Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced the Round Two winners in the competition for $4.5 billion in the Race to the Top Fund. If you recall, Delaware and Tennessee were the only states to receive funding in Phase I of the competition. Now, 9 states and the District of Columbia schools were selected as winners of millions of dollars in grant funds in the Phase II competition. There were 9 other states that were in the running for funds, but were not selected to receive funds. These states included: Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina.

Here is a map identifying the states that are receiving Race to the Top Funds.  Interestingly the states that did receive funds are Eastern and Southern states.

The ten winners will receive grants ranging from $75 to $700 million as follows:

The proposals from the States were required to advance reforms around four specific areas:

• Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy;
• Building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction;
• Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and
• Turning around our lowest-achieving schools.

According to Washington, D.C., Superintendent Rhee, one of the winning applicants, its plan is to use the grant money for school turnaround, alignment of curricula to the new “common core” standards, and expansion of the new IMPACT teacher evaluation system. The funds would also go toward improving teacher professional development, especially in the area of using data to drive instruction.

For many teachers, the top down proclamations implicit in the Race to the Top proposals, make the program suspect. But more importantly is the movement toward standardization through the acceptance of these states to the common core standards in math and literacy, and amazingly brazen over reliance on high stakes tests to determine the academic levels of students, determine teacher pay raises, and assess the performance of each school.

Carolyn Grannan, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, reports how Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute assesses the weakness of the Race to the Top through its use of testing, its narrowing of the curriculum to a focus on math and reading to the exclusion of everything else, its forcing states to allow more charter schools while ignoring the research giving no credence to that approach.

The state of Georgia, where I reside, was also one of the winners in the Race to the Top Fund.  I’ll be reporting now and then on this state’s efforts to improve education through its Race to the Top proposal.  Don’t hold your breathe.