Performance Measures

This section presents selected program performance information on the program below, including, for example, GPRA goals, objectives, measures, and performance targets and data; and an assessment of the progress made toward achieving program results. 
Achievement of program results is based on the cumulative effect of the resources provided in previous years and those requested in fiscal year 2013 and future years, and the resources and efforts invested by those served by this program.  Unless stated otherwise the source of these GPRA data are grantee annual and final performance reports.

Student Drug Testing

Goal:  To help ensure that schools are safe, disciplined, and drug free by promoting implementation of high-quality drug- and violence-prevention strategies.

Objective: Student drug testing grantees will make substantial progress in reducing substance abuse incidence among target students.

The Department last funded Student Drug Testing grants in 2010, which was the final year of the 2008 cohort.

Measure:  The percentage of Student Drug Testing grantees that experience a 5 percent annual reduction in the incidence of past-month drug use by students in the target population.  

Measure:  The percentage of Student Drug Testing grantees that experience a 5 percent annual reduction in the incidence of past-year drug use by students in the target population.

Additional information:  Data for the 2006 cohort were collected as part of the Institute for Education Sciences evaluation of the 2006 cohort of student drug testing projects.  The survey instrument for the evaluation collected data about student drug use for the past 6 months, rather than for the past year.  Data for the 2005 cohort of grantees are not provided because the data reported by grantees were not sufficiently comparable across sites to be aggregated meaningfully for the cohort.  The last of the data for these measures, for the 2011 performance year for the 2008 cohort, will be available later in 2012.

Other Performance Information
Drug Testing Evaluation

In 2006, the Department launched an impact evaluation to assess the effectiveness of random mandatory student drug testing.  The evaluation was designed to address the following research questions:  (1) Do high school students who are subject to mandatory-random drug testing (e.g., athletes, participants in competitive extra-curricular activities) report less use of tobacco, alcohol, and illicit substances compared to students in high schools without drug testing policies?;  (2) Do students in high schools with mandatory-random drug testing policies, but who are not subject to drug testing, report less use of tobacco, alcohol, and illicit substances compared to students in high schools without drug testing policies?; and (3) What are the characteristics of the drug testing policies implemented by participating treatment schools, and what types of other strategies are treatment or control schools using to reduce substance use among students?

This 4-year evaluation involved 36 schools from 7 grantees that received awards under the Department’s student drug testing grant competition in 2006.  (Because these districts committed to adopting drug testing programs and they were clustered in mostly southern States, the study results cannot be generalized to all high schools nationally.)  About half of the schools were randomly assigned to begin implementing drug testing immediately (treatment schools), and the other half were assigned to implement drug testing only at the conclusion of the 1-year experimental period (control schools).  Data collection included student surveys of reported drug use, interviews with staff at grantee schools, and school records. 
Results of the evaluation include the following:

• Students involved in extracurricular activities and subject to in-school drug testing reported less substance use than comparable students in high schools without drug testing, but for certain of these drugs the differences were not statistically significant.
• There was no statistically significant evidence of any “spillover effects” to students who were not subject to testing – the percentage of nonparticipating students who reported using substances in the past month was effectively the same at both treatment and control schools.

The Government Performance and Result Act of 1993 (GPRA) measures call for the incidence of student drug use in the target population to decline by five percent annually.