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California’s Supplemental Education Services (SES): What Gives?

California’s Supplemental Educational Services program looks a bit curious when you first study it: the grant-like program isn’t really a grant program, per se. It’s a competition designed to, as we said in the Seliger Funding Report:

apply for state approval of the applicant’s capability to provide before- and after-school tutoring to remedy academic deficiencies in low-income and at-risk youth. Once approved, the applicant can receive contracts from CA LEAs to provide such tutoring services. The SES program is a federal pass-through program and is available in all states.

(The link is ours, naturally.)

If you’re “funded”—although “selected” is a more appropriate verb here—you’ll be able to seek contracts with school districts throughout the state. Those contracts can be very lucrative. If you want to apply, however, you’ve got to do a two-step dance, and the application we link to in the first sentence is the first step.

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Behind the Article: Las Vegas’s Clark County and Race To The Top—District (RTTT-D)

In a press release masquerading as a news article, The Las Vegas Sun claims that the Clark County School District—the big one that covers Vegas—doesn’t want to apply for Race To The Top—District funds because they have “too many strings attached.” The strings aren’t that different from those that come with any very large grant program. And most of those strings are imaginary anyway.

Which means there’s something else going on.

The reporter, Paul Takahashi, writes, “There is also an expectation that school districts scale up these innovations after the Race to the Top pilot program ends, said Kimberly Wooden, chief student services officer.” Notice the weasel words: “There is also an expectation.” An expectation from who? How? In another choice quote, Takahashi writes:

“It’s a great idea, but in order to bring it to scale in a district our size, it may require technology,” Wooden said, adding there may be additional costs incurred to the School District to implement this technology.

Getting a grant that “may require technology”—whatever that means—sounds like a tremendous trial. This is the second example of weasel words I’ve quoted, and there are others.

It’s highly likely that there’s something else going on behind the scenes. Here are some possibilities:

  • The school district actually wants to apply, but it doesn’t like some aspect of the competition and wants a waiver or exception. As such, it’s threatening to take its ball and go home if the Department of Education doesn’t play by its rules. This kind of article might help get that exception. The district might be looking for a signal or reassurance from the feds.
  • As an addendum to the bullet above, the school district might already be negotiating with the Department of Education, and this kind of public statement is part of the negotiation process.
  • The district thinks it doesn’t have a real shot at the grant and wants to preemptively cover its ass by announcing that it doesn’t want the grant anyway. This yields a story to tell reporters and angry parents at school board meetings.
  • The district has already screwed up something we don’t know about.
  • There is some political reason the district, the teachers union, the city counsel, the mayor, the governor, or another political entity doesn’t want the district to apply (this is an election year, too, and RTTT-D is one of the rare Federal programs that generates mainstream media coverage; in addition, although presidential politics might not be the driving force, Slate.com’s John Dickerson thinks Obama has a shot in Nevada). Perhaps there’s already a deal in place to offer more or less restricted money.

It’s possible that the district’s story as presented by Takahashi is true. It’s just highly unlikely. The political people and grant writers at the district know or should know the difference between the proposal world and the real world. They know that you have to apply to get the money (one of the school board members says as much). They know there’s a fair amount of money available, and that it would be a handy PR win if the district got the reward, and, moreover, most people and institutions like money. Given those facts, the stated reason for not applying—which amounts to, “it’s too hard”—doesn’t pass the smell test.

This kind of speculation only makes sense in the context of a district large enough to generate political gravity. Smaller districts that claim they don’t want to apply are probably simply telling the truth, or don’t have the political will to apply. For a very large district, like this one, which has access to grant writers or funds for grant writing consultants, something else is almost certainly going on, and the Las Vegas Sun is only being used as a messenger.

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Upward Bound means more narrative confusion

The Upward Bound deadline passed, but the RFP lingers on in my mind like a foul meal.

The RFP was an extraordinary work of indirection, with 130-something pages of instructions supporting a 72-page narrative (counting “Competitive Priorities”). Upward Bound is one of the Department of Education’s “TRIO” programs—there used to be three: Upward Bound, Educational Opportunity Centers, and Student Supportive Services, but now there are five or six. Another TRIO program, Educational Opportunity Centers (“EOC”), was released last May, and that RFP is particularly close to my heart because I used its “Plan of operation” section to teach my University of Arizona students technical writing. The EOC RFP was also overly long and overly verbose, but its similarity to Upward Bound meant that looking at that proposal would help me with the new one.

