State Improvement Grant Program Evaluation Abstract (2004)

With funding from the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), Westat is conducting a five-year, formative evaluation of the State Improvement Grant (SIG) Program.   The SIG Program was authorized by the 1997 Amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).   The goal of this evaluation is to help OSEP improve the SIG Program.   Westat, an employee-owned research organization that serves agencies of the federal government, has a long history of evaluating federal programs and working with OSEP and other offices of the U.S. Department of Education.  

In the course of this project, Westat will address four evaluation questions:

• How faithfully are SIG projects implementing the SIG Program outlined by Congress in the 1997 Amendments to IDEA?
• What are the characteristics of models of systemic change implemented by SIG-funded states?
• What barriers to and facilitators of successful program implementation and subsequent systemic change are states experiencing?
• Which models of systemic change lead to or are expected to lead to improved outcomes, including improved performance of students with disabilities?

Westat is collecting data from multiple sources at the federal, state, and local levels, using a variety of methods including interviews, telephone surveys, site visits, focus groups, and document reviews.   Although the evaluation will focus heavily on the plans, accomplishments, and outcomes of the individual SIG projects, and the SIG projects are the unit of analysis in this evaluation, Westat is not evaluating individual projects per se.   The evaluation is investigating in depth three issues that are critical to the SIG projects and ultimately to the SIG Program: projects' self-evaluations, systemic change, and projects' results.

Each year, Westat will prepare a comprehensive summary of findings for OSEP containing information about the SIG projects' performance and about the SIG Program as a whole. To maintain the confidentiality of sensitive information, we will aggregate state-level information for our reports, and we will not identify individual respondents. SIG Program evaluation reports are here.  

Tom Fiore of Westat serves as the Project Director for the evaluation. The OSEP Project Officer is Pat Gonzalez.