This month there has been little good news for the California public school system. On March 4, California got word that the state’s bid for a piece of over $4 billion of the federal stimulus dollars available to improve education for the poorest students, the program known as Race to the Top, was denied. Instead, fifteen states including New York, Pennsylvania and Louisiana as well as the District of Columbia were selected in the first round ofRace to the Top dollars.

California won’t know until April why it was rejected. It is suspected that its proposed reforms were not strong enough. The Governor has promised that it will seek more aggressive reforms and apply for the second round of funding in June.

A few days later on March 8, the California Department of Education released a preliminary list of 188 public schools that are considered “persistently lowest achieving” schools. Performance is calculated based on how students perform on standardized tests. Provisions under the federal stimulus funding require that the schools listed take specific actions such as replacing the principal and most of the staff, closing and sending the children to other schools, or closing and opening as a charter school. However, the schools listed are now eligible for federal grants from $50,000 to as much as $2 million to improve their performance. The list included 12 San Francisco schools, 20 in the East Bay and 35 in Los Angeles.

Last, a report released on March 25 by the Brookings Institution, Brown Center Report on American Education, found that