Recommendations

A number of positive initiatives are being undertaken by State Councils directly or through collaborative programs with other State agencies. However, identifying Statewide performance data is difficult. While it may be challenging for State Councils to capture and measure extensive information on general effectiveness of employment programs, steps need to be taken to report the progress of persons with developmental disabilities in obtaining and keeping jobs. To accomplish this, ACF should consider the following:

Promising Practices Should be Shared Among States

State Councils identify a number of promising and innovative practices and generally feel these could be replicated in other States. In fact, some State Councils already require grantees to develop a replication manual for their demonstration projects. We believe that communicating these practices is in the best interest of employment programs and their effective operation. Three specific actions that ACF/ADD should consider include:

1) working with State Councils to develop an ongoing inventory of successful employment initiatives;

2) working toward developing a formal mechanism to allow State Councils to share promising employment approaches on a national level. One method for accomplishing this is by ACF publishing and updating reports of State Council innovative practices on the ACF/ADD website at http://www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/add, and by disseminating materials through mailings and conferences; and

3) communicating practices known to enhance the quality and efficiency of data documentation and reporting.

Core Data Requirements Should be Established to Evaluate Job Initiatives

State entities confirm the benefits of having outcome data to relate performance/achievement, and to measure effectiveness. Despite activities underway to develop and implement such outcome data, we believe it would be beneficial for ACF to develop mandatory performance measures with which all State Councils must comply.

The current system of selectively choosing a small portion of the overall set of performance measures severely limits the ability of ACF to adequately assess operational effectiveness and outcomes of Council-sponsored employment initiatives. The ACF/ADD should consider working with State Councils to identify those specific mission-critical performance measures which must be addressed annually by each Council.

We note that a beneficial tool in this effort may be the "Core Indicators" being developed by a workgroup of State Mental Retardation/Developmental Disabilities directors. While these performance measures are largely focused on State mental retardation issues, some of the measures may be valuable to apply to all persons with developmental disabilities.

AGENCY COMMENTS

The ACF concurred with recommendations in this report. We have made changes to the final report to reflect agency wording suggestions. The full text of ACF's comments are included in Appendix D.