Special Report
Federal

Finalists Cram for Race to Top Presentations

By Lesli A. Maxwell — March 10, 2010 5 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

With millions of grant dollars on the line, representatives of the 16 state finalists for federal Race to the Top prize money will go to Washington next week to make final, in-person pitches to the U.S. Department of Education for investment in their brand of school reform.

How a state’s delegation performs in a 30-minute presentation and a 60-minute question-and-answer session with a panel of judges could make or break its chances in round one of the competition. The Race to the Top Fund will award $4 billion in such grants under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

That pressure has had the 15 states and the District of Columbia—which learned only March 4 that they were finalists—scrambling to perfect their presentations and assemble high-powered five-person teams to deliver them.

See Also

View the accompanying interactive state snapshots, The Sweet Sixteen: Race to Top Finalists Snapshots. Includes highlights of the proposals submitted by each of the 16 finalists.

“This is a performance,” said Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday. “We’ve got a great team. All we can do is tell Kentucky’s story, and if it’s good enough, it’s good enough. If it’s not, we’ll look at round two.”

Some states are preparing by reading the other finalists’ applications to size up the competition. Others are focused on how to whittle down hundreds of pages of a detailed proposal into a pithy, powerful pitch.

Many are still making final plans on whom to include in their delegations, a delicate calculation for some states that includes debate over whether to bring governors. (The governors of Delaware, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee are definitely planning to appear.)

And some finalists are turning to outside experts to help them dress-rehearse their presentations. A select group of states— Colorado, Illinois, Rhode Island, and Tennessee are among them—have been invited by the nonprofit Aspen Institute to do a dry run of their presentations before the real thing.

The Aspen Institute, which has headquarters in Washington and works in many public-policy arenas, is an influential player in education circles. Judy Wurtzel, the deputy assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development in the Education Department, served as the executive director of Aspen’s education program until she was tapped by U.S. Secretary Arne Duncan last spring to work in the department. Paul G. Pastorek, the state superintendent in Louisiana—one of the finalist states—serves on Aspen’s No Child Left Behind Act commission.

Ross Wiener, the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s education and society program, declined to name the states that will rehearse their Race to the Top presentations or say how many of the finalists were invited to receive Aspen’s feedback.

“We told the states that we would do this off the record and with confidentiality,” Mr. Wiener said.

Asked how Aspen selected the states, Mr. Wiener would only say that the organization had offered its help to those that it has “been in conversations with” for several months about Race to the Top.

Education Week queried several finalist states to see if Aspen had extended the invitation to them. Kentucky received no such offer, said Lisa Gross, the spokeswoman for the state department of education. Neither did Georgia, said Kathy Cox, that state’s schools chief.

“They didn’t contact me,” Ms. Cox said.

High-Stakes Preparation

The stakes are high for the finalists, especially since each scored above 400 points on a 500-point grading scale for the voluminous applications they submitted to the federal Education Department. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said recently that any of the 16 could emerge as winners, but that most of them would end up empty-handed, at least in the first round of awards.

The Education Department’s rules allow only five people to actually make the pitch and prohibit any outside consultants from attending. According to a two-page guidance that the department gave to the finalist states, presenters “must have a deep knowledge of your application and have significant, ongoing roles in and responsibilities for executing your state’s Race to the Top activities.”

In New York—a state that many observers had not expected to see as a finalist because of a failed effort in the legislature to lift a cap on charter schools, an education priority for the Obama administration—officials are likely to highlight what they view as the state’s strong proposal around improving teacher and school leader effectiveness, said David Steiner, the state education commissioner.

“I think that what is clear is that the states bring very different strengths,” said Mr. Steiner. “I think those professionals who have had the patience to read New York’s application were able to move beyond what the legislature did or didn’t do here.”

Ms. Cox, the Georgia schools chief, said that besides herself, her state’s team will include Gov. Sonny Perdue, a Republican; two of his top policy advisers; and J. Alvin Wilbanks, the superintendent in Gwinnett County, the state’s largest district.

“To have him with us to talk about how he’s willing to make the investment in these reforms is a real feather in our cap,” Ms. Cox said of Mr. Wilbanks.

