Giving Compass' Take:

• In this story from Governing, the authors show how states use evidence-based grants to drive systematic changes in K-12 education, learning agendas, and curricula.

• Billions of dollars of federal education funding flow through state grant-making offices, many of which only distribute grants to those schools and districts which employ rigorous, research-backed methods. How might nonprofit funders imitate this model to encourage innovation and evidence-based approached to philanthropy?

• To learn about the importance of a hands-on approach to grant-making, click here.

Grant-making offices may seem like a sleepy corner of state education agencies, but billions of dollars from the federal government flow through them. Those big dollars mean big opportunities for states to drive systematic learning agendas about the implementation, effectiveness and cost of various approaches. As knowledge accumulates about what is most feasible, effective and budget-friendly, states can also incentivize or require grantees to use approaches backed by rigorous research. In this way, grants become a test bed for innovation, while traditional compliance-focused grant reporting becomes an opportunity to contribute to the knowledge base.

A small but growing number of states have recognized the quiet power of evidence-based grant-making and have taken action. This year, for example, Nevada conditioned all of its school-improvement grants to districts and schools on the basis of their use of evidence-based interventions, up from just 15 percent going to such approaches last year. The state also set aside resources to evaluate the impact of those approaches on school and student outcomes. Massachusetts now competitively allocates its school-improvement dollars based in part on districts' use of evidence-based strategies, and 12 other states have committed to doing the same.

Read the full article about evidence-based grant-making by Andrew Feldman, Sara Kerr, and Ruth Curran Neild at Governing