It also included a trap, because the Department of Education made subtle but real changes between the way they phrased requirements from one program to the other. For example, under “Project Need” in EOC, the first two major headers said something like, “Low-incomes in the target area” and “High percentage of target area residents with education completion levels below the baccalaureate level.” The UB RFP says, “The income level of families in the target area is low” and “The education attainment level of adults in the target area is low.” So an applicant who applies for both EOC and UB can reuse data—but a straight copy-paste will result in the Department of Education knowing that you’ve done so. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Department of Education does this intentionally, like Van Halen and their legendary M&M Rider:

The rider’s “Munchies” section was where the group made its candy-with-a-caveat request: “M&M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).” While the underlined rider entry has often been described as an example of rock excess, the outlandish demand of multimillionaires, the group has said the M&M provision was included to make sure that promoters had actually read its lengthy rider. If brown M&M’s were in the backstage candy bowl, Van Halen surmised that more important aspects of a performance–lighting, staging, security, ticketing–may have been botched by an inattentive promoter.

Van Halen uses brow M&M’s as a signal, and the Department of Education is using section headers the same way. If your section headers are identical to the EOC section heads, your proposal will be thrown out altogether, or at least have its points lowered.

There are other perils stashed in this RFP, too: its writers practically hide the location of the material you’re supposed to respond to. The RFP directs you to page 102, but the actual narrative requirement in the form of the “selection criteria” to which you’re supposed to respond starts on page 70 (of a 132-page RFP). And the narrative section lists “Objectives” on page 71, but you have to be cognizant enough to know that you have to copy the objectives listed on page 93.

Read and tread carefully when preparing to write a grant proposal.

EDIT: A former Department of Education reviewer wrote us to say:

I read with interest your article on Upward Bound grants in which you spoke of “traps” by the Department of Education. You clearly are experienced and are doing a great service for fledgling grants writers. However, I have served as a reader for several TRIO programs, and my experience is that the Department of Education NEVER puts traps in their RFPs. They work very hard to see that readers are fair and generally positive about the grant process. Of course, they also want consistency to keep down on appeals. The reason that I am writing is that you are doing your readers a disservice by making them think that there is a “magic phrase” that might result in acceptance for funding or rejection of a grant. The Department of Education wants writers to address the problems in a straightforward manner and teachers readers to reward clear writing.

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September 2011 Links: Understanding Expenses, the Freelance Revolution, Skirt Length, College Life, Schools, Software, and More

* The Tyranny of Silly Expense Control Rules; notice the comment from yours truly.

* The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time. People are, in other words, repurposing their jobs. A lot of academics in the humanities appear to be completely missing this. In addition, you might want to emphasize this fact in your job training proposals, much like social media.

* Speaking of college life: “Smart Girls Wear Short Skirts, Too: Stop Complaining About College Students.”

* The FDA should be limited to establishing safety, which I find convincing for reasons demonstrated by Cowen and Grove.

* The Real Problem With College Admissions: It’s Not the Rankings. Notice especially the graph.

* I don’t often agree with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial line, but “The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School” has it about right:

In case you needed further proof of the American education system’s failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That’s the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio’s Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.

An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father’s address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher’s license she had been working on. [. . .]

Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children.

I knew some kids in high school who used this trick; one day, I gave a guy a ride home after working on the school newspaper and was surprised at how far he lived from campus. He told me that his parents used his uncle’s address to smuggle him in.

* Is barefoot running (using shoes like the “Vibram Five-Fingers” I wear) “better” for you? Yes, if you land on your forefoot. If you still land on your heel, however, they’re probably worse. This, however, would be pretty damn unnatural.

* My job is to watch dreams die. My job is to make dreams live; I think it works out better for me.

* One Path to Better Jobs: More Density in Cities.

* File this under “no shit:”

But to many education experts, something is not adding up — here and across the country. In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.

This conundrum calls into question one of the most significant contemporary educational movements.

Remember: there is no silver bullet for education.

