Dive Brief:

• The Obama Administration sent $7 billion to districts between 2010 and 2015 under the School Improvement Grant program, but a study by the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Center for Educational Evaluation and Regional Assistance says it didn’t improve key student outcomes.
• The Washington Post reports schools that got an infusion of cash through the SIG program did not perform any better on standardized tests, graduation rates or college enrollment than their counterparts that got no money.
• The School Improvement Grant program was the Obama administration’s signature strategy for turning around failing schools — to get as much as $2 million per year for three years, schools had to either replace the principal and at least half the teachers, convert to a charter school, close or create their own “transformation” with innovative strategies — and its failure is sure to bolster critics’ arguments that more money doesn’t solve problems in education.

Dive Insight:

Even though most schools which received SIG funding chose the fourth option — transformation — over converting to a charter school, replacing most of the staff or closing, the federal report found none of the SIG-funded models had any statistically significant impact on test scores, high school graduation or college enrollment. One important caveat from the study, however, is that it looked only at schools that were close to the SIG eligibility cutoff. Schools that were well within the eligibility boundaries could have seen greater impact.

At WBEZ in Chicago, Linda Lutton spent the 2014-15 school year in a “typical” high-poverty school, chronicling the reality that most of these schools and children in them perform as one might expect, given their circumstances. While the “No Excuses” mantra asks schools and students to overcome their disadvantages, Lutton’s recently-aired project asks whether it’s reasonable to expect schools to do so much.