Education Secretary Arne Duncan lavished praise Thursday on the Louisiana system that enables the state to tie student test scores to the teachers who taught them and to the education schools that taught those teachers.
But Duncan, in an interview with a roundtable of reporters, said that doesn't necessarily mean that Louisiana is a shoo-in to win the high-stakes competition between states for a share of the new education grant program known as Race to the Top.
Forty states and the District of Columbia are competing for shares of the more than $4 billion Race to the Top money that has become the centerpiece of the Obama administration's expanded efforts to spur education reform and innovation nationwide.
Asked whether he wasn't, in effect, tipping his hand about Louisiana's chances in issuing the latest in a series of kind words from the administration about education reform efforts in Louisiana, Duncan said, "No, I don't think I've tipped my hand at all ... good things are going on in other places."
"All of this stuff is going to be peer-reviewed," Duncan said of the Race to the Top applications.
He said he will only get a sense of what was in the applications once they've been analyzed by "people a lot smarter than me" who will present him rank-ordered results. Then, Duncan said, the states with the best entries will be asked to make presentations to his office, probably in March.
There are no set number of awardees, he said, only that "there are going to be more losers than winners."
"We have no idea (how many states will receive money)," said Duncan. "We're just going to have a very high bar."
The key to a successful application, he said, will be the courage and commitment to innovate, and the capacity to get it done.
Despite his disclaimers, it has become clear that education officials in Louisiana and in the Obama Education Department are on the same wavelength, not to mention the fact that Paul Vallas, the superintendent of the Recovery School District, used to be Duncan's boss in the Chicago schools.
On Jan. 19, the Louisiana Department of Education submitted a 263-page application seeking $300 million in Race to the Top money.
That same day, President Obama, in remarks at a Virginia elementary school, cited Louisiana as one of the states adopting effective school reform policies, particularly in encouraging the growth of charter schools.
Over the weekend, Duncan, in an interview on "Washington Watch with Roland Martin" once again praised reform efforts in Louisiana, albeit in a manner that required him to apologize.
Describing Hurricane Katrina as "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans," he explained that, before the storm the