This report presents an update on ongoing activities by the U.S. Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) in developing an evidence base for the STOP School Violence (STOP) grant program, with attention to the efforts of the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) already undertaken to develop performance measures and publish annual performance information about the STOP grant program.
The recommended measures of STOP performance focus on the extent to which the STOP grantees have successfully implemented their planned activities. It is theorized that successful implementation of planned activities will produce the desired outcome, i.e., a reduction in school violence. The recommended measures will assist BJA and the COPS Office in assessing the performance of STOP grantees and be responsive to the Congressional requests for performance metrics. These measures included both shared measures that enable aggregation of results across offices, as well as unique measures that enable office-specific analyses that are tailored to unique program areas. Although direct measures of the desired outcome of stopping school violence were considered, they were rejected because they are poorly suited for performance measurement. To identify whether the implemented activity funded by the project is responsible for reducing school violence, NIJ is engaged in other activities, such as funding evaluations under the FY 2020 solicitation “Research and Evaluation on School Violence” and conducting a program assessment of FY 2018 and FY 2019 awards under the STOP grant program. Performance measures considered but not recommended are noted and discussed. 3 tables