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.