What is the Race to the Top? And why didn't California win a finalist position in the first round?
The Race to the Top is a federal competitive grant program authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to encourage and reward States that are implementing significant reforms in four specific educational areas:
Enhancing standards and assessments, emphasizing math, science and engineering;
Improving the collection and the use of data;
Increasing teacher effectiveness and achieving equity in teacher distribution;
Turning around low-achieving schools.
The U.S. Department of Education announced that 15 states and the District of Columbia were finalists for the first round of funding, with grant winners eligible for $4.3 billion in federal dollars. Glaringly and notably absent from the list was California, where approximately one of every nine K-12 students in the country attends school. Kentucky, which doesn't even permit charter schools, was a finalist.
What happened to California? Wasn't there recently a hard-fought victory in the state legislature
to pass important reforms to enhance California's chances in the competition?
One partial explanation is the view held by some that the Race to the Top was just an extension of the already failed federal reform policy of No Child Left Behind. Race to
