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Reports on the Comprehensive Child Development Program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Effort of the federal government to assist children from disadvantaged families; Commitment of the committee to provide quality services to grantees; Provision of case management and early childhood education to each family.

This article focuses on the management of federally funded evaluation research by (1) discussing several aspects of building an efficient in-house evaluation team including planning for upcoming procurements, deciding which staff to bid on a proposal, maintaining in-house staff versus hiring new staff, subcontracting, and using consul tants; (2) defining and discussing four possible contractor/client relationships; and (3) considering the contractor/practitioner team and problems of building rapport and working relationships with field practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Education Voucher Demonstration began in the Alum Rock Union Elementary School District during the 1972-1973 school year. Under the voucher concept, parents freely select a school for their child and receive a credit or voucher equal to the cost of the child's education that is paid directly to the school upon enrollment. It was presumed that this form of school finance would foster competition among the schools and improve the quality of education by making schools more responsive to students' needs. An initial external evaluation at the conclusion of the first year found, however, a relative loss in reading achievement for students in the six public schools that participated in the voucher demonstration. The present report reexamines some of these data using a quasi-experi mental design involving multiple pretests and individual students' test scores (rather than school means) as the unit of analysis. The results appear to indicate that the deleterious reading effect of the voucher demonstration was confined to a few within-school programs featuring nontraditional, innovative curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The possible biasing effects of attrition of subjects in experiments is a problem to which social science researchers and evaluators rarely attend. A study of the relationships between attrition rate and background variables for children participating in the Nation al Follow Through Evaluation revealed that in general there were few differences between students who dropped out of treatment and comparison groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article shows how several of the models of educational researchers T.D. Cook and C.L. Gruder, have been applied in the evaluation of Project Follow Through in the U.S. Project Follow Through is a large-scale federally funded experiment in education. The origins of Follow Through can be traced to an early evaluation of Head Start which asserted that Head Start increased children's school readiness. On the basis of this study, the President Lyndon Baines Johnson's administration proposed a Follow Through program that would continue service to disadvantaged children through the third grade. Funding problems forced a change in the emphasis of Follow Through from a full-scale service program to an experimental program in education in which a variety of educational specialists each implemented an educational model in several school districts. In 1969 the U.S. Office of Education contracted for a national evaluation of Follow Through which focused on comparing the relative impact of the various educational models implemented in Follow Through on the academic skills and affective levels of the children they served.

The article focuses on the effect of federal policy on services delivered through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the U.S. Title I has two main purposes. The first is to provide districts with support that will allow them to offer educational services to students who both need the services and who reside in low-income areas. The second is to provide services, which expand the Title I student's regular curriculum. These requirements are meant to insure that the services provided by Title I are related to the needs of the children to be served, and that they are carefully planned, implemented and evaluated. Although these requirements determine to some extent whether Title I does expand and improve services, four of the eight fund allocation provisions have a much greater effect. These are the comparability, supplement not supplant, excess costs, and equitably provided requirements. The comparability requirements are school-level requirements. Generally, they require that the level of services provided from state and local funds in every Title I school be comparable to the average level in non-Title I schools.

The article presents information about the true and quasi-experiments as evaluation tools for multiple analyses in education. Proponents of true experiments believe that they are under-utilized. Some others believe that true experiments are the most reliable method for assessing the worth of a program. Both experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations exhibit many of the same ideal characteristics. There are certain dimensions which may be varied in the construction of a multiple analysis strategy. These include using different covariate sets, different test score metrics, units of analysis, comparison groups, outcomes etc. Performing multiple analyses on a single set of data gathered from quasi-experiments is a valuable practice in that it enhances one's confidence in the results when analyses agree, and allows for alternative interpretations to be made when they disagree. The second type of analyses which are critical to the evaluation of quasi-experiments are those performed in order to check the validity of the experiment. The conduct of multiple analyses can be placed within a larger framework: meta-evaluation.