HIGHLIGHTS
- Federal grantees need support improving education outcomes for children
- Abt provides data assessment and technical assistance
- We’ll help create opportunities for children and their families
The Challenge
The Promise Neighborhood program is a place-based initiative designed to improve the educational outcomes of children through linked, holistic and evidence-based cradle-to-career interventions. The program’s grantees provide a menu of services to the residents of “promise neighborhoods” and to students attending schools within the neighborhood's footprint, including early childhood interventions, safety and nutrition support, academic enrichment and remedial support, and parenting education. The grantees need support and their efforts need to be assessed.
The Approach
Our partner, Westat is primarily in charge of providing programmatic technical assistance (TA) while Abt is taking the lead on data-related support. We’re collecting and analyzing data from a variety of sources (e.g., parents, students, schools) to report on school and neighborhood level Government Performance Results Modernization Act (GPRA) indicators. We’ve assigned senior TA leads to liaison monthly with the six 2016 grantees and is providing TA support, including help calculating GPRA benchmarks and targets, designing data collection efforts, identifying appropriate child assessment tools, and building a culture of continuous quality improvement.
The Results
Our TA and data collection efforts will help grantees--and neighborhoods--build a cradle-to-career pipeline of education, health and social supports to create communities of opportunity for children and their families, including facilitating peer to peer learning, advancing and supporting equitable policy strategies and serving as a link to public and private investors.