This week, the U.S. Department of Education published the notices inviting applications for the seventh and final Investing in Innovation (i3) Validation and Scale-up competitions. Since 2010, i3 has supported partner organizations with over $1.3 billion in grant awards to expand innovation and evidence-based programs that support more students, schools and communities. We plan to award new grants at the end of the 2016 calendar year to educators who are discovering and scaling innovative approaches to help students succeed.
We are proud that i3 has helped catalyze the work of organizations leading transformational work. “With the i3 Validation grant, the U.S. Department of Education has given us a tremendous opportunity to understand precisely what new teachers need to be successful with students. We are learning which elements of our teacher induction model are the most critical, and learning more through a third-party evaluation study about all of the elements of our model and how they come together to improve teacher retention, instructional practices and ultimately student success,” says New Teacher Center (NTC) Founder and CEO Ellen Moir. The NTC is a 2012 i3 Validation Grantee and 2015 i3 Scale-up grantee. “Early results are in, and show NTC’s induction model yields more intense and instructionally-focused supports to new teachers that lead to student learning.”
For the 2016 competitions, school districts and nonprofit organizations can compete for i3 Validation grants of up to $12 million and i3 Scale-up grants of up to $20 million. This year’s competitions include a focus on projects that implement and support the transition to college- and career-ready academic content standards and associated assessments; promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education; and improve low-performing schools. In addition, the Department is committed to funding applications that serve rural communities.
Learn more about this year’s i3 competitions on our website and read about examples of exciting work underway by visiting the i3 community website.
