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Investing in Innovation Final Priorities Released—Eligible Applicants Must Partner with Private Sector CompaniesMarch 22, 2010—The Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) Final Priorities were released on March 12. While some changes were made to clarify definitions and to have the priorities and eligibility requirement match the language of the ARRA, no significant alterations were made. However, there is an eligibility requirement that educational publishers should be aware of. AEP submitted two comments regarding i3. First, we asked that the Department of Education combine the development and validation grants into one category. We asked this because we felt that when divided into multiple grants with the idea of seeding numerous promising practices, the small amount of money that each innovative program would receive would most likely not cover the costs of applying and evaluating the programs. The Department of Education declined to make this change or any others to the types of grants. “The Department believes that the structure of this program and the use of three categories of grants present an appropriate balance between support for the development of promising yet relatively untested ideas and the growth and scaling of practices that have made demonstrable improvements in student achievement and attainment outcomes. In addition, we believe that the scaling targets provided for the three grant types are needed by applicants in developing their proposed projects. Consequently, we do not believe changes such as those recommended by the commenters are warranted.” In AEP’s second comment, we requested that the applicant pool be expanded to allow the private sector to apply in partnership with LEAs or consortia of schools. As the Department said in its discussion, “Section 14007(a)(1) of the ARRA describes the types of entities that are eligible to apply for funding under this program. The Department has no authority to expand this statutorily-prescribed requirement.” While a private sector company cannot be an applicant, applicants are required to “demonstrate that they have established partnerships with the private sector, which may include philanthropic organizations, and that the private sector will provide matching funds in order to help bring results to scale.” In other words, there are opportunities for private sector companies to partner with an eligible LEA, non-profit, and consortia of schools on an i3 grant. “The purpose of the Cost Sharing or Matching requirement is to help ensure that the results of the funded projects will be brought to scale and sustained. The Department’s decision that eligible applicants for all three grant types–Scale-up, Validation, and Development grants–demonstrate a private-sector match of at least 20 percent of the total amount of Federal funds requested for each proposed project is based on the belief that this amount of private support is a strong indicator of the potential for sustainability of the proposed project over time.” More information Investing
in Innovation Fund: Final Rule and Notice Investing
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