Foundations See ‘Moment of Opportunity’ to Improve Schools

Twelve foundations announced today they plan to spend $506-million this year on grants designed to bolster a new $650-million federal grant program to expand innovative school-improvement projects.

“We see this as a real moment of opportunity for the country,” said Michelle Cahill, a vice president at Carnegie Corporation of New York, which is coordinating the effort along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The grant makers said in a statement they have also created an online registry to make it easier for groups to apply for, and share information about, the new federal program, known as the Investing in Innovation, or “i3,” program.

Foundations would, for example, be able to coordinate to provide the matching funds that are required for i3 grants, Ms. Cahill said.

If an applicant is looking for money, she said, “we can say very early, we’re very interested in this, we can do some part of this match, who else is interested in this?”

20 Percent Match

The i3 program, operated by the Department of Education, is accepting applications until May 11 for projects to improve the achievement of “high-needs” students, for example by reducing dropout rates and increasing graduation and college-enrollment rates.

The applicants — which can be groups like school districts or partnerships between the districts and nonprofit groups — must match 20 percent of the grant with private money.

Applicants can get up to $50-million, with the biggest grants requiring strong evidence of effectiveness.

Like the administration’s other education-grants program, Race to the Top, the i3 program seeks proposals to improve teacher and principal effectiveness, use data to measure school performance, develop academic standards, and turn around low-performing schools.

The foundations said in a statement that each grant maker will determine independently which projects to pay for, but their spending will fall into three categories: classroom innovation, school improvements and choices, and research and evaluation.

Ms. Cahill said Carnegie and other foundations plan to make some of the money available for matching funds. Other money could be used to pay for projects that are promising but don’t win i3 money this year — for example, in cases in which a project is new and has not yet produced the results the government is seeking, she said.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation announced that is providing $1.4-million to help rural school districts prepare i3 applications and $4-million in matching funds for rural schools that apply.

The foundations have been working to coordinate efforts since last September, when some of them met with Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, Ms. Cahill said.

Mr. Duncan praised “this historic coordinated effort between the Department of Education and philanthropy,” saying in a statement that his department was taking a cue from philanthropy’s willingness to “invest in big ideas still operating on a small scale.”

Other participating grant makers are the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Ford Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Robertson Foundation, Wallace Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, and William & Flora Hewlett Foundation.