Newsweek’s Thomas and Wingert with a very good write-up of the Rhee-Weingarten saga

Very good i3 analysis from Tom Vander Ark

Encouraging story of a new start charter in a distressed Chicago neighborhood

Great WSJ piece on charters and Harlem

–Andy Smarick

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

The Department just released the final application for the “Investing in Innovation” fund or “I3″.

This is the $650 million sister program to the RTT. I3 grants will go to non-profits, districts, and networks of schools.

Prospective applicants now have 60 days to apply.

–Andy Smarick

Yesterday, the Baltimore Sun had a front-page story about more upcoming closures of Catholic schools in the city. Despite their strong service of disadvantaged kids, these schools are suffering under an unsustainable financial model.

A year into his tenure, Secretary Duncan, to my knowledge, has yet to visit one of these schools. And unless the Department has a change of heart, these schools will be excluded from the i3 competition.

Given our continued paucity of great urban schools, it makes no sense to allow these schools to disappear.

–Andy Smarick

I was busy finishing the first draft of my book (whew!) when the President’s 2011 budget came out, so all of the budget publicity and punditry passed me by. I’ve finally had a chance to give all of the documents a read, so at the risk of being late and repetitive, here are my 8 big takeaways.

1. Competitive Grants: ED was true to its word about trying to increase the amount of funding distributed through competitive grant programs. Good move.
2. Classic Washington Accretion: But rather than cutting and fundamentally changing its huge old programs, ED is just adding new competitive programs on top. This is why ED got such a huge budget increase; if you want to change the percentage going toward your priorities while not reducing the baseline, you have to add, add, add. And this is why federal budgets always grow. For example, Title I gets $14.5 billion, the same amount as last year, and IDEA gets almost $13 billion (2 percent increase).
3. Hope Before Evidence: Even though not a penny has been spent from the Race to the Top or Investing in Innovation funds, thereby providing us no evidence of their ability to improve student learning, ED is asking for nearly $2 billion in additional funding for the two. IES is undertaking a major study of RTT to find out if it will work. Prudence and humility suggest we wait for those results before doubling down. (Yes, I agree that RTT has led states to change some important policies, but there’s a huge difference between a change in policy and a change in practice.)
4. Upside of Program Consolidation I: Like so many before it, this administration wants to consolidate a number of programs, in other words jam a bunch of disparate funds and activities into a smaller number of new, bigger, more flexible programs with fancier names, such as “Effective teaching and learning for a well-rounded education” (for examples, see page 3 here). If they succeed, they will have greater control over how federal funds are spent and enable applicants to propose activities more closely aligned with their actual needs instead of tight, old program specifications.
5. Upside of Program Consolidation II: Though the new, bigger programs are yet to be defined (they’d require new legislation), it appears that the administration is interested in funding important things, like a fund for new pathways into the teaching profession and a program for innovations in educator compensation.
6. The Downside of Program Consolidation I: Every new administration sees the opportunity to consolidate programs because previous administrations have tried and failed. But there’s a reason for those failures. Yes, it might make sense to combine a group of literacy programs, but each individual program has a constituency, both outside the Beltway and inside Congress. They don’t like to see their pet programs get lumped in with others. The chances of ED getting its full way on this are infinitesimal.
7. The Downside of Program Consolidation II: Sometimes consolidation is unwise, as in the case of the administration’s proposed “Expanding Educational Options” program, which would blend several charter school programs with other non-charter programs. Based on the description, it would fund charters and an array of decidedly weaker options that states and districts create so as to protect the status quo (the wide array of “faux charters”). The beauty of a narrow, dedicated charter school start-up fund was that it couldn’t be co-opted by the establishment. This program? Not so much, as NAPCS alludes to here.  Side note: in the RTT application, states without charter laws can still get points for charter-lite “autonomous schools.” This budget conflates charters with these far weaker alternatives. I’m seriously beginning to wonder if ED appreciates what makes charters special.
8. The Turnaround Fallacy: Despite my best efforts and decades of contrary evidence, the administration is determined to spend as much money as possible on school “turnarounds.” There’s nearly a billion new dollars in the 2011 request, which is on top of the $3 billion in school improvement grants under the ARRA and a large portion of the $4.35 billion from the RTT. At least with RTT, IES is planning a major evaluation. It appears all of these funds will be spent without a close, analytical eye. My gloomy but firm prediction is that almost all of this money will be spent in the same ways as previous billions dedicated to fixing the nation’s lowest-performing schools. Those dollars will lead to virtually no meaningful improvement. The funds that are spent differently (and more “rigorously” as turnaround proponents like to say) will only be marginally more successful.

