The word on the street (and by street, I mean twitter) is that the Race to the Top application process is going to be announced as soon as tomorrow. (The folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a think-tank in Washington, are saying it outright.)

The $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, which was created under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is meant to reward states that make significant progress on teacher quality and distribution, standards and assessments, school improvement, and tracking student progress through data systems.

Folks are wondering just how serious the Education Department is about some of the things it has proposed to take into account in allocating the grants, such as lifting those charter caps, tearing down that data firewall, and just who will have to sign off on the applications. (Superintendents? State chiefs? Unions?)

If the buzz is right, we’ll find out soon enough.