RAND School Leadership Intervention Evaluation Toolkit

This toolkit is a companion to School Leadership Interventions Under the Every Student Succeeds Act: An Evidence Review (the School Leadership Interventions report), which assessed the evidence on school leadership interventions against Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) evidence tiers. An outcome evaluation is an ESSA requirement for federally funded interventions that have low levels of evidence [e.g., Tier IV]. To address this, the authors developed this toolkit to help state and local education policymakers evaluate school leadership intervention outcomes as they implement the interventions. This toolkit is designed primarily for administrators working in state education agencies (SEA) and local (e.g., county, district) education agencies (LEA) considering school leadership improvement interventions as a school improvement lever. The authors provide guidance and tools for building an intervention logic model, selecting program evaluation designs and measures, organizing and analyzing data, and using data to improve the intervention. The guidance shared in this toolkit is consistent with the larger body of evaluation methodology but is specifically tailored to be relevant for school leadership intervention evaluations. Although the toolkit focuses on outcome evaluations, the authors strongly encourage state and local education administrators to go beyond the ESSA requirements to look at implementation processes as well.