I’ve gotten in the habit of checking out the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant site on a regular basis.

I recently pulled up all the 2014 ‘college ready’ grants.  The amount of money being doled out for 116 grants was over $87 million. This $87 million spans only 2014 through 9/28/14.

The second largest grant was to the CCSSO for over $6 million to support the implementation of their ‘strategic plan’:

Council of Chief State School Officers

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Date: June 2014
Purpose: to support the implementation of CCSSO’s 2014-2015 Strategic Plan
Amount: $6,148,749
Term: 19
Topic: College-Ready
Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Washington, District of Columbia
Grantee Website: http://www.ccsso.org

Does this strategic plan include pushing the “Refreshed” standards?

Good luck trying to find said ‘2014-15 strategy’ on the CCSSO site. The only mention of the strategy I found takes you to a passworded site.

Reminder: NC’s State Superintendent is also the President Elect of the CCSSO.

New Venture Fund was the largest amount given out to date in 2014 for College Ready at over $10 million:

New Venture Fund

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Date: May 2014
Purpose: to support the successful implementation of the Common Core State Standards and related assessments through comprehensive and targeted communications and advocacy in key states and the District of Columbia
Amount: $10,300,300
Term: 13
Topic: Global Policy & Advocacy, College-Ready
Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Washington, District of Columbia
Grantee Website: http://www.newventurefund.org

Gates Grants Pushing Personalized Learning
Here are some of the grants I came across mentioning personalized learning. There may be more in the 2014 batch that I missed.

Lake County Schools, FL – $450k and $3,940,766

School Board of Pinellas County, FL – $550K

Denver Public Schools Foundation – $306k

Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust, Inc., IN – $1 million

Tulsa Public Schools, OK – $4,421,847

Alliance for Excellent Education Inc. (Jeb Bush’s outfit) – $787,530

Empirical Resolution Inc. – $200k

LightSIDE Labs – $200k