North Carolina’s schools chief, June Atkinson, said her state delegation, which will include her and Gov. Beverly Perdue, will also feature local school district leaders.

Kentucky is being strategic about whom to include in its delegation. Along with Mr. Holliday, the group will include Mary Ann Blankenship, the executive director of the Kentucky Education Association, the statewide teachers’ union. Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat and a strong supporter of the state’s Race to the Top bid, will not attend, Mr. Holliday said.

“We got the sense that the [federal] department really wants people who are directly in charge of this and can answer discrete questions about our application,” Mr. Holliday said. “We’ll be ready.”

Mr. Steiner, New York’s schools chief, said he hopes that the department and Secretary Duncan will ultimately choose winners whose plans represent different approaches to school improvement.

“I think the most important thing is that the scoring points to the fact that within the Race to the Top criteria, there is more than one path to a persuasive vision,” Mr. Steiner said. “If the secretary wants to look at a couple of different models, and sustain those with federal funding and treat them in a sense as pilots for the rest of the nation, that seems to me to be sensible.”

The other finalists for the first-round grants are Florida, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina.

Related Tags:

A version of this article appeared in the March 17, 2010 edition of Education Week as Finalists Cram for Race to Top Presentations

Events

Teaching Profession K-12 Essentials Forum New Insights Into the Teaching Profession
Join this free virtual event to get exclusive insights from Education Week's State of Teaching project.
Jobs Virtual Career Fair for Teachers and K-12 Staff
Find teaching jobs and K-12 education jubs at the EdWeek Top School Jobs virtual career fair.
Mathematics K-12 Essentials Forum Helping Students Succeed in Math

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Federal Trump Admin. Adds Project 2025 Author to Education Department Staff
The appointment comes as Trump has already begun to embrace plans outlined in the controversial 900-page conservative policy agenda.
4 min read
A copy of Project 2025 is held during the Democratic National Convention, Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago.
A copy of Project 2025 is held during the Democratic National Convention, Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago. The Trump administration has added the author of the conservative policy document's chapter on education to the U.S. Department of Education's staff.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Federal Trump Admin. Pauses Ed. Dept. Layoffs After Judge's Order
The U.S. Department of Education is slowly complying with a federal court order to reinstate staff.
3 min read
Phil Rosenfelt, center, an attorney with the Office of the General Counsel at the Department of Education, is greeted by supporters after retrieving personal belongings from the Education Department building in Washington on March 24, 2025.
Phil Rosenfelt, center, an attorney with the office of general counsel at the U.S. Department of Education, is greeted by supporters after retrieving personal belongings from the Education Department building in Washington on March 24, 2025, the last day of work for hundreds of agency employees. The Trump administration has had to bump back the day it planned to stop paying laid-off staff.
Jose Luis Magana/AP
Federal Tutoring, After-School, and Other Student Services at Risk as Trump Cuts AmeriCorps
Deep cuts to programs across the federal government have left students without programming they'd come to count on.
8 min read
Members of the City Year program work at Isaac Newton Middle School for Math and Science in East Harlem during the MLK Day of Service on Jan. 20, 2025, in New York City.
Members of the City Year program work at Isaac Newton Middle School for Math and Science in East Harlem during the MLK Day of Service on Jan. 20, 2025, in New York City. City Year places AmeriCorps volunteers in underserved schools, but cuts to the federal service agency have led City Year to scale back some of its AmeriCorps volunteer-powered programs.
Courtesy of City Year New York
Federal Republicans Press Top Ed. Dept. Nominees to Commit to Trump's Agenda
Penny Schwinn and Kimberly Richey appeared before lawmakers for leadership in the department.
6 min read
Deputy Secretary of Education nominee Penny Schwinn, left, and Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights nominee Kimberly Richey prior to testifying before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee about their nominations for the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., on June 5, 2025.
Penny Schwinn, left, and Kimberly Richey speak prior to testifying before the U.S. Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee in Washington on June 5, 2025. Schwinn is President Donald Trump's nominee to serve as deputy secretary in the U.S. Department of Education. Richey is Trump's nominee to lead the department's office for civil rights.
Jason Andrew for Education Week