Ritchie part of team honored by Gore

For her work in evaluating a prototype education initiative, a Mississippi State researcher is part of a team winning a national performance review award from Vice President Al Gore.

Liesel Ritchie of the university's Social Science Research Center has since December 1996 led evaluation efforts for the Tri-State Education Initiative, managed by NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis.

Ritchie

The Tri-State Education Initiative, developed in 1990, serves a three-state region within a 50-mile radius of Iuka, bringing community resources together to improve educational opportunities.

For the fourth time, those working with the initiative have won a Hammer Award, said David Powe, manager of education programs for Stennis Space Center.

"The award, named for a hammer Vice President Gore used to smash a Pentagon ash tray, recognizes efforts to reinvent government by finding new ways to make government cost less and work better," he explained.

The Tri-State model now is being duplicated at sites around the country, Ritchie said. The Mississippi team won the recent Hammer Award for its efforts in helping Fulton County, N.Y., establish a similar program.

"The Tri-State model really is a process," Ritchie explained. "It is a strategic effort to get community, business and government agencies involved to set goals and determine available resources." Working together, the community can leverage its resources to benefit education, she said.

Ritchie says that the process clearly has benefited the educational system in the tri-state area.

"There has been a clear progression of improved accreditation in the schools in the area," she noted. "This year, 11 schools in Mississippi received the highest accreditation--Level 5; five of those were in the Tri-State impact area. More importantly, lasting partnerships have been established which continue to develop."

Evaluating the program at Iuka and replication sites that also include the Tribal Schools of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians requires innovative assessment methods, Ritchie said.

"We're finding that traditional forms of evaluation don't capture what's happening in these communities," she said. "We're using a mixed-method approach that gathers both qualitative and quantitative data from as many levels as possible.

"We want to assess the impact on all stakeholders, especially the ultimate customer--the student who receives the benefit of the process."