* The New Pants Revue, by Bruce Sterling: “Since I’m a blogger and therefore a modern thought-leader type, my favorite maker of pants sent me some new-model pants in the mail:”

I should explain now why I have been wearing “5.11 Tactical” trousers for a decade. It’s pretty simple: before that time, I wore commonplace black jeans, for two decades. Jeans and tactical pants are the same school of garment. They’re both repurposed American Western gear. I’m an American and it’s common for us to re-adapt our frontier inventions.”

(Hat tip Charlie Stross.)

* The most important post you haven’t read and probably won’t read: Great Stagnation…or Great Relocation?:

Suppose all of those people had the same purchasing power. If you were a factory owner, and you wanted to minimize transport costs, where would you put your factories? The answer is a no-brainer: China and India. Some others in Europe, Japan, and Indonesia. Perhaps a couple on the U.S. East Coast. But for the most part, you’d laugh in the face of any consultant who told you to put a factory in the U.S. The place looks like one giant farm!

It may be that American manufacturing strength was due to a historical accident. Here is the story I’m thinking of. First, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, our proximity to Europe – at that time the only agglomerated Core in the world – allowed us to serve as a low-cost manufacturing base. Then, after World War 2, the U.S. was the only rich capitalist economy not in ruins, so we became the new Core. But as Europe and Japan recovered, our lack of population density made our manufacturing dominance short-lived.

Now, with China finally free of its communist constraints, economic activity is reverting to where it ought to be. More and more, you hear about companies relocating to China not for the cheap labor, but because of the huge domestic market. This is exactly the New Economic Geography in action.

* California or Bust. Isaac may also write a post on this.

* Student choice, employment skills, and grade inflation.

* People respond to incentives, example #14,893:

Top officials [in the Social Security Administration], in a bid to meet goals to win promotions or thousands of dollars in bonuses, directed many employees to refrain from issuing decisions on cases until next week, according to judges and union officials. This likely would delay benefits paid to thousands of Americans with pending applications, many of whom are financially needy and have waited for a government decision for more than a year.

* Demand for software developers is still high.

* Two thousand years in one chart, or, “we make a lot of stuff these days.”

* This is how you catch someone’s attention with the lead: “I became a feminist the day my sixth-grade math teacher dismembered and spit on a white rose, telling us, ‘This is you after you have sex.’

* How Suburban Sprawl Works Like a Ponzi Scheme.

* Hiring Locally for Farm Work Is No Cure-All.

* “The Numbers Behind What’s Your Number?: How many sex partners has the average American woman had—and does anyone still care?” My guess tends towards “no,” and that the number of think “no” increases with age.

* Why Businessmen Wear Black Hats in the Movies:

Why don’t the movies have plausible, real world villains anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic minorities and physically handicapped people to Army and CIA veterans, now maintain a liaison in Hollywood to protect their image. The studios themselves often have an “outreach program” in which executives are assigned to review scripts and characters with representatives from these groups, evaluate their complaints, and attempt to avoid potential brouhahas.

Finding evil villains is not as easy as it was in the days when a director could choose among Nazis, Communists, KGB, and Mafiosos.

This has the unfortunate side effect of decreasing realism and / or pandering to obviousness; no one is going to argue Nazis aren’t bad guys.

* For the performing arts, this is the moment where recession turns into depression. See data at the link.

* Filed under “duh:” “The e-book marketplace is redefining what people expect to pay for books.”

* “[T]he broader point really is the cliche: this is what it looks like when “the terrorists win” and we lose the long-term struggle to protect a free society.” From James Fallows.

* Awesome: NASA revealed on Wednesday a design for its next colossal rocket that is to serve as the backbone for exploration of the solar system for the coming decades.

* Some real Shock and Awe: Racially profiled and cuffed in Detroit.

* Better Business Bureau (BBB) accreditation appears to be bullshit, since the organization will rescind accreditation if you criticize it.

* Finally, for those of you who made it to the end: “Steve Jobs passes and the Internet speaks.”

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September 2011 Links: How to Meet Your Program Officer, The Death of Books, Mistakes in Thinking Outside the Box, Handwriting, Education, and More

* How to meet not only your program officer, but the US Attorney as well: “D.C. Government Claims Nonprofit Used Grant Money to Open Strip Club.” This is especially brazen; everyone knows that programs occur a certain amount of indirect costs, but that’s considerably different than out-and-out fraud.

* Reminder: in the age of the death of the book, “Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1 percent increase since 2008.

* Charities Struggle With Smaller Wall Street Donations, although this probably isn’t news to GWC readers.

