March 4 (Bloomberg) -- More than half of U.S. states won’t be in line today to receive grants from the Education Department’s $4.35 billion fund to improve student performance, Secretary Arne Duncan said.Forty states and Washington, D.C. applied to the Race to the Top fund, the largest pool of federal discretionary education money in U.S. history. The grants, to be announced today, reward school systems for finding ways to strengthen academic standards, recruit better teachers, collect data on student performance and turn around failing schools that can be replicated across the country.
Most states won’t get any money because their proposals aren’t tough enough, Grover J. Whitehurst, who served in the Education Department under former President George W. Bush, said in an interview. Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee may prevail because of their use of technology to track student achievement over time, he said.
“Underlying the Obama administration’s specific proposals is an agenda for dramatic change of the public schools,” said Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, which analyzes U.S. public policy. “The reviewers will have been asking: ‘Is the state willing and able to change the status quo?’”
There will be “a lot more losers than winners,” Duncan said in testimony yesterday before the House Education and Labor Committee.