States Vie to Stand Out in Race to Top Proposals

States' Aggressive Grant Bids Must Run Reviewer Gantlet

As peer reviewers for the U.S. Department of Education begin to comb through the thousands of pages of applications for $4 billion in federal Race to the Top Fund grants, they’ll be under pressure to determine which are most worthy of funding: those that promise the most, or those with the best chance of delivering.

In a competition whose criteria were tightly outlined, applications from 40 states and the District of Columbia contained many common themes. But the plans differ markedly on the details, and in interviews with Education Week , state officials highlighted reform proposals they believed might set them apart in the scoring process.

Among other areas, those officials noted factors such as how heavily they plan to weight student-achievement data in teacher and principal evaluations, highlighted the percentage of local school boards and unions that signed on to the plans, and promised to be even tougher than the federal guidelines in seeking to...