New York Is Among the States to Win Education Grants

New York Is Among the States to Win Education Grants
By SAM DILLON and JENNIFER MEDINA
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: August 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/education/25schools.html?hp


New York, eight other states and the District of Columbia were named winners Tuesday in the second round of a national competition for $3.4 billion in federal funds for school improvement and education innovation.

The other winning states in the Race to the Top grant competition were Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan selected the winning states, after judges reviewed the 36 proposals submitted in the second round (from 35 states and the District of Columbia).

Mr. Duncan was scheduled to discuss why he picked the winning states in a conference call Tuesday afternoon.

But some experts were already challenging the logic that led to this list of winners.

Congress appropriated more than $4 billion for the competition, which aims to promote educational innovation in areas President Obama considers crucial to education reform.

After Delaware won $100 million and Tennessee $500 million in the first round in March, $3.4 billion remained, which Mr. Duncan will distribute to Tuesday’s winners.

In the first round, New York placed 15th out of 16 finalist states. But in the months since, Gov. David Patterson, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the Legislature worked together to build a stronger educational blueprint.

New York State has won as much as $700 million, federal officials said Tuesday. The money comes after months of wrangling in the State Legislature and fights with the state and city teachers’ unions.

This year, state lawmakers passed legislation to double the number of charter schools in the state to 460 to improve the state’s chances at securing the federal money.

Like other states, New York approved a plan to allow local school districts to use student test scores in teacher evaluations, a practice teachers’ unions have bitterly opposed for years. But local school officials will still have to negotiate with the union over the details of the evaluations.

The state is also expected to use the money to improve tracking systems to better measure how students improve from kindergarten through college. Officials have also vowed to improve state tests, which have become steadily easier to pass in the last several years.

Mr. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said in a statement that the awarding of the money was a vindication of their efforts.

“This win is a testament to what we’ve accomplished in the New York City schools over the last eight years, and we are going to work with our teachers and schools to raise the bar once again,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Mr. Klein said: “Race to the Top has been a tremendous catalyst for precisely the kind of education reform we’ve supported and implemented in New York City; now it is up to all of us to live up to this commitment and continue the important work that got us here.”

Six other winning states — Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island — were also first round finalists that strengthened their proposals in recent months.

Two states vaulted from long shots to winners. Hawaii, which has a state-run school system with no local school districts, was ranked 22nd in the first round. Maryland did not even participate in the first round.

States that are likely to be disappointed include Colorado and Louisiana, both of which endured divisive political battles that tied up legislative business for weeks this year as they sought to make changes to education laws in hopes of winning Race to the Top money.

The choice of winners raised questions about the criteria among some experts.

“I’m astonished that Louisiana and Colorado finished out of the money,” said Frederick M. Hess, a director at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research policy group, who has followed the competition closely. “Colorado passed the single most important piece of education legislation of any state, changing their system for teacher evaluations and tenure. And Louisiana has carried out some of the nation’s most amazing reform efforts, including making New Orleans a laboratory for charter schools.”

The competition was designed to reward what Mr. Obama considers exemplary educational ideas and practice in a few states, in hopes of inspiring the remaining states to adopt similar practices.

But critics, especially educators in rural states, said the practices encouraged by the competition, like creating more charter schools and firing principals in low-performing schools, were designed for urban systems, not schools in small towns or across the sparsely populated West.

All the winning states, except Hawaii, lie east of the Mississippi. Ten of the 11 states that did not compete in one or both rounds of the competition were rural or western states.

One result of the competition could be to widen the divide between school systems in the big cities and suburbs of the Eastern Seaboard, which tend to be more engaged with ideas considered to be at the cutting edge of reform, and those of the Great Plains and the rural West.

The president’s goals in the competition included expanding the number and quality of charter schools, updating the way school districts evaluate teachers’ classroom effectiveness, improving student data-tracking systems to help educators know what students have learned and what needs to be retaught, and turning around thousands of the lowest-performing schools.