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Race to the Top Grant
Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Obama
Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
It’s relatively small by Washington standards, but the Obama administration’s $4.35 billion carrot for schools is already leading states to adopt a handful of key reforms.
Tucked into the $110 billion federal stimulus slated for education, a comparatively tiny grant known as the Race to the Top requires that states that want the money must commit to closing historic achievement gaps and getting more kids into college – but they also must show that they’re attending to a few nitty-gritty details that President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan believe are important, including:
•Tying teacher and principal pay – and school assignments – to student test scores.
•Adopting internationally benchmarked academic standards.
•Turning around their lowest-performing schools.
•Building long-term student tracking systems.
•Loosening legal caps on the number of charter schools that states allow each year.
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On Wednesday, Obama plans to mark the first anniversary of his 2008 election with a speech at a middle school in Madison, Wis., where he’ll talk about the Race to the Top. The first batch of money isn’t scheduled to go out until January, but state legislatures over the past few months have been scrambling to rewrite laws governing these systems.
If distributed to each of the USA’s schools, which educate an estimated 50 million students, it would equal only $87 more per student. But the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools says 10 states already have moved to raise or get rid of caps on publicly funded but privately run charter schools. Four – Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas – have already raised or eliminated them.
kimtaylor
19 days ago
258 comments
I am not ready to say which is better, formulaic or competitive - still pondering. However, I do want to note that the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, has for decades provided Basic State Grants to every state and territory in the union that are part formulaic and part competitive. It seems to work, albeit the competitive amount is not a very high percentage of the total grant pacakage.
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