* The Legislation That Could Kill Internet Privacy for Good.

* Why the Real Estate Recession is Halting Divorces.

* The grant of the week, courtesy of a reader: “Co-Management for Sibsistenceuse of Pacific Walrus.” That is in fact how it appeared at Grants.gov.

* News flash: college students like drinking because it alleviates social anxiety and enables hooking up. File this under, “I could’ve told them that.” If you’re running a Enforcing Underage Drinking Laws Discretionary Program: University/College Initiative or Capacity Building Initiative for Substance Abuse program, you should keep articles like this in mind. People don’t binge drink to become cautionary tales. They do it because it’s fun.

* Speaking of college life: “Smart Girls Wear Short Skirts, Too: Stop Complaining About College Students.”

* “Two years after it was awarded $186 million in federal stimulus money to weatherize drafty homes, California has spent only a little over half that sum and has so far created the equivalent of just 538 full-time jobs in the last quarter, according to the State Department of Community Services and Development.” That’s from the New York Times, “Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises.”

* What happens to doctors who think outside the box? Answer: nothing good. Kind of like grant writers who think outside the box.

* If you can get FiOS, you should.

* Broadcasting and Narrowcasting: “Generalized interventions tend to affect everyone a little bit, but they don’t close achievement gaps. Narrowly targeted interventions make large differences on a small scale; they help close gaps, but they don’t do much for the overall completion number.” If you’re not reading this blog about community college life, you probably should be.

* Handwriting Horror: Nation of adults who will write like children?

* Why Software Is Eating The World by Marc Andreessen—one of the most impressive essays I’ve read recently.

* CIA’s ‘Facebook’ Program Dramatically Cut Agency’s Costs.

* A Federal Register API? Shocking!

* Charlie Stross, interesting as usual:

In the period 1997-2010 in the UK, Parliament created an average of one new criminal offence for every day the House of Commons was in session. I asked a couple of legal experts how many actual chargeable offences there were in the English legal system; they couldn’t give an exact answer but suggested somewhere in the range 5,000-20,000. The situation in the USA is much, much worse, with different state and federal legal systems and combinations of felonies; the true number of chargeable felonies may be over a million, and this situation is augmented by a tax code so large that no single human being can be familiar with all of it (but failure to comply is of course illegal).

Now, most of the time most of these laws don’t affect most of us. But there’s a key principle of law, that ignorance is no defence: I’m willing to bet that most human beings are guilty of one or more crimes, be it smoking a joint or speeding or forgetting to declare earnings or failing to file the paperwork for some sort of permit we don’t even know exists. We are all potentially criminals.

* Note: there is no evidence that birth control actually causes weight gain.

* Does a Moleskine notebook tell the truth? Answer: probably not. I’ve been trying various notebooks over the years and have probably settled on the Rhodia Webbie, an unfortunately named but quite nice notebook that appears much more durable than its competitors. I am disappointed with Moleskines.

* The “overlearning the game” problem.

* On English as a language:

[. . .] there’s no subject, however technical or complex, that can’t be made clear to any reader in good English—if it’s used right. Unfortunately, there are many ways of using it wrong

This should remind you of our post, How to Write About Something You Know Nothing About: It’s Easy, Just Imagine a Can Opener.

* A Tough Job, but Someone’s Gotta Do It. A jobs-training proposal that looks straight out of, well, a proposal.

* College football as seen by a (British?) person acting as an anthropologist.

* PicPlum calls itself “the easiest way to send photos.” I ordered some and they turned out quite nicely.

* Text Slang for Adults. Sample: “NSR = Need some roughage”; “T4W = Time for whiskey.”

* Contrary to popular belief, riots might not mean much of anything:

But across U.S. cities, there has never been much of a link between unrest and either inequality or poverty. In fact, the riots of the 1960s were actually slightly more common in cities that had more government spending. Riots were significantly less common in the South, where the Jim Crow laws were making their long overdue exit. This isn’t to say that many people involved in riots don’t have valid grievances, but plenty of people have serious grievances and don’t riot.

* He Sexts, She Sexts More, Report Says, this from the NYT.

* How Cisco’s “unmitigated gall” derailed one man’s life.

* Recession worsens racial wealth gap; women and minorities hurt most.

