Rex says South Carolina weighing whether to enter Round 2 federal grant competition
March 30, 2010
WASHINGTON, DC – March 29, 2010 – State Superintendent of Education Jim Rex said today that South Carolina is considering whether to enter the second round of competition for hotly contested federal Race to Top Grants after today’s announcement that only two states – Delaware and Tennessee – were Round 1 winners.
South Carolina was one of 16 finalists selected from 41 original applicants. The finalists sent teams to Washington two weeks ago to make in-person presentations to the judges and answer detailed questions about their grant applications.
South Carolina’s score ranked the state sixth among the 16 finalists, coming in after Delaware, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida and Illinois.
States can reapply June 1 for Round 2, with final award announcements in September.
On one hand, we’re disappointed that South Carolina didn’t win in Round 1, Rex said. But on the other hand, we’re extremely gratified to have been named as one of just 16 finalists. Making the finals showed that we’re on the right track, that we’re on the cutting edge of making the changes that will make schools stronger.
More than 40 people within our agency, local school districts and other stakeholder partners worked very hard from mid-November to mid-January to complete our 1,200-page application. And many others helped indirectly by taking on extra workloads so that team members could pull together all of the application’s pieces. They did a terrific job. Rex said that agency staff would evaluate comments from the judges and hold extensive discussions with state leaders before the state decides whether to enter Round 2.
Should South Carolina enter Round 2, Rex said the state has a number of programs that should earn it points in Round 2. Those include a statewide system for evaluating teachers, high academic standards for students, a system to roll those out to teachers and a pilot project that links teacher effectiveness to their college alma mater. The state also has a solid data system with extensive capabilities in terms of linking student performance to areas such as crime, health and social services, he said.
The list of finalists is supposed to reflect U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s promise that he would set high standards for the federal education-reform competition, which has become one of the Obama administration’s most high-profile policy levers. At stake is $4.3 billion from the economic stimulus package approved by Congress last year, not to mention bragging rights. South Carolina’s application is for about $300 million.
Betsy Carpentier, the Deputy State Superintendent of Education who oversaw South Carolina’s more than 1,200-page application, said a key to South Carolina’s proposal is shifting the way the state defines an effective educator. Businesses have used performance measures for years, and our schools are shifting to more emphasis on student growth, she said.
Some grant money would be used to create a system that measures how much students grow in a year, Carpentier said. An effective teacher would be one who moves a student one grade level and a highly effective teacher would move students more than that, she said. Teachers would be evaluated on their students’ performance, and training and pay would be based on that review.
Rex said that even if South Carolina applies for and wins a Round 2 award, the grant funds would be directed at specific initiatives detailed in the state’s application and could not be used to blunt the impact of more than $700 million in budget cuts to public schools over the past 19 months.
The finalists were Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, South Carolina and the District of Columbia. They earned the highest scores from reviewers who rated states’ commitments to improve teacher effectiveness, data systems, academic standards and low-performing schools.
State applications were scored on a 500-point scale, with more than half of those points assigned to initiatives already in place. The remaining points were given to plans for the future.
