Office of Innovation and Improvement

An updated version of the guidebook, Evaluating Supplemental Educational Service Providers: Suggested Strategies for States, is now available from the Center on Innovation and Improvement (CII), a national content center in the Department's Comprehensive Centers program. Color and black-and-white versions are the guidebook are available on the CII website at http://www.centerii.org/ses.html.

Please see below for a message from CII and the guidebook authors:
Researchers from the University of Memphis and the American Institutes of Research worked with the Center on Innovation and Improvement to update the SES Guidebook, originally developed for the SES Quality Center in March 2005. This guidebook is designed to help state education agencies develop evaluation systems for SES providers. The guidebook reviews possible evaluation outcomes, data sources, and research designs, and offers practical and technical considerations associated with an evaluation.

Following the publication of the first version of the guidebook, much experience has been gained and lessons learned through the initial evaluation studies conducted by the present authors and other groups. At the same time, understanding by stakeholders in the evaluation process (e.g., policy makers, regulators, educators, providers, and evaluators) of expectations, challenges, and potentially useful models has also greatly increased. We now propose even more strongly than we did previously that evaluation designs should supplement the mandatory examination of student achievement outcomes with performance dimensions addressing customer satisfaction and service delivery. This guidebook explains these performance domains and describes possible evaluation measures and designs that states can use to assess each. It further expands the initial version by proposing strategies for (a) “front-end” communications with providers about evaluation requirements and expectations; and (b) end-of-year decisions about provider status (continuation or removal) based on the evaluation results. The student achievement design section has been updated to reflect the findings of an expert statistical panel, convened for the purposed of increasing the rigor of statistical methods used in all SES evaluations.