* This may be the most impressive blog comment I’ve ever read (it’s from Cory Doctorow):

Education is a public good. It is best supplied and paid for by the group as a whole, because no individual or small collective can produce the overall social benefit that the nation can provision collectively.

Education doesn’t respond well to market forces because many of the social goods that arise from education — socialization, a grounding in civics, historical context, rational and systematic reasoning — are not goods or services demanded by a market, but rather they are the underlying substrate that allows people to intelligently conduct transactions in a marketplace as well as establishing and maintaining good governance.

There is a long and wide body of evidence that people with wide, solid educational foundations that transcend mere vocational skills produce societies that are more prosperous, more transparent, healthier, more democratic — that attain, in short, all the things we hope markets will attain for us.

* “There are many studies of the stimulus, but finally there is one which goes behind the numbers to see what really happened. And it’s not an entirely pretty story.”

* Although For a Standout College Essay, Applicants Fill Their Summers doesn’t say as much, it’s actually about how hard it is for lower-and middle-class students to get into elite colleges.

* Born, and Evolved, to Run.

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May 2011 Links: Redevelopment Agencies, Word Dangers, Bribery, Education, Buildings, and More

* “Builders [in California] are lashing out against a provision in Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed budget that would eliminate the state’s 425 redevelopment agencies, local authorities that pay for low-income housing as well as roads, sidewalks and other infrastructure.”

* Microsoft Word Now Includes Squiggly Blue Line To Alert Writer When Word Is Too Advanced For Mainstream Audience.

* Charging Ahead: To speed along the success of the electric car, improvements in battery chemistry will matter as much as the price of oil. The 1976 program referred to in this review is the one for which Isaac wrote the funded DOE electric vehicle grant in 1979 (see also No Experience, No Problem: Why Writing a Department of Energy (DOE) Proposal Is Not Hard For A Good Grant Writer).

* A Book in Every Home, and Then Some. Remember our post on the open secrets of grant writing.

* Neil Gaiman: Why defend freedom of icky speech?

* To reduce bribery, make it legal (on one side).

* Long After Microsoft, Allen and Gates Cast Shadows Over City, that city being Seattle.

* The educational value of booze. The evidence is weak but I like the conclusion anyway because it flatters my own prejudices.

* The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels.

* The secret sex lives of teachers, which notes, “there is clearly something irresistible about teachers with decidedly adult extracurricular activities.”

* Squeezed Cities Ask Nonprofits for More Money.

* The problem with big, pretty projects in the context of the Three Cups of Tea scandal, as opposed to running those projects once you have them:

“Schools are really easy,” says Saundra Schimmelpfennig, whose organization, Good Intents, seeks to educate donors about nonprofits. “Any kind of a building is really easy to raise funding for, because it is something donors can wrap their minds around. They can see it. They can touch it. It is a one-time expense, not an ongoing or operational cost, which is harder to raise money for. But it is perhaps the least important part of education and the most inflexible as well. Spending all that money building schools is actually pretty questionable.”

This is also a problem Edward Glaeser discusses in “The Edifice Complex,” a chapter from The Triumph of the City:

The tendency to think that a city can build itself out of decline is an example of the edifice error, the tendency to think that abundant new building leads to urban success. Successful cities typically do build, because economic vitality makes people willing to pay for space and builders are happy to accommodate. But building is the result, not the cause, of success. Overbuilding a declining city that already has more structures than it needs is nothing but folly.

Remember: your organization is built out of people, not objects.

* Why we’ve reached the end of the camera megapixel race.

* Compton’s racial divide.

* Normally I think the day-to-day of politics is stupid and cruel, but some meta political commentary can be amusing, along the observation of hypocrisy. Like in this New York Times column: “What is it with Republicans lately? Is there something about being a leader of the family-values party that makes you want to go out and commit adultery?”

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Talent Search RFP Finally Published — But What A Stupid Deadline

Last Sunday I posed the question, “Searching for Talent Search: Where Oh Where Has the Talent Search RFP Gone And Why is It A Secret?.” I still don’t know why the RFP release date was a secret, but on Wednesday, the Department of Education finally published the Talent Search application instructions. Hallelujah, or as my now 24 year old son used to say at about age five, “Hallalulah!”

