2016 Grants for Innovation

The Office of Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education is running several grant competitions, and we hope you will consider applying.

This week, we launched the seventh and final Investing in Innovation (i3) Development competition for grants up to $3 million/each. This year, we are seeking applications that focus on:

• Creating new approaches to helping educators implement rigorous standards and assessments;
• Improving school climates, and developing alternatives to exclusionary school discipline;
• Fostering racially and socioeconomically diverse schools that close opportunity gaps for underserved students;
• Partnering with schools in rural areas; and
• Supporting students’ non-cognitive skills [important work, and we’re not in love with the terminology either!].

Our i3 Development grant partners are discovering better ways of serving students, and we hope you will share your own innovative ideas for teaching and learning through this competition. And please stay tuned for the start of the 2016 i3 Validation and Scale-up competitions that will empower educators with evidence-based tools and strategies for their schools.

Building on last year’s efforts, our team is awarding $160 million to states this year to create and expand new high quality charter schools. Across the nation, our partners in the Charter Schools Program are transforming students’ academic trajectories, and preparing more students to achieve their dreams in college and beyond. We are particularly excited that last year we were able to support the expansion of promising charter management organizations (CMOs) that are early in their growth, and we are eager to continue to do so again this year.

We are also running a $91 million competition for the Magnet Schools Assistance Programs to support theme-based schools that welcome a racially and socioeconomically diverse group of students, and that help ensure that every student has the opportunity to excel academically.

In the weeks ahead, we’ll launch the rest of our grant competitions for the year, which will help create new Promise Neighborhoods in areas of concentrated poverty, teacher preparation programs, and district-level educator support systems.

These competitions are an important tool for helping more students and schools grow and excel, but ultimately, they depend on your great ideas to drive meaningful change. That’s why we’re asking you to consider applying or reaching out to another education leader that should apply.

To learn more about our competitions, check out http://innovation.ed.gov/ or get in touch with us on Twitter at @ED_OII.