The U.S. Department of Education may not have a good way to evaluate the effectiveness of Promise Neighborhoods, a $100 million Obama administration grant program intended to improve education for students in distressed communities, the Government Accountability Office says.
The GAO report, released last week, explains that the department requires winners of the competitive grants to collect extensive data on such factors as individuals served, services provided, and related outcomes, as well as report annually on multiple indicators.
However, the department told the GAO that it needs to conduct a systematic examination of the reliability and validity of the data to determine whether the information can be used for an evaluation.
