RFP 2024-0500-0179 GREAT Alaska Special Education Professional Development

The Department of Education and Early Development (DEED) is seeking an evaluator who will assist
with the collection of data, set up meetings with team members to assist them in meeting benchmarks and solicit information from the project for reporting purposes. Their responsibilities will include ensuring that timelines and deliverables related to evaluation data collection and reporting activities are met. The coaches’ cohort, District Implementation Teams, and State Implementation Teams will rely on formative and summative evaluation data to inform internal continuous improvement processes and to track progress toward achievement of the outcomes and the GPRA performance measures. The evaluator will also represent the project at federal meetings as needed and requested by DEED.

The project’s evaluation design addresses the implementation and outcome evaluation needs of the
project. The evaluation design carefully considers issues of program implementation, fidelity to the design of the program intervention(s), and the importance of assessing many different types of outcomes on students, paraprofessionals, and systems of professional development within partnering school districts. It is expected that aspects of the evaluation, like aspects of the program implementation itself, may need to be modified and adapted to meet unforeseen and unanticipated challenges as the program is implemented. Quality of the project will be ensured through continuous formative performance assessments and summative measures to examine the impact. In order to meet long-term outcomes, understand the cost and impact of this personnel development plan, and in accordance with the research around active implementation frameworks, the program will be limited to three cohorts of districts, teacher coaches, and paraprofessionals. The quality, intensity and duration will be sufficient to demonstrate improvements in outcomes for students taught by GREAT Alaska participants through the quantitative and qualitative data collected through the Project Evaluation.

Please see attached documents for additional information.