RECOVERY Award Notice: "An Impact Evaluation for the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF)"

THIS NOTICE IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. THIS OPPORTUNITY IS AVAILABLE ONLY TO CONTRACTORS UNDER THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION'S MULTIPLE AWARD TASK ORDER CONTRACT (MATO). The U.S. Department of Education is awarding the contract titled "An Impact Evaluation for the Teacher Incentive Fund", as set forth below: Contract Number- ED-04-CO-0112/0012 Contractor - Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Contract Value - $7,895,327 Period of Performance - 60 months Rationale required by FAR 5.705 for use of a non-fixed price type contract under the Recovery Act: The contract requirement is to conduct a rigorous national impact evaluation of the grant program named Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). The TIF program supports efforts to develop and implement performance-based teacher and principal compensation systems in high-need schools. The purpose of this impact evaluation is to assess the impact of TIF, which is supported by funds of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. A cost type contract is appropriate when uncertainties exist that do not permit costs to be estimated with sufficient accuracy. FAR 16.301-2. The rationale for using a cost type contract for this requirement is as follows: • The TIF grant awards will be awarded in July 2010. However, ED anticipates awarding the TIF impact evaluation contract in November/December 2009. The impact evaluation requires that several tasks be conducted prior to the TIF grant awards to ensure 1) the evaluation contractor is able to work with the grantees, as soon as the grants are awarded and 2) the program implementation is consistent with the evaluation design. Since the grants will not be awarded until after the contract is awarded, the extent of the work required by the contractor is uncertain. The uncertainties include the number of grantees selected, the size of the grantees, and the nature of their selected incentive strategy. These uncertainties do not allow for costs to be estimated with sufficient accuracy. • ARRA also states that "randomized controlled methodology" must be utilized to the extent feasible. In order to ensure that grantees select schools for the TIF activities consistent with a randomized controlled methodology, the contractor must work with the grantees from the beginning of their process. Should even one school within a district be selected in a way that is not consistent with the evaluation design, the study design, and thus the validity of the study, would be invalidated. If random assignment is not feasible, additional design refinement and a larger sample size would be required. The lack of a firm study design adds further uncertainty to the process, and makes developing a reasonable fixed price difficult. • Finally, there are technical uncertainties that may impact the data collection and analysis of this evaluation contract. These uncertainties include collection of administrative records from the various districts and analysis of data related to the study design. Some districts have very sophisticated data systems which greatly facilitate the collection of such data. Other districts require extensive effort by the contractor to make use of the data (data cleaning and hand matching of students to teachers may be required). In addition, random assignment analyses are fairly straight forward; however, if the ultimate design is not random assignment the analyses will be more complex and time consuming.