Race to the Top Winners – Initial Thoughts

Ed Week has just reported the winners of Round II of Race to the Top – DC, FL, GA, HI, MD, MA, NY, NC, OH, and RI. Congrats to the winners.

 Some initial thoughts that I will be adding to during the day as more data becomes available.

 Big Reshuffle. This is a pretty big reshuffle from Round I. When all of the finalists from Round I made it into Round II, my expectation was that there would be little change from the initial results. But, it appears that I was wrong. Here is a list of the winners and the other finalist first round scores. I will update this as the new scores come out. While there are several winners that are surprises to no one like FL and GA, but some states are surprises. Four states that were top 10 finishers in Round I ended up out of the money in round II. For example take Illinois that did well in the first round. It has increased the # of charter schools allowed, required value added assessments to be a part of the teacher and principal evaluation systems, and implemented a new principal training program. This may be one of the states complaining the loudest about the second round results.

Hawaii Really? I am not sure how Hawaii snuck into the money, but we at Ed Sector think that there needs to be some serious investigation of their school reform approach and are volunteering to do some extensive site visits to figure it out.

Where is Colorado? Colorado made the most dramatic law changes between round I and round II. Lead by Michael Johnston, Colorado adopted what many believed to be the most progressive teacher evaluation reform legislation in the county. Reformers assumed that this would be enough to lift CO into the winners circle. What happened?