What the Race to Top Judges' Scores Tell Us
Behind the overall scores for the Race to the Top applicants is a complicated 500-point grading scale that weighs each state's plan according to more than a dozen different categories. The peer reviewers' scores and comments shed more light on the method behind the Race to the Top scoring madness.
After a quick review of the 16 finalists' scoring charts, here are some highlights I picked up:
Why Delaware and Tennessee won—In addition to the reasons detailed here, it's clear in looking at the judges' scores that the full panel of five peer reviewers agreed these were strong applications, in all categories. There were no wild swings in which one peer reviewer awarded a state all points in one category, while another peer reviewer drastically disagreed and awarded low points. In Florida's scoring, by contrast, one peer reviewer thought the state's plan for turning around lowest-performing schools was worthy of a perfect score, or 50. Another peer reviewer thought it was worth only 30 points. In Colorado, there was a 42-point difference in how the peer reviewers individually scored the teacher- and principal-effectiveness category. (To arrive at a final score, the
After a quick review of the 16 finalists' scoring charts, here are some highlights I picked up:
Why Delaware and Tennessee won—In addition to the reasons detailed here, it's clear in looking at the judges' scores that the full panel of five peer reviewers agreed these were strong applications, in all categories. There were no wild swings in which one peer reviewer awarded a state all points in one category, while another peer reviewer drastically disagreed and awarded low points. In Florida's scoring, by contrast, one peer reviewer thought the state's plan for turning around lowest-performing schools was worthy of a perfect score, or 50. Another peer reviewer thought it was worth only 30 points. In Colorado, there was a 42-point difference in how the peer reviewers individually scored the teacher- and principal-effectiveness category. (To arrive at a final score, the
