Memorandum for OMB 83C

MEMORANDUM for OMB 83C

Information Collection: Impact Study of Federally-Funded Magnet Schools

AGENCY: Department of Education (ED), Institute of Education Sciences (IES)

OMB Control Number: 1850-0943

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SUMMARY:

In accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (44 U.S.C. chapter 3501 et seq.), ED is submitting a simple change request to the existing information collection for the Impact Study of Federally-Funded Magnet Schools. The requested change is non-substantive in that no edits to information collection forms have been made. The change simply reflects new information about the sample size for one of the information collection forms. Detail is provided below.

CHANGE:

The original burden estimate for the principal survey, asking about school organization and instruction, was 238 hours. We would like to increase the estimate by an adjustment of 229.5 hours for a total of 467.5 hours. This is because the number of expected respondents for the 30-minute survey increased from 476 (85% of a total sample of 560) to 935 (85% of a total sample of 1,100) principals. Overall, this results in an annual adjustment of 77 hours and 153 responses.

RATIONALE:

There is an opportunity to include more MSAP schools in the analysis than originally projected. We initially assumed 70 MSAP schools would meet the study’s inclusion criteria (i.e., used lotteries to determine which students were admitted in the 2018-2019 school year or the 2019-2020 school year). However, since the initial OMB submission it has become clear that more districts than expected use unified lotteries. As a result, we anticipate being able to include up to 100 MSAP schools in the treatment group for the impact study.

Further, we originally assumed that students who were not admitted via lottery to an MSAP school—the control group—would attend an average of 7 control group schools, whose principals would need to be surveyed (to understand how the schools enrolling control group students differ from MSAP schools). However, based on our review of the administrative data we have collected since the initial OMB submission, we estimate that we will need to survey principals from 10 non-MSAP schools to collect information on school characteristics for 90% of the control group.

Including additional respondents is beneficial for this program evaluation for multiple reasons. Specifically, this change will increase both the statistical precision of the study (due to the larger sample size) and the external validity of the MSAP study (by including a larger proportion of MSAP schools in the impact study).