EDUCATION 

GRANTS

Promise 

Neighborhoods 

Promotes 

Collaboration but 

Needs National 

Evaluation Plan

Report to the Chairman, Committee on 

Education and the Workforce, House of 

Representatives

May 2014

GAO-14-432

United States Government Accountability Office
United States Government Accountability Office

Highlights of GAO-14-432, a report to the 

Chairman, Committee on Education and the 

Workforce, House of Representatives

May 2014

EDUCATION GRANTS

Promise Neighborhoods Promotes Collaboration but 

Needs National Evaluation Plan

Why GAO Did This Study

Education’s Promise Neighborhoods 

program is a competitive grant 

program with goals to improve 

educational and developmental 

outcomes for children in distressed 

neighborhoods. The grants fund 

community-based organizations’ efforts 

to work with local partners to develop 

and evaluate a cradle-to-career 

continuum of services in a designated 

geographic footprint. As it is one of 

several federal programs using this 

model GAO was asked to review the 

program. 

This report examines: (1) the extent to 

which Education’s strategy for 

awarding grants aligns with program 

goals; (2) how Education aligns 

Promise Neighborhoods efforts with 

other related programs; (3) how 

Education evaluates grantees’ efforts; 

and (4) the extent to which grants have 

enabled collaboration at the local level, 

and the results of such collaboration.

GAO reviewed Federal Register 

notices, applications, and guidance; 

surveyed all 48 grantees on the 

application process, coordination of 

resources, collaboration, and early 

results; visited 11 grantees selected 

based on geography and grant type; 

and interviewed Education officials and 

technical assistance providers. 

What GAO Recommends

GAO recommends that Education 

communicate grant expectations more 

clearly, identify federal resources that 

can contribute to the program’s goals, 

and develop a strategy for evaluation.

In commenting on a draft of this report, 

Education outlined the steps it will take 

to respond to recommendations. 

What GAO Found

The Department of Education (Education) used a two-phase strategy for 

awarding Promise Neighborhoods (Promise) grants, and aligned grant activities 

with program goals. Education awarded 1-year planning grants to organizations 

with the potential to effectively align services for students in their respective 

neighborhoods. Planning grants were generally intended to enhance the 

grantees’ capacity to plan a continuum of services. Through a separate 

competition, Education awarded 5-year implementation grants to organizations 

that demonstrated they were most ready to implement their plans. However, 

Education did not communicate clearly to grantees about its expectations for the 

planning grants and the likelihood of receiving implementation grants. As a result, 

some grantees experienced challenges sustaining momentum in the absence or 

delay of implementation grant funding.

The Promise program coordinates with related federal efforts primarily through a 

White House initiative that brings together neighborhood grant programs at five 

federal agencies. The Promise program’s efforts are focused on ensuring that 

grants are mutually reinforcing by aligning goals, developing common 

performance measures, and sharing technical assistance resources. While 

Promise grantees incorporate a wide range of federal programs in their local 

strategies, Education coordinates with a more limited number of federal 

programs. Officials told us that they do this to avoid spreading program 

resources too thin. Further, Education did not develop an inventory of the federal 

programs that share Promise goals, a practice that could assist grantees; help 

officials make decisions about interagency coordination; and identify potential 

fragmentation, overlap, and duplication. 

Education requires Promise grantees to develop information systems and collect 

extensive data, but it has not developed plans to evaluate the program. 

Specifically, implementation grantees must collect data on individuals they serve, 

services they provide, and related outcomes and report annually on multiple 

indicators. However, Education stated it must conduct a systematic examination 

of the reliability and validity of the data to determine whether it will be able to use 

the data for an evaluation. Absent an evaluation, Education cannot determine the 

viability and effectiveness of the Promise program’s approach.

The Promise grant enabled grantees and their partners to collaborate in ways 

that align with leading practices GAO previously identified for enhancing 

collaboration among interagency groups including establishing common 

outcomes, leveraging resources, and tracking performance. For example, 

Education required grantees to work with partners to develop common goals and 

a plan to use existing and new resources to meet identified needs in target areas. 

Grantees were also required to leverage resources by committing funding from 

multiple sources. Implementation grantees were required to collect and use data 

to track performance. Some planning grantees used a leading collaborative 

strategy not required by Education that produced early benefits. For example, 

several grantees and partners told us they completed easily achievable projects 

during the planning year to help build momentum and trust. Grantees told us that 

collaboration yielded benefits, including deeper relationships with partners, such 

as schools, as well as the ability to attract additional funding. However, grantees 

also said they faced some challenges collaborating with partners, particularly in 

overcoming privacy concerns related to data collection.

View GAO-14-432. For more information, 

contact Jacqueline M. Nowicki at 617-788-

0580 or nowickij@gao.gov.
Page i GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Letter 1

Scope and Methodology 2

Background 4

Education’s Grant Strategy Aligns with Promise Goals, but 

Education Has Not Clearly Communicated Expectations for 

Planning Grants 8

Promise Neighborhoods Program Coordinates with Some 

Programs with Related Goals but Has No Inventory of Related 

Programs 17

Education Collects Extensive Data but Has Not Determined 

Whether or How to Evaluate the Program 24

Grantees Collaborate Using Leading Practices, Resulting in 

Benefits and Challenges 28

Conclusions 38

Recommendations for Executive Action 39

Agency Comments 39

Appendix I Objectives, Scope, and Methodology 43

Appendix II Promise Neighborhood Grantees 46

Appendix III Goals, Results, and Performance Indicators for Promise 

Neighborhood Program 48

Appendix IV Comments from the Department of Education 50

Appendix V GAO Contact and Staff Acknowledgments 55

Tables

Table 1: Promise Neighborhoods Planning and Implementation 

Grants (2010-2012) 6

Table 2: Desired Results of the Promise Neighborhoods Grants 10

Contents
Page ii GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Table 3: Successful Implementation Grant Applications from 

Planning Grantees 14

Table 4: Examples of Promise Neighborhoods Program 

Coordination within Education and with NRI 19

Table 5: Federal Resources Leveraged by Promise 

Neighborhoods Implementation Grantees 23

Table 6: Approaches for Establishing Common Outcomes 29

Table 7: Approaches for Identifying and Addressing Needs by 

Leveraging Resources 31

Table 8: Approaches for Tracking Performance and Maintaining 

Accountability 33

Table 9: Selected Promise Neighborhoods Collaborative Efforts 

and Outcomes 37

Table 10: Promise Neighborhoods Program’s Design for 

Achieving Its Goals 48

Table 11: Promise Neighborhoods Desired Outcomes and 

Indicators 49

Figures

Figure 1: Sample Continuum of Cradle-to-Career Services 4

Figure 2: Locations of Planning and Implementation Grantees 8

Figure 3: Applicants’ Views of the Clarity of Implementation Grant 

Application Requirements and Peer Reviewer Scores and 

Comments 11

Figure 4: Applicants’ Views of Helpfulness of Peer Reviewer 

Comments 12

Figure 5: Key Efforts Contributing to the White House 

Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative 18

Figure 6: Resources Leveraged by Promise Neighborhoods 

Grantees 32

Figure 7: Number of Implementation Grantees Who Reported 

They Collaborate With Their Partners to Track 

Performance and Maintain Accountability 34
Page iii GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Abbreviations

Education Department of Education

HHS Department of Health and Human Services

HUD Department of Housing and Urban Development

Justice Department of Justice

NRI White House Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative

Promise Promise Neighborhoods

Treasury Department of the Treasury

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necessary if you wish to reproduce this material separately.
Page 1 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

441 G St. N.W.

Washington, DC 20548

May 5, 2014

The Honorable John Kline

Chairman

Committee on Education and the Workforce

House of Representatives

Dear Mr. Chairman:

The Department of Education’s (Education) Promise Neighborhoods 

(Promise) program aims to improve educational and developmental 

outcomes for students in some of the country’s most distressed urban, 

rural, and tribal neighborhoods by aligning a suite of cradle-to-career 

services in a designated geographic footprint. Since 2010, Education has 

competitively awarded Promise planning and implementation grants to 48 

community-based organizations, including nonprofits, institutions of 

higher education, and Indian tribes that work in partnership with several 

other organizations, such as schools and social service agencies. 

Promise Neighborhoods grants are one of several place-based strategies 

under the White House Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative (NRI), 

which was also launched in 2010. Place-based strategies focus on a 

specific geographic location and provide flexibility to address the area’s 

unique needs.

The purpose of the grants is to plan for, create, and evaluate a continuum 

of services for children and youth residing in a target neighborhood. The 

Promise program provides both planning and implementation grants. In 

fiscal years 2010 through 2012, Education awarded a total of 46 1-year 

planning grants of up to $500,000. In fiscal years 2011 and 2012, 

Education awarded a total of 12 5-year implementation grants of up to $6 

million per year. Almost all implementation grantees had received 

planning grants. No new grants were awarded in fiscal year 2013, and 

none have been awarded in fiscal year 2014, although Education has 

continued to fund prior-year implementation grants.

The Promise Neighborhood program was established in fiscal year 2010, 

with $10 million from Education’s discretionary Fund for the Improvement 
Page 2 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

of Education.1 Since 2011, the program has received an appropriation in 

the annual appropriations acts, in amounts ranging from approximately 

$30 million to $60 million. For fiscal year 2015, the President has 

requested $100 million for the program and an additional $200 million 

under the President’s Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative.2

In light of the President’s requests for increased appropriations and 

specific statutory authority for the Promise Neighborhoods program and 

the increasing use of place-based strategies, you asked us to examine 

the Promise Neighborhoods program. To do this, we examined (1) the 

extent to which Education’s strategy for awarding grants aligns with 

program goals, if at all; (2) how Education aligns Promise Neighborhoods 

efforts with other related programs; (3) how Education evaluates 

grantees’ efforts; and (4) the extent to which Promise Neighborhoods 

grants have enabled collaboration at the local level, if at all, and the 

results of such collaboration.

To determine the extent to which the structure of the Promise 

Neighborhoods program aligns with program goals and how Education 

selected grantees, we reviewed relevant Federal Register notices, 

application guidance, and agency information on applicants for fiscal year 

2011 and 2012 implementation grants.3

 1

The conference report accompanying H.R. 3288 included $10 million for Promise 

Neighborhoods. H.R. Rep. No. 111-366, at 1051 (2009) (Conf. Rep.).

To determine how Education 

aligns Promise grant activities with other federal programs, we reviewed 

documentation on Education’s alignment efforts. To assess Education’s 

approach to evaluating the program, we reviewed its grant monitoring 

reports, performance measures, and guidance for data collection. To 

determine the extent to which Promise grants enabled collaboration at the 

local level, we used GAO’s prior work on enhancing collaboration in 

2

Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 

2015 (Washington, D.C.: March 2014).

3

Fiscal years 2011 and 2012 were the only years in which Education awarded 

implementation grants. 

Scope and 

Methodology
Page 3 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

interagency groups as criteria.4 We compared the Promise grants’

collaboration approaches to certain successful approaches used by select 

interagency groups and reviewed implementation grantees’ application 

materials. To learn about grantees’ experiences with the program, we 

conducted a web-based survey of all planning and implementation 

grantees nationwide from late August to early November 2013. We 

received responses from all 48 grantees. We asked grantees to provide 

information on the application and peer review process, coordination of 

federal resources, collaboration with local organizations, and results of 

the planning grants. Because not all respondents answered every 

question, the number of grantees responding to any particular question 

will be noted throughout the report. In addition, we conducted site visits to 

11 planning and implementation grantees. During these visits, we 

interviewed five planning grantees and six implementation grantees. Sites 

were selected based on several factors, such as the type of grant 

awarded, the location of grantees, and whether they were urban or rural. 

