55 Middle Schools Receive $13 million in grants

In early April, the New York City Department of Education announced that 55 middle schools in New York City received $13 million in grants from both the Department of Education and the General Electric Foundation, according to a DOE press release.

Seventy schools applied for the grants -- which range from $50,000 to $250,000 -- but the 55 that won over Schools Chancellor Joel Klein provided the best proposals as to how the money will be used to increase academic achievement in middle schools.

The GE Foundation is funding the grants for 17 of the middle schools in Northern Manhattan, while the DOE is funding the remaining 38 schools, according to the DOE.

These grants were part of the DOE's fairly new "Campaign for Middle School Success," a blueprint for middle grade achievement that the DOE announced last August. The schools that received the funding will use it for new resources, such as after-school or summer programming.

Last week, I interview Barbara Gross, of the Coalition for Educational Justice. The CEJ has been working with middle schools for a long time, closely following the Bloomberg administration's every move with the system. Gross was quite pleased with the way the DOE took initiative and geared more of its focus toward middle grades.

"[The Department of Education] has made more of a priority of middle school education," Gross said. "They're now putting all this money into the lowest performing middle schools. Until a year or ago, there was no central staff whose job it was to support middle schools, and that is different now. Middle school staff is on board. There's more of an explicit understanding of the fact that what happens in middle schools is a critical link to high school graduation."