EdVANTAGE Blog

Education Week and others are reporting that New York and seventeen other states plus the District of Columbia have been chosen today as second round finalists in the federal Race to the Top competition.

More on this to come…

Today New York and other states seeking a share of federal Race to the Top education reform funding find out whether they have made it to the final round.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will announce the finalists in a speech at 12:30 1 pm today at the National Press Club in Washington.

You can watch the speech live here and read the announcement here when it is posted — expected to be around 1 pm.

I’ll be surprised if something doesn’t leak out before noon, however.

I expect that New York will be among the finalists.  So does an Education Week blogger.

Earlier this week U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said “I think New York has worked extraordinarily hard” to strengthen its second chance application for federal Race to the Top funding.

He singled out the approval of legislation raising the state’s charter school cap as an example.

Gotham Schools provides a 647 word summary of the state’s 450+ page new application.

The complete application is here.

Despite being given barely more than two days to act on the State Education Department’s request for memorandums of understanding in support of the new application, 91 percent of districts did submit MOUs signed by their superintendents.

Whatever one thinks of the actions taken to improve the state’s chances for funding, they should have that effect.

Read the rest of this entry »

More on the teacher evaluation reform proposal announced by State Education Commissioner David Steiner earlier this week…

Commissioner Steiner gave his explanation of the initiative in a New York Post column on Wednesday.

Gothamschools.org reported on New York City teacher union president Michael Mulgrew’s presentation of the plan to his board, suggesting he had to dispel some skepticism among his members.

Mr. Mulgrew’s union has posted this Q&A piece on the proposal.

Here is a copy of the bill itself.

Later this morning, State Education Commissioner David Steiner and leaders of New York State United Teachers will announce agreement on a package of changes to how teachers are evaluated in the state.

UPDATE (12:10 am, May 11):  Here is the State Education Department’s new release on the agreement.  Here is NYSUT’s release.

The changes are intended to enhance New York’s prospects for winning up to $700 million in federal Race to the Top funds.  At least some will require changes in state law, to be approved by the Assembly, Senate, and Governor in advance of the June 1 federal application deadline for Race to the Top.

The New York Times gives this summary of the proposed changes:

Teachers would be measured on a 100-point scale, with 20 percent points based on how much students improve on the standardized state exams. Another 20 percent would be based on local tests, which would have to be developed by each school system. After two years, 25 percent would be based on the state exams and 15 percent would come from the local tests.

The remainder of the evaluation will come from observations from principals and other teachers, and other measures. If teachers are rated ineffective for two consecutive years, they would face firing through an expedited hearing process that must conclude within 60 days. Currently hearings can drag on for several months.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Commissioner Steiner,

“We’ve never had anything like this before,” Mr. Steiner said. “It’s been nearly impossible to remove teachers for academic effectiveness reasons.” Struggling teachers would be given support, while “excellent” teachers would be rewarded.

We expect to have more on this later today.

Here is a chart that shows how New York’s “Race to the Top” application compares to those of higher scoring states on each of the criteria used to rate the proposal.

When the federal government announced the first round winners in its $4.35 billion systemic education reform initiative, only two states (Delaware and Tennessee) were awarded funding.  New York placed 15th out of 16 finalists.

In the aftermath of failure, hunting scapegoats became a popular preoccupation.  Blame fell on the Legislature for failing to raise the state’s charter school cap, the State Education Department for proposing to use federal aid to purchase expensive office furniture, and teacher unions for resisting the use of student performance data in professional evaluations.

But careful review of how New York’s application compared to higher ranked states yields a more complex picture of the reality the state must address as it assembles an application for round two – due in Washington by June 1. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times “City Room” blog had an insightful post yesterday on what went wrong for New York State’s application for funding under the federal Race to the Top initiative. Read the rest of this entry »

The U.S. Education Department has confirmed that Delaware and Tennessee are the only first round winners in the federal government’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) systemic reform initiative.

New York State Education Commissioner David Steiner issued this response,

While our application placed us among the finalists, the United States Education Department has announced that New York is not among the two first round winners in the Race to the Top competition. We will closely analyze the USED reviewers’ response and will revisit our application with a view to submitting a successful second round plan that advances the Regents’ education reform agenda. Critical to a positive outcome will be the legislative changes the Regents proposed prior to the submission of the Round 1 application – changes that will not only strengthen our application, but will bring important benefits to education in New York State. For the sake of our 3.1 million children, we cannot allow this critical opportunity to undertake vital reforms to slip away.

The Department announced that, “Delaware will receive approximately $100 million and Tennessee $500 million to implement their comprehensive school reform plans over the next four years.”

