The U.S. Department of Education, through its Institute of Education Sciences, has awarded Abt Associates a five-year $9.4M contract to conduct the evaluation of Investing in Innovation (i3), one of the department’s signature initiatives.

The $650 million i3 program is designed to support school districts and nonprofit organizations in expanding, developing, and evaluating promising efforts to improve outcomes for the nation’s students, teachers, and schools.

Abt Associates will conduct the overall evaluation of this new initiative, including providing technical assistance to local evaluators in order to improve the design and implementation of the evaluations; reviewing the evaluations to determine the degree to which they are well-designed and well-implemented; and summarizing the findings from the evaluations.

The Abt Associates team includes nationally known leaders in rigorous evaluation of educational initiatives, including Dr. Beth Boulay, Project Director; Dr. Barbara Goodson, Principal Investigator, Dr. Ricky Takai, practice leader in Education; and Cristofer Price, a principal scientist with over two decades of experience in behavioral and educational research. Abt Associate's partners in this effort include Chesapeake Research Associates, Analytica, AIR, and Westat.