
contribute to improving college and career
readiness, employability, and earnings.
Implementation is only as good as the
monitoring.
Online CIS can help facilitate the data gathering
needed for this type of accountability
system and allow for tracking the fidelity
with which education and community agencies
are implementing their career development
programs and activities. They can play
a tremendous role in designing an accountability
system to evaluate the impact on student
outcomes by
More than being able to evaluate impact, accountability
systems are needed to track implementation
fidelity. ROI measures are only
relevant if they are indeed measuring innovative
programming that was implemented
as intended (Greenhalgh et al., 2004). For
career development programs and activities,
one indicator of implementation fidelity is
whether all students are actually included in
career development efforts. Monitoring implementation
fidelity will also provide beneficial
information regarding which schools,
and therefore which students, are actually
receiving career development programming
and have ePortfolios. This is particularly important
for students with disabilities, as too
often, nationally popular school reform efforts
do not include these students (Morningstar,
Bassett, Kochhar-Bryant, Cashman, &
Wehmeyer, 2012). Finally, ROI measures also
contribute to successful implementation and
sustained use of new initiatives.
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establishing a dashboard for school
and districts to identify which
students have completed districtprescribed
career development
activities;
providing school and district
personnel with access to
personalized and aggregate reports
that compare student engagement
in career development activities and
performance with concurrent and
future academic outcomes;
providing reports that disaggregate
data in ways to ensure that students
from diverse racial/ethnic groups,
those with lower income levels,
students with disabilities, Englishlanguage
learners, and other at-risk
groups are being provided equal
opportunities and access; and
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