For all four objectives, we interviewed Education officials, technical 

assistance providers, and subject matter specialists from the Promise 

Neighborhoods Institute.5

We conducted this performance audit from February 2013 to May 2014 in 

accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. 

Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain 

sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our 

findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that 

the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and 

conclusions based on our audit objectives.

(See appendix I for more detail on the scope 

and methodology.)

 4

GAO, Managing for Results: Implementation Approaches Used to Enhance Collaboration 

in Interagency Groups, GAO-14-220 (Washington, D.C.: Feb. 14, 2014). To identify the 

approaches we selected four interagency groups that use key practices for enhancing and 

sustaining collaboration. To identify successful approaches, we reviewed agency 

documents and interviewed agency officials who participated in these groups. 

5

The Promise Neighborhoods Institute is a nonprofit independent organization affiliated 

with PolicyLink. The institute supports Promise Neighborhoods grantees and aspiring 

Promise Neighborhoods by providing technical assistance with its partners, the Harlem 

Children’s Zone and the Center for the Study of Social Policy. The Center for the Study of 

Social Policy is one of Education’s contracted technical assistance providers. 
Page 4 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

The Promise Neighborhoods program is a place-based program that 

attempts to address the problems of children and youth in a designated 

geographic footprint. The program is designed to identify and address the 

needs of children in low-performing schools in areas of concentrated 

poverty by aligning a cradle-to-career continuum of services. The 

program moves beyond a focus on low-performing schools by recognizing 

the role an entire community plays in a child’s education (see fig. 1). 

Place-based initiatives provide communities the flexibility to address their 

unique needs and interrelated problems by taking into account the unique 

circumstances, challenges, and resources in that particular geographic 

area.

Figure 1: Sample Continuum of Cradle-to-Career Services

The Promise program is one of several place-based initiatives at the 

federal level, but it is the only one focused on educational issues. In 

addition to Education, the Departments of Justice (Justice), Housing and 

Urban Development (HUD), and Health and Human Services (HHS) also 

have grant programs aimed at impoverished neighborhoods. Together, 

these four agencies and their grant programs form the core of the White 

Background
Page 5 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

House Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative. This initiative coordinates 

neighborhood grant programs at the federal level across agencies, and 

identifies and shares best practices. Each agency’s grant program 

focuses on its respective agency’s core mission, but together, they focus 

on key components of neighborhood revitalization, education, housing, 

crime prevention, and healthcare.

Generally, the purpose of the Promise grants is to fund individual 

grantees’ efforts to plan for and create a cradle-to-career pipeline of 

services based on the specific needs of their communities. The grants are 

focused on improving student outcomes on 15 performance indicators, 

chosen by Education. Along with the grantee, partner organizations, 

funded by federal, state, local, private, or nonprofit organizations, are 

expected to collaborate to provide matching funds and services.

A number of nonprofits and foundations have worked on initiatives to 

address complex problems in a similarly comprehensive way. Their 

approach brings together a group of stakeholders from different sectors to 

collaborate on a common agenda, align their efforts, and use common 

measures of success. This approach has been described as the collective 

impact model.6 The premise of the model is that better cross-sector 

alignment and collaboration creates change more effectively than isolated 

interventions by individual organizations. A number of organizations have 

used this approach to address issues such as childhood obesity and 

water pollution.

 6

John Kania and Mark Kramer, “Collective Impact,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, 

(Winter 2011).

Promise Neighborhoods 

Model
Page 6 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Several other cradle-to-career place-based collective impact programs 

share key characteristics with the Promise program, including Cincinnati’s 

Strive program and the Harlem Children’s Zone. 7 8 These collective 

impact initiatives use a centralized infrastructure and a structured 

process, including training, tools, and resources, intended to result in a 

common agenda, shared measurement, and mutually-reinforcing 

activities among all participants. This centralized infrastructure requires 

staff to manage technology, communications support, data collection, 

reporting, and administrative details. The Promise grantees’ role is to 

create and provide this centralized infrastructure for their communities.

The Promise program relies on a two-phase strategy for awarding grants, 

which includes both one-year planning grants and three- to five-year 

implementation grants.9

Table 1: Promise Neighborhoods Planning and Implementation Grants (2010-2012)

(See table 1.)

Planning grant Implementation grant 

Description Supports a comprehensive needs assessment, a 

prioritization process to identity areas where 

interventions could be most successful, and 

design of a longitudinal data system to track 

results and student outcomes for children in the 

neighborhood. 

Supports implementation of strategies developed in 

planning phase. Funds can go toward a wide range of 

coordination and outreach efforts, building and 

operating longitudinal data systems, and some direct 

services. 

Length and amount 1-year grants; up to $500,000 each 5-year grants; up to $6 million per year 

Number awarded 46 12

Source: GAO analysis of relevant Federal Register notices and documents from Education.

 7

Cincinnati’s Strive program brings together representatives from private and corporate 

foundations, city governments, school districts, universities and community colleges, and 

education-related nonprofit and advocacy groups to coordinate improvements at every 

stage of a young person’s life, from “cradle to career.” Within 4 years Strive reported 

positive trends on almost two-thirds of its success indicators, including high school 

graduation rates and fourth grade reading and math scores.

8

The Harlem Children’s Zone provides a range of support services to address problems in 

a 100-block area in New York City, including poor housing, failing schools, violent crime, 

and chronic health problems. The program provides parenting workshops, preschool, 

health initiatives, charter schools, in-school programs, and after-school programs, among 

other services.

9

According to Education officials, all implementation grants awarded to date have been for 

5-year projects. 

Types of Grants
Page 7 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Among other things, planning grantees are required to conduct a 

comprehensive needs assessment of children and youth in the 

neighborhood and develop a plan to deliver a continuum of solutions with 

the potential to achieve results.10

The implementation grant provides funds to develop the administrative 

capacity to implement the planned continuum of services. Education 

expects implementation grantees to build and strengthen the partnerships 

they developed to provide and sustain services and to continue to build 

their longitudinal data systems.

This effort involves building community 

support for and involvement in developing the plan. Planning grantees are 

also expected to establish effective partnerships with organizations for 

purposes such as providing solutions along the continuum and obtaining 

resources to sustain and scale up the activities that work. Finally, 

planning grantees are required to plan to build, adapt, or expand a 

longitudinal data system to provide information and use data for learning, 

continuous improvement, and accountability.

Education awarded most of the 2010-2012 grants to non-profit 

organizations (38 of 48), eight to institutions of higher education, and two 

to tribal organizations. Almost all (10 of 12) implementation grantees 

received planning grants, while two did not. (See fig. 2 for locations of 

grantees.) (See appendix II for a list of grantees and year of grant award.)

 10For both planning and implementation grants, Education considers only applications that 

meet the criteria for an absolute priority. Under these priorities, applicants are required to 

describe in detail about how they will carry out the project. Federal regulations require 

grantees to carry out the project as specified in their approved applications. 34 C.F.R. § 

75.700. As a result, throughout this report we refer to the numerous aspects of the 

application required under an absolute priority as “requirements,” as the grantees are 

required to carry out the project as described in their applications.
Page 8 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Figure 2: Locations of Planning and Implementation Grantees

Education’s Grant 

Strategy Aligns with 

Promise Goals, but 

Education Has Not 

Clearly 

Communicated 

Expectations for 

Planning Grants
Page 9 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

The planning and implementation grant activities that Education 

developed for the Promise program generally align with Education’s goal 

of significantly improving the educational and developmental outcomes of 

children and youth in the nation’s most distressed communities. 

According to Education officials, the planning grant award process 

enabled them to identify community-based organizations in distressed 

neighborhoods with the potential to effectively coordinate the continuum 

of services for students living in the neighborhood. The eligibility 

requirements, which included matching funds or in-kind donations and an 

established relationship with the community to be served, helped to 

ensure that grantees had financial and organizational capacity and were 

representative of the area to be served. Education developed criteria to 

evaluate applications and select grantees based on the grantees’ ability 

to describe the need for the project; the quality of the project design, 

including the ability to leverage existing resources; the quality of the 

project services; and the quality of the management plan.

Education’s Promise planning grants were intended to enhance the

capacity of identified organizations to create the cradle-to-career 

continuum. The activities required of planning grantees enable grantees 

and their partners to gain a depth of knowledge about their communities 

and the communities’ needs, which can increase their capacity to focus 

on improving educational and developmental outcomes for children and 

youth throughout their neighborhood.

Through a separate competition, Education identified organizations that 

application reviewers determined were most ready to implement their 

plans. While acknowledging that the implementation grantees are best 

positioned to determine the allocation of grant funds, Education expects 

that grant funds will be used to develop the administrative capacity to 

implement the planned continuum and that the majority of resources to 

provide services to students and families will come from other public and 

private funding sources rather than from the grant itself. This expectation 

gives the Promise strategies a chance to extend beyond the 5-year life of 

the grant. Further, the requirement that grantees build a longitudinal data 

set allows Promise grantees and their partners to review and analyze 

robust data in real time to make informed decisions about whether to 

adjust their strategies. The data can also help the grantees and Education 

learn about the impact of the program.

Education identified 10 desired results from implementation of the 

program, which cover the cradle-to-career age span that Promise 

Neighborhoods are expected to address. A technical assistance provider 

Grant Requirements 

Enabled Education to 

Identify Organizations with 

Potential to Coordinate 

Student Services
Page 10 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

stated that the list of desired results help grantees focus on improving 

educational and developmental outcomes across the entire continuum. 

(See table 2.) (The indicators that measure progress toward achieving 

results are listed in Appendix III.)

Table 2: Desired Results of the Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Focus Result

Academic Children enter kindergarten ready to succeed in school

Students are proficient in core academic subjects

Students successfully transition from middle school grades to high 

school

Youth graduate from high school

High school graduates obtain a postsecondary degree, certification, or 

credential

Family and 

community 

supports

Students are healthy

Students feel safe at school and in their community

Students live in stable communities

Families and community members support learning in Promise 

Neighborhood schools

Students have access to 21st century learning tools

Source: Relevant Federal Register notices.

Education’s grantee selection process was generally clear and 

transparent. However, Education did not communicate clearly to planning 

grantees about the probability of receiving an implementation grant and 

its expectations for grantees to continue their efforts without 

implementation funding. This lack of clarity created challenges for some 

grantees.

Education outlined its selection criteria and how grant applications would 

be scored in its grant announcements and selected peer reviewers from 

outside the organization. According to Education officials, the peer 

reviewers had expertise in various related fields, including community 

development and all levels of education. Education provided additional 

training on the application review process. For the planning grant 

selection, Education divided about 100 peer reviewers into panels of 

three to review packages of about 10 applications. Afterward, peer 

reviewers conferred about scores in a conference call.