One minor problem: The deadline is December 28, dead center between Christmas and New Years Day. I wonder why the Department of Education would pick such a dumb deadline. A quick check of the calendar reveals that Christmas and New Years Day fall on Saturdays. Anybody who has worked for a public agency will know that almost all Talent Search employees will, at a minimum, take off December 24 and 31, and most will be on vacation from December 24 through at least January 3. Most folks want to combine vacation days with holidays and quasi-holidays to stretch out their time off.

Thus, there will be no one home to look at proposals submitted on December 28. Likely, because of the hullabaloo in D.C. with the start of the new Congress on January 3 and MLK day on January 17 (another opportunity to stretch a three day weekend into ten days off), not much will likely happen with Talent Search applications until at least the third week in January.

So why make Talent Search applicants work right through Christmas? The Talent Search team is either venal or just plain stupid. As Forrest Gump observed, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

You be the judge. Of course, if you really want to have a Happy Holiday, let us slave over your hot Talent Search proposal and you can hit those day after Xmas sales to do your part to bring the economy back.

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Here They Come: RFPs Are Thundering Down the Plain, So Look out for the Carol M. White Physical Education Program (PEP), Upward Bound, Choice Neighborhoods, REACH CORE and More

In the somewhat interminable but occasionally engaging Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner finally ingratiates himself with his Sioux neighbors by telling them that the “tatonka” (buffalo) are suddenly thundering nearby. Last February, I asked Where Have All the RFPs Gone? Well, the FY ’10 grant tatonka are finally here and the distant noise you hear is the sound of federal grant opportunities. Work fast, because this herd will have come and gone by the end of the federal fiscal year on September 30.

For example, the Department of Education finally issued RFPs for the Carol M. White Physical Education Program (PEP), the High School Graduation Initiative, Personnel Development To Improve Services and Results for Children With Disabilities, and the Fund for the Improvement of Secondary Education (FIPSE) last week.

In 2008, the FIPSE RFP was issued on March 21. This year, it was issued on June 14. Under normal circumstances, this could be chalked up to random variation in funders. This year, that’s much less likely because of the stimulus madness that continues to work through the federal system. The good news about FIPSE: in 2008 it had $2,584,000 for seven grants. This year it has $27,307,000 for 37 grants. This isn’t the only program that’s seen a massive money increase: Personnel Development To Improve Services and Results for Children With Disabilities has gone from $1,500,000 in total funding to $22,900,000.

We heard from a client recently (we wrote their funded Upward Bound proposal in the last funding round about four years ago) that RFPs for both Upward Bound and Talent Search will soon be issued by the Department of Education. It is unusual for RFPs for two “TRIO” programs to be issued in one fiscal year, but this is no usual year.

On the community development front, HUD has about 35 or so competitive grant programs, but only one or two NOFAs (HUD-speak for “RFP”) have been issued this year, which means there are more than 30 to go. Another client, for whom we wrote a funded Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control (LBPHC) Program proposal last year, was just at the grantee meeting. The HUD program officer told the group that all of the NOFAs are late this year (duh!) but would be issued with short turnarounds—just like the Department of Education RFPs listed above. Expect to hear HUD hooves in the distance for such old faves LBPHC, Healthy Homes, various Housing Choice Voucher—formerly called Section 8— programs and lots more soon. There will be a HUD NOFA stampede.

In a tease of goodies to come, HUD just released a “Pre-NOFA” for an entirely new competitive program, Choice Neighborhoods. This is not to be confused the Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhood Program, for which the RFP process concludes next week, even though both are new programs that can be used to fund more or less the same activities. Choice Neighborhoods will have $65,000,000 up for grabs once the HUD program officers can shovel the NOFA out the door, which should be within a few weeks. I’ve never seen a “Pre-NOFA” before, but once again this is an unusual year with strange portents in the grant world. I guess a Pre-NOFA is like getting one of those annoying “Save May 12, 2018 for Hershel Himmelfarb’s Bar Mitzvah” in the mail. This is HUD’s way of saying, “Stay tuned––MONEY COMING, MONEY COMING.”

I love the Promise Neighborhoods and Choice Neighborhoods programs because both offer planning and implementation grants, so grantees can keep the party going for years. Not to be outdone, HRSA also just issued an announcement for the wonderfully named Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health for Communities Organized to Respond and Evaluate (REACH CORE) Program. REACH CORE grantees get two-year, $400,000 planning grants followed by multi-million dollar five-year implementation grants. Seven year grants! Now this is worth competing for.

