The Harvard Project on Schooling and Children, one of five Interfaculty Initiatives, has announced the selection of the first Postdoctoral Fellows in Evaluating Programs for Children. The fellowship invites recent doctoral graduates to join Harvard faculty from across the University on the Evaluation Task Force, a group that is exploring how to better evaluate complicated educational and social programs for children.

The initial four fellows, supported by the Spencer Foundation, were selected on the basis of their commitment to improving children's education and their ability to bring interdisciplinary perspectives to the theory and practice of evaluating programs for children. They will spend two years in residence at the Harvard Project on Schooling and Children, working with Harvard faculty on the Evaluation Task Force including Professors Jane Gardner (School of Public Health), Joseph Newhouse (Medical School, Kennedy School of Government), Robert Rosenthal (FAS, Psychology), Donald Rubin (FAS, Statistics), and Carol Weiss (Graduate School of Education).

The 1997-99 Postdoctoral Fellows are:

Timothy Hasci received his Ph.D. in history in 1993 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he currently serves as a lecturer in education. His dissertation will be published as Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America by Harvard University Press this fall. At the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, Hasci worked on historical and current policy issues related to boarding schools, juvenile courts, group homes, and foster care. During his fellowship, he will investigate the quality and stability of schooling available to children in out-of-home placements, also examining the barriers to uninterrupted education for these children and the efforts made by schools, parents, children, shelters, placement agencies, group homes, foster parents, and social workers to overcome those barriers.

Tracy Huebner will receive her Ph.D. in education this June from Stanford University, with a dissertation, "Pre-service Teacher Preparation: Reflective Practice and Teaching Portfolios." She is currently a research assistant at the National Center for the Accelerated Schools Project, where she conducts field research on a school reform project that brings at-risk students into the educational mainstream. Huebner's long-term goals are to combine her interests in alternative evaluation methods and in school reform to create substantive evaluations for individuals as well as whole school communities working toward effective change. During the fellowship, she will use a model training program called the Powerful Learning Laboratory to examine the tensions among specific efforts at classroom change supported by whole school initiatives.

Anthony Petrosino will receive his Ph.D. in criminal justice from Rutgers University this June. He has spent the last 10 years working as a researcher and evaluator in the field of criminal justice, and is presently research associate with the Massachusetts Committee on Criminal Justice and adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His dissertation, "What Works? Revisited Again: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Crime Reduction Experiments," uses meta-analytic techniques to study nearly 300 randomized experiments in deterrence, rehabilitation, and prevention. Formerly a Graduate Research Fellow at the National Institute of Justice and visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University's College of Criminal Justice, Petrosino plans a meta-analytic research project to study the efficacy of school-based interventions designed to reduce problem behavior.

Patricia Rogers received her Ph.D. in education policy and management from the University of Melbourne in 1996, with her thesis, "Evaluating Approaches to Program Evaluation: A Framework and its Application to an Evaluation of Pattons Utilization Approach." Since 1989 she has been a lecturer in the Faculty of Applied Science in the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where she also co-directs the Program for Public Sector Evaluation. Rogers has worked in human services research and evaluation since 1984, focusing on the development of internal evaluation capacities to complement external evaluation activity and in school-to-work transition projects. One of her fellowship projects will test the theory that multi-level evaluation can contribute to more sustained and widespread improvements in educational practice.

For more information on the fellowships, contact the Harvard Project on Schooling and Children at 496-4938.