Education’s Two-Phase 

Grant Strategy Created 

Challenges for Some 

Grantees

Education’s Selection Process
Page 11 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

For the first implementation grant selection, Education had a two-tiered 

peer review process. During the first tier, peer reviewers were divided into 

panels of three to review approximately seven applications. During the 

second tier review of the 16 highest scoring applications, panels of 

reviewers were adjusted so that different reviewers read and scored 

different applications. For the second implementation grant selection, 

there was only one round of reviews. Reviewers were asked to review the 

applications and submit comments before meeting on-site to discuss 

applications. Education posted the results online, including peer reviewer 

comments for grantees and a list of applicants with scores above 80 out 

of 100 points.

In our web-based survey of grantees, grantees had mixed views on the 

clarity of application requirements and the helpfulness of peer reviewer 

comments. Specifically, 13 of 18 planning grantees who applied 

unsuccessfully for implementation grants and responded to the relevant 

survey question said the application requirements were very clear or 

extremely clear, while 8 of 19 grantees that responded said the same 

about peer reviewer scores and comments (see fig. 3). The unsuccessful 

applicants gave somewhat lower marks to the helpfulness of peer 

reviewer comments in improving their future applications and 

strengthening their current strategies (see fig. 4).

Figure 3: Applicants’ Views of the Clarity of Implementation Grant Application 

Requirements and Peer Reviewer Scores and Comments

Note: Not all grantees responded to all questions.
Page 12 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Figure 4: Applicants’ Views of Helpfulness of Peer Reviewer Comments

Note: Not all grantees responded to all questions.

Some of the 11 planning and implementation grantees that we 

interviewed raised concerns about specific application guidelines, such as 

how the term “neighborhood” is defined and the length of the application. 

Specifically, two rural grantees said that the grant application and 

materials had a few areas that seemed to be more geared to urban or 

suburban grantees. For example, the term “neighborhood” was somewhat 

difficult for them to interpret in a rural context. In fact, two rural grantees 

included multiple towns or counties in their neighborhood footprints. 

Additionally, two grantees we spoke with had concerns about the 

implementation grant application’s 50-page recommended maximum for 

the project narrative. Both organizations limited their narratives to 50

pages, but said they later learned that most of the successful grant 

recipients had exceeded this limit, often by a large amount.

The timing of the grant cycles created either an overlap or a long gap 

between the two grants. Grantees who applied for the implementation 

grant in the first cycle after receiving a planning grant had an overlap 

between executing the first grant and applying for the second grant. 

According to Education officials these grantees were unable to fully apply 

the knowledge gained in the planning year to develop their 

implementation applications. For example, one grantee said having to 

apply for the implementation grant during the planning year made it 

difficult to create opportunities for community input into the planning 

process. On the other hand, one of the four grantees that received an 

implementation grant 2 years after receiving a planning grant faced 

challenges sustaining the momentum of its efforts without additional 

funding. Another grantee in the same situation was able to sustain 

momentum with a separate grant from a private foundation. Education 
Page 13 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

officials said they became aware of the problems with the timing of the 

implementation applications a few months into the first planning grant 

year. However, they said they did not have much flexibility in timing the 

grant cycles. For example, they said that they needed to allow time for 

public comment on the grant notification in the Federal Register. In 

addition, they said that agency budget decisions were delayed that year 

because the Department was operating under a continuing resolution for 

over 6 months in fiscal year 2011—the first year implementation grants 

were awarded.

Some grantees also said there was a disconnect between the planning 

and the implementation grant application processes. Specifically, two 

officials from the six implementation grantees we visited told us that a 

high-quality planning year was not nearly as important for obtaining an 

implementation grant as having someone who could write a high-quality 

federal grant application. For example, one grantee noted that writing a 

good implementation grant application was not heavily dependent on 

information gleaned from the planning process. Another grantee said that 

the implementation grant application was written by a completely different 

person who was not involved in planning grant activities.

Some grantees who received only planning grants reported in our survey 

and in interviews that they experienced challenges continuing their work 

without implementation funds. In addition, two of the five planning 

grantees we interviewed had concerns with Education’s strategy of 

awarding few implementation grants compared with the number of 

planning grants.11

Education informed grantees there was a possibility they would not 

receive an implementation grant following the planning grant, but no 

information was provided about the likelihood of whether this would occur. 

We found indications that grantees did not fully appreciate that receiving 

a planning grant would not necessarily result in receiving an 

implementation grant. Three of the five planning grantees we interviewed 

stated that they did not have contingency plans for continuing their 

Promise Neighborhood efforts in the event that they did not receive 

 11Because we asked grantees to generally discuss what suggestions they had for 

improving the program, not all of the grantees we interviewed commented specifically 

about Education’s two-phase strategy for awarding grants.

Challenges with the TwoPhase Strategy
Page 14 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

implementation funding.12 The lack of contingency planning raises 

questions about the grantees’ understanding of the probability of 

receiving an implementation grant. Internal control standards state that 

management should ensure that effective external communications occur 

with groups that can have a serious impact on programs, projects, 

operations, and other activities, including budgeting and financing.13 To 

date, Education has awarded 46 planning grants (21, 15, and 10 in 2010, 

2011, and 2012, respectively) and 12 implementation grants. Even 

though all but two implementation grants were awarded to planning 

grantees, fewer than one-quarter of planning grantees received 

implementation funding.

14

Table 3: Successful Implementation Grant Applications from Planning Grantees

(See table 3.) 

Year planning grant received 2010 2011

Number of recipients 21 15

Number that applied for 2011 implementation grants 19 n/a

Number awarded 2011 implementation grants 4 n/a

Number that applied for 2012 implementation grants 10 8

Number awarded a 2012 implementation grants 4 2

Source: GAO analysis of applicant lists from Education.

Note: In both 2011 and 2012, there was also one successful implementation grant applicant that had 

not previously received a planning grant.

Education officials provided several reasons for separating the planning 

and implementation grants and for not awarding implementation grants to 

all planning grantees who applied. Officials said that when they awarded 

the first planning grants, they were not sure which neighborhoods had 

potential grantees with the capacity to implement a Promise plan. In their 

view, the planning grants allowed them to invest in the capacity of 

 12One of the five planning grantees we interviewed had not yet applied for an 

implementation grant.

13GAO, Internal Control: Standards for Internal Control in the Federal Government, 

GAO/AIMD-00-21.3.1 (Washington, D.C.: November 1999).

14Of the 21 grantees who received planning grants in 2010, 8 received implementation 

grants in either 2011 or 2012. Of the 15 2011 planning grantees, two have received 

implementation grants. Two implementation grants were awarded to grantees who had not 

received planning grants. Education did not award any additional planning or 

implementation grants for 2013 or 2014.
Page 15 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

communities to take on this work, while the implementation grants were 

only awarded to those that demonstrated they were ready for 

implementation. Education officials said it was important that grantees 

demonstrate they have an implementation plan in place before receiving 

such a large sum of money. In addition, after the first round of 

implementation grants were awarded, they noted that some applicants did 

not receive implementation grants because they were not yet 

competitive—in part because they had applied for the implementation 

grants before their planning efforts were complete. Finally, in commenting 

on a draft of this report, Education officials said that in several years, 

Congress appropriated less funds than were requested, which, they said, 

affected the number of implementation grants Education awarded. 

In 2010, both Education’s Federal Register Notice Inviting Applications for 

planning grants and a related frequently asked questions document 

informed organizations receiving planning grants that they should not 

necessarily plan on automatically receiving implementation grants.15

 15The 2010 Federal Register Notice Inviting Applications for planning grants noted that in 

subsequent years, contingent on the availability of funds, the Department intended to 

conduct competitions for implementation grants, as well as competitions for new Promise 

Neighborhoods planning grants. The 2010 Frequently Asked Questions issued by 

Education also stated that planning grantees would not automatically receive 

implementation grants and would compete for implementation grants alongside applicants 

who did not compete for or receive a planning grant.

The 

frequently asked questions guidance noted that the two types of grants 

could stand alone. For example, an applicant could receive just a 

planning grant, consecutive planning and implementation grants, or—if 

the applicant was further along in the planning process—just an 

implementation grant. Education officials told us that they viewed the 

planning grant activities as useful in themselves. For example, they told 

us that the planning process offers rich data and begins the process of 

bringing together partners and breaking down silos. They expected that 

planning grantees that applied for but did not receive implementation 

funding could continue their efforts without implementation grant funding, 

using their partners’ pledged matching funds to implement their plans on 

a smaller scale. They noted that the requirement to develop memoranda 

of understanding with partners should have signaled that the obligations 

of the partner organizations were not to be contingent upon receipt of an 

implementation grant. However, Education did not require grantees to 

have matching funds in-hand before submitting their applications.

Especially in light of the difficult fiscal climate that federal agencies will 
Page 16 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

likely continue to face in the future, we believe that it is important for 

Education to clearly communicate to grantees regarding expectations for 

planning and implementation grants. Clear communication and 

expectations can also help promote more realistic expectations among 

grantees about future funding opportunities given the fiscal realities of the 

Promise program over the past 5 years.

Grantees who had not received implementation grants were trying to 

continue their efforts and most reported significant challenges in 

sustaining momentum. According to our survey, since the end of the 

planning grant, most planning grantees who did not receive an 

implementation grant (17 out of 29 that answered the related question) 

found it very or extremely challenging to maintain funding, 12 out of 29 

planning grantees felt that maintaining key leadership positions was very 

or extremely challenging, and 13 out of 29 planning grantees found that 

hiring staff was very or extremely challenging.

Four of the five planning grantees we interviewed who had not received 

implementation grants told us that they need to determine how to 

implement scaled-down versions of programs and services identified in 

their implementation grant applications. They described challenges 

continuing their work without implementation funding. For example, three 

grantees noted that partners had pledged funding as a match for federal 

dollars in their implementation grant proposal. Without the leverage of 

implementation grant funds, it was difficult to maintain the proposed 

funding streams.16 All of the five grantees we interviewed that had 

received only planning grants said the planning process was very helpful 

in building connections and trust and deepening communication among 

partners, and between partners and the community. Four grantees were 

concerned, however, that the trust and momentum they had built might 

dissipate if they were not able to carry out their plans without an 

implementation grant.

 16Because we asked grantees to generally discuss how they sustained momentum in the 

absence of implementation funding, not all grantees provided information about whether 

they were able to keep pledged matching funds.
Page 17 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

In an effort to target its resources and align the Promise program goals 

with those of other place-based initiatives, the Promise program 

coordinates closely with a limited number of federal programs within 

Education and with other federal programs as part of the White House 

Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative (NRI).The NRI is an interagency 

coordinating body that aligns place-based programs run by HUD, HHS, 

Justice, and the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) (see fig. 5). 

Coordination through NRI is more structured than internal coordination 

within Education, which, according to Promise program officials, occurs 

as needed. Liaisons from each grant program meet at biweekly and 

monthly NRI meetings. They have formed a program integration 

workgroup to coordinate program development, monitoring, and technical 

assistance for the grant programs included. For example, they conducted 

a joint monitoring trip to a neighborhood in San Antonio, Texas that has 

Promise, HUD’s Choice Neighborhood, and Justice’s Byrne Criminal 

Justice Innovation grants.

