A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Synthesis of Local and State
Even Start Evaluations:
Final Report

Since its inception, the Even Start program has undergone evaluative scrutiny at a variety of levels. In addition to the ongoing federally-funded national evaluation, each local project is required by law to conduct an independent local evaluation, and in some states, projects participate in a state-wide evaluation. While the primary purpose of many state and local evaluations is to help improve and focus the program in specific locales, these evaluations may contain information that could be more widely disseminated to program developers and policy makers.

To understand what types of evaluation activities are being undertaken, and to see whether state and local evaluations do, indeed, contain information that would be useful for project improvement and helpful outside of their immediate applications, the U.S. Department of Education (hereafter, the Department) asked Abt Associates Inc. to collect, read, and report on state and local Even Start evaluations. This document is the final report from that project.

This project aimed to gather and review state and local Even Start evaluations, to describe the types of evaluations that were conducted, to describe findings about the outcomes of Even Start programs, and to provide guidance on improving state and local evaluations. In practice, the study focused on local evaluations since few state-level studies were available for review at the time that we were collecting evaluation documents.

[Executive Summary]

[1.0 Overview of Even Start]