National Evaluation of the Comprehensive Technical Assistance Centers: Interim Report

In an evaluation of the Comprehensive Technical Assistance Centers, a sample of Center projects were rated by their clients to be on average 3.94 for relevance and 3.70 for usefulness on a scale of 1 to 5, A panel of experts rated their technical quality to be on average 3.34.

NCEE released an interim report on the congressionally mandated evaluation of the centers, a federally funded program that provides technical assistance to states to implement provisions of NCLB through 16 Regional Comprehensive Centers (RCCs) and 5 Content Centers (CCs).

This interim report addresses the first of the evaluation's three rounds of data collection pertaining to the Comprehensive Centers' work from July 2006 through June 2007. The evaluation was designed as a multi-year study examining the Center program as a whole.

Descriptions of Center operations were drawn from Center management plans, documentation from each Center, and site visit interviews with staff from each Center. Senior state education agency administrators were surveyed to assess how the work of the Centers met states' technical assistance needs and priorities. The technical quality of Center assistance was assessed by expert panel review of a sample of projects. Surveys were administered to project participants to obtain client views of the relevance and usefulness of the Center technical assistance across the same sample of projects.

Other findings include:

• All Comprehensive Centers reported planning their work in coordination and consultation with their clients, making adjustments in their work plan during the year.
• Consistent with the mission of providing "front-line" assistance, RCC projects more often involved sustained interaction with participants through ongoing consultation and follow up (82 percent of RCC projects in the sample) than did the work of CCs (22 percent of CC projects in the sample). CC assistance most often focused on delivery of research information (74 percent of CC projects), consistent with the CCs' focus on synthesizing, translating, and delivering knowledge on a particular topic.
• More than one third of state administrators reported that the Centers "served the state's purposes completely," with another 52 percent reporting that "it was a good start."

View, download, and print the report as a PDF file (2.9 MB)
View, download, and print the executive summary as a PDF file (577 KB)