Eleven winning states and the District of Columbia will split the 3.4 billion dollars dispensed by the U.S. Department of Education as part of “The Race for the Top”educational reform grant. But what happens to the remaining 18 states that submitted applications but didn’t win any funding? They went out on a limb
and agreed to increase the number charter schools, agreed to have new evaluations for teachers, adopted new procedures to turning around low-performing schools. (Before the Race for the Top was announced, five states changed their teacher evaluation laws. In the last two years, eighteen more states changed their teacher evaluation laws.) Do the non-winning states continue to accept the proposals they submitted without any federal funding to implement them? Or do they abandon their reform plans? Some states have already said they will continue to try to implement their plans as best they can. Some have pushed back the deadlines for implementation. But many states are already making severe educational cutbacks because of shortfalls in state revenues. It seems that while some states were winners in this race, as happens in most races, there are far more losers.