The Council on American Private Education (CAPE) has submitted superb public comments on the i3 fund. They address the Department's unfortunate and unnecessary decision to exclude nonpublic schools from this competition (for background, see??here and here).
It's a quick read and very much worth the time if you are interested in the i3. In addition to asking a few very important questions, the document makes three particularly forceful arguments:
Religious and independent schools have an outstanding record of??serving high-need students...Many private schools provide innovative and successful??approaches to serving students at risk. The Cristo Rey Network of Schools, for example, which educates inner-city??students through an innovative work-study model, has 99 percent of its graduates accepted into college.Numerous well-implemented, well-designed, large-scale experimental studies (the kind the Education??Department is looking for to support Scale-up Grants) have documented the effects of various private school??programs. Patrick Wolf, the lead researcher for the U.S. Department of Education's gold-standard study of the D.C.??Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allows students to attend religious and independent schools, recently??reported that the program ???has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal??government's official education research arm so far."
If the Education Department is interested in finding and scaling-up successful programs to improve performance,??close the achievement gap, and prepare students for college, the workplace, and life, it should enlist the efforts of all??schools???public and private???that have a history of exemplary accomplishment.?? Excluding an entire group of??proven programs from eligibility for the fund is not in the best interests of the nation or its students.
Very well said.