(From The New York Times, August 24, 2010)
By JENNIFER MEDINA
New York captured almost $700 million for schools when it was selected Tuesday as one of 10 winners in the federal Race to the Top competition, a victory for state education officials as well as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who had pushed the Legislature to enact changes that helped secure the money.
The state’s success came after months of wrangling in Albany and fights with the state and city teachers’ unions, who initially opposed many of the changes, most notably increasing the number of charter schools and tying teacher evaluations to standardized test scores.
But the moves still fell short of some of the more wide-ranging changes Mr. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, had pushed for, including paying teachers more in hard-to-staff subjects like math and science. And they have done nothing to change the way teachers are fired and laid off, which Mr. Klein has repeatedly called one of the biggest problems in education.
It also remains unclear how the changes made in Albany will trickle down to districts. The state will use some of the money to create the new teacher-evaluation system, but local school officials, including those in New York City, will still have to reach an agreement with unions on how the evaluations are created and used.
“So much of this has to be negotiated,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a well-funded advocacy group that is often aligned with Mr. Klein. “While the door has been opened, it’s not entirely clear how aggressively New York is going to run through it.”
Race to the Top rewards states that embrace changes that federal officials believe will improve schools. The federal education secretary,Arne Duncan, is a big fan of Mr. Klein’s efforts, and so a failure by New York to win money could have been an embarrassment.
The announcement provided vindication for the mayor, Mr. Klein and their allies that the changes they had sought and the fights they had picked had been worthwhile.
“Race to the Top has been a tremendous catalyst for precisely the kind of education reforms we’ve supported and implemented in New York City,” Mr. Klein said at a news conference.
“Is it everything in the world, if I could single-handedly do it?” he said in an interview later. “No, but it is a huge step in the right direction.”
States began altering their laws to compete for the grants last summer, but New York officials initially believed their education laws were already good enough, and did not begin to think otherwise until the end of the year. They rushed to try to increase the number of charter schools, but could not reach an agreement with teachers’ unions and their legislative allies in time for the first round of Race to the Top applications, which were due in January. Only Tennessee and Delaware won grants in the first round.
Supporters of charter schools, including a number of hedge-fund executives, bankrolled an intense campaign to pressure lawmakers to raise the cap in time for the second round.
By the end of May, state lawmakers reached a deal to increase the number of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run and usually not unionized, to 460 statewide, up from 200, while also increasing state oversight of them.
The competition spurred other moves. The state will replicate the city’s practice of closing low-performing schools. It will make it easier for teachers to earn certification through alternative programs like Teach for America, which emphasize practical experience more than theory. It will focus on building a statewide curriculum tied to the so-called common core standards in math and English that many states have adopted in response to criticism that the United States was slipping too far behind other industrialized countries.
The Race to the Top money will allow the state to create an immense tracking system to monitor how students perform from kindergarten through college.
State officials have also vowed to improve their standardized tests, which they said have become easier to pass. They recalibrated the scoring this year, causing large drop-offs in passing rates. That occurred after the June 1 deadline and was not a factor in Race to the Top, although Secretary Duncan praised the effort.
“What New York is doing is telling the truth,” Mr. Duncan said. “What has been happening all over is that states were dummying down the standards.”
New York was ranked second, just behind Massachusetts, and will receive $696 million, one of the largest Race to the Top grants, because of its population. While the amount New York will receive is a small fraction of the state education budget, officials said it was still significant.
In the two rounds combined, the competition doled out $4 billion to 11 states and the District of Columbia, on top of $10 billion for school hiring nationwide that is part of a federal aid package signed this month by President Obama.
New Jersey ranked 11th, just out of the money. The scoring system gave credit to states in which unions signed onto the application, but New Jersey’s union withheld its approval after Gov. Chris Christie decided he would not compromise on some issues, including merit pay for individual teachers. The union wanted merit pay allotted to whole schools, to be spread out among all teachers at the schools.
Connecticut created more stringent graduation requirements and a teacher evaluation system that used student achievement. But the state was not even among the 19 finalists announced last month, leading some education advocates to charge that the changes did not go far enough.
New York lawmakers never considered some of Mr. Klein’s more far-reaching demands, including the discretion to pay more to teachers who work in poor neighborhoods and in certain subjects, like math and science.
Under the state’s plan, he will be able to do so on a limited basis, in schools identified as struggling or “turnaround” schools. The plan will also allow teachers with proven track records, known as “master teachers,” to be paid more.
The new teacher evaluation system, tied to test scores, could make it easier for principals to single out teachers deemed ineffective, although state laws still make firing such teachers so arduous that only a few are forced out each year. And in the event of layoffs, school districts must use seniority to determine who loses their jobs; Mr. Klein has not been able to convince the Legislature that principals should have the power to choose the teachers they keep.
B. Jason Brooks, the research director for the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability in Albany, said the new money would nonetheless allow the rest of the state to try to catch up with changes New York City had been making for years.
“On its face, it doesn’t make huge differences in New York City,” he said. “But changing the curriculum and state standards is really going to allow them to do new things.”