How evaluation can support the scaling and replication of an effective initiative: the story of CAN

Arts teachers face persistent professional isolation, often serving as the sole representative of their discipline within their schools or districts. This isolation, compounded by a lack of targeted professional development, undermines teacher well-being and contributes to attrition—resulting in the loss of educators who possess significant, often untapped, leadership potential. The Connected Arts Networks (CAN) initiative was designed to address these challenges by building professional learning communities (PLCs) among arts teachers and cultivating their capacity as instructional leaders. CAN’s roots trace back to 2005, when the New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) Arts Office launched the first of four U.S. Department of Education-funded grants aimed at connecting arts teachers across the city’s five boroughs. Through inquiry-based PLCs, teachers collaborated around formative assessment, student ownership of learning, and arts standards. Over time, a cadre of experienced teacher leaders emerged, leading to the establishment of the Arts Facilitator Institute in 2016. At its peak, more than 700 arts educators participated in over 80 PLCs citywide. Building on these successes, CAN was launched in 2021 as a national initiative, ultimately engaging arts teachers from 47 states and expanding its focus to include the intentional integration of social-emotional learning (SEL) and equity, diversity, and inclusion into arts classrooms. Metis Associates, an independent research and evaluation organization with evaluative history across three of the four preceding NYCPS grants, serves as the external evaluator for CAN. This paper examines how evaluation has functioned as a strategic partner in supporting the initiative’s growth and informing its scaling and replication. The evaluation design incorporates both implementation and outcome components, drawing on teacher surveys, student SEL surveys, professional learning feedback forms, classroom observations, and documentation review. Several features of the evaluation have been particularly critical to the initiative’s success. A strong, trust-based partnership between the evaluation and program teams—characterized by transparency, participatory feedback processes, and shared learning—has enabled both formative and summative data to inform continuous program improvement. NYCPS has served as a national “laboratory,” piloting new materials and tools before broader rollout. Importantly, the evaluation has treated challenges as essential data, recognizing that understanding implementation barriers across diverse geographic and policy contexts is foundational to effective scaling. Unfortunately, the future of federal funding remains uncertain. Nevertheless, the initiative has demonstrated that arts educators are powerful agents of pedagogical transformation, and the evaluation has helped document and communicate this story to practitioners, administrators, researchers, and funders alike. The lessons learned from CAN’s development offer a compelling model for how rigorous, relationship-centered evaluation can support not only program accountability, but the thoughtful and sustainable growth of impactful educational initiatives.