Race to the Top second round winners announced

August 24, 2010 By Mike Itti

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan named 10 winners in the second round of the Race to the Top competition today. The round two winners are the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Rhode Island. About $3.4 billion in federal funding will be divided among these states to be used to innovate and reform their public schools.

Washington State submitted an application to win up to $250 million from the Race to the Top fund in June, but was not selected as a finalist last month. Out of 36 applicants in round two, Washington ranked 32 with a score of 290.6 out of 500.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Race to the Top

Comments

Seattle Citizen says:

August 24, 2010 at 6:44 pm

Whew! We sure dodged THAT bullet! Keep up the good work, Washingtonians! Glad you all understand the faustian bargain that is Race to the Top – “You MIGHT win money….if you change your ways to what WE, the federales, want!”

Of course, races always have losers, too – if we participated, we might have made some other state’s needy children not get needed funding.

So eight states “won” funding? Does this mean the other 42 can eat cake?
Melissa Westbrook says:

August 25, 2010 at 10:30 am

What is interesting (and what the governor of Colorado was fuming about on NBC) is that no state west of Tennessee got funding (except Hawaii). He seemed to think there is some kind of bias.
Seattle Citizen says:

August 25, 2010 at 6:22 pm

Melissa, data can’t be biased, can it? The scoring for RTTT was surely carried out under the strictest controls and used tools to ensure fairness….the qualitative aspects of it surely had accurate quantitative numbers attached to them for scoring, no?

Surely the numbers don’t lie! Surely Obama’s home state of Hawaii got funds because it scored a 217.31245 or whatever, and not because it’s Obama’s home state!