A Portrait of School Improvement Grantees
After years of identifying America’s failing schools through the No Child Left Behind Act (and perhaps,overidentifying them as suggested by President Obama and Secretary Duncan) little progress has been made in turning these low-performing schools around. The School Improvement Grant (SIG) program is the Obama administration’s efforts to change this by targeting the lowest-performing schools with dramatic interventions—a test run for Obama’s Blueprint for ESEA. For the first time, the Department of Education is going after our nation’s lowest-performing schools with prescriptive intervention models: school closure, restart as a charter school, turnaround through replacing the principal and 50% of the instructional staff or transformation, which requires the school to implement numerous research-based reforms.
But we don’t know much about where these schools are, who they are, the models chosen, and what they’re promising to do—until now. Our new Charts You Can Trust presents an early snapshot of the first cycle of SIG