Promise 

Neighborhoods 

Program Coordinates 

with Some Programs 

with Related Goals 

but Has No Inventory 

of Related Programs

Promise Program 

Coordinates Closely with 

Some Related Federal 

Programs to Align Grants
Page 18 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Figure 5: Key Efforts Contributing to the White House Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative

Note: HHS’ Community Health Centers have been in existence since the 1960s. Treasury’s 

Community Development Financial Institutions Fund was established in 1994 by the Riegle 

Community Development and Regulatory Improvement Act of 1994. HUD’s Choice Neighborhood 

program was launched in 2010 to replace HUD’s HOPE VI program. DOJ’s Byrne Criminal Justice 

Innovation program made its first grants in 2012.
Page 19 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

In coordinating within Education and with NRI, Education’s efforts are 

focused on ensuring that grants are mutually reinforcing. These 

coordination activities include aligning goals, developing common 

performance measures where there are common purposes, and sharing 

technical assistance resources in areas where programs address similar 

issues or fund similar activities. (See table 4.)

Table 4: Examples of Promise Neighborhoods Program Coordination within Education and with NRI

Coordination 

activity

Example of coordination within the Department 

of Education Example of coordination within NRI

Align grant language 

or activities and 

establish competitive 

preference priority. a 

Education aligned the Promise program and the Race 

to the Top grant program to ensure grant activities 

were mutually reinforcing by including a competitive 

preference priority in the Race to the Top program. b

Applicants could receive points under this priority for 

doing work similar to that funded by the Promise 

program, such as increasing the schools’ core 

resources by providing additional student and family 

services. This allows districts to further some of the 

aims of the Promise program when carrying out Race 

to the Top activities, even if they did not have Promise 

grantees in their districts. Promise officials were also 

involved in the peer review process for selection of 

Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grantees.c

Education and HUD have coordinated to establish 

competitive preference priorities. The Choice 

Neighborhoods planning grant application included a 

categorical preference for Promise planning grantees 

who meet Choice planning grant requirements. 

Similarly, the Promise Program includes a competitive 

preference priority for Choice grantees. There are 

some neighborhoods with both Choice and Promise 

grants, but, according to Education, most Promise 

grantees do not have distressed public housing in their 

geographic footprints.

Align goals and 

share performance 

measures

The Promise program coordinated with Education’s 

Office of Safe and Healthy Students to align the 

student safety performance measure with one that was 

being used by the Safe Schools/Healthy Students 

program.d

To align goals and measures, the agencies use 

common language in grant applications and share 

performance indicators where there are mutual 

interests. For example, one of the indicators of need 

included in the Promise planning grant notice is high 

rates of vacant or substandard homes, including 

distressed public and assisted housing, which is 

aligned with the HUD’s Choice grant program.

Share technical 

assistance 

resources

The Promise office hosted a joint webinar with School 

Improvement Grant recipients.e The integration workgroup is exploring ways to share 

technical assistance with the agencies’ respective 

grantees. For example, Education officials stated they 

are trying to find a way to use the technical assistance 

provided to Byrne grantees to help Promise grantees 

who have public safety concerns. In addition, 

Education has invited other NRI programs to annual 

grantee conferences to conduct workshops on 

integrating the grants.

Source: GAO analysis based on interviews with Education officials, NRI documentation and grant announcements.

a

Under a competitive preference priority, preference is given to an application by (1) awarding 

additional points, depending on the extent to which the application meets the priority or (2) selecting 

an application that meets the priority over an application of comparable merit that does not meet the 

priority. 34 C.F.R. § 75.105(c)(2). For example, in the Race to the Top District program, an applicant 

received points under this priority based on the extent to which it integrated public and private 

resources to augment the schools’ core resources by providing additional student and family 

supports, such as addressing the social-emotional, behavioral, and other needs of participating 

students giving highest priority to those in high-needs schools.
Page 20 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

b Education created Race to the Top under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to 

provide incentives for states to reform K-12 education in areas such as improving the lowest 

performing schools and developing effective teachers and leaders.

c

Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grants are meant to support states’ efforts to increase the 

number and percentage of low-income and disadvantaged children enrolled in high-quality early 

learning programs and to design and implement an integrated system of high-quality early learning 

programs and services. The program is run jointly by Education and HHS.

d

The Office of Safe and Healthy Students’ mission is to support the creation of safe, disciplined, drugfree and healthy learning environments for students.

e

The School Improvement Grants program funds reforms in the country’s lowest-performing schools 

with the goal of improving student outcomes, such as standardized test scores and graduation rates.

The Promise program has also participated in another place-based 

program led out of the White House Domestic Policy Council: the Strong 

Cities, Strong Communities initiative.17

As of 2013, Education also began taking part in the Promise Zone 

initiative, a new program intended to accelerate and expand the work 

taking place under NRI grant programs such as Promise Neighborhoods. 

Unlike the Promise Neighborhoods program, which focuses primarily on 

the educational and developmental needs of children and youth, the 

Promise Zones program addresses economic security, jobs, education, 

affordable housing, and public safety in high-poverty areas usually larger 

than a neighborhood.

This program sends teams of 

federal officials to work with distressed cities, providing them expertise to 

more efficiently and effectively use the federal funds they already receive. 

Education’s Promise program participates in initial on-site assessments of 

communities. Education staff assisted two of the participating 

communities by providing education expertise at their request.

18

 17This city-focused, interagency program began in 2011. 

The Promise Zone initiative, launched in 2013, is 

lead by HUD and takes an approach that is similar to that used by Strong 

Cities, Strong Communities in that it brings together expertise from 

multiple agencies. It is a place-based initiative that does not receive direct 

federal funding but uses existing resources from programs within the NRI 

18Promise Zones had to meet a number of requirements, including meeting certain 

poverty thresholds and having certain population levels. 
Page 21 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

agencies and five other agencies19 in partnership with state and local 

governments, businesses, and non-profit organizations.20

The Promise Neighborhoods program does, on occasion, coordinate with 

other individual federal agencies and programs outside of the NRI, but 

officials stated that the program is focused on deepening and broadening 

the communication it has with the five named NRI programs and Promise 

Zones. Promise Neighborhoods officials explained that they had concerns 

about spreading their coordination efforts too thinly given the large 

number of programs grantees may include in their strategies.

Only areas that 

already had certain NRI grants or a similar rural or tribal grant were 

eligible to apply in the first round. As of January 2014, three Promise 

Neighborhoods implementation sites in San Antonio, Los Angeles, and 

Southeastern Kentucky were located in designated Promise Zones, which 

provide additional opportunity for coordination at the federal and local 

level.

In addition to Promise grants from Education, individual Promise 

Neighborhoods have access to a broad range of federal programs from 

other agencies, including many programs that are not part of NRI. 

However, Education has not developed an inventory of federal programs 

that could contribute to Promise program goals that it could share with 

planning and implementation grantees and use to make its own decisions 

about coordination across agencies. In recent work examining 

approaches used by interagency groups that successfully collaborated, 

we found that an inventory of resources related to reaching interagency 

goals can be used to promote an understanding of related 

 19Applicants are usually municipalities or non-profit organizations working with the 

municipality. Designations allow the zones to receive on-the-ground technical assistance 

from federal agencies to solve problems and navigate federal programs. In addition they 

will be eligible for competitive preference priority in applying for certain grants from the 10

federal agencies involved in the effort. Designated Promise Zones use existing resources 

to make new investments in the community with their local business and non-profit 

partners and have indentified related outcomes they will track. The administration has also 

proposed employer tax incentives to create jobs for Zone residents and attract private 

capital to disinvested places. The first five of twenty Zones were designated in January 

2014: San Antonio, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Southeastern Kentucky, and the Choctaw 

Nation of Oklahoma. 

20The five other agencies are the Departments of Commerce, Labor, and Agriculture, the 

Small Business Administration, and the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Education Does Not Have 

an Inventory of Federal 

Programs with Similar 

Goals
Page 22 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

governmentwide programs.21 Such inventories are useful in making 

decisions about coordinating related programs across agency lines and 

between levels of government, according to officials. We have also found 

that creating a comprehensive list of programs is a first step in identifying 

potential fragmentation, overlap, or duplication among federal programs 

or activities.22

As shown in table 5, the 12 implementation grantees we surveyed stated 

that they included a variety of federal resources in their Promise 

Neighborhoods strategies. AmeriCorps was included in 9 out of 11 

implementation grantees’ strategies,23 followed by Head Start (8 of 12) 

and Education’s School Improvement Grants (6 of 11). None of these are 

part of NRI. Few grantees said that NRI programs were part of their 

Promise strategies. For example, four grantees said that a Choice 

Neighborhood grant was part of their Promise strategy, and three 

grantees stated that DOJ’s Byrne program was part of their strategy. 

Education officials attributed the small number of grantees that use 

HUD’s Choice program to the fact that few grantees have distressed 

public housing within their footprint that is eligible for this funding.

 21GAO, Managing for Results: Implementation Approaches Used to Enhance 

Collaboration in Interagency Groups, GAO-14-220 (Washington, D.C.: February 14, 

2014). The GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 requires the Director of the Office of 

Management and Budget to compile and make publicly available a comprehensive list of 

all federal programs identified by federal agencies. Pub. L. No. 111-352, § 7, 124 Stat. 

3866, 3876. 

22GAO, 2013 Annual Report Actions Needed to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and 

Duplication and Achieve Other Financial Benefits, GAO-13-279SP (Washington, D.C.: 

Apr. 9. 2013). This report and previous GAO annual reports on this topic have highlighted 

the challenges associated with the lack of a comprehensive list of federal programs and 

funding information.

23Not all respondents answered every question. 
Page 23 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Table 5: Federal Resources Leveraged by Promise Neighborhoods Implementation 

Grantees 

Agency

Federal grants/programs

(NRI programs are shaded)

Number of grantees who said 

program was included in a 

Promise Neighborhood strategy

HUD Choice Neighborhood grants 4

Other HUD grants 4

DOJ Byrne grants 3

Other DOJ grants 2

HHS Community Health Center 4

Head Start 8

Early Head Start 5

Other HHS Grants 3

Education Race to the Top 3

School Improvement Grants 6

Investing in Innovation 3

21st Century Learning 4

Full Service Community Schools 2

Federal TRIO Programs 5

GEAR UP 5

Early Reading First 1

Other Education grants 0

Corporation for 

National and 

Community 

Service

AmeriCorps 9

Social Innovation Fund 1

DOL YouthBuild 3

USDA Nutrition Programs 3

Source: GAO analysis of survey of Promise Neighborhood grantees.

Although Promise grantees conduct their own inventories of the existing 

federal and other resources in their neighborhoods in order to develop 

their strategies, two grantees we spoke with were unaware of some of the 

other federal programs that could contribute towards their strategies. For 

example, one implementation grantee we spoke to with concerns about 

school safety was unaware of DOJ’s Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation 

grant program. Another planning grantee who completed our survey 

commented that a list of related federal programs like the one in our 

survey would be especially useful to grantees who did not receive 

implementation grants. Education officials with the Promise program told 

us that sometimes grantees are unaware that the community is benefiting 
Page 24 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

from certain federal programs because programs are renamed as they 

filter down through the state or local levels. Education officials said they 

emphasize to grantees the importance of reaching out to key partners to 

ensure they are aware of other federally funded programs in the 

neighborhood because their partners may be more knowledgeable about 

other sources of federal funding. While encouraging grantees to reach out 

to key partners is helpful, Education, through its coordination with other 

federal agencies, would likely have more knowledge about existing 

federal resources.

Without a federal level inventory, Education is not well-positioned to 

support grantee efforts to identify other federal programs that could 

contribute to Promise program goals. Further, Education lacks complete 

information to inform decisions about future federal coordination efforts 

and identify potential fragmentation, overlap, and duplication.

