Impact Evaluation of 'UNISON': 'U'plifting 'N'on-Cognitive Skills and 'I'nnovation through 'S'tudent 'O'pportunity 'N'etworks

"UNISON" was an Investing in Innovation (i3) development grant funded by the Office of Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education to Take Stock in Children (TSIC), a state-wide, 501(c)(3) non-profit, private-public partnership in Florida. UNISON provided a whole school mentoring approach and focused on developing students' non-cognitive skills with a focus on improving academic success and attainment thereby impacting graduation rates in low-performing schools. Intervention strategies included a whole-school culture program with clubs and activities focused on sustaining the culture of kindness and compassion, BARR teacher training, block meetings, and implementation of the I-Time curricula, TSIC 1:1 mentoring, group mentoring, summer Leadership Institute, and parent engagement. The grant funded a collective impact coordinator for each county and a college success coach in each school. "UNISON" targeted three treatment schools in northeast Florida, and the impact study included 15 comparison schools using a comparative short interrupted time series (CSITS) to measure the effect on graduation rates after three years of intervention strategies. Using the publicly available graduation rate data from the Florida Department of Education website, baseline equivalence was established based on rural/urban county designations and baseline graduation rates from 2014-15 prior to the intervention. The study found a statistically significant positive difference in the one urban and two rural treatment schools compared to the six urban and nine rural "business-as-usual" comparison schools. The treatment schools gained almost 20 percentage points in their graduation rate during the three-year intervention from 72.43% to 91.73%, while comparison schools moved from 72.98% to 83.40%. [The report was written for Take Stock in Children.]