If You Build It, Will They Come? Encouraging Take-Up of State Initiatives Through Extended Outreach and Symbolic Incentives

• In Event: 68.034 - Encouraging Compliance Without Mandates: The Challenge of Take-Up in a New State-Sponsored Education Initiative

Abstract

A long literature examines the disconnect between policy and practice, exploring the levers available to policymakers for promoting compliance with enacted policy (e.g., Cohen & Moffitt, 2010; McDonnell & Elmore, 1987). However, in many cases, government agencies develop or sponsor educational interventions that they want schools and teachers to adopt without relying on mandates. Here, we explore the impact of several approaches taken by the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) encouraging schools across the state to implement IPI after the pilot study demonstrated clear evidence of success. Notably, the state did not mandate that schools implement the program.

As part of a broader research study concerning IPI’s impact, we conducted two experimental sub-studies to examine what practices support schools' voluntary take-up of a promising state program. The first focused on principals, examining the effect of one-to-one outreach. Subsets of principals were randomly assigned to a control group that got no additional outreach or to receive outreach from either (a) TDOE’s Centers of Regional Excellence (CORE) staff, which provide schools with regional support, or (b) peer principals who had participated in IPI in the past. The second sub-study examined symbolic incentives for teacher-level take-up; specifically, a randomly-assigned subset of schools were told that participating teachers would receive certificates of completion. TDOE chose these take-up practices to study based on what they could conceivably offer at scale and their ability to inform future practice.

We sought to determine the impact of these practices on various measures of program take-up. Preliminary results suggest that peer principal outreach and the certificate of participation increased take-up. For example, having a peer principal reach out increased the probability that principals logged in to the IPI website by 6.4 percentage points and that they introduced partners by 7.6 percentage points. In addition, being offered certificates increased the probability that principals introduced partners by 11 percentage points and the probability that principals submitted partnerships on the website by 5.8 percentage points. While these effects are fairly modest in absolute terms, they do represent large increases in the proportion of schools that participated, given that overall program take-up rates were quite low. We find no effect of CORE outreach, although contamination may have diminished the treatment contrast.

While these preliminary results do not provide a definitive answer about the effectiveness of these three interventions, they carry some important implications. We believe one-to-one outreach is likely a meaningful lever for program implementation. In addition, incentives for teachers to participate appear to matter. This is particularly striking given that the certificates were a very light touch and low-cost incentive. Thus, stronger incentives (such as professional development credits) may be meaningful interventions to encourage principals or teachers to participate. In the coming year, the TDOE will refine the set of randomized incentives based on these findings and we will continue to study their effects.

Authors

• Mary Elizabeth Laski, Brown University

• John Papay, Brown University

• Eric Taylor, Harvard University

• John H. Tyler, Brown University