I've finally made it through the 377-page final application for the ???Investing in Innovation??? fund (i3) and several long supporting documents.?? The biggest news is that not all that much changed since the draft documents were released last year (if you need to catch up a bit, you can find previous write-ups here and here).
Of course, the program's major specs are the same: It's a competitive grant program for districts, nonprofits, and groups of schools (unlike RTT, which is for states), and it is designed to spur new ideas and to scale up highly successful or promising initiatives.
It is still wholly focused only high-need students (so a suburban district with only affluent families may find it very hard to win), and it has the same four priority areas as RTT: teacher and principal quality; better use of data; improved standards and assessments; improving failing schools. Unlike RTT though, bonus points will be awarded to proposals working in one of four targeted areas: early childhood; college access and success; special education and LEP; and rural education.
Grants will still be made in three categories: ???Scale Up??? grants (up to $50 million) for programs with high degrees of evidence and the potential to grow nationally; ???Validation??? grants (up to $30 million) for successful programs with less evidence of success and marginally less potential to scale; and ???Development??? grants (up to $5 million) for high-potential, relatively untested initiatives.
The greatest disappointment is that the Department did not reconsider its earlier decision to disallow private schools from making up a ???consortium of schools.????? The upshot is that the nation's invaluable but deeply threatened faith-based urban schools will be all but excluded from participation.?? This decision on the Department's part was unnecessary and deeply regrettable.
For those interested in getting into the weeds, there were a couple other minor changes:
- Some changes were made to eligibility requirements (related to AYP determinations) to enable low-performing districts to more easily apply
- Development grants will no longer have a pre-application phase
- The definition of ???persistently failing schools??? was changed to expand (beyond the School Improvement Fund definition) which schools would be eligible for attention
- The 20 percent private sector match was adjusted such that applicants have more time to find partners
- No organization can win more than two grants totaling $55 million
When all is said and done, I expect the nation's most well known education reform nonprofits to win significant awards.?? These include Teach for America, KIPP, New Leaders for New Schools, Achievement First, New Teacher Project, NewSchools Venture Fund, and so on.?? Also a number of reform-minded urban districts, such as New York City and New Orleans could receive major awards.?? The smaller grants will probably go to a wide array of projects that are still largely unknown nationally.
My initial reaction after reading the final documents is that the i3 has significant promise and that the Department did an admirably professional job crafting the application (apart from the private school exclusion). The hundreds of pages dedicated to addressing the public's comments reflect the huge amount of work done. Though implementation still remains a huge question mark, because state and local politics will play a much smaller role in the i3 than in the RTT, at this point, I suspect the former has a clearer path to success.
--Andy Smarick