Now in its second year, the i3 program provided $650-million in its first year for grants to nonprofits and schools for innovative and proven approaches to improving student achievement.

The report, released this week by Bellwether Education Partners, is based on a survey and interviews with experts, program applicants, and philanthropists.

It says that i3 has heightened the importance of evidence—measuring results to prove that a program is working—particularly among foundations and other organizations that provided money to grant winners. It has also brought increased visibility and support to the grantees.

But this improvement came at a cost. Applicants that were not selected are worried that their reputation has suffered and they could lose private money—and coming close did not appear to help. An exposition sponsored by the Aspen Institute in January to showcase applicants that received high scores produced few new private grants for the organizations that did not win any federal aid.

Moreover, although it successfully emphasized evidence, the i3 program may have stifled proposals that were innovative. Grant winners tended to be organizations with extensive track records in education, including well-known nonprofits like Teach for America and the KIPP Foundation—derided by some as “the usual suspects.”

Meanwhile, for-profit organizations were barred from participating, which probably reduced the number of high-quality applications featuring innovative technology, the report said. The program’s larger grants required expensive experimental and quasi-experimental studies to measure results that few new or small organizations could afford.

Other innovations received mixed reviews.  The Foundation Registry, a Web site launched in 2010 to bring foundations together to share information and pool money for grant winners, drew praise from several participating foundations. One foundation executive said it prompted conversations about how to improve efficiencies through common applications and reporting forms.

It was less popular with grantees, who generally did not credit it with attracting money for their projects. Another Department of Education Web site intended to bring together donors and educational innovators, called the Open Innovation Portal, was criticized on similar grounds.

Despite the negatives, the report praises i3 for the increased attention it has brought to innovation in education and for its emphasis on awarding money based on research about what works. The final judgment may lie in the degree to which these lessons are extended to other, much larger programs that distribute grants according to a formula.

The grant amount is down from $650-million last year, when i3 first received money under the federal economic-stimulus program. That money went to 49 groups, including $50-million each to Teach for America, the alternative teacher-training program, and the Knowledge Is Power Program, also known as KIPP, which operates charter schools.

The department said applicants for this year’s grants must focus on one of the following:

• Turning around persistently low-performing schools.
• Supporting effective teachers and principals.
• Helping schools develop high standards and ways to assess quality.
• Increasing educational achievement and high-school graduation rates in rural schools.
• Promoting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

As in the first grant round, applicants who have the best track record in running successful programs will get the most money—up to $25-million. Grants of up to $15-million will be available for projects with less evidence of success, and up to $3-million for projects with potential but whose impact must be studied further.

The administration will continue to require applicants to get matching donations from private sources, but the amount has been lowered from last year’s requirement of 20 percent for all grants. This year, they will be asked to raise from 5 percent to 15 percent of the grant amount in private money, depending on the kind of award they get.

Last year, a dozen major foundations created the Foundation Registry to support i3 applicants. The list of participating foundations has since grown to several dozen.

Applications for the i3 grants will be due in August, and awards will be announced by December 31.

The new fund, called the Early Learning Challenge, will consume most of the $700-million that was allocated by Congress in April for Race to the Top, the grants program to help states improve the quality of their schools.

Like previous Race to the Top competitions, the Early Learning Challenge will award grants directly to states. The program will be administered jointly by the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services.

Many of the details about how the program will work will not be revealed until late summer. However, the administration said in a statement that states will be encouraged to make it easier for kids from needy families to get access to programs, to align their child-care and education programs, and create “robust evaluation systems.”

The federal government now provides more than $7-billion annually for Head Start early-learning programs and more than $5-billion for child care.

“Our goal is to transform disconnected programs with uneven quality and access into a coordinated system,” Arne Duncan, the education secretary, said in announcing the program.

Based on my conversations with administration officials, I expect the program will also encourage states to build, or further develop, systems to rate the quality of early-childhood programs. The administration has already said that low-performing Head Start programs will need to prove their effectiveness to get more money.

One senior administration official said the agencies are hoping to get foundations to provide money for the program, as they did for the Education Department’s Investing in Innovation and Promise Neighborhoods programs.