While Education is collecting a large amount of data from Promise 

grantees that was intended, in part, to be used to evaluate the program, 

the Education offices responsible for program evaluation— the Institute 

for Educational Sciences (IES) and Office of Planning, Evaluation, and 

Policy Development (OPEPD)—have not yet determined whether or how 

they will evaluate the program.

One of Education’s primary goals for the Promise program, as described 

in the Federal Register, is to learn about the overall impact of the program 

through a rigorous program evaluation. Applicants are required to 

describe their commitment to work with a national evaluator for Promise 

Neighborhoods to ensure that data collection and program design are 

consistent with plans to conduct a rigorous national evaluation of the 

program and the specific solutions and strategies pursued by individual 

grantees. We have found that federal program evaluation studies provide 

external accountability for the use of public resources. Evaluation can 

help to determine the “value added” of the expenditure of federal 

resources or to learn how to improve performance—or both. Evaluation 

can play a key role in strategic planning and in program management, 

informing both program design and execution.24

 24GAO, Designing Evaluations: 2012 Revision, GAO-12-208G (Washington, D.C.: January 

2012).

Education Collects 

Extensive Data but 

Has Not Determined 

Whether or How to 

Evaluate the Program
Page 25 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Education requires implementation grantees to report annually on their 

performance using 15 indicators. The indicators include graduation rates, 

attendance, academic proficiency, student mobility, physical activity, and 

perceptions of safety. (See table 11 in appendix III.) Education contracted 

with the Urban Institute to provide guidance on how to collect data on the 

indicators, including data sources and survey techniques. According to 

Urban Institute officials, they used existing, validated measures whenever 

possible to ensure comparability across programs.25

The Urban Institute has analyzed the data on the indicators for the first 

implementation year (the baseline), but Education has not decided 

whether it will make the first year’s data public because it was not 

collected in a consistent manner and not all grantees were able to collect 

all of the necessary data. According to Promise program officials there 

were inconsistencies in data collection because guidance was not 

available until February 2013, 13 months after 2011 implementation 

grants were awarded and over 1 month after 2012 implementation grants 

were awarded.

Seven of twelve 

implementation grantees we surveyed said the guidance documents were 

extremely or very helpful, while four found it moderately helpful and one 

somewhat helpful.

Promise officials stated that they will use the performance data to target 

their technical assistance. They are still working with grantees to develop 

meaningful targets for the second implementation year. Urban Institute 

officials noted that these 15 indicators help grantees focus their efforts on 

the outcomes they are trying to achieve.

In addition, Promise grantees are required to develop a longitudinal data 

system to collect information on the individuals served, services provided 

in the cradle-to-career continuum, and the related outcomes.26

 25Urban Institute, Measuring Performance: A Guidance Document for Promise 

Neighborhoods on Collecting Data and Reporting Results, prepared for the U.S. 

Department of Education (Washington, D.C.: February 2013). 

Grantees 

are expected to use the longitudinal data to evaluate their programs on an 

26The Promise Neighborhoods Institute works closely with the technical assistance 

provider and provides assistance to high-scoring Promise Neighborhoods applicants and 

both implementation and planning grantees. It has made longitudinal database software 

available to all grantees free of charge.
Page 26 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

ongoing basis and make adjustments to their strategies and services, as 

discussed later in this report.

Grantees are also required to provide the longitudinal data to Education, 

which Education officials said they may use to create a restricted-use 

data set. However, Education currently does not have a plan for analyzing 

the data. In commenting on a draft of this report, Education stated it must 

first conduct a systematic examination of the reliability and validity of the 

data to determine whether it can be used for a descriptive study and a 

restricted-use data set. Education further stated that the restricted-use 

data set would only be made available to external researchers after 

Education determines that the data quality is adequate and appropriate 

for research; analyzes the data, taking into account privacy concerns; and 

determines whether to release its own report. In addition, officials from 

IES and OPEPD cited limitations and challenges to using the longitudinal 

data for program evaluation.

• An official from IES, the entity responsible for all impact evaluations 

conducted by Education, told us that it is not feasible to conduct an 

impact evaluation of individual program pieces or an overall 

evaluation of the Promise approach. The official offered three options 

for evaluation. IES’ preferred option is to conduct a rigorous impact 

evaluation with a control group obtained through randomized 

assignment to the program. However, Promise Neighborhoods are not 

designed to create such a control group. Another option would be for 

IES to use students or families who were not chosen to participate in 

an oversubscribed program as a control group, but an informal poll 

that IES took at a Promise Neighborhoods conference suggested that 

there were not a sufficient number of oversubscribed programs. A 

third option was to develop a comparison group of neighborhoods that 

did not receive a Promise Neighborhood grant. However, IES officials 

question whether such an approach would enable them to match 

neighborhoods that were comparable to Promise neighborhoods at 

the beginning of the grant period. Finally, IES noted that collecting 

additional data for a control group could be expensive.

• Education’s OPEPD is responsible for conducting other types of 

program evaluations. According to Education officials, it could conduct 

a more limited evaluation focused on outcomes without demonstrating 

that they are a direct result of the Promise program, but they have no 

specific plans to do so. An OPEPD official stated OPEPD is reluctant 

to commit to a plan because they have not yet seen the data and do 

not know how reliable or complete it will be. In addition, the official 

said that OPEPD is unsure about funding and that any comprehensive 
Page 27 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

evaluations are expensive to carry out. By creating a restricted-use 

data set, OPEPD hopes that other researchers may have the funding 

to use the data to reach some conclusions about the program. The 

OPEPD official further explained that no one has ever evaluated a 

community-based approach like this one and that they hope 

researchers may have some ideas about how to do so.

Researchers at the Urban Institute and within the Promise grantee 

community have proposed other options for evaluating the program. A 

researcher at the Urban Institute27 noted that random assignment is not 

the right approach for evaluating place-based programs.28

While Education recognizes the importance of evaluating the Promise 

program, they lack a plan to do so. If an evaluation is not conducted, 

Education will have limited information about the Promise program’s 

success or the viability of the program’s collaborative approach.

Instead, the 

researcher recommends a variety of other options for evaluating such 

programs, including approaches that estimate a single site’s effect on 

outcomes and aggregating those outcomes. This differs from the 

traditional program evaluation approach, which IES has considered, of 

isolating the effects of an intervention so that its effects can be measured 

separately from other interventions.

 27The researcher proposed this option in his capacity as an independent researcher, not 

as part of the Urban Institute’s contract for technical assistance. 

28Nichols, Austin, Evaluation of Community-Wide Interventions, (Washington, D.C.: July 

2013). Random assignment is an evaluation design in which participants are either 

randomly selected to receive a service or assigned to a control group. According to 

Nichols, the traditional program evaluation approach does not lend itself to evaluation of 

the Promise program because the Promise program aims to produce change by affecting 

the entire community, not just those who receive direct services. In addition, place-based 

programs are not the same from one place to another. These programs offer different 

interventions based on the communities’ and the individuals’ unique needs, and 

interventions may change as outcome data is analyzed. 
Page 28 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

The Promise program generally requires grantees to use collaborative 

approaches. We found that grantees are following approaches consistent 

with those we have recognized as enhancing and sustaining collaboration 

with partners.29

• Establishing common outcomes: Establishing common outcomes 

helps collaborating agencies develop a clear and compelling rationale 

to work together.

The approaches we have previously identified include:

• Addressing needs by leveraging resources: Leveraging the various 

human, information technology, physical and financial resources 

available from agencies in a collaborative group allows the group to 

obtain benefits that would not be available if they worked separately.

• Tracking performance and maintaining accountability: Tracking 

performance and other mechanisms for maintaining accountability are 

consistent with our prior work, which has shown that performance 

information can be used to improve results by setting priorities and 

allocating resources to take corrective actions to solve program 

problems.

The approaches are discussed below and in Tables 6 through 8.

 29GAO, Managing for Results: Implementation Approaches Used to Enhance 

Collaboration in Interagency Groups, GAO-14-220 (Washington, D.C.: Feb. 14, 2014). 

Grantees Collaborate 

Using Leading 

Practices, Resulting 

in Benefits and 

Challenges

Promise Grant Framework 

Encourages Collaboration
Page 29 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Table 6: Approaches for Establishing Common Outcomes 

Select collaboration approaches 

identified by GAO

Grantee collaboration activities required by 

Education

Examples of grantee and partner 

collaboration 

• Start group with the most directly 

affected participants and gradually 

broaden to others.

• Conduct outreach to stakeholders to 

identify shared interests.

• Identify early wins for the group to 

accomplish.

• Develop outcomes that represent the 

collective interests of participants.

• Establish, build and strengthen 

partnerships for purposes such as 

providing services and obtaining 

resources. Document partnerships with 

memoranda of understanding which 

explain how partner organizations’

desired results align with the Promise 

program.

• Develop a plan to deliver the continuum 

of services during the implementation 

years and describe how the grantee has 

built community support for and 

involvement in the development of the 

plan.

• Propose clear and measurable annual 

goals as well as short and long term 

goals, as appropriate, for the 

implementation grant.

• 44 of 46 grantees that received 

planning grants reported that they 

brought service providers together to 

break down silos.

• One grantee partnered with several 

organizations on a key goal for their 

Promise Neighborhood—building an 

early childhood foundation and early 

learning network. Three of the 

grantees’ partners identified their own 

long term goals that align with the 

early childhood foundation in the 

memoranda of understanding.

Source: GAO-14-220 and GAO analysis of relevant Federal Register notices.

A significant majority of the grantees we interviewed stated that working 

with partners to establish common outcomes and strategies helped foster 

closer relationships between stakeholders in the community. One grantee 

stated that in some cases, organizations were doing work in the 

neighborhood in isolation from each other. The Promise grant helped 

bring these organizations together. Similarly, another grantee stated that 

Promise is distinct from other federal programs in that it provides funds 

for organizations to create partnerships and facilitate collaboration.

Almost all grantees stated that working collaboratively to meet the 

requirements of the grant helped break down barriers with local schools. 

Specifically, our survey results indicated that for 44 out of 46 grantees

that received planning grants, the grants enabled or enhanced their 

existing efforts to build relationships with schools. Three of the 11 

grantees we interviewed also stated that one of the benefits of working 

collaboratively was building relationships between school administrators. 

For example, one Promise grantee stated that bringing partners together 

to establish common goals and strategies enabled the grantee to 

introduce the local elementary school principal to the principal of the 

secondary school where students typically transition for the next phase of 

Establishing Common 

Outcomes
Page 30 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

their education. Another grantee reports being able to strengthen 

relationships among local school leaders. For example, the grantee 

stated that the schools are developing plans to use the same student 

identification code for the duration of each student’s attendance in the 

schools.

Four grantees and partners we interviewed stated that one of the lessons 

learned from their planning year was that undertaking practical, 

achievable collaborative projects that can be completed in the short term 

helped build momentum in their Promise efforts. Grantees stated that the 

grant does not designate funds for Promise sites to identify and achieve 

early tangible benefits for the community, and it is unclear whether

grantees we did not interview also set aside funds for this purpose. 

