I’m pleased to announce that IES has released the Department’s first report on the revamped School Improvement Grant (SIG), called “Baseline Analyses of SIG Applications and SIG-Eligible and SIG-Awarded Schools“. This report uses publicly-available data from State Education Agency (SEA) websites, SEA SIG applications, and the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data to provide initial information on SIG-related policies and practices that states intend to implement, and the characteristics of both SIG-eligible and SIG-awarded schools. We’re also making available the entire database of SIG data to the public — you can find links to the database and documentation below. Finally, a mapping tool for the SIG data is available at http://data.ed.gov/grants/school-improvement-grants.
Some of the key highlights of the analyses in the report on SIG-eligible and SIG-awarded schools include the following:
- 15,277 schools, or 16 percent of all schools nationwide, were eligible for SIG.
- Given the program’s intent, SIG-awarded schools were, as expected, more likely to be high-poverty (75 percent), high-minority (86 percent), urban schools in comparison to elementary and secondary schools nationwide.
- SIG-awarded schools are more likely to be high schools: high schools constitute 21 percent of schools nationwide and 19 percent of SIG-eligible schools, but constitute 40 percent of SIG-awarded schools.
- The average total award among Tier I and Tier II schools was $2.54 million.
- The majority of districts with SIG-awarded schools (62 percent) have only one SIG-awarded school.
- Forty-three districts (7 percent of the 576 districts with SIG-awarded schools) across 24 states and the District of Columbia have 5 or more SIG-awarded schools.
SIG Funding to States and Schools
- The average state award was $65 million, and the median state award was $39.7 million.
- Among the different intervention models, turnaround schools received the largest total awards ($2.96 million per school).
- By school level, high schools received the largest total allocation ($2.37 million), whereas non-standard schools (i.e. schools with a grade configuration not falling within the elementary, middle or high school categories) received the highest per-pupil grants ($1,880).
- Schools in eleven states will receive an increase in per-pupil funding of 30 percent or more as a result of SIG.
The report also analyzes State SIG applications in fiscal year 2009, including how State Educational Agencies defined and identified what they meant by “persistently lowest achieving schools,” what types of monitoring strategies they would be using to monitor progress toward SIG goals, and other measures of support and technical assistance States are supporting SIG implementation.
Among the SIG-eligible schools:
- Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia defined secondary school as including both middle and high school levels, or those schools serving 6th through 12th grade.
- Seventeen states will prioritize Tier III schools that commit to implementing one of the four intervention models.
The SIG database contains 15,518 SIG-eligible schools across 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE), including 1,247 SIG-awarded schools across 49 states. The database has information on all the SIG-related data you may be curious about, from information on award allocations, to SIG model selection, to demographic information on SIG-awarded schools. For more informtaion on SIG, please visit http://www2.ed.gov/programs/sif/index.html
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| SIG Database Documentation.pdf | 150.46 KB |
| sig_database.xls | 8.91 MB |
