The EdVocate West

Hopeful Signs for in California for Race to the Top

April 29, 2010 at 12:07 am arunramanathan Leave a comment

So this is what happens when you’re following a team and you happen to run into their trainer in a bar and the trainer tells you that the point guard and the power forward are out of the next tournament because they are depressed by the results of the last tournament where they came in 27th.

You take this information and construct a set of odds and potentially put a lot of money down against the team playing in the tournament.

Then, at the last minute, the Head of the Tournament calls your team president and encourages him to send his team to compete in the tourny because other teams are dropping out left and right and it wouldn’t be good if there were so few teams left that the sponsor decided pull out. So, your team decides to actually give it a shot – given the better odds.  

According to this article from the LA Times, this is what appears to have happened to California’s decision on whether to apply for the second round of Race to the Top. Although, we are all still waiting for the final word from the Governor.

Kudos to the Oabama administration for the nudge that Secretary Duncan gave to our leaders. We hope that our Governor will take the nudge and commit to submitting a second round application. We hope that the information in the article is true and that California’s application will bed based on a strategy we floated in our Roadmap for the Second Round of Race to the Top. I like the Super LEA strategy of leveraging the work of a group of forward-thinking California districts committed to serious reform  targeting their achievement gaps . However, once the parameters of the reform proposals in the application are determined, other districts willing to commit to making changes in areas such as assessing teacher quality and assigning the best teachers to the highest need students should be allowed to sign on. We also expect the state to hold districts accountable for their promises.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this process works out. If the Governor releases a statement indicating that we’re moving forward, we’ll post our recommendations for next steps on our website.

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