Evaluation of Promise Neighborhoods and Full-Service Community Schools

Analyzing data and preparing the final Promise Neighborhoods study report under the Base Period and Option Period 1 has taken longer than anticipated for several reasons. The pandemic was substantially disruptive for the Government, Vendor, and the Grantee Organizations. Therefore, it took much longer for the contractor to complete the data collection from grantees with a high response rate, which was a required step to proceeding to analysis and reporting. At the same time, there was a perfect storm of turnover in the IES COR, IES leadership overseeing this evaluation, and leadership in the contractor team, which created transitional delays. Finally, given how complex a program Promise Neighborhoods is (i.e., cradle to career pipeline of comprehensive services to whole communities, and not just individual schools), there are substantial data analytic challenges that need to be grappled with in producing findings and reporting that will pass muster with IES’s required peer review process. This review process via IES’s Standards and Review Office (SRO) has increasingly become more difficult to pass, due to increased scrutiny over how to report certain types of data and how to present findings in a policy-relevant way. Therefore, more time is needed to be thoughtful about these stringent standards to ensure that IES’s findings report for this program can ultimately be approved for sharing with the public.

Awarded contract 91990020C0001 to unknown vendor for unknown amount on 2019-11-07.