The U.S. Department of Education today unveiled the final rules for its $650 million Investing in Innovation, or i3, grant program, standing fast in the face of criticism that its proposed guidelines demanded too much from applicants in the way of private-sector match and evidence to back up their proposals.
In the final rules and application for the program, department officials left intact a demand that applicants secure 20 percent in matching funds from the private sector.
OVERVIEW
The Education Department announced the availability of the grant application for the highly anticipated Investing in Innovation (i3) program.
These grants will support local districts and nonprofit organizations—working in partnership with several districts and/or several schools—as they seek to implement educational innovations with promising or demonstrated effective outcomes for students. As many of you have expressed interest in the announcement of these grants, we wanted to make you immediately aware of their availability. Applicants will have 60 days to develop applications. We are including the press release below for your convenience. Please share this information far and wide with your constituents.
Through this program, competitive grants will be awarded to applicants with a record of improving student achievement and attainment in order to expand the implementation of, and investment in, innovative practices that are demonstrated to have an impact on:
The notice of final priorities, requirements, definitions, and selection criteria (NFP) for the i3 program can be found here on ED.gov: http://www2.ed.gov/programs/innovation/index.html In the coming days it will be published in the Federal Register. As you’ll note, there are three types of grants for which funding is available under the i3 program: Scale-up Grants, Validation Grants, and Development Grants. We advise interested local parties to carefully review the specifics regarding each of these grant types, as they look to determine which grant category is most suited to the specific progress level of their local activities.
There will be a series of Pre-application meetings designed to provide technical assistance to interested applicants for all three types of grants under the Investing in Innovation Fund (i3).
Interested applicants who wish to attend the Investing in Innovation (i3) Pre-Application Workshops or Pre- Application Webinars, must register online.
Also, the Department has developed “The Open Innovation Portal” (https://innovation.ed.gov/), a Web 2.0 innovation ecosystem combining features of both a community and a marketplace. As a community, the portal creates a social network that strengthens relationships, facilitates connections, and promotes collaborations. As a marketplace, the portal creates an innovation process that taps the “wisdom of the community” to identify and resource the most promising ideas in education. All registered users, be it teachers, administrators, or members of the public, are invited to be “innovators” and post their “solutions” on the portal. All solutions are posted to categories of “challenges” of interest to the community, the Department, and potential funders. (Note: The latest issue of The Education Innovator, at http://www2.ed.gov/news/newsletters/innovator/2010/0223.html, describes the portal in greater detail.)
