Where Has the $3.5 Billion in School Improvement Grant Money Gone?

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New Education Sector Chart Reveals Some Surprising Answers

Washington D.C.—In the last year, the federal government has invested $3.5 billion dollars in an effort to fix the nation's bottom 5 percent of public schools. In the coming months, it will roll out another $546 million dollars to do the same.The School Improvement Grant (SIG) program is the largest pot of federal funds ever aimed at improving a discrete set of the worst-performing schools.

SIG grantees are eligible for up to an unprecedented $6 million dollars per school over a three-year period to implement one of four reform models. So far, 843 schools from 49 states and the District of Columbia have been selected as SIG grantees, and the combined grants are expected to serve 594,117 students. What do these schools look like? What reform models have they chosen?

A Portrait of School Improvement Grantees takes an early look at how the $3.5 billion has been allocated and how it is being used. Using publicly available data from a variety of sources, author Padmini Jambulapati provides an in-depth look at the schools that received the SIG awards.

Nationwide, many SIG grantees look a lot like the schools that typically receive the majority of federal dollars—large, low-performing, traditional public schools that are highly segregated, low-income, and in urban areas. More than half have African-American/Latino populations that are 86 percent or higher; the median free/reduced lunch rate is 78 percent; and around 58 percent of the schools are located in urban areas.

But that is not the complete picture. A significant number of schools receiving SIG funding are charter schools. These schools were created with the express purpose of being easily closed due to poor performance. However, 58 charter schools (22 of them in Texas) are grant recipients. This illustrates the difficulty in closing any school—nationwide, just 2 percent of schools selected the closure option.

There also are no guarantees that the funding is reaching the neediest schools. For example, Stanford New School, which already receives $3,000 per student more than the typical California school, is slated to receive $3 million in SIG funding over the next three years.

The SIG program signals a shift in federal funding strategy toward prioritizing high-poverty rural schools, Jambulapati notes. While over half the schools are located in urban areas, 18 percent are rural and 17 percent are suburban schools. And 49 percent of grantees are high schools, which signals another shift in the distribution of federal dollars, since the vast majority of Title I money goes to elementary schools.

The information is available in an interactive map. Here, readers can sort data by state, school district, or reform model selected. Each dot on the map represents one school. Clicking on the dot reveals the school's location, population, and the amount SIG funds awarded. There is also a link to the school's application for funding.

Education Sector is also offering readers the opportunity to download all the data that provides the foundation for this report. So researchers, policymakers, or others interested in school reform can use the information compiled here for their own analysis.

Read A Portrait of School Improvement Grantees and explore the interactive map.