Investing in Innovation Development Grant (Pre Application)

Overview

<p><span>The Investing in Innovation Fund (i3), established under section 14007 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), provides funding to support (1) local educational agencies (LEAs), and (2) nonprofit organizations in partnership with (a) one or more LEAs or (b) a consortium of schools. The i3 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. The central design element of the i3 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. Applicants proposing practices supported by limited evidence can receive relatively small grants that support the development and initial evaluation of promising practices and help to identify new solutions to pressing challenges; applicants proposing practices supported by evidence from rigorous evaluations, such as large randomized controlled trials, can receive sizable grants to support expansion across the country. This structure provides incentives for applicants to build evidence of effectiveness of their proposed projects and to address the barriers to serving more students across schools, districts, and States. <br>As importantly, all i3 projects are required to generate additional evidence of effectiveness. All i3 grantees must use part of their budgets to conduct independent evaluations (as defined in this notice) of their projects. This requirement ensures that projects funded under the i3 program contribute significantly to improving the information available to practitioners and policymakers about which practices work, for which types of students, and in what contexts. Development grants provide funding to support the development or testing of practices that are supported by evidence of promise (as defined in this notice) or a strong theory (as defined in this notice) and whose efficacy should be systematically studied. Development grants will support new or substantially more effective practices for addressing widely shared challenges. Development projects are novel and significant nationally, not projects that simply implement existing practices in additional locations or support needs that are primarily local in nature. All Development grantees must evaluate the effectiveness of the project at the level of scale proposed in the application. This notice invites applications for Development grants only. Applicants must address one of the first five absolute priorities in their pre-applications and full applications. An applicant that addresses Absolute Priority 5, Serving Rural Communities, must also address one of the first four absolute priorities. These priorities are: </span></p> <p><span>Absolute Priority 1—Promoting Diversity. <br>Absolute Priority 2—Implementing Internationally Benchmarked College- and Career-Ready Standards and Assessments. <br>Absolute Priority 3—Improving School Climate, Behavioral Supports, and Correctional Education. <br>Absolute Priority 4—Influencing the Development of Non-Cognitive Factors. <br>Absolute Priority 5—Serving Rural Communities.</span></p> <p><span> For more details on each of these priorities, please see the full RFP linked below.</span></p>