Social Innovation Research Center

Last month Mathematica Policy Research released a tough report on the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s School Improvement Grants (SIG) program. The conclusion? After $7 billion spent, the program had no effect on student achievement in some of the nation’s most poorly performing schools.

The study’s results spurred a round of “I told you so” responses from some analysts, including Andrew Smarick of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who suggested that SIG might be the “greatest failure in the history of the U.S. Department of Education.” According to Smarick:

The results are almost too much to believe. How in the world do you spend billions and billions of dollars and get no results—especially after Secretary Duncan promised it would turn around 5,000 failing schools and hailed it as the biggest bet of his tenure?

Probably the only thing more remarkable than the scope of this program’s failure is that this outcome was absolutely, positively, unavoidably predictable.

Smarick had previously argued that the answer was to close poorly-performing schools (which was one of the options under SIG, although it was rarely used) and start from scratch. Smarick pointed to successful charter school networks like KIPP as a more promising alternative.

Is Smarick right?  Are turnaround efforts a complete waste of time and money?

Probably not.  There are plenty of reasons to think that this conclusion is premature. First, the Mathematica study’s conclusions do not quite paint the definitive picture of failure among school turnarounds that has been widely reported.  Second, there have been other examples of success in the turnaround space that are not associated with SIG.

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The Social Innovation Research Center has today released a report examining the early progress of the Investing in Innovation (i3) program. The executive summary follows below.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report is an evaluation of the Investing in Innovation (i3) program, a tiered-evidence grantmaking initiative at the U.S. Department of Education.    The program’s primary purpose is to support the development, testing, and scaling of field-initiated programs for high-need students in K-12 education.

Created in 2009, it has provided over $1.4 billion in grants for education projects, including those focused on kindergarten readiness, student achievement, decreasing dropout rates, and turning around low-performing schools. In late 2015, the program was changed as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act.  However, the renamed Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program has retained most of i3’s original features.

This report reviews the program’s early progress. Its findings are based on a review of publicly available final project evaluations, internal performance reports obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and interviews with current and former officials from the U.S. Department of Education, i3 project directors, and several national experts in education.

The report includes an assessment of the program’s overall results, its contributions to the knowledge base, and lessons learned from launching, implementing, evaluating, and scaling i3-funded projects. The remainder of this executive summary provides highlights from the full report.

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The following is an excerpt from SIRC’s report on the i3 program. In it, national experts and former Obama administration officials weigh in on lessons learned and the program’s possible future.

EPILOGUE

Viewed in isolation, the i3 program – while imperfect – appears to have been generally effective.  But the newly-renamed Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program does not exist in a silo.

The program exists in a larger policy context – one that includes other federal programs, state and local education agencies, and perhaps most importantly, a political context that has become very different in the aftermath of the 2016 elections.

How does EIR fit into this larger context?  As one administration exits the stage, what fate awaits it in the next one?  If the new Republican administration and GOP Congress choose to keep it, how might it change?

New Administration, New Priorities

In late 2015, Congress reworked i3 as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act, bipartisan legislation that replaced No Child Left Behind. The new EIR program now bears a bipartisan imprint.

Still, as a program originally associated with the Obama administration, its fate under the incoming administration is uncertain.  The Trump administration may decide to eliminate it, but it may also see it as useful tool for furthering its school choice and accountability agendas.  Moreover, support for evidence-based policy and tiered evidence initiatives (like EIR) more generally has been growing among Republicans on Capitol Hill.

When asked, Rick Hess, the Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, began by making the pessimistic case.  “I don’t know what will be done in the new administration,” he said, “but I assume the new administration and Congress will take a hard look at the full array of Obama initiatives, including this one.”

“If i3 had happened outside the context of Race to the Top and had not been locked arm-in-arm with foundations on Common Core, I think I would have looked upon it differently, because historically the idea of public-private partnerships has a lot of appeal.”

“On the other hand, there are folks who are interested in school choice.  They might see it as a vehicle for encouraging more choice programs and expanding efforts to study their impact,” he said.

The president-elect has pledged $20 billion for school choice.  His Education Secretary-designee, Betsy DeVos, is a strong school choice and accountability advocate.   Federal support for charter schools is overseen by the Office of Innovation and Improvement, the same division that runs EIR.   As a program that provided support for charter school initiatives like KIPP and New Schools for New Orleans, EIR could be useful to the incoming administration.

Others point to potential support in Congress. “Betsy DeVos will be extremely important, but there is also more appetite on the congressional side than there used to be,” said Grover “Russ” Whitehurst, a former director of the Institute of Education Sciences under President George W. Bush.

“There is still bipartisan momentum to increase evidence use within federal policy,” agreed Martin West, associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a former senior education policy advisor to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN). “I think the status of programs like EIR hinges on that broader momentum.”

Support for evidence-based policy has been growing among Republicans in recent years. In the summer of 2016, House Speaker Paul Ryan and other members of the House Republican leadership made evidence a central component of a policy plan that it ran on in the fall, called A Better Way.   Although the plan did not mention EIR specifically, it endorsed tiered-evidence initiatives in general.

The broader focus on evidence has also drawn cautious support from analysts at conservative organizations like the American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute, and Heritage Foundation.   In November, the Heritage Foundation endorsed the increased use of evidence in the federal budget process.

Given these varied sources of potential support, EIR’s fate is unclear.  If it were to be kept in place, however, how might it be changed?

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The Department of Education today announced the availability of new grants under the Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program, an updated version of the Investing in Innovation (i3) program.

As was the case with i3, EIR has three tiers of grants, with higher levels of funding provided to projects with higher levels of incoming evidence. The three types of grants are linked to each other, each “with the expectation that projects that build this evidence will advance through EIR’s grant tiers.” According to ED:

Applicants proposing innovative practices (as defined in this notice) that are supported by limited evidence can receive relatively small grants to support the development, iteration, and initial evaluation of the practices; applicants proposing practices supported by evidence from rigorous evaluations, such as large randomized controlled trials (as defined in this notice), can receive larger grant awards to support expansion across the country.

Congress authorized this reworked version of i3 in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced No Child Left Behind.

Final funding for the program has yet to be resolved by Congress, which passed a continuing resolution before leaving for Christmas. It funded all federal discretionary programs (including this one) at current levels until April 28.  The temporary funding extension will give the incoming Trump administration a chance to influence funding for the rest of the year when it comes up for full consideration in April.

Until then, EIR/i3 remains level-funded at $120 million. The program was also funded at that level in the Senate version of the full-year spending bill (S.3040), but it was defunded in the House version (H.R.5926). Assuming she is confirmed, the president-elect’s pick for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, may have some say on the final spending figure.

Meanwhile, ED is proceeding with the new roll out.  Descriptions of the three types of grants (and links to their associated applications) follow below. Application deadlines for all three are the same: February 13 for the notice of intent to apply and April 13 for the application itself.

Note: SIRC is anticipating release of a major report on lessons learned from the i3 program in January. The report is based on interviews with over 60 i3 grantees, outside experts, and former and current Education Department officials. This report was developed with the generous financial support of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

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