Shooting for the moon: a JV

Shooting for the Moon, that’s the title of today’s Education Innovator from the Departments Office of Innovation & Improvement.  I like to think that Arne got the moon shot theme from a quote of mine in EdWeek the week before he used it in a speech–it’s an apt metaphor for the task before us.  The work of educational equity and excellence is at least as technical as going to the moon but with a lot more politics.

The i3 grant program requires a 20% match–that’s $130m in total.  The partial match is a reasonable request.  Foundations can help improve applicant plans and sustainability of innovation efforts.  Unfortunately, according to draft guidelines, the match must be obtained up before the spring application deadline.

Most of the Scaling applicants (up to $50M grants) like KIPP and TFA will rely on current donors for the match.  But Development Grant applicants (the up to $5M category) face a huge challenge in raising $1M match in the next few months.

Foundations should collaborate to create a matching fund–$50M would be a good start.  New Schools would be the best place to house the program.  They have a talented senior staff and have the bandwidth to read a couple hundred applications while they’re raising Fund 4.

Foundations should also help scale providers behind promising school consortia.  In a number of cases the innovations will be produced by for-profit providers. Foundations can provide loans (structured as PRIs) or equity investments (MRIs). It’s likely that a PRI provided to a private provider for an innovation consortium could be treated as a portion of the match.

While it’s inevitable that a lot of the schools ‘transformation’ work funded by RttT, SIG and i3 will be lame, this is the best opportunity we have for educational progress in our lifetimes.  It’s time to get behind the Department and treat this like a real joint venture.  If you’re a donor, call the New Schools staff and discuss would a matching grant program.