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Race to Top Winners Work to Balance Promises, Capacity

Sen. Christopher Coons, D-Del, left, speaks with Delaware Secretary of Education Lillian Lowery outside of a science classroom at Howard High School of Technology in Wilmington, Del., on March 21 as the state celebrated the one-year anniversary of receiving more than $119 million in Race to the Top funds. Howard High one of the first four schools in Delaware to receive the funding.

—Cliff Owen/AP

Some states scaling back ambitious plans, deadlines

By Michele McNeil

Nearly a year after the first Race to the Top grants were awarded, the dozen winners in the federal competition for school reform aid are slowly starting to spend their money, ramp up the capacity within their own state education departments, and, in some cases, ratchet down expectations from plans that may have promised too much, too fast.

The U.S. Department of Education has approved changes to Race to the Top plans in six states and the District of Columbia, as winners seek to push ambitious project timelines back. The changes range from a delay in implementing Massachusetts’ tiered licensing system for principals to North Carolina’s plan to scale back a new teacher-retention bonus program in its low-performing schools.

Meeting fast-approaching deadlines, which states themselves set, is part of the challenge facing personnel- and budget-strapped state agencies. The Race to the Top is a small yet high-profile slice of some $100 billion in education aid contained in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which Congress passed in 2009 to...