State and Local Evaluation Center at AIR Chosen to Evaluate Three Winning i3 Grants

The State and Local Evaluation Center at AIR is partnering on three winning Investing in Innovation (i3) federal grants to evaluate innovative practices designed to improve student achievement. The Internationals Network for Public Schools and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (National Board) were selected as two of the highest rated of 12 development grant applications, and the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System was selected as one of the highest rated of eight validation grant applications by the U.S. Department of Education.

The i3 competitive grant program awarded more than $140 million in federal funds for innovative ideas in education on November 8, 2012.

The State and Local Evaluation Center will serve as the independent evaluator of the Internationals Network for Public Schools Development Project. The Internationals Network for Public Schools, a small network of schools in New York City, California, and Virginia that serve newly arrived immigrants, will use its development grant to bring its curriculum and support model to additional schools in New York City and San Francisco that serve large numbers of English language learners.

The National Board’s Building a Pipeline of Teaching Excellence Project capitalizes on the National Board’s unique repository of case studies of accomplished teaching, including videos of Board-certified teachers paired with reflective analyses describing instructional decision-making and teaching strategies. The cases will be housed in an online resource called Accomplished Teaching, Learning, and Schools (ATLAS). Through the i3 grant, the National Board and its partners will pilot ATLAS cases in six teacher preparation programs and seven local education agencies (LEAs). The State and Local Evaluation Center will provide a formative and summative evaluation of this new effort led by the National Board.

The State and Local Evaluation Center will also serve as the independent evaluator to the i3 Validation Grant awarded to the Families and Schools Together: An Innovative, Targeted Strategy for Removing Key Barriers to School Turnaround (FAST) Project. The family strengthening and parent involvement program is delivered in schools and communities using multifamily group interaction. The State and Local Evaluation Center will work in partnership with the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW–Madison), which will serve as the lead organization and provide administrative capacity; the School District of Philadelphia, PA, which will serve as the LEA and coordinate the participation of 60 schools in the program; and Turning Points for Children, a Philadelphia-based non-profit organization, which will implement the local FAST groups. The evaluation will be based on a mixed-method experimental cluster-randomized controlled trial with the 60 schools in Philadelphia, and will focus on the degree to which FAST achieves its intended short- and long-term outcomes, while also examining key elements of program implementation to facilitate replication and additional testing in other settings.