The grants will be awarded by December 31. The administration has not yet decided how many grants will be awarded or how large they will be. In the meantime, it is seeking ideas on a Department of Education blog.

Up until now, the Promise Neighborhoods program—the centerpiece of the President’s pledge—has received only temporary authority by Congress through annual spending bills.

Promise Neighborhoods is an important element of the Obama administration’s effort to promote innovative thinking in solving social problems.

In this case, the goal is to break down barriers between existing educational and social-service programs by creating umbrella groups that serve a wide array of needs in a single neighborhood. Under the approach, parents get prenatal attention and learn how to nurture a child, and family members and youngsters all participate in efforts to help kids make the transition to school, college, and career.

Nonprofits lead the neighborhood efforts, and much of the money to run them has come from private sources, including foundations and local United Ways.

To date, the program has received modest levels of federal support— just $10-million in 2010 and $30-million this year. The first year’s spending is now being used to help plan  projects in 21 communities that will integrate education and social services in poor neighborhoods. Those grantees will vie later this year for some of the 2011 money ,which will help them carry out those programs.

The program’s small size belies its importance, however. It is part of the administration’s overall emphasis on programs that have proven results and continuous measurement of success. In addition, nonprofit coalitions need to compete to win the money, putting the emphasis more on performance than on other factors that sometimes influence where federal money goes.

In the long run, the administration clearly envisions transforming many much larger social-service and educational programs, worth billions of dollars annually, along the same lines.

The new bill was introduced this week by Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa. It would authorize two kinds of grants: grants for nonprofits and grants for schools.

For both, nonprofits and schools would work together, but the lead applicant would differ in each case.

That is somewhat different from the administration’s original vision, in which nonprofits (like Harlem Children’s Zone) have played a stronger lead role. This change may have been made because local nonprofits in some smaller communities may lack the capacity to be strong lead applicants. It may also have been a political nod to the education establishment.

One notable improvement over the way Promise Neighborhoods works now is the bill’s emphasis on getting a large number of kids to participate in the education efforts.

The first round of Promise Neighborhoods grantees included several neighborhoods that were quite large.

But unless government and private organizations spend a lot of money, it will be impossible to serve a large percentage of children in each neighborhood.

So the bill emphasizes high participation rates and, indirectly, the idea of expanding slowly—much as the Harlem Children’s Zone itself did over the past decade. That project began with a zone just 24 blocks in size and grew to its current 97 blocks. Harlem Children’s Zone has said that at least 65 percent of young people in a neighborhood need to participate before the culture of the local community can be transformed.

The next step for the new bill is consideration in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which Mr. Harkin chairs.

The bill is unlikely to move ahead on its own, however. Instead, it is likely to be included as part of a larger renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (also known as No Child Left Behind), the principal federal law governing elementary and secondary education.

The fate of that larger bill will depend on the two parties in Congress reaching bipartisan agreement.

What is behind the drop in applications? It is hard to know, but there are several possible explanations.

First, there is a finite pool of potential applicants and many of those that were interested likely applied last year. Those that did and fell short may have been hesitant to reapply for fear of failing again, with all the potential embarrassment that might cause with local supporters. Indeed, of the 69 applicants in the first round last year, only seven reapplied this year.

Second, the uncertainty surrounding the corporation’s budget may have played a role. House Republicans had targeted the corporation and the Social Innovation Fund for elimination. If they had been successful, any work put into an application would have been lost.

Why are so many United Ways applying? One of the grantees in the first round was the United Way of Greater Cincinnati, which appears to have provided a model for other groups in the United Way’s network.

According to the corporation, most of the $49.9 million in funding this year ($50-million minus a 0.2-percent across-the-board cut that Congress imposed in its 2011 spending plan) will be used to extend the grants for the first year’s grant recipients.

The 18 new applicants requested a total of $24.6-million. According to the corporation, the final amount awarded will depend on:

• Money needed to support first-year grant recipients.
• The strength of second-year applications.
• The number of second-year applicants that receive multiyear grants.

The new grant winners, which must raise matching money and in turn award grants to nonprofit groups that do the work, are expected to be announced in August.

Following a controversy last summer over charges that its awards process was too secretive, the fund has fallen out of the headlines. But the 11 organizations that won a total of $50-million in the first round of grants have been quietly going about distributing the money to the nonprofit groups that will actually do the work.