However, the several grantees that raised outside funds during the 

planning grant year for projects such as building playgrounds and other 

safe, outdoor community spaces stated that these early accomplishments 

helped build trust and goodwill with the community. Our recent work on 

collaboration found that identifying such “early wins” can enable 

collaborative groups to practice working together and allows participants 

to build upon recent experiences, working relationships, improved 

knowledge of related programs, and team structures to coordinate group 

activities.30 Given that many grantees do not receive implementation 

funding, some planning grantees may be missing an opportunity to 

demonstrate early in their Promise efforts what can be achieved when 

they work collaboratively. Such demonstrations can encourage grantees 

and their partners to continue their efforts even without implementation 

funding.

 30GAO-14-220.
Page 31 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Table 7: Approaches for Identifying and Addressing Needs by Leveraging Resources

Select collaboration approaches 

identified by GAO

Grantee collaboration activities required 

by Education Examples of grantee and partner collaboration

• Create an inventory of 

resources dedicated towards 

interagency outcomes.

• Leverage related agency 

resources towards the group’s 

outcomes.

• Pilot test new collaborative 

ideas, programs or policies 

before investing resources.

• Complete a needs assessment and 

prioritization analysis during the 

planning year to identify and serve 

children with the highest needs.a

• Planning and implementation grantees 

must obtain funds or in-kind donations 

to match a percentage of the Promise 

program funding they will use to 

support their project.

• Establish clear, annual goals for 

evaluating progress in leveraging 

resources for the implementation 

grant.

• Several grantees stated that studying the 

needs of the community and mapping 

neighborhood assets during the planning year 

helped them more appropriately target 

resources. For example, during the planning 

year one grantee found that the community 

lacked afterschool programming options and 

residents lacked knowledge of existing 

services. The grantee partnered with two 

local schools to create a resource hub which 

now offers academic support, referrals, family 

literacy, and parent engagement 

opportunities.

Source: GAO-14-220 and GAO analysis of relevant Federal Register notices.

a

Education refers to the prioritization analysis as a segmentation analysis.

Implementation grantees reported that the grant enhanced their ability to 

access resources. Specifically, our survey results indicated that the 

grants enabled 41 out of 46 grantees that received planning grants to 

build new efforts or enhance existing efforts for identifying service 

providers. A majority of grantees also reported that the grant enabled new 

efforts or enhanced existing efforts to secure funding from non-profits or 

federal, state and local government (see fig. 6).

Addressing Needs by 

Leveraging Resources
Page 32 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Figure 6: Resources Leveraged by Promise Neighborhoods Grantees

Several grantees we interviewed stated that identifying and leveraging 

resources to address needs helped them identify gaps in services and 

identify resources that were not being adequately used. Additionally, 

implementation grantees we surveyed reported that they were able to 

decrease overlapping services. Specifically, 7 of 12 implementation 

grantees reported reduced overlap of activities and resources as a result 

of collaborating with their Promise partners. Grantees reduced overlap by 

subcontracting services from partner organizations rather than providing 

similar services in-house, consolidating outreach to community members 

for specific programs, proactively identifying children who are likely to 

attend a variety of programs to ensure that resources are optimized, and 

reducing case management services for families being served by multiple 

agencies.

Four of the six implementation grantees and partners we interviewed 

found that the Promise implementation grant helped or may help them 

attract funding. For example, officials from one Promise Neighborhood 

stated their efforts increased funders’ confidence in their capacity to 

implement other initiatives. As a result, the grantee received a $500,000 

donation from a funder to pilot a family economic mobility initiative.
Page 33 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Table 8: Approaches for Tracking Performance and Maintaining Accountability

Select collaboration 

approaches identified by GAO

Grantee collaboration activities required 

by Education Examples of grantee and partner collaboration

• Develop performance 

measures and tie measures 

to shared outcomes.

• Identify and share relevant 

agency performance data.

• Develop methods to report 

on progress.

• Link specific activities and solutions to 

measures that can be used to track 

progress.

• Develop data systems that integrate 

data from multiple sources.

• Use data to manage program 

performance and to report progress.

• All six of the implementation grantees we 

interviewed stated that they are either in the 

process of building or deploying longitudinal data 

systems or generally collecting and tracking data. 

Additionally, 8 of 12 implementation grantees 

surveyed reported that they currently share 

access to their data systems with their partners.

Source: GAO-14-220 and GAO analysis of relevant Federal Register notices.

Four of the 11 grantees we interviewed mentioned that they have 

mechanisms in place to ensure that partners are committed to achieving 

their expected outcomes, such as score cards.31

 31Because we asked grantees to generally discuss how they were using data, not all of 

the grantees we interviewed specifically discussed the mechanisms they have in place to 

ensure that their partners are achieving expected outcomes.

Further, a majority of the 

implementation grantees we surveyed reported that they currently work or 

plan to work with their partners to share access to data systems and 

establish performance measures, among other things (see fig. 7).

Tracking Performance and 

Maintaining Accountability
Page 34 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Figure 7: Number of Implementation Grantees Who Reported They Collaborate With 

Their Partners to Track Performance and Maintain Accountability

A majority of the grantees we surveyed stated that they had conducted or 

were planning to conduct an evaluation of their efforts at the local level. 

Fourteen of 44 respondents said they had conducted a formal evaluation, 

while 17 said they were planning to do so. Eighteen said they had 

conducted a formal process evaluation, and another 18 said they planned 

to do so.32

All of the implementation grantees we interviewed stated that they are still 

in the process of developing their data collection and monitoring efforts 

and several are addressing significant challenges during this process. 

Additionally, 16 of 39 grantees reported in our survey that since the end 

of the planning grant, they have found it very or extremely challenging to 

develop their data collection infrastructure. Specifically:

• Two of the six implementation grantees we interviewed stated that 

because the Urban Institute’s guidance for collecting data and 

reporting results was not released until after they received 

 32A process evaluation examines whether a program is operating as intended rather than 

whether it achieved the outcomes it is intended to achieve. 
Page 35 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

implementation funds,33

• Grantees in collaboration with their partners are expected to enroll 

children and families in a data system and collect, store and use 

identified individual-level data and other personally identifiable 

information in order to monitor Promise efforts. However, federal laws 

and regulations restrict how grantees may access and share this data 

in order to protect the privacy of individual-level data. Students’ school 

records are covered by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act 

of 1974 (FERPA)

they began their implementation efforts with 

inadequate knowledge of the work required and resources they would 

need to meet the data requirements for the program. For example, 

officials from one Promise Neighborhood stated that Promise funding 

for evaluation is limited and that planning how to spend funds for 

evaluation may be difficult without an idea of how resource intensive it 

may be to meet the program’s data requirements. According to these 

officials, Education’s technical assistance providers stated that it 

should take two staff members (one full-time and one half-time) to 

build and maintain the data system. However, officials from the 

neighborhood only dedicated one staff member to manage their data 

system. Further, officials from two Promise Neighborhoods stated that 

some of the Promise Neighborhood’s partners who are supposed to 

submit data to the longitudinal database do not have the capacity or 

technical ability to use the longitudinal database software provided by 

the Promise Neighborhoods Institute. Officials stated that they have to 

provide help to their partners in order for them to navigate the 

database.

34 and medical records are covered by the Health 

Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).35

 33The Urban Institute released its guidance for grantees on collecting and reporting data 

in February 2013.

Promise grantees must obtain written consent in order to access and 

34FERPA protects the privacy of student education records. 20 U.S.C. § 1232g. The law 

applies to all schools that receive funds under an applicable program of the U.S. 

Department of Education. Under FERPA, schools generally must have written consent 

from the parents or eligible student in order to release information from a student’s 

education record.

35HIPAA and its implementing regulations provide federal protections for individually 

identifiable health information and give patients an array of rights with respect to that 

information. Pub. L. No. 104-191, 110 Stat. 1936 (1996); 45 C.F.R. Parts 160, 164. These 

provisions generally require that health insurers and providers must have consumers’

permission before their health information can be used or shared for certain purposes, 

such as marketing.
Page 36 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

share individual-level data from schools for students in their target 

areas, in certain circumstances. Six of the 11 grantees we spoke with 

stated that one challenge they faced was getting consent to access 

and share students’ records. For example, officials from one Promise 

Neighborhood stated they sent separate consent forms for sharing 

private data as part of the package of paperwork that parents are 

normally required to sign before the start of the school year. However, 

officials noted concern over whether they will be able to get signed 

consent forms from all families in the target area. Further, officials 

stated that they are concerned that the students and families that 

need Promise programs and services the most may not be signing 

consent forms and granting access to their information. Similarly, 

officials from another Promise Neighborhood stated that they have 

2,100 children targeted in their geographic footprint but only received 

consent forms to collect and share individual-level data on 80 percent 

of those children. Officials stated that they are considering using 

aggregate data to report outcomes for the children that they do not 

receive consent forms for.

Grantees and partners provided examples of how they have collaborated 

through the Promise grant to deliver services and supports that are 

intended to improve educational and developmental outcomes. Grantees 

and their partners focused on delivering services at various steps along 

the cradle-to-career pipeline, including:

• Early learning supports: programs or services designed to improve 

outcomes and ensure that young children enter kindergarten and 

progress through early elementary school grades demonstrating ageappropriate functioning.

• K-12 supports: programs, including policies and personnel, linked to 

improving educational outcomes for children in pre-school through 

12th grade. These include developing effective teachers and 

principals, facilitating the use of data on student achievement and 

student growth to inform decision-making, supporting a well-rounded 

curriculum, and creating multiple pathways for students to earn high 

school diplomas.

• College and career supports: programs preparing students for college 

and career success. These include partnering with higher education 

institutions to help instill a college-going culture in the neighborhood, 

providing dual-enrollment opportunities for students to gain college 

credit while in high school, and providing access to career and 

technical education programs.

Grantees Collaborate to 

Deliver a Range of 

Services
Page 37 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

• Family and community supports: these include child and youth 

physical, mental, behavioral and emotional health programs, safety 

programs such as those to prevent or reduce gang activity and 

programs that expand access to quality affordable housing.

For examples of the services delivered and outcomes reported by 

grantees for each part of the cradle-to-career pipeline, see table 9 below.

Table 9: Selected Promise Neighborhoods Collaborative Efforts and Outcomes

Support type

Neighborhood 

location Service activity Reported outcome

Early learning 

supports

Boston, MA Established a workgroup to create and 

implement school readiness and quality early 

learning strategies for children birth to age 5.

Began forming an Early Learning Network of 

neighborhood center-based and home-based 

providers to develop an early childhood system 

of care.

San Diego, CA Grantee worked with local elementary school 

partner to implement a transition to kindergarten 

program.

Helped children develop early social-emotional 

skills, improved their behavior and kindergarten 

attendance rates, enabled faculty and parents to 

interact, and allowed parents to become familiar 

with school facilities.

K-12 supports Los Angeles, CA Co-located grantee staff as onsite coordinators 

and advisors to school administrators to identify 

and manage community services. 

Gave the student counselor more time to focus 

her efforts on academics rather than on 

managing agencies and outside resources to 

support students’ non-academic needs.

Boston, MA Partnered with a local organization that provides 

residency-based teacher education programs to 

write the charter for a Pre-K–5th grade charter 

school. 

Opened a new charter school in the 

neighborhood to provide families with more 

school choice.

Berea, KY Identified a need to help at-risk students 

graduate from high school through partnerships 

with local schools.

Held an intensive summer school program for 

at-risk high school students, which helped four 

participating students graduate in August and 

avoid a 5th year in high school.

