Winners announced . . .

Race to the Top round one winners were announced today. Delaware will receive about $100 million and Tennessee about $500 million. In both cases it was more money than the Education Department had originally indicated would be available to these states, about $25 million more for Delaware and about $250 million more for Tennessee. This is both good and bad. Good because it leaves about $3.4 billion left for round two and bad because the bar for a successful grant is obviously very high. There were sixteen finalists and only these two received funding.

Here is the Education Department’s announcement with links to scores and here are two articles providing information, one in the Washington Post and a second in Education Week. The buzz seems to be about the correlation between high ranking and union support. Over at Flypaper, Andy Smarick has some thoughts about this and about how his ratings differed from the education departments.

Now, here’s the telling point. States that fared better with ED had union support levels of 100%, 100%, 100%, 100%, 93%, and 31% (Illinois). South Carolina didn’t have a union rating because it is right-to-work, but 95% of its districts signed on.

States that fared worse with ED had union support levels of 0%, 4%, 8%, 41%, 61%, 78%, 99%, and 100%.

The message for our state and all those other non-winners is to get busy on ensuring union support for their applications due on June 1st. We have been told that our state’s grant should be available for review sometime in early April. Even if all local associations sign on, however, I don’t believe that we will be among the winners in round two. There are too many other issues surrounding charters, use of data, and intervening in struggling schools to overcome when compared to where other states are at.