In our final installment of PennCAN’s three-part series highlighting the shortcomings of Governor Wolf’s school improvement agenda, we dive into a program called School Improvement Grants (SIG). SIG targets PA’s lowest achieving schools and provides competitive grants to implement one of four school improvement models. PennCAN’s research reveals that the vast majority of schools who received a grant chose to implement the weakest of the improvement models, resulting in very limited gains.
In fact, in the 46 schools that received a combined $101 million over a three-year grant period, proficiency in both reading and math declined by an average of 2.2 and 3.2 percentage points, respectively.
The good news is we don’t have to leave PA to find an example of how a school used additional funding to implement meaningful changes through the SIG program.
Check out PennCAN’s third one-pager to find out how the Grover Cleveland School in Philadelphia went from being one of the lowest performing and unsafe school environment in 2012, to doubling the percentage of students proficient in math and decreasing the number of incidents of misconducts to one in a matter of two school years.
