Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Lessons Learned from the First Four i3 Scale-up Evaluations

(Education)

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education awarded the first round of Investing in Innovation (i3) grants, intended to expand investment in innovative and evidence-based educational practices and programs. These grants included $200 million in scale-up grants to fund the expansion of four programs with rigorous evidence of prior effectiveness—Teach For America, the KIPP Foundation, Success for All, and Reading Recovery. All i3 scale-up grantees were required to commission rigorous, independent evaluations of the effectiveness of their scale-up efforts, to provide insights for researchers and policymakers on the feasibility and challenges of scaling up effective education interventions. In this panel, evaluators for the first four i3 scale-up grantees will present findings on the effectiveness of the grantee programs’ scale-up efforts and reflect on implications for policy and practice.

The first paper examines whether the KIPP charter school network maintained its prior demonstrated effectiveness as it scaled up. KIPP is a national network of charter schools that seeks to prepare students in underserved communities for success in college and beyond. The paper examines KIPP’s impacts on student achievement as it scaled up the number of schools and grades served, using a combination of experimental and quasi-experimental techniques.

The second paper examines the effectiveness of Success for All’s efforts to scale up its program. Success for All is a school reform models that aims to improve the reading skills of all children, particularly those in schools that serve large numbers of students from low-income families. Success for All combines a reading program, whole-school reform elements, and an emphasis on continuous improvement. The paper examines Success for All’s effects on students’ reading skills as it scaled up, based on a school-level random assignment design.

The third paper examines Teach For America’s efforts to expand the size of its teaching corps by 80 percent over four years. Teach For America is a non-profit organization that seeks to improve educational opportunities for disadvantaged students by recruiting and training high-achieving college graduates to teach for two years in low-income schools. The paper examines the effectiveness of Teach For America elementary school teachers hired during the first two years of the i3 scale-up, relative to other teachers in the same grades and schools, based on a student-level random assignment design.

The final paper examines the Reading Recovery program's efforts to expand its capacity under the i3 grant by training 3,625 new teachers . Reading Recovery is a short-term early intervention designed to help the lowest-achieving readers in first grade reach average levels of classroom performance in literacy. The paper estimates Reading Recovery’s impacts on student reading achievement under the scale-up, using a student-level random assignment design.

Vivian Tseng, Vice-President of the W.T. Grant Foundation, will discuss the implications of the studies' findings for policy and practice, and Helen Ladd, Susan B. King Professor of Public Policy at Duke University, will chair.