Measurement and Evaluation

The Trump Foundation practices catalytic philanthropy: it identifies a national problem, sets a measurable target, and convenes partners who work in complementary ways to achieve it. Since its establishment, the Foundation has looked beyond the results of its own grants and tracked change in the national indicator that reflects the problem it set out to address. That is how we worked to expand advanced (five-unit) mathematics, and how we are now working to expand High-Tech Matriculation. Because the national indicator reflects the combined work of many partners, it gives all of us a compass and a yardstick for progress.

To this end, we document, analyze, and review our work at four levels: grant performance against work plans; the progress of the initiatives and the cumulative contribution of the work; the quality of our relationships with our partners, knowing that their success is also ours; and the education system’s progress toward the national target. Over the years, we have also experimented with shared cluster evaluation of grants, which looks at how different activities add up to broader change. Since 2014, we have used the Grantee Perception Report (GPR) to hear from our partners how well we work with them.

As the new roadmap’s initiatives expand, it becomes more important to understand not only where we stand, but also what is moving us forward. We know how many students complete High-Tech Matriculation and how many reach the top levels in PISA. We know less about the stage at which students choose to enter the tracks, when they drop out, and what helps them persist. In AI and mental resilience, too, we need to identify which early changes would show that the initiatives are bearing fruit. Alongside this, in middle school we still lack a systematic capacity, built on sample-based measurement, to connect the findings from different grants, identify what is changing in schools, and assess whether the initiative as a whole is moving in the desired direction.

At a preliminary consultation with measurement and evaluation experts in August, the message was that the answer does not necessarily lie in collecting more data. The experts suggested strengthening evaluation at the level of each initiative as a whole, defining a few meaningful interim indicators, periodically testing the assumptions on which the work rests, and using the findings to inform decisions. This calls for the professional capacity to ask the right questions, determine when in-depth evaluation is needed and when routine monitoring is enough, and help the Foundation and its partners learn and adjust course when needed. The question before the Advisory Council is how best to develop this capacity without burdening partners, and without turning measurement into an end in itself.