Obama pushes to add $1.35 billion to Race to the Top grants

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has emphasized that having a spirit of collaboration and buy-in from stakeholders will be important. But proposing less ambitious reforms to get that buy-in won’t earn states any points, he adds.

“If a state is getting consensus but doing it by driving the status quo, we won’t be that interested,” he said in a telebriefing. “But we’re confident that we’re going to have a set of states that are able both to push a strong reform agenda and get all the adults working together. Those are the states we’re going to invest in.”

The Department of Education hasn’t specified how many states will receive grants in this first round, but says that it will be highly competitive. Awards will be announced in April, and a second round of applications will be accepted in June.

Some states, like Maryland and Mississippi, have already said they will wait to submit an application in the second round. Texas, meanwhile, has announced that it will not submit any application, with Gov. Rick Perry (R) saying that the effort “smacks of a federal takeover of public schools.”

In announcing his hopes of opening up Race to the Top to individual districts, Obama singled out Texas’s opt-out stance as a reason, noting that “innovative districts like the one in Texas whose reform efforts are being stymied by state decisionmakers will soon have the chance to earn funding to help them pursue those reforms.”

Just the beginning?

The administration has also indicated that the program may be an ongoing one even past the next fiscal year, with a senior official saying that “you could envision this going on until we felt like we’ve made significant progress across the country.”

Such an extension, note some observers, would entail a significant shift in how the federal government involves itself in education.

“I generally applaud this administration’s policies, but I worry about it in terms of that degree of authority being given to a secretary of education,” says Russ Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The original Race to the Top was conceived as a one-shot deal, he says, and has already had a big impact even before grants have been awarded.

“Now we see a shift to a strategy where the US Education Secretary will be able to control a pot of $1 billion a year…. That’s a remarkable shift in terms of the number of carrots in the basket that the federal government has to hand out.”

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