–Andy Smarick

After literally months of daily stories in local and national newspapers about Race to the Top–often dozens per day–today my Google Reader account had ZERO articles on the RTT.

Obviously, this is a treat for me–I’ve had my share of stories that begin with “Despite strong opposition from a variety of education stakeholders including the state teachers union, last night state legislators responded to Arne Duncan’s challenge and passed…”

But it also signals the beginning of a new RTT phase. We’re likely to see very few new state legislative battles until awards are made in April and losing states go back to the drawing boards to address peer reviewers’ comments. The only exceptions may be in states that didn’t apply in the first round because they knew changes had to be made.

Attention now shifts to the Department and the peer reviewers who will be reading thousands of pages of promises and filling in score sheets. But their lips are locked until April.

So RTT is going to be relatively low-profile for the next two months or so. Filling the vacuum will be three things: the release of the final i3 documents, the budget, and an ESEA proposal. We know the budget will dominate a few days in early February. The timing of i3 and ESEA will probably just be a function of ED’s bandwidth.

–Andy Smarick

In its weekly ARRA update, the Department notes that it completed a draft of the final i3 documents, which are now in “internal clearance” (this is the process by which all of the relevant ED offices weigh-in on important matters).

Once the internal process is complete, the documents will be reviewed by the White House and OMB. This can take weeks or months, but ED has been moving these things relatively quickly to date.

Bottom line for those of you following the i3: Don’t expect to see final versions this week, but don’t be totally surprised if they’re released before the end of the year or, more likely, early in the new year.

–Andy Smarick

I just finished reading Diane Ravitch’s 2000 book Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. I recommend it strongly.

Though I’m currently focusing intently on changing education systems, Left Back is an excellent history of the century-long war over what goes on inside our public school classrooms. Our current debates over expectations, standards, assessments, innovation, and more have a long, fascinating, and (at times) shameful pedigree. In short, we didn’t get where we are today randomly or by accident.

Ravitch’s lesson is a modest, even sage one: We need to avoid new “movements” like the plague and give “more attention to fundamental, time-tested truths.”

Massive changes in curricula and pedagogy should be based on solid research and careful field-tested demonstration before they are imposed on entire school districts and states. There has been no shortage of innovation in American education; what is needed before broad implementation of any innovation is clear evidence of its effectiveness.

I find myself disagreeing with many of Dr. Ravitch’s current policy views (e.g. charters, assessments), but there’s a great deal to be learned from this history and her conclusions. I certainly now better understand the roots of her criticisms of the Race to the Top’s favored strategies.

If you’re not in the market for a dose of humility, this probably isn’t your bag. If read with an open mind, it’s sobering stuff for hard-charging reformers chock-full of certainty. But part of me thinks it should be required reading for anyone handing out big philanthropic grants or overseeing massive government education programs, especially those dedicated to innovation, like the much-discussed 13 program.

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.

ED just hosted a webinar on the i3, led by OII head Jim Shelton. Though the basic information in the presentation tracked faithfully with the priorities document (so nothing terribly new or different), some of the Q&A was quite interesting.

I’m not sure if they will make the audio available, but there are docs on the ed.gov site. Also, I tweeted during the event–you can check those out at my twitter account, @smarick.

Jim and his team have done their homework on this. Apart from the issue in my big complaint, this seems to be thoughtfully put together.

New NY education commissioner Steiner fails first test?

