Contains board chair and president's message; 2010 highlights; program information, with a focus on education; grants summaries and grantee profiles from Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming; financial summary; and list of board members.

For the past three-and-a-half years, through the HIP to College initiative, Hispanicsin Philanthropy has worked diligently to strengthen the academic success of Latino students and the long-term community advancement that results from their earning postsecondary degrees. With the support of generous partners, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the HIP to College initiative in North Carolina and Colorado worked to develop networks that support Latino students through high school and into college. Improving outcomes for Latino students is the priority of the HIP Education Focused Initiative. The success of this initiative has been remarkable. HIP is optimistic about the future of this work and its role in cultivating an educational landscape and partnerships in the United States that help Latino students thrive.

The evaluation team collected general data on states' Common Core efforts by reviewing recent news articles, journals, online documents, and systems-change literature. Using this knowledge base, the team drafted driving research questions for this final report that focused on exploring how states' higher education systems are involved in standards efforts today, including aligning course sequences, updating placement policies, and supporting faculty awareness of college readiness standards. These research questions informed an interview protocol through which the team engaged several Core to College states in semi-structured conversations.

The WestEd team spoke by phone with key Core to College contacts from seven of the Core to College states: Colorado, Hawai'i, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington. These individuals (many held the title of Alignment Director under the grant) had been part of the Core to College work and, for the most part, are still involved in work that has evolved from the initiative. The other four states involved in the initiative did not have applicable staff for the team to speak with.

This report uses a case-study approach to describe how three of the Core to College states -- Washington, Hawai'i, and Louisiana -- continue their Core to College–initiated efforts of aligning K–12 and postsecondary education systems to better prepare students for college. The case studies include details about key components of each state's respective Core to College work, including the state's history with systemschange efforts in education; key staff and organizations that "championed" the Core to College efforts and promoted cross‑system collaboration; specific strategies used to align the state's K–12 and higher education systems; the state's approach to standardized assessments and course-placement policies; and key outcomes of the Core to Collegerelated efforts.

Afterschool programs are seen as a way to keep low-income children safe and to foster the skills needed to succeed in school and life. Many cities are creating afterschool systems to ensure that such programs are high-quality and widely available. One way to do so is to ensure afterschool systems develop and maintain a data system.This interim report presents early findings from a study of how afterschool systems build their capacity to understand and improve their practices through their data systems. It examines afterschool data systems in nine cities that are part of The Wallace Foundation’s Next Generation Afterschool System-Building initiative, a multi-year effort to strengthen systems that support access to and participation in high-quality afterschool programs for low-income youth. The cities are Baltimore, Md., Denver, Colo., Fort Worth, Texas, Grand Rapids, Mich., Jacksonville, Fla.,Louisville, Ky., Nashville, Tenn., Philadelphia, Pa., and Saint Paul, Minn.To date, research on data use in afterschool systems has focused more on the implementation of technology than on what it takes to develop and sustain effective data use. This study found that the factors that either enabled or hampered the use of data in afterschool systems—such as norms and routines, partner relationships, leadership and coordination, and technical knowledge—had as much to do with the people and process components of the systems as with the technology.Strategies that appear to contribute to success include:

•     Starting small. A number of cities intentionally started with a limited set of goals for data collection and use, and/or a limited set of providers piloting a new data system, with plans to scale up gradually.

•     Ongoing training. Stakeholders learned that high staff turnover required ongoing introductory trainings to help new hires use management information systems and data. Providing coaching and developing manuals also helped to mitigate the effects of turnover and to further the development of more experienced and engaged staff.

•     Outside help. Systems varied in how they used the expertise of outside research partners. Some cities identified a research partner who participated in all phases of the development of their data systems. Others used the relationship primarily to help analyze and report data collected by providers. Still others did not engage external research partner, but identified internal staff to support the system. In any of these scenarios, dedicated staffers with skills in data analytics were key.