Looks to me like it is a fine grant hunting season this summer. Get out your virtual Sharps 50 Caliber Buffalo Rifle in the form of a trusty iMac or MacBook out and start plinking. You’ll be exhausted, but you’ll have a week or two at the start of October before the FY ’11 RFPs start down the chute.

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The Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) Notice Inviting Applications Finally Appears

NOTE: The Notices Inviting Applications (NIA) for Fiscal Year 2011 are now available. It took the Department of Education a year and three months to issue the second round, but I suppose that’s better than never.

Subscribers to our e-mail grant newsletter saw that the Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) RFP was (finally) released on Friday by the Department of Education, with a deadline of May 11. We’ve already written about i3 twice, including a post about its similarity to other Department of Education programs, like Goals 2000. We’ve also found one nasty trick in the RFP in our first reading.

Virtually every Department of Education RFP has a section at the start that clearly states what types of organizations are eligible applicants. This one doesn’t. Instead, the i3 RFP says on page 8 of 29 that:

Applicant means the entity that applies for a grant under this program on behalf of an eligible applicant (i.e., an LEA or a partnership in accordance with section 14007(a)(1)(B) of the ARRA).

What’s a partnership? Are nonprofits on their own eligible? If you find section 14007 in the American Recovery and Relief Act full text, you’ll see that the legislation is completely clear that an eligible entity is:

(A) a local educational agency; or
(B) a partnership between a nonprofit organization and—
(i) one or more local educational agencies; or
(ii) a consortium of schools.

(Emphasis added.)

So an LEA has to be involved for a nonprofit to apply, but presumably several schools could apply even if their respective districts were not involved in the project. Interesting, but curious. The text at the very beginning of the RFP lists the entities blockquoted above but doesn’t specifically say they are the eligible organizations. There are probably other gotchas too, despite the fact that ARRA was passed in February 2009. We first wrote about i3 in November 2009. The proposals won’t be reviewed until July 2010—almost 18 months after ARRA, which was designed to provide immediate stimulus fund to the economy, passed in Congress.

Another notable aspect to the i3 application process is that the grant writer has to understand the relevant sections of 407-page ARRA, the 29-page RFP, the 76-page application with lots of complex forms, and (get ready for it) the 212-page Final Priorities Notice. While i3 is a great opportunity with tons of money up for grabs, preparing a technically correct proposal will be fantastically complicated and not for the faint-of-heart or inexperienced grant writer. If you’ve never written a Dept. of Education proposal before, this is not a good starter. Isaac uses three monitors as a matter of course; I use two; but you probably need five to have all these documents open at once. Writer beware.

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Acronym Confusion at the Department of Education: Does i3 Mean “Innovation through Institutional Integration” or “Investing in Innovation Fund?”

(EDIT: Note that the i3 RFP discussed below has finally been released, as discussed at the link.)

The “Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program” program solicitation says that it’s part of the “Institutional Integration (I3)” program, which immediately made me think of the i3 programs that Isaac wrote about here. I sent him an e-mail saying, “the i3 RFPs are starting to be released!”

“Not so fast, young Skywalker,” he replied (young Skywalker is how the Emperor and Darth Vader refer to Luke in Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi): the Department of Education must be running out of acronyms, because I3 is different from i3. The first stands for “Innovation through Institutional Integration,” while the second stands for “Investing in Innovation Fund.” The only difference between the two acronyms is the capitalization of the letter “i.” Maybe someone is taking lessons from Steve Jobs.

I can’t be the only person who is going to be confused, given the similarity. Since millions of potential acronyms exist out there, how does the Department of Education come up with two nearly identical acronyms for programs that already sound similar? If they must recycle an acronym, they should pick ECOMCOM (Emergency Communications Control), the central mystery in the pretty good 1964 film, Seven Days in May.

Perhaps the Department of Education is using Unix-style case-sensitive acronyms, in which you have to pay attention to whether you’re getting a capital-I cubed or a lower-case-i cubed. As the Wikipedia entry on filenames says, “In most file systems in Unix-like systems… upper-case and lower-case are considered different, so that files MyName and myname would be valid names for different files concurrently in the same directory.” When you’re thinking Department of Education, think Unix, with all the user friendliness that entails. Consider this a public service announcement that clarifies the difference.