College and 

career 

supports

Indianola, MS Grantee partnered with the school district led by 

the district conservator to develop a college 

preparatory program.

Modified the school day across all schools to 

include an extra period at least twice a week. 

This extended learning time is used to improve 

students’ retention of school subject areas and 

provide students with ACT preparation, among 

other things.

San Diego, CA Conducted a needs assessment and confirmed 

the need for more support to help families and 

students understand and discuss opportunities 

for college education.

Partnered with a local college support 

organization to develop a college-prep program 

for students grades 2-5 that provides academic 

advising for students and parents.

Family and 

community 

supports

Boston, MA Worked with a local school and partners to 

launch a homelessness prevention initiative that 

identifies students and families at risk of losing 

their homes and helps them avoid eviction.

Created a safety net for approximately 50 

homeless students at its partner schools.
Page 38 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Support type

Neighborhood 

location Service activity Reported outcome

Los Angeles, CA Used funds from Department of Labor programs 

to develop youth source centers.

Provides residents with tools such as computer 

labs for computer literacy classes, youth 

services, and has space available for local 

schools to use for presentations and workshops.

Source: GAO analysis of site visits with Promise Neighborhoods grantees.

The Promise program has energized the 48 planning and implementation 

grantees and their partners to tackle the complex challenges facing 

impoverished neighborhoods together. While grantees said they will 

continue their efforts to build their Promise Neighborhoods, planning 

grantees faced challenges in sustaining their work over the long term 

without implementation grants. Planning grantees, especially those 

concerned about building trust with their communities and partners, may 

have been better served if Education had provided a more transparent, 

realistic picture of the fiscal reality of the Promise program and its 

potential impact on implementation grant funding. Lack of clear 

communication about the expectations Education had for planning 

grantees who did not receive implementation funding made it difficult for 

these grantees to develop specific plans to continue their efforts without 

future Promise funds. However, the reported small, yet tangible benefits 

that some communities pursued during the planning year—such as a safe 

place for children to play—increased momentum and built trust with 

community members. Encouraging such “early wins” could help all 

grantees and their partners build upon and improve their efforts, 

especially since implementation funding has proven scarce.

Additionally, much of the information grantees use about what existing 

federal, state, and local programs and resources to incorporate into their 

strategies is gleaned through their needs assessment at the local level. 

Education has not provided grantees with comprehensive information 

about other federal resources that may be available to use in their 

Promise strategies. Education is best positioned to develop and share 

such an inventory of federal programs that relate to the goals of the 

Promise program. Without such an inventory, Education may be missing 

opportunities to better support grantees, find other federal programs for 

future coordination efforts, and identify potential fragmentation, overlap, 

and duplication at the federal level.

One of the Promise program’s primary goals is to identify the overall 

impact of its approach and the relationship between particular strategies 

Conclusions
Page 39 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

and student outcomes. Grantees are investing significant time and 

resources to collect data to assess the program, but Education lacks a 

clear plan for using it. Without evaluating program, it will be difficult for 

Education to determine whether it is successfully addressing the complex 

problem of poor student outcomes in impoverished neighborhoods. 

Finally, the Promise program is one of several place-based and collective 

impact programs being implemented across many federal agencies. 

Given the number of these initiatives, not evaluating the program limits 

Education and other agencies from learning about the extent to which 

model is effective and should be replicated.

In order to improve grantees’ planning and implementation efforts, 

increase the effectiveness of grantee efforts to integrate and manage 

resources, and learn more about the program’s impact, we recommend 

that the Secretary of Education take the following three actions:

1. Clarify program guidance about planning and implementation grants 

to provide reasonable assurance that planning grantees are better 

prepared to continue their efforts in the absence of implementation 

funding. Additional guidance could include encouraging grantees to 

set aside a small amount of the grant to identify and deliver early, 

tangible benefits to their neighborhoods.

2. Develop and disseminate to grantees on an ongoing basis an 

inventory of federal programs and resources that can contribute to the 

Promise Neighborhoods program’s goal to better support coordination 

across agency lines.

3. Develop a plan to use the data collected from grantees to conduct a 

national evaluation of the program.

We provided a draft of this report to the Department of Education for 

review and comment. Education’s comments are reproduced in appendix 

IV and are summarized below. Education also provided technical 

comments, which we incorporated into the final report as appropriate. 

Education outlined the steps it would take to implement our three 

recommendations, and provided its perspective on communicating 

expectations to grantees regarding future funding. Education did not 

explicitly agree or disagree with our findings. 

Regarding our finding that Education did not communicate clearly to 

planning grantees about its expectations for the grants, Education stated 

that in any given year it does not know and therefore cannot 

Recommendations for 

Executive Action

Agency Comments
Page 40 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

communicate the amount of funding available or the number of grant 

awards anticipated in the following year. We agree, and have clarified our 

finding in the report accordingly. 

Education stated that an early assessment of planning grantees’ 

likelihood of receiving implementation funding would have been 

premature. Education noted that although Congress has funded the 

Promise program for the past 5 years, in 4 of those 5 years it 

appropriated far less than the President requested, and for the last 3 

years the program has essentially been level funded. Education further 

stated that this underscores the limited control that the program had over 

the number of implementation grants made. We recognize that federal 

agencies have faced a difficult fiscal climate over the past few years, 

particularly for discretionary programs. For that reason—and especially 

given the level at which the Promise program has been funded for the 

past 3 years—we believe it is even more important that Education be 

clear and transparent with planning grantees about historical fiscal 

realities of the Promise program and the implications this may have on 

future implementation grants. We also believe this situation highlights the 

need for planning grantees to have contingency plans, especially given 

Education’s expectations that grantees continue their efforts even in the 

absence of implementation funding. We further believe that this also 

underscores the importance of “early wins” to demonstrate what can be 

achieved when grantees and their partners work collaboratively, as such 

demonstrations can encourage them to continue their efforts even without 

implementation funding.

In discussing its perspective on communicating expectations to grantees 

regarding future funding, Education stated that its Notifications Inviting 

Applications indicated that future funding was contingent on the 

availability of funds and that the program’s frequently asked questions 

document noted that implementation funding was not guaranteed and that 

planning grantees would have to compete for implementation grants. We 

believe that our report adequately reflects these communication efforts. 

However, as we reported, Education did not communicate to planning 

grantees that it expected them to continue their efforts even in the 

absence of implementation funding. Nor did Education communicate to 

implementation grant applicants that it expected them to be able to use 

their partners’ pledged matching funds even if they did not receive 

implementation grants. This lack of communication was evidenced by 

planning grantees’ lack of contingency plans and challenges they faced 

accessing the pledged matching funds, according to the grantees we 

interviewed. 
Page 41 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

In response to our first recommendation, Education stated that it would 

continue to communicate to planning grant applicants that implementation 

funding is contingent on the availability of funds, and that it would provide 

more targeted technical assistance to planning grant recipients regarding 

strategies for continuing grantees’ efforts absent implementation funding.

Education also stated that it would clarify to grantees that planning grant 

funds could be used to achieve early, tangible benefits.

Regarding our second recommendation, Education stated that it would 

work with its technical assistance providers to create a mechanism to 

distribute a comprehensive list of external funding opportunities, 

programs and resources on a regular basis to better support the grantees’ 

implementation efforts.

With regard to our final recommendation, Education stated that it will 

consider options for how and whether it can use the data collected from 

grantees to conduct a national evaluation. Education stated that as a first 

step it will conduct a systematic evaluation of the reliability and validity of 

the data, given issues that we and Education noted about inconsistencies 

in data collection and privacy concerns. In addition, Education stated that 

to date, it has not received sufficient funding to support a national 

evaluation. We agree that conducting evaluations can be costly. 

However, given that one of Education’s primary goals is to learn about the 

overall impact of the program through a rigorous program evaluation, we 

continue to believe that absent an evaluation, it will be difficult for 

Education to determine whether it is successfully addressing the complex 

problem of poor student outcomes in impoverished neighborhoods—one 

of its stated goals. Further, developing an evaluation plan would provide 

critical information about the resources required to conduct an evaluation, 

and could better inform future funding requests for such an evaluation.

As agreed with your office, unless you publicly announce the contents of 

this report earlier, we plan no further distribution until 30 days from the 

report date. At that time, we will send copies of this report to the 

Secretary of Education and other interested congressional committees. In 

addition, the report will be available at no charge on GAO’s website at 

http://www.gao.gov.
Page 42 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

If you or your staff have any questions regarding this report, please 

contact me at 617-788-0580 or NowickiJ@gao.gov. Contact points for our 

Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may be found on 

the last page of this report. GAO staff who made major contributions to 

this report are in appendix V.

Sincerely yours,

Jacqueline M. Nowicki

Acting Director, Education, Workforce, and Income Security
Page 43 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

To better understand grantees’ experiences with the Promise 

Neighborhoods program, we conducted a web-based survey of all 48 

planning and implementation grantees. The survey was conducted from 

August 23, 2013 through November 7, 2013. We received completed 

surveys from all 48 grantees for a 100 percent response rate. The survey 

included questions about the clarity and helpfulness of the application and 

peer review process, challenges sustaining efforts after the end of the 

planning grant, coordination of federal resources, collaboration with local 

organizations and associated challenges, the extent to which local 

coordination reduced duplication, overlap and fragmentation, if at all, the 

mechanisms organizations use to track the results of their efforts, the 

results of the grants, and the helpfulness of Education’s guidance and 

resources for the program.

Because this was not a sample survey, there are no sampling errors. 

However, the practical difficulties of conducting any survey may introduce 

nonsampling errors, such as variations in how respondents interpret 

questions and their willingness to offer accurate responses. We took 

steps to minimize nonsampling errors, including pretesting draft 

instruments and using a web-based administration system. Specifically, 

during survey development, we pretested draft instruments with five 

grantees that received planning and/or implementation grants. In the 

pretests, we were generally interested in the clarity, precision, and 

objectivity of the questions, as well as the flow and layout of the survey. 

For example, we wanted to ensure definitions used in the surveys were 

clear and known to the respondents, categories provided in closed-ended 

questions were complete and exclusive, and the ordering of survey 

sections and the questions within each section was appropriate. We 

revised the final survey based on pretest results. We took another step to 

minimize nonsampling errors by using a web-based survey. This allowed 

respondents to enter their responses directly into an electronic instrument 

and created a record for each respondent in a data file—eliminating the 

need for manual data entry and its associated errors. To further minimize 

errors, programs used to analyze the survey data were independently 

verified to ensure the accuracy of this work. Because not all respondents 

answered every question, we reported the number of grantees 

responding to particular questions throughout the report.

In addition, we conducted site visits to 11 Promise grantees. We selected 

sites based on several factors, such as the type of grant awarded, the 

location of the grantees, and whether the Promise Neighborhood was 

urban or rural. The site visits provided opportunities to collect more indepth information on the program and highlighted different types of 

Appendix I: Objectives, Scope, and 

Methodology
Page 44 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

grantees and approaches. We visited six implementation grantees in 

Boston, Massachusetts; Berea, Kentucky; Chula Vista, California; 

Indianola, Mississippi; Los Angeles, California; and Washington, DC. We 

visited five planning grantees in Campo, California; Lawrence, 

Massachusetts; Los Angeles, California; Nashville, Tennessee; and 

Worcester, Massachusetts. These include one tribal and two rural 

grantees. We also interviewed Education officials and technical 

assistance providers, as well as other experts who have worked with 

Promise grant applicants, such as the Promise Neighborhoods Institute.

