Black Voice News

    California has fallen short in its second and final bid to win a controversial federal Race to the Top school-reform grant.

    The winners, confirmed last week by federal officials, are Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia.

    Had the state prevailed, participating California school systems stood to receive as much as $700 million. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school system, was in line for about $120 million.

    The Obama administration created the competitive grant program to spur its vision of reform nationwide. A total of $3.4 billion was available.

    In order to qualify for competition, the school districts had pledged to embrace controversial reforms such as linking teacher evaluations to standardized test scores and allowing poorly performing schools to be converted into independently run charters.

    Officials said no one reason precluded a state from winning the funds, but a glaring shortcoming of California’s application was its absence of union support, from local teachers unions to the two major state teacher unions. As a result, California lost some points with evaluators, but officials stressed that no single virtue or shortcoming would by itself determine the fate of an application. Critics have long argued that some states, including California, were too willing to trade the prospect of badly needed, one-time funding for policies that were academically unproven and that could prove prohibitively expensive over the long term.

    California’s plan focused on strategies favored by the Obama administration, such as placing the most effective educators in struggling schools and improving instruction through the improved use of data.

    The state blueprint also embraced the federal endorsement of aggressive remedies, such as replacing the staff at a poorly performing school and converting it to an independently run charter school. Most charters schools are non-union, another arena of discomfort for teacher unions.

    In the end, the number of high-quality applications overstretched the available funding, said department spokesman Justin Hamilton. As a result, a few deserving states had to go home empty-handed, he said.

    Delaware and Tennessee already had prevailed in a first round, which concluded in March.