D.C. and 15 States Vie for U.S. Funds to Shake Up Ailing Schools; a Few Raise Eyebrows
(From The Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2010)
By NEIL KING JR. and BARBARA MARTINEZ
The Obama administration picked 15 states and the District of Columbia as finalists in a heated competition for extra federal education funds to shake up underperforming schools.
The states that made the cut in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition were Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Tennessee.
Under the program, states stand to garner hundreds of millions of dollars each, depending on their size, at a time when many local education budgets face deep funding shortfalls.
The sheer number of finalists surprised outside observers, who had predicted the administration would impose more stringent standards. The list included a number of states whose applications were considered weak.
A total of 40 states and the District of Columbia submitted applications in January for the first round of funding, with a second round set for summer.
The administration defended the selection of the 16 finalists, saying that all states whose applications cleared a pre-set score automatically advanced to the next round.
The Education Department promises to be tougher in winnowing the list down to the winners, which will be announced next month, and are expected to include fewer than a half-dozen states.
“Most of them will go home losers,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “We anticipate very few winners in round one.”
The size of the finalist list drew fire from some quarters. “I was hoping the administration would send a clear message that you had to be absolutely great to even be in the competition,” said Andrew Smarick, a former George W. Bush administration official who has supported the program. “This is a huge disappointment.”
President Barack Obama has used the lure of federal grants as a way to get states and school districts to improve local education standards, even if they receive no money in the end. The idea behind the program is to reward states that show a willingness to overhaul failing schools through measures such as tough testing standards, data collection and teacher training. The administration intends to apply this competitive approach to an increasingly large share of its education budget.
The Education Department turned to a panel of outside judges to pick the finalists according to 19 criteria, including a state’s track record, openness to charter schools and use of testing systems to judge teacher performance. The finalists’ scores weren’t made public.
Independent evaluators have given especially high marks to three states on the list–Florida, Tennessee and Louisiana–for their accountability standards and for implementing systems to track student performance. All three have also pushed to expand the growth of charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run.
Observers who have dug through the applications were taken aback by other picks. Few gave New York much chance after state lawmakers failed in January to lift a cap on charter schools and allow for the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations.
New York caps charter schools in the state at 200, a limit it is expected to hit this year. The failed legislation would have doubled the maximum allowable, while killing a current law that bars tying teacher evaluations to student test scores.
Not allowing student test scores to be tied to teacher evaluations “seemed like a clear no-no under the rules” of the competition, said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a group that favors charter schools and stronger teacher evaluation systems. He said the state legislature now had a short window to enact legislation that would correct New York’s shortcomings.
Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City school system, the largest in the country, failed to win the legislative changes he sought in January, but cheered the announcement nonetheless. “We’re within striking distance,” he said. He wants the legislature to immediately move to lift the charter cap and change state laws regarding teacher evaluations, firings and seniority. “That’s the way to win this,” he said. “We know that these things are hurting us.”
California, which faces a $20 billion state budget crisis, failed to make the finalist list. The state had hoped to qualify for as much as $700 million at a time when many local school districts are slashing their budgets. California had also tried hard to qualify by doing things such as ramming a bill through the legislature over union objections that allowed teachers’ pay to be linked to students’ test scores.
Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines said Thursday he was “disappointed to learn that California is not among the Race to the Top finalists for the first round of funding.” He added that “I look forward to working with the state and federal education authorities on future rounds of funding. I also hope that the Obama administration recognizes that [the Los Angeles school district] is paving its own path to success in the midst of our challenges.”
Mr. Duncan and his team say they have aimed to keep the selection process as free of politics as possible. Congress, the states and the White House weren’t told who made the cut until Thursday morning. Mr. Duncan said the finalists were picked solely based on the judges’ scoring of their applications, and that he had no hand in the decision.
Mr. Duncan has won bipartisan support for Race to the Top, but that could change as lawmakers and governors realize only a small minority of states may emerge as winners.
The list of winners so far could stir unease for other reasons. Only five of the 16 finalists were states that went for Republican Sen. John McCain in the last presidential election. And only one of them, Colorado, was west of the Mississippi–a fact that Mr. Duncan said was “purely a coincidence.”