Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) Education Innovation and Research Program: Expansion Grants for Scaling Evidence-based Solutions

Purpose of Program: The Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Program, established under section 4611 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as amended by Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), provides funding to create, develop, implement, replicate, or take to scale entrepreneurial, evidence-based, field-initiated innovations to improve student achievement (as defined in this notice) and attainment for high-need students (as defined in this notice); and rigorously evaluate such innovations. The EIR program is designed to generate and validate solutions to persistent educational challenges and to support the expansion of effective solutions to serve substantially larger numbers of students.
The central design element of the EIR program is its multi-tier structure that links the amount of funding that an applicant may receive to the quality of the evidence supporting the efficacy of the proposed project, with the expectation that projects that build this evidence will advance through EIR’s grant tiers. Applicants proposing innovative practices (as defined in this notice) that are supported by limited evidence can receive relatively small grants to support the development, iteration and initial evaluation of the practices; applicants proposing practices supported by evidence from rigorous evaluations, such as large randomized controlled trials (as defined in this notice), can receive larger grant awards to support expansion across the country. This structure provides incentives for applicants to: (1) Explore new ways of addressing persistent challenges that other educators can build on and learn from; (2) build evidence of effectiveness of their practices; and (3) replicate and scale successful practices in new schools, districts, and states while addressing the barriers to scale, such as cost structures and implementation fidelity.
All EIR projects are expected to generate information regarding their effectiveness in order to inform EIR grantees’ efforts to learn about and improve upon their efforts, and to help similar, non-EIR efforts across the country benefit from EIR grantees’ knowledge. By requiring that all grantees conduct independent evaluations of their EIR projects, EIR ensures that its funded projects make a significant contribution to improving the quality and quantity of information available to practitioners and policymakers about which practices improve student achievement, for which types of students, and in what contexts.
The Department of Education (Department) awards three types of grants under this program: “Early-phase” grants, “Mid-phase” grants, and “Expansion” grants. These grants differ in terms of the level of prior evidence of effectiveness required for consideration for funding, the expectations regarding the kind of evidence and information funded projects should produce, the level of scale that funded projects should reach, and, consequently, the amount of funding available to support each type of project.
Expansion grants provide funding for grantees to scale projects that are supported by strong evidence (as defined in this notice) for at least one population and setting and thus are ready to be implemented at the national level (as defined in this notice). This notice invites applications for Expansion grants only. The notices inviting applications for Early-phase and Mid-phase grants are published elsewhere in this issue of the Federal Register.

Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) Number: 84.411A (Expansion Grants).

Applications for grants under the EIR Program, CFDA number 84.411A, must be submitted electronically using the Governmentwide Grants.gov Apply site at www.Grants.gov. Through this site, you will be able to download a copy of the application package, complete it offline, and then upload and submit your application. You may not email an
electronic copy of a grant application to us.
You may access the electronic grant application for EIR Expansion at www.Grants.gov. You must search for the downloadable application package for this competition by the CFDA number. Do not include the CFDA number’s alpha suffix in your search (e.g., search for 84.411, not 84.411A).