South Carolina team interviewed by judges in tight Race to the Top grant competition

WASHINGTON, DC – March 17, 2010 –  A five-member team from South Carolina was interviewed today by a panel of judges in the hotly contested national competition for $4.3 billion in federal Race to the Top grants.

Fifteen states and the District of Columbia, dubbed the “Sweet Sixteen” by national news media, are finalists.  Teams from each state are in Washington to make in-person presentations to the judges and to answer detailed questions about their grant applications.

The finalists are Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, 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.

After today’s presentation by South Carolina’s team, the judges conferred privately and adjusted the state’s final grade based on how team members answered questions.  National news reports have hinted that as few as three winners will be announced in the first round of grant awards next month.  States that don’t win can reapply June 1 for Round Two, with final awards given out in September.

“That was a rigorous, comprehensive 90 minutes,” said State Superintendent of Education Jim Rex after completing today’s interview session.  “We heard solid, detailed questions from the judges, and I think our team did a terrific job of providing solid, detailed answers.
We have ambitious proposals, and the fact that we’re a finalist in this competition shows that South Carolina is viewed as being on the cutting edge of making the changes that will make schools stronger.

“What the federal government is doing, really, is placing major bets on a few states that have the capacity to be a transformational force in the nation.  And what we did today was try to make a strong case that South Carolina is a state worth betting on.”

State applications are being scored on a 500-point scale, with more than half of those points assigned to initiatives already in place.  The remaining points are given to state’s plans for the future. 

Rex said that South Carolina has a number of programs that should earn it points, such as 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 has a well-developed 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 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 the biggest change South Carolina would see, if it were to receive the money, would be a shift in the way the state defines an effective educator.  Businesses have used performance measures for years, but schools haven’t, she said.

Some federal 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 should South Carolina win in the first round of competition, grant funds would be directed specifically at the 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. 
 
South Carolina’s five-member team in the interview room today was comprised of Rex, Carpentier, State Board of Education Chair-Elect Gerrita Postlewait, and deputy superintendents Janice Poda and Valerie Harrison.  After the 90-minute session with the judges, three other deputy superintendents joined the five-member interview team to meet with U.S. Department of Education staff to answer additional questions about South Carolina’s application.