Grant recipients risk losing millions of dollars in Race to the Top money if they fail to live up to their promises, federal education officials make clear. By threatening to revoke Hawaii's $75 million Race to the Top award for failing to make "adequate progress" on key milestones of its education reform plan, U.S. Secretary of…

The 12 winners of the federal Race to the Top competition have experienced near-universal challenges in turning their sweeping, multifaceted proposals into reality, among them a limited state capacity to execute fast, dramatic change and deeply rooted teacher-evaluation systems that have proved hard to transform. Reports unveiled by the U.S.…

According to Section 2141(c) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as reauthorized by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), local education agencies (LEAs) that fail to meet annual measurable objectives and make adequate yearly progress (AYP) for three consecutive years must enter into an agreement with the state education agency…

A preliminary report on performance contracting in the Wichita school district. (RY)

A new approach to educational improvement: a school with a successful program adapts the program for another school, and the Office of Education becomes central repository for data on programs validated as successful. (Author)

This book examines the process of change in American public education, focusing in particular on various experiments in performance contracting that were conducted between 1969 and 1973. Chapter 1 briefly reviews the process of change in education and describes the performance contracting concept and the ways its advocates expected it to overcome…

This report describes briefly the experimental design and presents the basic contract provisions. The experiment results reveal that performance contracting is no more successful than traditional classroom methods in improving the reading and mathematics skills of poor children. Both control and experimental groups performed equally poorly in…

New approach extends manpower service delivery, on contractual basis, to remote rural areas. (AG)

This report explores the evolutionary process of the concepts of accountability and performance contracting from their inception through mid 1970-71. Six major topics are discussed: (1) ideological, managerial, and pedagogical underpinnings, (2) definitions and history of the concepts, (3) five performance contracting projects, (4) the political…

The General Accounting Office (GAO) evaluated the Office of Economic Opportunity's (OEO) performance contracting experiment because of its potential impact in education. Performance contracting has been defined as an agreement between a local education agency, such as a public school, and a private educational firm, known as a learning system…

This guide provides assistance in using two primary management tools--the performance standards and performance-based, fixed unit price contracts--to achieve satisfactory results in Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) programs. The guide is organized in six chapters. Chapter 1 reviews the original purpose of the JTPA and introduces the investment…

This book examines in detail the experiment in educational performance contracting conducted by the United States Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) during the 1970-71 school year. Major objectives of the OEO project were to find out whether a private educational firm could teach educationally disadvantaged children to read and write better than…

One of the originators of performance contracting explains how school districts can use that concept to attack difficult educational problems and meet the increasing demand that schools be held accountable for their educational product. The author argues that what he calls "educational engineering" will guarantee a basic level of achievement in…