Advance Equity in Grantmaking: Examples

Allocation of Federal Education Funds by SEAs

• In the California Department of Education’s 2021 Comprehensive State Literacy Development grant program, the department contextualizes the use of evidence-based strategies by requiring applicants to identify their local and regional needs and then show how the evidence-based strategies they select will address those needs (page 10).

• The Georgia Department of Education’s 2020 Literacy for Learning, Living and Leading in Georgia (L4GA) awards up to 15 points (out of 90) for proposals that include plans for engaging key stakeholders, including community coalitions (page 2). Further, the department commits to a statewide evaluation of the L4GA grant program and will include results of the evaluation disaggregated by demographic groups to demonstrate whether Georgia’s literacy efforts are having an equitable impact on students.

• Washington, D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education’s High Impact Tutoring Grant Program awards up to 5 points (out of 100) to applications that will serve schools and non-school sites with larger proportions of at-risk students and English learners or that are focused on students with disabilities, students involved in the juvenile justice system, or students who are one or more grade level behind (pages 8 and 13).