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Politics K-12 kept watch on education policy and politics in the nation’s capital and in the states. This blog is no longer being updated, but you can continue to explore these issues on edweek.org by visiting our related topic pages: Federal, States.

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Can We Reach Consensus on ‘Race to the Top’ Abbreviation?

By Michele McNeil — October 08, 2009 1 min read
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The U.S. Department of Education did us all a favor by nicknaming the Investing in Innovation grants “i3" from the start. We’re all clear on that.

But the education policy, blogging and Tweeting communities don’t seem to have a common style for the stimulus program’s other big discretionary grant program, Race to the Top. The department hasn’t really given it a shorter name either. Should we abbreviate it RTTT? Or RTT? Or RttT? Those are three most common ways I’ve seen it.

So please vote, and let’s all agree. If you have a different suggestion, leave a comment. I’ll post the results in a week.

UPDATE: Commenter Denny thinks we should add R2T to the list of choices. If you agree, would you please leave a comment saying so?
UPDATE 2: Note that I changed the headline from “acronym” to “abbreviation” after learning from an editor that an acronym has to be pronounced as a word (and not just by its initials) to be a true acronym. NASA is an acronym. CIA is an abbreviation. However we abbreviate Race to the Top, it isn’t likely to be pronounceable as a word.

UPDATE 3: Tom Luna, the state superintendent in Idaho, calls the program the RT3 Fund, which has the advantage of being easy to type and kind of matching the “i3" fund. So we’ll start a “write-in” campaign for that, in the comments section.

What should we call Race to the Top for short?

RTT
RTTT
RttT

A version of this news article first appeared in the Politics K-12 blog.