When President Obama managed to get the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 through Congress, few news organizations paid much attention to the bill's education provisions. But that law increased the funding for a little known portion of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). Funding for School Improvement Grants (also known as SIG grants) went from $38 million in 2008 to $3.5 billion in 2009. SIG grants became the primary vehicle for addressing the issue of failing school. Over 70% of SIG grants use the program's Transformation Model.
The Four SIG Grant Models
SIG grants are supposed to solve the problem of students being stranded in a poorly performing educational environment – either by improving a school's academic performance or by closing the school. The grants are available to schools that fall within the bottom 5% of failing schools.
SIG grants have to be implemented using one of four grant models: the Turnaround Model, the School Closure Model, the Transformation Model, or the Restart Model. The School Closure Model and the Restart Model both close the school and either disperse the students to other locations or cannibalize the campus in order to create a charter school on the site. The Turnaround Model requires terminating all staff (though some can be hired back) and the Transformation Model requires terminating the principal under most circumstances.
Details of the Transformation Model
During the 2010-11 school year now coming to an end about 730 schools received SIG grants. About 520 of those schools (71%) chose to adopt the Transformation Model. The attraction of the Transformation Model is simple: it's the only grant model that allows most of a school's employees to keep their jobs. The other three models require at least half of a school's staff to be transferred or terminated. While the Transformation Model does require the removal of the principal (unless the principal has been in office less than three years), it focuses primarily on comprehensive curriculum reform, job-embedded professional development, extending learning time, and similar approaches to reform.
Specific requirements of the Transformation Model include:
- Extensive use of data to help identify curriculum needs.
- Ongoing professional development that is a) of high quality, b) job-embedded, and c) aligned with the instructional programs in use at the school.
- Increased student learning time.
- A new, locally devised system of teacher evaluation that is rigorous, transparent, and equitable. This new system should include student test data as a significant factor in evaluating teachers.
- "Merit pay" as a way of rewarding (and attracting) the best teachers.
- Improved mechanisms for family engagement.
Changes may be coming to the Transformation Model. As Congress considers reauthorizing ESEA, proposed legislation now being considered would reduce the amount of time a principal can have served to two years before the model would require replacing the principal in order for the school to receive the grant. The proposed legislation would also put a specific required number of hours to the model's increased learning time for students, requiring 300 hours per year. The 300 hours is recommended (but not required) at the moment.
SIG grants are awarded to states. The states in turn award the money to individual local school districts to use in implementing one of the four models at qualifying schools. SIG grants are sometimes referred to as 1003(g) ("Ten Oh Three Gee") grants because they are authorized under section 1003(g) of ESEA.
Sources
- Carole Perlman, Carol Chelemer, Sam Redding. Transformation Toolkit. Center on Innovation & Improvement.
- Comparing Turnaround and Transformation SIG Models. Education Northwest Dot Org.
- Alyson Klein. Turnaround Bill Would Give Congress' Stamp of Approval to SIG. EdWeek.
Greg Cruey - Greg Cruey is an educator and journalist. He works as an educational interventionist specializing in a small, rural school in Central ...
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