When the Best Bet Is on an Internship

As Lecturer Joe McIntyre points out, “working with real data is always very different from class exercises.” The questions are open-ended and the datasets are messy and need to be assembled, he says, plus “there’s never a point when you know that you’re done and there's nothing else to be learned.”

Recently McIntyre had the chance to watch this play out when he helped recruit two current master’s students from the Education Policy and Analysis Program, Rathna Ramesh and Anruo Wang, for an internship with the city of Las Vegas. The internship was initially facilitated by Cecelia Di Mino, Ed.M.’22, a Vegas-based social impact consultant, for her client, the city’s Department of Youth Development and Social Initiatives. The city was looking for interns skilled in using data to evaluate how well Strong Start Academy, their first municipally run K–5 charter school, was doing. Strong Start opened in 2022 using a bilingual immersion model with the goal of offering high-quality early and elementary education for families in the city, especially those living in lower performing wards.

Ramesh and Wang spent the fall semester digging through the Nevada Report Card, a publicly accessible data set from the Nevada Department of Education that allowed them to download metrics on a range of measures, including chronic absenteeism, student demographics, student spending, instructional time, teacher attendance, and test scores. They looked specifically at data for Strong Start, and then measured it against data from other schools in the district and in the lower performing wards.

“They wanted to see if this new school, Strong Start, was actually having the results that they wanted,” says Ramesh, who tackled data related to demographics, equity, and resources while Wang analyzed academic achievement.   

What they found is that Strong Start consistently outperforms district and ward averages. Students show stronger proficiency in math and English language and display faster academic growth than their peers, “placing Strong Start among the highest-performing schools citywide,” their final report stated. “Strong Start has one of the highest English language proficiency assessment (ELPA) rates in Las Vegas, especially in the upper proficiency bands (expanding and proficient), sharply contrasting with the low-performing ELPA cluster surrounding wards 1/3/5.” On the non-academic side, they also found that Strong Start outperforms all other elementary schools in the district and neighboring wards on teacher attendance and per-pupil spending. The areas that the school needed to address, they noted, included lower student daily attendance (but not chronic absenteeism), which they attributed to a lack of school busses, and the lower percentage of transient students served.

In December, Ramesh and Wang traveled to Las Vegas to meet students and teachers at the charter school and present their findings in person to Strong Start’s school board, as well as the city council, city officials, and the mayor. “The purpose,” says Wang, “was to show Strong Start Academy that what they're doing is helping and also help them make the case for their charter renewal whenever that comes up. Presenting the finding also showed the council members ways that they could improve other schools in the city: These things worked at Strong Start. Maybe we can consider putting these in the other public schools, too.”

Both students say this experience of taking what they’re learning in class and applying it to real work for a real client — what McIntyre says is an invaluable portfolio booster — has altered how they see their future careers.

“This opportunity has changed my thinking about what I'm going to do after graduation for my job,” says Wang, who assumed she would become an academic researcher. “Because of this internship, I got exposed to how city hall works and what the daily operation looks like, and I found myself thinking, I like that kind of environment and that kind of working vibe. I also like the nature of this work, using public data to analyze students’ performance, how the school is doing, and how we're going to use this data information to help schools do better.”
Ramesh says she feels the same.

“When I applied to the HGSE program, I was thinking I would do something related to education policy, but I didn't know what type of role,” she says. “When I looked into career exploration resources from the career center, I narrowed in on policy or data analysts. But I knew I didn't really like research when it was in more of an academic setting. This internship really helped me figure out that I enjoy research when it's connected to change directly, like working for an organization that's going to take that research and do something with it and the focus is more on, how does this data inform implementation recommendations?”