OUTCOMES

OUTCOMES

June 2008 Outcomes Page

Intro:

Welcome to the Mary’s Center Outcomes page. On this page, you will find quantitative evidence of Mary’s Center’s success in the areas of health, education and social services. Every three months, Mary’s Center’s Outcomes Manager works with medical, education and social service program staff to produce a set of performance indicators that help program directors and senior management assess and improve the quality of Mary’s Center programs. Performance information presented here comes directly from those quarterly efforts.

Background:

This quarter, the Outcomes page focuses on adult and family literacy. Mary’s Center’s mission is to build better futures for our patients, and our family literacy programs are a critical part of that mission. According to federal law (Workforce Investment Act of 1998), literacy is defined as “an individual's ability to read, write, speak in English, compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job, in the family of the individual and in society.” This definition highlights the depth of the impact of limited English proficiency on our participants’ lives. Without English proficiency, they find it difficult to find and maintain employment, to understand safety and medical instructions for themselves and their children, and to assume the role of their children’s primary teacher.

Mary’s Center predominantly serves a population for which English is not their primary language. The vast majority (86 %) of Mary’s Center medical patients identified their primary language as something other than English when they registered in the clinic and only 13% of participants chose to complete the English version of a patient satisfaction survey conducted in December of 2007.

The Even Start family literacy program at Mary’s Center strives to meet this need. The program is a federal program with the goals to:

enrich language development, extend learning, and support high levels of educational success for children birth to age seven and their parents;

provide literacy services of sufficient hours and duration to make sustainable changes in a family;

provide integrated instructional services for families, where children and their parents learn together to develop habits of life-long learning; and

support families committed to education and to economic independence. (Source: National Even Start Association)

Our Performance:

For the 2006-2007 academic year, the Mary’s Center Even Start program served 184 adult literacy students who completed at least 60 hours of instruction. Among those students, 63 % improved at least one educational functioning level, as measured by the Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System (CASAS). Even Start is a federal program that is administered by states. The District of Columbia Public Schools’ standard for CASAS improvement is at 35%. Mary’s Center’s Even Start program exceeded that standard by almost 20 percentage points.

Preliminary results for 2007-2008 indicate that the program will exceed this standard by over 35 percentage points – that’s double the standard!

Return on Investment:

In addition to the obvious educational and psychosocial benefits of our family literacy efforts, there are also tangible financial benefits. According to research reported by ProLiteracy America, every dollar spent on family literacy programs returns more than $7 in the form of:

increased earnings for participants with improved English proficiency,

lower criminal justice costs,

reduced education cost for children in families with improved literacy, and

increased taxes paid by participants who increase their earnings.

February 2008 Outcomes Page

October 2007 Outcomes Page

June 2008 Outcomes Page

Intro:

Welcome to the Mary’s Center Outcomes page. On this page, you will find quantitative evidence of Mary’s Center’s success in the areas of health, education and social services. Every three months, Mary’s Center’s Outcomes Manager works with medical, education and social service program staff to produce a set of performance indicators that help program directors and senior management assess and improve the quality of Mary’s Center programs. Performance information presented here comes directly from those quarterly efforts.

Background:

This quarter, the Outcomes page focuses on adult and family literacy. Mary’s Center’s mission is to build better futures for our patients, and our family literacy programs are a critical part of that mission. According to federal law (Workforce Investment Act of 1998), literacy is defined as “an individual's ability to read, write, speak in English, compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job, in the family of the individual and in society.” This definition highlights the depth of the impact of limited English proficiency on our participants’ lives. Without English proficiency, they find it difficult to find and maintain employment, to understand safety and medical instructions for themselves and their children, and to assume the role of their children’s primary teacher.

Mary’s Center predominantly serves a population for which English is not their primary language. The vast majority (86 %) of Mary’s Center medical patients identified their primary language as something other than English when they registered in the clinic and only 13% of participants chose to complete the English version of a patient satisfaction survey conducted in December of 2007.

The Even Start family literacy program at Mary’s Center strives to meet this need. The program is a federal program with the goals to:

enrich language development, extend learning, and support high levels of educational success for children birth to age seven and their parents;
provide literacy services of sufficient hours and duration to make sustainable changes in a family;
provide integrated instructional services for families, where children and their parents learn together to develop habits of life-long learning; and
support families committed to education and to economic independence. (Source: National Even Start Association)

Our Performance:

For the 2006-2007 academic year, the Mary’s Center Even Start program served 184 adult literacy students who completed at least 60 hours of instruction. Among those students, 63 % improved at least one educational functioning level, as measured by the Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System (CASAS). Even Start is a federal program that is administered by states. The District of Columbia Public Schools’ standard for CASAS improvement is at 35%. Mary’s Center’s Even Start program exceeded that standard by almost 20 percentage points.

Preliminary results for 2007-2008 indicate that the program will exceed this standard by over 35 percentage points – that’s double the standard!

Return on Investment:

In addition to the obvious educational and psychosocial benefits of our family literacy efforts, there are also tangible financial benefits. According to research reported by ProLiteracy America, every dollar spent on family literacy programs returns more than $7 in the form of:

increased earnings for participants with improved English proficiency,
lower criminal justice costs,
reduced education cost for children in families with improved literacy, and
increased taxes paid by participants who increase their earnings.

February 2008 Outcomes Page

October 2007 Outcomes Page