Angela Hernandez-Marshall 971K PDF:
We have completed our review of applications received under the Smaller Learning Communities Program (CFDA 84.215L) [MMSD SLC Application]. The Department received a total of 236 eligible applications in this competition. Of these, 38 were selected for funding. Unfortunately, your application was not selected for funding this year.
Each application received a comprehensive review b y external reviewers who had experience implementing, documenting, or evaluating policies, programs, or practices at the national, state, or district level to improve the academic achievement of public high school students. Panel members included teachers, school, district, and state administrators, technical assistance providers, education researchers and program evaluators. Using the criteria published in the Federal Register notice, three reviewers independently rated each application and documented strengths and weaknesses.
The Department does not return copies of unfunded application to the applicant but we will retain a copy of your application until the end of this calendar year in the event that you wish to discuss it with us. We are enclosing a copy of the reviewers’ evaluations and comments, which you may use to strengthen your proposal for future competitions. To that end, please check our website beginning in November 2007 for information about the next Smaller Learning Communities grants competition: http://www.ed.gov/programs/slcp/applicant.html.
We appreciate the time and thought that went into the planning and preparation of your application. Your ongoing school improvement efforts are critical to improving educational services that will meet the unique needs o f high school students. Again, we do regret that we are unable to support your application and thank you for your effort.
Please forward any further inquiries to me at smallerlearningcornmunities@ed.gov.
The first reviewer noted (page 3) that “(5) As part of the district’s strategic planing there is no examination of the successes and weaknesses of previous SLC initiatives (pages 15-16).”.
Related, via Jeff Henriques:
- District SLC Grant – Examining the Data from Earlier Grants, Part 1 (Memorial High School)
- Reviewing the Data from Earlier SLC Grants, Part 2 (Madison West High School)
- Part 3, Community Connection data from West High School, another major goal of the grant.
- Where does the MMSD get its numbers from?
Thanks for posting this. Can someone please unpack this a little bit? Does this mean that West did not receive their grant for further funding their SLC initiative? and that the reason they did not receive it is the lack of a process to collect and analyze data to see whether the SLC approach has the intended effects?
Who has primary responsibility for the whole process (both grant application and analysis of data)? Is it based at the school or at the district level?
The rejection of the grant now gives the school board time to discuss and seek input on whether the small learning communities, as proposed, will raise the academic performance of students at all points on the spectrum.
A decision of this import should not be left to administrators alone.
A quick review of the evaluation showed me that MMSD was not funded due to some quite trivial errors of omission. The evaluation done by DOE seems to be quite mechanical, and the evaluation of truthfuless of the submission was not part of the process. This is as I had expected.
These grant proposals are like resume’s and the acceptance or non-acceptance of a proposal is like a prospective employer culling out the best based on some superficial review — except the winners get money. I expect the submissions are mostly puffing. I wonder if the winners’ references are even checked.
Of course, my desire would be for those receiving the grant to have the competence to make real progress and success in teaching their kids. But, I don’t believe for a moment any grant recipient will do so. Certainly the prior grants MMSD received were of no value to the students and their education.
So, it would have been nice, for purely selfish reasons, for MMSD to have received the grant — it would have been a complete waste of money, but it least it would be money spent with the community — some of our wasted taxpayer money coming back to us. Now, instead, the money goes to waste in another community.
“(1) The district conducted extensive focus groups that sought the input of teachers, parents and community members (page 8). ” was rated by the panel as “No weaknesses”.
I was at one parents/community session. The quality of the thinking and preparation within the MMSD administration as represented by the questionaires, and discussion was embarrassingly low. And the input requested from parents/community was absurd.
Attending this MMSD forum was like walking into a sheltered workshop, the inmates babbling about one thing or another, but without the motivation or sincerity. The only qualification these people seem to have brought into such an important discussion is a functioning brain-stem.
Regarding now a review of the value of SLCs is quite silly. There cannot be any discussion of value without substantive data to analyze and none were gathered, and people competent and interested in getting at whatever truths can be gleaned. Such data and such ability is quite absent. So any discussion held on the matter will be devoid of relevance.
Hello Kay,
I think the grant was written by the district with input from staff and parents at each high school. You bring up a good question about what will happen at West (and all the other high schools) as far as SLC. Does anyone know the answer?
Very briefly —
The West SLC grant was for the three-year period beginning in the fall of 2003 and ending in the spring of 2006, thus we are currently in the second post-grant school year. Lack of additional DOE funds does not mean West will be discontinuing/dismantling the structural and curricular changes that were made during the grant years. (On the contrary, lack of additional DOE funds may not even keep the District from making some of the changes — at West and at the other three high schools — that were proposed in the recently rejected grant.)
IMHO, Larry is correct in much of what he says about the process by which the District-wide grant was written and why it was rejected. Assistant Superintendent Pam Nash led a grant-writing team that consisted of one or two staff members from each high school. For example, West SLC Coordinator — and former FACE teacher — Heather Lott was the lead representative from West.
I attended both the community-wide input session and the West HS focus group. The former was completely scripted and controlled by the Administration (even at the meeting itself there were many complaints about that) and the latter wound up being more about why we still didn’t have PTSO officers for the following year in mid-June. (Of note, that discussion more than touched on parental demoralization, due to unhappiness with both the process and content of recent changes at West.) I highly doubt that information from either of these two sessions was made use of by the grant-writers.
The recent grant was not rejected for any single or particular reason. A point or two here and there adds up. We simply had fewer points than Milwaukee.
Jim highlighted the first (of the three) reviewer’s comment about the absence in the MMSD grant of information about the results of the West and Memorial “pilot projects” because he (Jim) is highly intelligent and because he intuitively understands the commonsense importance of building on the successes and failures of previous work.
Unfortunately, the DOE does not. We were told by someone at DOE that the agency is years behind the behavioral sciences when it comes to rigorously reviewing and thoughtfully funding proposals. Indeed, if you look at the cover letter that accompanies the three reviews (first page), you will see that many of the reviewers of the SLC grants have no training or background in research. It was shocking to be told that — more likely than not — no one will pay attention to whether you actually did what you said you were going to do in any previous grant you might have received from the agency, much less whether or not you actually got the results you hoped to. If you check out the links Jim provides, you will learn that neither Memorial nor West got the results they had hoped to, and that West didn’t even do much of what it said it was going to.
FYI, the DOE is shifting the timing of its grant cycle so that awards are announced in the spring semester, not as a new school year is starting. The next cycle will be announced in November, with the deadline for submission not too long after that.