The Department of Education announced Thursday that Wisconsin will not be a finalist for the first round of the federal Race to the Top competition, a program providing states with more than $4.5 billion in funding to reform their educational systems.
Fifteen states and the District of Columbia were chosen to advance out of a pool of 41 applicants, each of which submitted an application outlining how it would allocate the funds received.
But not all finalists are guaranteed funding, with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan predicting in a conference call that “winners are likely to be in single digits.”
The secretary added this is only the first round of the competition and “at least half, if not more, of the money will be available in round two,” when states will be able to reapply in June.
“The fact is that the demand for this funding far outweighs the supply,” Duncan said.
The announcement of Wisconsin’s exclusion from the pool of finalists caught a few state leaders off-guard. Gov. Jim Doyle’s spokesperson Adam Collins said it is disappointing Wisconsin did not receive funds in the first round, but not a huge surprise.
“What the federal government, the president and Secretary Duncan have said all along is that they want to invest in states that have a clear reform agenda and that can actually execute the plans that have been set forth,” Collins said.
Collins said a bill giving control of Milwaukee schools to the city’s mayor, instead of the district’s school board, is crucial to making Wisconsin competitive in Race to the Top’s second phase.
Despite the setbacks, Collins said Wisconsin has made progress in the past few months.
“The state removed a prohibition for using student achievement to evaluate teachers and adopted international agreed-upon standards to better see where children stand in relation to students in other states and other parts of the world,” Collins said.
Not all of these measures have been met with universal commendation. The elimination laws prohibiting districts from evaluating teachers based on the success of their students and adjusting teacher pay accordingly has been met with criticism among some education academics.
UW professor of curriculum and instruction and educational policy studies Michael Apple said there are major problems with performance pay for teachers. Focusing on performance pay will not make much of a difference in the rough economic times.
“Schools are not factories. Schools are quite complicated places. And we’re asking teachers to compensate for a changing society,” Apple said.
With three months until the second round of applications are due, however, any reforms will need to happen quickly.
“We’ve already got a team working on seeing what we can do to make a better application for round two,” Wisconsin Department of Instruction spokesperson Patrick Gaspar said.
Application scores will not be made public until after first-round winners are chosen, leaving officials with little idea of where their proposals succeeded and where they need to improve.
“It’s just hard to look in a crystal ball here; right now most of us don’t even have a clear understanding of why some finalists were chosen over others,” Apple said.