Race to the Top Bracketology � The Quick and the Ed

Race to the Top Bracketology � The Quick and the Ed

Fifteen states and Washington DC made it to the finals of the first round of the Race to the Top (RttT) – Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The Secretary of Education has stated “we expect no more than half of the money will be awarded in phase 1 to ensure a robust competition in phase 2.” So assuming that this means that around $2 billion will be distributed in this phase, this tells us a lot about how the finals of round I will look. There has been a lot of flack in the blogs about too many states making it into the finals. (See my colleague Chad’s post below for links).
In the end how many states receive grants is a combination of the quality of the grant and some simple math. At the end of the second round, it is clear that all of the $4 billion will be granted to states. It seems reasonable to distribute half of the funding in the first round and the other half in the second round, especially when the more obvious states and easier to justify states will be the ones funded in the first round. Choosing states in the second round will be a much more difficult set of decisions.
Two key decisions will have a big impact on how many states win grants. First, are states funded at the level that they requested or are they funded at the non-binding estimates that the Department proposed before the applications were submitted. In developing these grant ranges, the Department was sending a strong signal that they wanted a lot of winners. If all states received the max of the proposed funding range, it would total – around $12 billion. So when the Department set their non-binding funding ranges, the expected that around one third of states would win RttT grants – somewhere around 16 states.