A gloomy federal analysis of the Obama administration’s multibillion dollar School Improvement Grant program missed the boat, according to a report released last week by FutureEd, a nonpartisan think tank at Georgetown University.
The new report was written by two former U.S. Department of Education officials—Alan Ginsburg and Marshall S. Smith. They say the earlier report, commissioned by the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences, ignored more-localized studies that gave a brighter picture of SIG’s success. It also had some design flaws and missed a chance to communicate best practices in states and districts where SIG worked, they say.
The IES report found that the SIG grant, which poured more than $7 billion into low-performing schools, had no significant impact on math and reading scores or high school graduation. The IES study’s authors dispute the new findings.
