Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In recent years, an increased focus on accountability in publicly-funded programs has led to an increase in performance assessment and, in turn, the evaluation of those assessment systems. The Head Start Designation Renewal System (DRS) was developed in response to the 2007 reauthorization of Head Start which required the Office of Head Start (OHS) to develop a system to identify which grantees are delivering high-quality, comprehensive services and which are not; to provide automatic renewal of grant funds to high quality programs and implement a competitive grant process in communities where high quality services are not being provided.  The reauthorization bill argued that the quality of Head Start would be improved though this process because lower-performing grantees will either have to improve their quality to win a competition for grant funding or would be replaced with higher quality grantees through the competitive process.

In 2011, OHS began implementing the DRS which represents a major policy shift for Head Start and has significantly changed the way OHS administers and manages the program. Since its inception in 1965, grants were awarded in perpetuity unless an organization committed a major infraction such as fraud. Thus, the notion of competing to keep a grant was a significant change to this system. In this paper, we will present findings to one set of questions in a larger evaluation of the DRS: (1) How much competition was there, and to what extent did the level of competition differ by grantee and local characteristics? (2) In what ways did services proposed by competing applicants vary from those provided by the incumbent grantee before the competition? (3) In what ways were awardees from DRS competitions similar to or different from the incumbent grantees? And (4) How did competition affect partnerships or operations of grantees? Data for this study include a mix of primary and secondary data, including Census, the Head Start Program Information Report (PIR), grant applications, a web-based survey of 118 of Head Start grant applicants, and interviews with Head Start grantees in various stages of the DRS process. 

The DRS introduces a form of competition that Kincaid (1991) refers to as mediated competition – competition that is initiated and decided through the institutions of government, rather than through the market. Previous research suggests that mediated local government competitions generate little competition, but facilitate the formation of collaborative community partnerships and/or increase access to additional resources (Hefetz & Warner, 2011; Warner & Hefetz, 2003). Although the DRS competition is initiated nationally, each competition occurs locally and the competing organizations must show a strong local presence. Thus, the federal-to-local funding model lends itself to examination using local competition and contracting literature. This literature guided the interview and survey questions for our mixed methods study.

We are currently wrapping up the study and findings are in review at this time so we cannot share them here. We expect the public findings to be released in summer 2016 and therefore to be available for discussion at the APPAM 2016 conference.