Promoting Other Innovative Ideas: An i3 Update

With 1698 proposals for Investing in Innovation (i3) grants – and only $650 million to award – it was inevitable that the U.S. Department of Education couldn’t possibly fund all of the good ideas. In fact it funded less than three percent of the proposals—49 in all.  (13 of the winners listed early learning as a priority.)

Realizing this, in an August conference call, Department officials promised they would find ways to promote the other promising, innovative ideas that they weren’t able to fund.  Last month the Department posted a list of the 212 i3 applicants with proposals that scored at least 80 points.  Of those, 163 were not awarded i3 grants —a group we’ll refer to as Group II.

Early Ed Watch was curious if the Department has any other plans to promote the Group II applicants’ ideas – especially because at least three members of Group II have interesting ideas related to early learning (as we’ll get to later in this post). Here’s what we found out:

Group II applicants received letters from the Department notifying them that their proposal had scored at least 80 points and encouraging them to load their proposals on the Open Innovation Portal. We think the Portal has potential, but right now, it is very difficult to navigate and it’s unclear whether it could help these proposed projects find additional funding. (You can check it out here.)

Also, last spring, the Department and the philanthropy community came together to launch the i3 Foundation Registry. One of its purposes was to assist winning i3 applicants to secure their 20 percent match requirement. But according to Department officials, the broader purpose of the registry, similar to that of the Open Innovation Portal, is to connect funders with innovative ideas and organizations that they might not have come across on their own. According to an article on Education Week by Alyson Klein, some of the foundations that participated in the registry do have plans to fund i3 proposals in Group II, namely the Gates Foundation and Rural Community and Youth Trust.

Klein’s article also tipped us off to an innovation summit scheduled to take place in January.  The Aspen Institute will hold the summit to highlight i3-funded projects and promising ventures that the Department of Education could not fund. We think this summit could be a great way to connect projects and funders, as long as it is accessible. 

We hope that projects that included early learning as a priority will be considered, along with the others, as worthy ideas to solve the challenges facing the American education system. Because to effectively address the challenges facing education, school leaders, policymakers and funders need to be thinking beyond the basic K-12 frame. We think the Department recognizes this, evidenced – in one way – by its inclusion of early learning as a competitive priority for the i3 program.

If you remember, back in July, when the Department first made information about the i3 applicants public, Early Ed Watch took a closer look at the initiatives that included early learning as a competitive priority. We highlighted seven applicants with PreK-3^rd or birth-to-third grade initiatives.

Three of them are among the Group II applicants —The New School Foundation, ServeMinnesota and Bank Street College of Education in New York.

The New School Foundation submitted a proposal to validate its Pre-K —Third Quality and Alignment Model (P3QAM). One major component of their proposal was to take the PreK-3^rd model district wide in Seattle Public Schools. It is this piece, that Laura Kohn, executive director of the New School Foundation, said her board is committed to making happen even without the federal i3 funding. “The urban scale-up work is our top strategic priority,” she said. Kohn also said that both the City of Seattle and the school district will continue to partner with the New School Foundation to make the scale-up possible.

ServeMinnesota submitted a proposal to validate and expand its Age 3 to Grade 3 Reading Corp Program. For the past several years, the organization has trained and placed AmeriCorps members in elementary and preschool settings across Minnesota, who, in turn, provide evidence-based literacy instruction to at-risk children. ServeMinnesota’s proposal put forth plans to scale-up in Minnesota and then eventually replicate the model in seven interested states. The executive director of ServeMinnesota, Audrey Suker, said the organization intends to move forward with replication efforts, albeit more slowly without the i3 funding.  She said that putting together the i3 proposal “gave us the opportunity to really think about what we wanted to do and why and develop a solid plan.” Suker expects that the replication work will begin in Texas.  ServeMinnesota is actively seeking funding to begin the replication as well as to conduct an evaluation in Minnesota.

The last Group II proposal we highlighted in July was Bank Street College of Education in New York’s proposal, which was submitted in partnership with the Memphis City Schools to develop the Project Teacher Leaders for the Pre-K Continuum (Project TLC). You can read more about it here.

Will these and other organizations have another chance at i3 funds? For the 2010 competition, i3 was funded through stimulus funds—one time funds. President Obama included $500 million to continue i3 in his fiscal year 2011 budget request to Congress. A Senate appropriations subcommittee included $250 million and a House appropriations subcommittee included $400 million. But we will have to wait until after the fall recess since Congress has yet to pass a FY 2011 federal budget.

But suppose that i3 is funded in fiscal year 2011, the Department will need to specify how the next round of grants would be awarded. Would the Department run the program the same way? Would they select the next set of highly rated applicants from this round? Or, would applicants be required to reapply, which would open the door to new innovative ideas too? We will likely have to wait several months for these answers.

In the meantime, we’re interested to see how effective the tools, put into place by the Department and the Aspen Institute, are at assisting Group II applicants find funding partners. If you are in Group II, have you had any luck securing funding for your ideas? Let us know!