The Echo

By Lesli Maxwell on June 1, 2010 6:59 PM

Michele's got the full list of states posted over at Politics K-12, so we can officially kick off our prognosticating on who the likely victors will be in Round 2 of the Race to the Top sweepstakes.

It's certainly not going out on a limb to predict that strong finishers in Round One are likely to be competitive again: Illinois, Florida, Louisiana, and Rhode Island, for example.

But let's consider what may happen with a couple of other, lower-profile applicants.

First, the big boy: California. The state crashed and burned in its first crack at Race to the Top, finishing a lackluster 27th out of 41 applicants. That performance nearly kept the state from bothering with a second-round application, but some pressure from Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan helped convince Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other leaders to keep the state in the running.

This time around, the state lined up a smaller number of districts—including mammoth Los Angeles Unified and universally-respected Long Beach—to push for bolder plans in those locales. Bonnie Reiss, Gov. Schwarzenegger's appointed secretary of education, helped enlist the Parthenon Group, the consultant behind Georgia's third-place finish in Round One, and one of three application gurus endorsed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She also got several foundations, including Gates, to pay the Parthenon tab.

Reiss told me that Parthenon helped the state's Race to the Top team comb through every detail of the two winning states and strong finalists to pick out those features that garnered big points in Round One. What the group came up with in that all-important category of teacher and leader effectiveness is a plan to give those districts that have endorsed the state's Race to the Top application 13 months to create new teacher and principal evaluations that will, at a minimum, link 30 percent of job performance to growth in student achievement. That certainly goes beyond what the state had laid out for teacher evaluations in its first crack at Race to the Top money.

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