Behind the Race to the Top Furor, Five Nameless JudgesReports from panel of reviewers shows where NJ gained and lost -- and maybe tripped up
For all the drama and argument over what narrowly lost New Jersey’s bid for federal Race to the Top money, the decision came down to five mostly anonymous judges, or peer reviewers.
Each one scored the state’s voluminous application, both its written and oral presentation, and the five scores were averaged into one final tally.
For New Jersey, the final score was 437.8 out of 500, a mere three points short of the Top 10 and its $399 million prize. And with the different scores ranging from a high of 463 (Reviewer 3) to a low of 399 (Reviewer 5), it could have been just one outlier who made all the difference.
Who are these people? They are mostly anonymous in that the specific five who reviewed New Jersey’s application are not publicly named.
The 70-Person Pool
But the “mostly” part is in that they come from a list of 70 people picked for the jobs by the U.S Department of Education, from a retired New York and Washington State education bureaucrat to a former Baltimore high school principal who grew up in Elizabeth.
In between are college professors, including one from Rutgers, and an education entrepreneur who developed an online tool for college applications. A Catholic school administrator from the Boston