Education Innovation and Research Program-Expansion Grants

Overview

<p>The Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Program, established under section 4611 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as amended by Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), provides funding to create, develop, implement, replicate, or take to scale Start Printed Page 90798entrepreneurial, evidence-based, field-initiated innovations to improve student achievement (as defined in this notice) and attainment for high-need students (as defined in this notice); and rigorously evaluate such innovations. The EIR program is designed to generate and validate solutions to persistent educational challenges and to support the expansion of effective solutions to serve substantially larger numbers of students.</p> <p>The central design element of the EIR program is its multi-tier structure that links the amount of funding that an applicant may receive to the quality of the evidence supporting the efficacy of the proposed project, with the expectation that projects that build this evidence will advance through EIR's grant tiers. 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. This structure provides incentives for applicants to: (1) Explore new ways of addressing persistent challenges that other educators can build on and learn from; (2) build evidence of effectiveness of their practices; and (3) replicate and scale successful practices in new schools, districts, and states while addressing the barriers to scale, such as cost structures and implementation fidelity. EIR Expansion grants are expected to scale practices that have prior evidence of effectiveness, in order to improve outcomes for high-need students. They should also be expected to generate important information about educational practices (e.g., in what contexts does the practice work best? Where does it not work as well? What components of the practice are most critical to its success?). Expansion grants are uniquely positioned to help answer critical questions about the process of scaling a practice across geographies (e.g., how does or should the cost structure of a practice change as it scales? What are ways to facilitate implementation fidelity without making scaling too onerous?). Given that Expansion grants (as with all EIR grants) focus on improving outcomes for high-need students, they are a critical resource for practitioners and policymakers in addressing educational disparities across the nation. Identifying and describing the core elements of the EIR-supported practices is a basic expectation for all Expansion grantees, in order to support adoption or replication by other entities. Evaluations of Expansion grants must be conducted in a variety of contexts and for a variety of students in order to determine the context(s) and population(s) for which the EIR-supported practice is most effective and how to effectively adapt the practice for these contexts and populations. An Expansion grantee's EIR-supported evaluation must examine the cost effectiveness of its practices and identify potential obstacles and success factors to scaling that would be relevant to other organizations. We expect that Expansion grantees will work toward sustaining their projects and continuing to scale successful practices after the EIR grant period ends; EIR grantees can use their evaluations to assess how their EIR-funded practices could be successfully reproduced and sustained.</p>