The Interior Department
Grant program didn’t produce desired results
is tweeting again after an agencywide freeze spurred by tweets that seemed adverse to Trump.
WASHINGTON — One of the Obama administration’s signature efforts in education, which pumped billions of federal dollars into overhauling the nation’s worst schools, failed to produce meaningful results, according to a federal analysis.
Test scores, graduation rates and college enrollment were no different in schools that received money through the School Improvement Grants program — the largest federal investment ever targeted to failing schools — than that did not.
The Education Department published the findings on the website of its research division last week, hours before President Barack Obama’s political appointees left.
“We’re talking about millions of kids who are assigned to these failing schools, and we just spent several billion dollars promising them things were going to get better,” said Andy Smarick, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who was long skeptical that the strategy would work. “Think of what all that money could have been spent on instead.”
The School Improvement Grants program has been around since the administration in schools of President George W. Bush, but it received an enormous boost under Obama.
The administration funneled $7 billion into the program between 2010 and 2015.
Arne Duncan, Obama’s education secretary from 2009 to 2016, said his aim was to turn around 1,000 schools every year for five years.
“This outcome reminds us that turning around our lowest-performing schools is some of the hardest, most complex work in education and that we don’t yet have solid evidence on effective, replicable, comprehensive school improvement strategies,” said Dorie Nolt, an Education Department spokeswoman.