Pay For Success English Language Learners

Pay for Success, the centerpiece of the President’s social innovation agenda, is a new funding tool designed to find and scale what works. PFS helps government fund better, more effective solutions by aligning funding with positive social outcomes. Instead of paying upfront for the promise of results, PFS enables government to pay only after positive outcomes are achieved. Impact investors often cover the upfront costs of providing services and are repaid with a modest return if individual lives are measurably improved as determined by an independent evaluator. PFS is being deployed across the country to improve outcomes in a variety of areas, including maternal and child health, early childhood education, family stability and homelessness, and criminal justice. With today’s announcement, the Department of Education breaks new ground, supporting the use of PFS for CTE programs serving at-risk youth and to exploring the use of PFS for young English language learners: To improve outcomes for underserved, high-need youth, the Department has awarded a $2 million grant to the Boston-based Social Finance Inc., in partnership with Jobs for the Future (JFF), to support the development of PFS projects to implement new or scale up existing high-quality CTE opportunities. A student who has benefited from JFF’s work will participate in the ESPN forum with President Obama. To improve outcomes for children learning English, the Department has awarded a $293,049 contract to the Washington, D.C.-based American Institutes for Research (AIR) to conduct a feasibility study that will identify at least two promising school sites that are using evidence-based interventions for early learning dual language models where a PFS project could take shape to help scale the interventions to reach more students those who need them.