Among the highlights of how the 11 groups decided to give away their money:

• The grant makers—which included groups like Venture Philanthropy Partners, United Way of Greater Cincinnati, and AIDS United—awarded money to 138 groups.

• When all private matching funds are secured, it is expected that they will have raised $130 million in additional money, bringing total social-innovation spending to $180 million. (The program requires both the grant makers and the nonprofits to raise $1 for every $1 they receive.)

• Beneficiaries of the grants spanned 28 states and the District of Columbia.

• The bulk of the awards, 87, went to projects on economic opportunity, followed by health, 21; youth development and school support, 21; and multi-issue projects, nine.

The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation received the largest federal grant, $10-million, or 20 percent of the total amount allotted. The foundation, which is known for its support of proven and innovative programs—including the Nurse-Family Partnership, Youth Villages, and Harlem Children’s Zone—awarded nine grants.

Its process of distributing the money illustrates how this new federal money is being put to work.

The foundation asked committees composed of foundation staff members; Bridgespan, the nonprofit consulting firm; and MDRC, an education and social-policy research organization, to select winners from among 225 proposals. They ranked applicants according to the strength of the proposed programs, ability to evaluate results, organizational leadership, financial and organizational strength, capacity to manage growth, and geography.

As an example of how grant winners showed they could get results, BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life), was able to point to an evaluation by the Urban Institute–one that used a control group to figure out if participants in its summer-reading program did better than kids from similar neighborhoods and backgrounds who did not get the special help. The evaluation showed that the program did indeed make a difference.

BELL will use its $2-million grant to expand the summer program, strengthen its financial-development strategy, and conduct a broader study that will see if the program is achieving results as it spreads to new locations.

At the national level, the Social Innovation Fund, which is housed in the Corporation for National and Community Service, is setting up an online “learning community” to allow all of the social-innovation grant recipients to share documents. It hopes eventually to open this community to the public.

The fund is also gearing up for a second round of grants. In its recent budget compromise for 2011, Congress allocated $50-million again for 2011, although that will be reduced by a 0.2 percent across-the-board cut that was part of the package.

The federal efforts are being supplemented with management assistance from Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. The organization, which received just over $4-million from 22 foundations to help broaden the impact of the Social Innovation Fund, has released a new report under its “Scaling What Works” project. The report offers advice based on interviews with three of the organizations distributing social-innovation money.

Among the lessons? Their experience with the Social Innovation Fund “opened their eyes to the challenges facing nonprofit organizations that rely on grants from government and philanthropic institutions.”

The report suggests that the grant makers consider reducing administrative requirements for their grantees so they can focus more of their limited resources on their missions.

It also happens to center on a vitally important issue: education.

Less well known (and perhaps less advanced) is a second movement that has been brewing for several years. It has its own controversies and its own central players. They include the organizations in America Forward, a coalition of nonprofits that promote social enterprise and innovation, and journals like the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

They also include organizations with a foot in each movement, such as the Harlem Children’s Zone, KIPP charter schools, and New Leaders for New Schools. Moreover, like the education-overhaul movement, this one focuses on important and seemingly intractable problems, like persistent poverty.

This blog, Public Measures, will cover major developments in this growing nonprofit movement, particularly the efforts of the Obama administration, which has hired many of its key players and absorbed many of its ideas. Topics will include:

• Public innovation. We will track several Obama-administration programs whose explicit aim is promoting innovation in the  nonprofit world, including the Social Innovation Fund and the Education Department’s Investing in Innovation and Promise Neighborhoods programs.
• Data and evidence. More than its predecessors, this administration is requiring grant recipients to collect data and measure their performance. How are these changes taking place? What difference are they having?
• Competition. The administration’s new programs emphasize grant competitions over the long-favored government approach of giving money to any groups that qualifies. What effect does this have on the nonprofit world?
• Philanthropy’s role. The administration is working directly with private foundations in many of these programs. We will track their work and major contributions.

This blog will feature a mix of news, links to major new resources and reports, and opinions.

It won’t truly be a success, however, unless it also includes the thoughts and opinions of people who are working to solve social problems every day. We want to hear from you.