A second round of competition will be conducted, with applications due on June 1.  The selection of only two states as winners, one small and one mid-sized, leaves roughly $3.4 billion on the table for round two.

The Washington Post noted, “Duncan’s decision to name only two initial winners gives the Obama administration continued leverage to upend the status quo in public education. It also squelches any suggestion that Duncan would seek to spread the money around as much and as fast as possible to help Obama win favor in key political states.”

The New York Times reports that Georgia and Florida finished third and fourth.

The Times also described the priorities of the RTTT initiative and observed,

Tennessee has long had a student-data tracking system that allows it to trace student achievement to individual teachers, and in its proposal the state promised to adopt an advanced statewide teacher evaluation system by the 2011-12 school year. Currently, teacher evaluation systems there, as in most states, are designed by school districts

Delaware already has a statewide annual teacher evaluation system, and has recently adopted regulations requiring that those evaluations be based on growth in student achievement, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality, which rated the finalists’ proposals.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan noted, “Perhaps most importantly, every one of the districts in Delaware and Tennessee is committed to implementing the reforms in Race to the Top, and they have the support of the state leaders as well as their unions.”

Secretary Duncan also explained that his Department will be releasing information that will illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of each state’s application.  He said, “We want to help states improve their proposals and share great ideas. On our Web site, we’re posting the scores for every application and all of the reviewers’ comments. By the end of next week, we’ll post the video of every finalist’s presentation to the peer reviewers.”

The information will be posted here.

New York has nine weeks to revise its application.

As its second round application takes shape, the State Education Department will again be asking superintendents, board presidents and local teacher union presidents sign memoranda of understanding indicating support for the reform initiatives in the revised plan.

In his weekly Saturday radio and Internet address, President Obama announced that his administration would send Congress its blueprint for reauthorizing the principle federal education law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The ESEA was last reauthorized in 2001-02 through the No Child Left behind Act.

The Washington Post reported,

On Friday, Education Department officials briefed reporters, governors and interest groups. “From what they showed us, we like it,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “It looks like a significant departure from No Child Left Behind and the kind of thing we’d like to see done sooner rather than later.”

AASA is the Council’s national affiliate.

Meanwhile the teacher unions reacted skeptically.  The Post reported that American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said, “Obama’s plan ‘appears to place 100 percent of responsibility on educators and gives them zero percent authority.’”

The Post noted,

The president telegraphed his position on a stringent accountability policy March 1 when he expressed support for a decision to fire the staff of a struggling high school in Rhode Island, enraging teachers unions. However, Obama pledged in the Saturday address to treat teachers “like the professionals they are.”

The New York Times wrote that Mr.Obama’s plan “strikes a careful balance, retaining some key features of the Bush-era law, including its requirement for annual reading and math tests, while proposing far-reaching changes.”

The Times explains,

The administration would replace the law’s pass-fail school grading system with one that would measure individual students’ academic growth and judge schools based not on test scores alone but also on indicators like pupil attendance, graduation rates and learning climate. And while the proposal calls for more vigorous interventions in failing schools, it would also reward top performers and lessen federal interference in tens of thousands of reasonably well-run schools in the middle.

In addition, President Obama would replace the law’s requirement that every American child reach proficiency in reading and math, which administration officials have called utopian, with a new national target that could prove equally elusive: that all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career.

The proposal would also replace the current law’s emphasis on credentials as a measure of teacher quality to with requirements for states to develop process for evaluating teacher effectiveness in promoting student learning.

Another priority would be closing achievement gaps between poor and affluent students.  The plan has the potential of requiring state intervention in schools with seemingly high overall performance, if some groups of students are lagging.

The plan echoes themes of the Race to the Top initiative, for example requiring states to take aggressive action to turn-around their lowest-achieving 5 percent, by closing them, replacing at least half their staff, switching to independent management or take other action, including replacing the principal.

The proposal would authorize a $29 billion, 16 percent increase in federal aid, most of which would be distributed through competitive grants.  This emphasis had been rumored, leading to concerns that expanded competitive grant funding would be at the expense of traditional formula aid, which schools have come to depend upon.

The Obama Administration’s complete 45-page blue print is available here.

The National Governors’ Association and Council of Chief State School Officers have posted the latest drafts of “Common Core” standards –  quasi-national standards developed through collaboration among 48 states, two territories, and the District of Columbia.

There are two sets of standards — one for English language arts and literacy in history/social studies and science, the other for mathematics.

The drafts are available here.

The groups are seeking public comments through April 2nd.

The corestandards.org website includes an online survey.

The State Education Department is also conducting a survey — see here — and will provide the results to the NGA and CCSSO.

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