To determine how well the structure of Education’s Promise 

Neighborhoods grant program aligns with program goals and how 

Education selected grantees, using Education’s goals for the Promise 

program as criteria, we reviewed Education reports on place-based 

strategies; relevant Federal Register notices; and application guidance 

and training materials, including both the guidance available to applicants 

and to the peer reviewers regarding the technical evaluation/grant 

selection process. We reviewed agency information on applicants for 

implementation grants in the fiscal year 2011 and 2012 cycles, as fiscal 

years 2011 and 2012 were the only years in which Education awarded 

implementation grants. For both cycles, we analyzed application materials 

and technical evaluation documentation for a subset of implementation 

grant applicants—those that received planning grants in prior years. We 

compared the scores in each component of the application for both 

successful and unsuccessful applicants to identify criteria or factors that 

accounted for significant variation in total scores. We conducted a limited 

review of selected peer reviewer comments to gain more insight into the 

reasons for any differences. We interviewed Education officials about the 

process that the department used for the selection of both planning and 

implementation grantees.

To determine how the Promise Neighborhoods program coordinated with 

other Education programs and with the other federal agencies, including 

those involved in the White House Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative 

(NRI), we reviewed documentation of the NRI’s efforts and interviewed 

agency officials participating in the NRI. We also interviewed cognizant 

officials at other agencies participating in the NRI. To assess Education’s 

approach to evaluating the success of the grants, we reviewed grant 

monitoring reports, Education’s performance measures, and related 

guidance for data collection for this program and interviewed agency 

officials responsible for evaluation, including technical assistance 

providers.
Page 45 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

To determine the extent to which Promise grants enabled collaboration at 

the local level, we used GAO’s prior work on implementing interagency 

collaborative mechanisms as criteria.1

We conducted this performance audit from February 2013 to May 2014 in 

accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. 

Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain 

sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our 

findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that 

the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and 

conclusions based on our audit objectives.

We compared the Promise grants’

collaboration mechanisms to certain successful approaches used by 

select interagency groups and reviewed implementation grantees’

application materials. Our 11 site visits provided additional insight into 

how selected grantees align services supported by multiple funding 

streams and delivered by multiple providers. Using survey responses 

from all planning grantees, we determined whether they have continued 

their efforts, whether they have implemented any of their strategies, and 

what, if any, interim results they have identified, regardless of whether 

they received implementation grants. Site visits provided illustrative 

examples of interim benefits and challenges.

 1

GAO, Managing for Results: Implementation Approaches Used to Enhance Collaboration 

in Interagency Groups, GAO-14-220 (Washington, D.C.: Feb/ 14, 2014). To identify the 

approaches we selected four interagency groups that use key practices for enhancing and 

sustaining collaboration. To identify successful approaches, we reviewed agency 

documents and interviewed agency officials that participated in these groups.
Page 46 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Organization Location

Year planning 

grant received 

Year 

implementation 

grant received 

Abyssinian Development Corporation New York , NY (Harlem) 2010

Amherst H. Wilder Foundation St. Paul, MN 2010

Athens Clarke County Family Connection Inc. Athens, GA 2010

Berea College Clay, Jackson, and Owsley Counties, 

KY

2010 2011

Boys & Girls Club of the Northern Cheyenne Nation Northern Cheyenne Reservation, MT 2010

California State University East Bay Hayward, CA 2010 2011

DC Promise Neighborhood, Inc. Washington, DC 2010 2012

Community Day Care Center of Lawrence, Inc. Lawrence, MA 2010

Delta Health Alliance, Inc. Indianola, MS 2010 2012

Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative Boston, MA 2010 2012

Lutheran Family Health Centers/ Lutheran Medical 

Center

New York , NY (Brooklyn) 2010

Morehouse School of Medicine, Inc. Atlanta, GA 2010

Neighborhood Centers, Inc. Houston, TX 2010

Proyecto Pasotoral at Dolores Mission Los Angeles, CA 2010

The Guidance Center River Rouge, MI 2010

United Way of Central Massachusetts, Inc. Worcester, MA 2010

United Way of San Antonio & Bexar County, Inc San Antonio, TX 2010 2011

Universal Community Homes Philadelphia, PA 2010

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Little Rock, AR 2010

Westminster Foundation Buffalo, NY 2010 2011

Youth Policy Institute Los Angeles, CA 2010 2012

Black Family Development Detroit , MI 2011

CAMBA New York, NY (Brooklyn) 2011

Campo Band of Mission Indians Campo, CA 2011

Catholic Diocese of Albany Greenport, NY and Hudson, NY 2011

Children Youth and Family Services Charlottesville, VA 2011

Community Action Project of Tulsa Tulsa, OK 2011

Thomas and Jeanne Elmezzi Foundation New York, NY (Queens) 2011

Martha O’Bryan Center Nashville, TN 2011

Mercer University Macon, GA 2011

Meriden Children First Meriden, CT 2011

Appendix II: Promise Neighborhood 

Grantees
Page 47 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Organization Location

Year planning 

grant received 

Year 

implementation 

grant received 

Mission Economic Development Agency San Francisco, CA 2011 2012

Northside Achievement Zone Minneapolis, MN 2011

Ohio University Glouster, OH 2011

Reading and Beyond Fresno, CA 2011

SGA Youth and Family Services Chicago, IL 2011

South Bay Community Services Chula Vista, CA 2011 2012

CASA de Maryland, Inc. Langley Park, MD 2012

Center for Family Services, Inc. Camden, NJ 2012

Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation New York, NY (Brooklyn) 2012

Penquis C.A.P., Inc. Rockland, Cushing, Owls Head, St. 

George, Thomaston, and South 

Thomaston, ME

2012

Mid-Iowa Community Action Marshalltown, IA 2012

Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians Corning, CA 2012

Rutgers, The State University Newark, NJ 2012

Texas Tech University Lubbock, TX 2012

United Way of Northern Utah Ogden, UT 2012

University of Maryland Baltimore Baltimore, MD 2012

Renewal Unlimited, Inc. Adams County, WI 2012

Source: Department of Education data.
Page 48 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Table 10: Promise Neighborhoods Program’s Design for Achieving Its Goals

How Promise Neighborhoods will 

achieve its goal Grant requirements supporting method of achieving goal

Identify and increase the capacity of 

eligible organizations focused on 

achieving results for children and youth 

throughout an entire neighborhood.

• Applicants must be a nonprofit, institution of higher education, or Indian tribe.

• Applicants must be representative of the area to be served.

• Applicant must already be providing at least one of the programs or services 

proposed in the cradle-to-career continuum in the neighborhood. 

Building a complete continuum of cradlethrough-college-to-career solutions of both 

educational programs and family and 

community supports with great schools at 

the center.

• Implementation grant applicants must develop an implementation plan based on a 

comprehensive needs assessment and prioritization analysis. Applicant must also 

describe how it built community support for and involvement in the development of 

the plan.

• While grants are awarded to organizations already providing services in the 

community, the applications require a partnership with a target school serving the 

neighborhood that is either a persistently lowest-achieving or a low-performing 

school.

Integrating programs and breaking down 

agency “silos” so that solutions are 

implemented effectively and efficiently 

across agencies.

• Applicants must identify effective partner organizations and formalize these 

partnerships with memoranda of understanding.

• Grant recipients are required to have a structure to hold partners accountable.

Developing the local infrastructure of 

systems and resources needed to sustain 

and scale up proven, effective solutions 

across the broader region beyond the 

initial neighborhood.

• Implementation grant applicants must include a plan to collect data on indicators at 

least annually and use data for learning, continuous improvement, and accountability. 

A longitudinal data system may provide some of this data.

• Applicants must submit a list of proposed funds and in-kind donations to match the 

federal investment that it proposes to use to support its Promise Neighborhoods 

project.

Learning about the overall impact of the 

Promise Neighborhoods program and 

about the relationship between particular 

strategies in Promise Neighborhoods and 

student outcomes, including through a 

rigorous evaluation of the program.

• Implementation grant recipients must provide performance on indicators at least 

annually and submit longitudinal data to Education, which will be used to evaluate the 

program.

• Grant recipients must also participate in a community of practice to solve persistent 

problems or improve practices among Promise Neighborhoods.

Source: GAO analysis of relevant Federal Register notices and other program documentation.

Appendix III: Goals, Results, and 

Performance Indicators for Promise 

Neighborhood Program
Page 49 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Table 11: Promise Neighborhoods Desired Outcomes and Indicators

Outcome Indicator

Children enter kindergarten ready to 

succeed in school

Number and percent of children, from birth to kindergarten entry, who have a place where 

they usually go, other than an emergency room, when they are sick or in need of advice 

about their health. 

Number and percent of three-year-olds and children in kindergarten who demonstrate at 

the beginning of the program or school year age-appropriate functioning across multiple 

domains of early learning as determined using developmentally-appropriate early 

learning measures.

Number and percent of children, from birth to kindergarten entry, participating in centerbased or formal home-based early learning settings or programs, which may include 

Early Head Start, Head Start, child care, or preschool. 

Students are proficient in core academic 

subjects

Number and percent of students at or above grade level according to state mathematics 

and reading or language arts assessments in at least the grades required by the 

Elementary and Secondary Education Act (3rd through 8th and once in high school).

Students successfully transition from 

middle school grades to high school

Attendance rate of students in 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th grade.

Youth graduate from high school Graduation rate 

High school graduates obtain a 

postsecondary degree, certification, or 

credential

Number and percent of Promise Neighborhood students who graduate with a regular high 

school diploma and obtain postsecondary degrees, vocational certificates, or other 

industry-recognized certifications or credentials without the need for remediation.

Students are healthy Number and percent of children who participate in at least 60 minutes of moderate to 

vigorous physical activity daily.

Number and percent of children who consume five or more servings of fruits and 

vegetables daily.

Students feel safe at school and in their 

community

Number and percent of students who feel safe at school and traveling to and from school, 

as measured by a school climate needs assessment.

Students live in stable communities Student mobility rate 

Families and community members support 

learning in Promise Neighborhood schools

For children birth to kindergarten entry, the number and percent of parents or family 

members who report reading to their children three or more times a week.

For children in kindergarten through 8th grades, the number and percent of parents or 

family members who report encouraging their children to read books outside of school.

For children in the 9th to 12th grades, the number and percent of parents or family 

members who report talking with their child about the importance of college and career.

Students have access to 21st century 

learning tools

Number and percent of students who have school and home access (and percent of the 

day they have access) to broadband internet and a connected computing device.

Source: Relevant Federal Register notices.
Page 50 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Appendix IV: Comments from the 

Department of Education
Page 51 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants
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Page 55 GAO-14-432 Promise Neighborhoods Grants

Jacqueline M. Nowicki (617) 788-0580

In addition to the contact named above, Elizabeth Sirois, Assistant 

Director; Jacques Arsenault; Aimee Elivert; and Lara Laufer made key 

contributions to this report. Also contributing to this report were James 

Bennett, Deborah Bland, Mallory Barg Bulman, Holly Dye, Alex Galuten, 

Jean McSween, Matthew Saradjian, and Sarah Veale.

Appendix V: GAO Contact and Staff 

Acknowledgments

GAO Contact

Staff 

Acknowledgments

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