Wise cautions about “innovation” and the i3 from former IES head Whitehurst

Good Toppo article on Latino aspiration gap

Yesterday, ED released its “proposed priorities” for the Investing in Innovation (or i3) fund, a $650 million program embedded in the federal stimulus legislation. I give the document a full treatment here, but here’s a quick and dirty explanation and analysis with a bit of lingering attention on one important matter.

• * Applicants must serve high-need students. The Department continues to focus on teacher quality, data, standards/assessments, and failing schools, but it will also give preference to proposals targeting rural schools, college access issues, special ed and ELL students, and early childhood initiatives.
• * There will be three categories of grants; the smallest grants will go to promising but unproven projects, the largest will go to highly successful programs ready to scale.
• * The document spends a lot of time trying to define “evidence of success” for proposals. We can expect lots of debate–now and after awards are made–about how much data is needed, what data is of high enough quality, how large positive effects must be, and so on.

Overall the document is strong.  There is, however, one very troubling provision that must be changed.

The law makes clear that a nonprofit that teams up with a consortium of schools constitutes an eligible applicant. The Department, unnecessarily and to the detriment of important causes, excludes all private schools. So even though thousands of private schools, including faith-based schools, serve countless needy students in some of America’s toughest neighborhoods they cannot be a part of an application.  So what does this mean in practice?

A set of urban private schools wanting to build interim assessments to better serve their young readers cannot apply. A set of highly successful private schools serving poor ELL kids and hoping to replicate its model cannot apply. A group of low-income rural private schools looking to share widely its tactics for increasing college going rates among its FRPL kids cannot apply. A group of inner-city Catholic schools miraculously sending all of their minority graduates to college cannot apply. A set of private schools hoping to convert to charter status so they can stay open and continue to serve their kids and needing funding to facilitate the conversion process cannot apply.

So, in total, if a school has undeniably great results with disadvantaged boys and girls, wants to help more high-need kids (the program’s top goal), adheres to the four absolute priorities, embraces one or more of the competitive priorities, and plans to carry out wholly secular activities with the federal funds, it is barred from applying if it is a nonpublic school.  I cannot see how this is in the best interest of kids.

There is a simple way to solve this problem. In the final version of the priorities, the Department should merely remove this provision and allow private schools to compete–with neither advantage nor disadvantage–with all other applicants. As long as the award is made to the partner nonprofit and not the schools themselves, and as long as the activities being carried out are secular, there is no legislative or constitutional problem. Bear in mind that every single day private schools receive secular services for their disadvantaged kids through Title I and IDEA. The same basic principle applies here: federal funds through an eligible recipient for secular services for kids in need.

Since its creation early in President G.W. Bush’s first term, the US Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement has been involved in some of the most interesting education issues around. It continues to oversee a number of valuable programs and initiatives under the current administration.

Crockpot Mike was part of the leadership team of OII back in its heady early days and had a hand in launching the “Education Innovator,” that office’s newsletter. That worthwhile tradition continues under the able leadership of OII’s current chief, Assistant Deputy Secretary Jim Shelton.

The current edition of the Innovator is particularly meaty, and leads off with a Q&A session with Shelton. The topic is one of much interest to the ed reform community–the ARRA’s $650 million Investing in Innovation (“I3″) program.  Jim sheds a bit more light on what ED wants to see by way of proposals and how it intends to size grant awards.

Definitely worth a read if you’re considering applying or if you’re just interested in this major federal investment in education innovation.

This morning Secretary Duncan and Assistant Deputy Secretary Jim Shelton gave a preview of the $650 million “Investing in Innovation Fund” (or “I3″), the companion to the Race to the Top.

I liked what I heard, though there are many, many question left outstanding (the actual announcement will happen this fall).  I give their presentation a fuller treatment here.

While I’ve pushed back on ED about turnarounds, the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and some other issues, there’s no doubt that they are advocating for some very, very important reforms. It wasn’t long ago that a Democratic administration would’ve thought an innovative use for $650 million in flexible money was giving each teacher in America a $200 bonus. This group wants to see differentiated teacher pay, clever use of data, replications of successful charters, new preparation programs, and more.

What a welcome change. Onward and upward.