A report released July 25 by Bellwether Education Partners sought to answer a crucial question: Did the Investing in Innovation (“i3”) program successfully find truly innovative ideas to improve K-12 education? The report is the culmination of interviews with dozens of i3 applicants, winners and philanthropists, plus a review of public documents about the program.
As the August 2 deadline approaches for the second round of i3 grants, the report acknowledges that in many ways, the competition itself was the most innovative part of the program, particularly since it was rolled out by a federal department used to giving grants based on formula funding, not competitions.
The first round competition for $650 million in prize money funded by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act resulted in 49 winners, with awards split into three tiers ranging from roughly $5 million to $50 million. This year’s round will award only $150 million, but nearly 1,400 organizations have notified the Department of Education they intend to apply.
The report acknowledges some of the positive benefits of the program, such as increased partnership between the philanthropic sector and K-12 public education and the requirements for varying levels of evidence to be considered in each type of grant—those with larger bodies of research received larger grants. This framework was “by far the most significant innovation that i3 brought to the table.”
This achievement is a double-edged sword, however. Since greater amounts of research were required for larger grants, the program ended up favoring programs that had been around long enough and had enough financial backing to have such bodies of evidence. The result was a “pool of applicants and grantees made up of existing organizations that had already addressed K-12 schooling in some way.” Winners included the well-known Teach For America and the Knowledge is Power programs. One unnamed applicant is quoted in the report as saying that “neither the iPhone or iPad teams at Apple would have been able to meet this standard to get the funds to initiate these projects.”
The most interesting problem that researchers found with the program was its name. Originally, the Department of Education called it the Invest in What Works and Innovation Fund, later shortened to Investing in Innovation, and from there given the nickname “i3.” Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement James Shelton acknowledged that taking the phrase “what works” out the title set up unrealistic expectations about the kind of innovation the department would fund, but he also pointed out that alongside the well-known winners were a good number of no-names, such as the highest-scoring winner, a school district in Colorado.
To read more about the report’s findings, please visit http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/07/25/37i3.h30.html?tkn=NWUF5%2FRp%2BUxtoIcaw%2BLaa%2BH1VMyeBAiwcpBU&cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1
