by Howard Blume, August 24, 2010 | 8:45 am
California has fallen short in its bid to win a controversial federal Race to the Top school-reform grant.
The winners, just confirmed by federal officials, are Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia.
Had they prevailed, participating California school systems stood to receive as much as $700 million. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest school system, was in line for about $120 million; Long Beach Unified would have received at least $18 million.
The Obama administration created the competitive grant program to spur its vision of reform nationwide. A total of $3.4 billion was available.
In California, school districts had pledged to pursue reforms that included linking teacher evaluations to the standardized test scores of their students. The grant application committed them to using this test-score analysis for at least 30% of a teacher's evaluation.
A new evaluation system, however, would need to be negotiated with local teacher unions, and that was by no means automatic. In fact, California representatives were queried about that issue during a 90-minute presentation this month before federal evaluators in Washington, D.C.
As a result, California lost some points with evaluators, but officials stressed that no single virtue or shortcoming would by itself determine the fate of an application.
Read the rest of this post on LA Times.com
Photo: LAUSD Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, right, leads U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on a tour of Samuel Gompers Middle School in 2009. Duncan urged Gov. Schwarzenegger to apply again for the federal grant. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times
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