Evaluation of Delaware's Opportunity Funding and Student Success Block Grant Programs: Third and Final Year

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Doan, Sy

Contributor:

Engberg, John

Karoly, Lynn A.

Morales, Sam

Schwartz, Heather L.

Language:

English

Other Title:

Evaluation of Delaware's Opportunity Funding and Student Success Block Grant Programs

Place of Publication:

RAND Corporation 2023

Summary:

This report is the third of three annual reports evaluating the implementation and effects of two Delaware weighted funding programs designed to support Delaware's 42 school districts and charter schools (also known as local education agencies [LEAs]) enrolling students experiencing poverty (SEPs) and multilingual learners (MLs) during the 2019–2020 to 2021–2022 school years: Opportunity Funding and the Student Success Block Grant (SSBG) program. In this report, the authors describe how Delaware's LEAs spent their Opportunity Funding and SSBG dollars, what portion of their allocations they spent, and what LEA leaders deemed their most effective investments with those dollars. They also examine whether both the allocation of the funds and the actual expenditures were associated with improved performance on spring 2022 math and reading tests. The authors use and report results from multiple quantitative designs, including cross-state comparisons of academic achievement, comparisons of the size of academic achievement gaps before and after the availability of funds, and comparisons of academic achievement between schools that did and did not expend these funds. Since the 2019–2020 school year, the Opportunity Funding and SSBG programs have allocated nearly 00 million to Delaware LEAs to support student learning and well-being, with particular emphasis on supporting SEPs and MLs. Delaware LEAs have used these funds to make hundreds of investments, most of which are the employment of staff dedicated to support reading instruction, MLs, and student mental health.