New York City public schools can re-name themselves only by jumping through a series of bureaucratic hoops that ultimately lead to Chancellor Joel Klein’s final approval.

Once a principal approves or initiates a change, it’s voted on by the parent association, which then passes it on to the school’s superintendent. In cases where a school is part of a community school district, the superintendent makes a recommendation to the community education council, which holds a public meeting and then votes on the change. But for most high schools and other schools that are not zoned for a district, the decision goes straight from the superintendent to Chancellor Klein.

Unlike schools that change buildings or expand, schools that give themselves new names do not need the citywide school board’s approval.

There are a few rules: you can’t name a school after someone who’s still alive, and if your school is already named after someone and you decide to change it, you have to tell their relatives first. Once a school is given a new name, it can’t be changed for ten years, though there are exceptions to this.

Nationally, it’s becoming increasingly rare to name a school after a person.

Two other schools changed their names this summer. Bard High School Early College II, which opened in 2008 and is modeled on the Bard High School in Lower Manhattan, is now Bard High School Early College Queens. And the Bronx Studio School for Writers and Artists, which opened in 2009, is now the Urban Assembly Bronx Studio for Writers and Artists.

It’s unclear why the High School for International Business and Finance’s principal, Juan Alvarez, chose to change the school’s name to College Academy. Still on summer break, no one at the school returned calls. DOE officials did not respond to a request for information.

Duncan’s approach, which inspired his signature Race to the Top grant program, has drawn criticism from advocates like the NAACP, some state leaders and even members of Congress. His critics say that a policy that awards funds based on anything other than student need will inevitably leave some districts behind.

During Duncan’s visit to the state teachers union headquarters in Albany yesterday, those concerns surfaced again, this time from a teacher from Newburgh. Patricia Van Duser told Duncan that school districts like hers depend on the reliable funding that the federal education department doles out to schools based on need.

Van Duser worried that her district’s finances could be jeopardized if the federal government moves towards a more competitive model as the Obama administration plans its overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

“You really need that to be formula-driven, not competitive-driven,” she said.

Duncan responded that under his proposal, the Department of Education would still hand out 80 percent of federal education funds based on need. And Race to the Top has proven that the federal government can use competition to leverage widespread policy change with a small amount of money, he argued.

Less than one percent of current federal education funds have been spent on competitive grant programs, Duncan said. That contest, which in the end awarded funds to a total of 11 states and the District of Columbia, prompted policy changes in 34 states.

“It’s not either-or,” Duncan said. “The vast majority will be formula-driven…but we still have a chance to reward excellence through competitive grants. I think we need to do that.”

For next year, Obama and Duncan have asked Congress for nearly $50 billion in education funds, a 7.5 percent increase from the year before. Most of that increase — about $3.5 billion — would go to new competitive programs, including continuations of the Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation grant programs.

My school’s History Day is the accomplishment in which I take the most pride in my teaching career. It is the only event in the year that’s attended by the entire school and the only event at my school where parents and community members are invited to view the products of students’ learning. My former principal (Marc Sternberg, now a deputy chancellor) always told me that History Day was his favorite day of the school year.

Most significantly, it yields the greatest buy-in, interest, and growth in my students of anything I do. Students look forward to having the opportunity to learn about a topic in which they have interest and show off to the community. It has become a rite of passage. Over the past four years, I have had students complete research on a range of topics from the Missouri Compromise to the Spanish Civil War to Septima Clark, often yielding insights and understandings new even to me. It is the only time in our curriculum where students have the opportunity to complete in-depth, college-level research.

The students who go on to the city and even state levels of the competition have the opportunity to compete with and learn from the best students New York has to offer. It has been a transformative experience for my public school students, nearly all of whom are black or Latino, to see that their work is just as strong as that from the mostly white, private school students who enter our city’s competition.

I am very proud that in two of the past four years my students have won awards at the city level. But I am even more proud that four of my students have used their History Day papers as the writing samples that helped earn them full-tuition Posse Scholarships to elite private colleges. It meant the world to me, and their future to them, that they all felt that the best piece of writing they did in four years of high school was their work on the History Day project.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan (right, blue shirt) and NYSUT President Richard Ianuzzi listen to a teacher at a roundtable at NYSUT's Albany headquarters today.

ALBANY, N.Y. — Teamwork was the watchword as U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan took his national back-to-school bus tour to Albany today.

Duncan has taken to the road to celebrate teachers, and to convince them that his reform efforts will not undercut their interests.

In New York, many teachers are still skittish of a new teacher evaluation plan that will, for the first time, allow school districts to judge them based on their students’ test scores. The state and city teachers union struck the agreement with state education officials in May, in part to improve the state’s Race to the Top application.

And so, in appearances at the state teachers union headquarters and the State Capitol, Duncan and state officials emphasized that New York’s reform policies are the result of a team effort between state education officials and its teachers unions. Those policies won the state nearly $700 million in federal Race to the Top funds last week.

“Where other states were not able to reach consensus, New York was,” Duncan said.

At the offices of the state teachers union, Duncan and New York State United Teachers Union President Richard Iannuzzi faced a panel of teachers and administrators from six upstate districts. The group shared lessons from a teacher evaluation experiment they had begun before the teacher evaluation deal was struck. They were generally upbeat about the changes, but they also sounded warning notes for Duncan.

Duncan asked the group why it’s taken so long to create momentum around creating new teacher evaluations. One reason, said Dawn Sherwood, a social studies teacher from Hempstead, is that school districts rarely collaborate.

“In the past, it felt like every man for himself,” she said. “What that led to were pockets of success.”

Julius Brown, the assistant superintendent of Sherwood’s district, cautioned that the increased attention on teacher effectiveness should extend also to principals and administrators. “The teachers didn’t hire themselves; they weren’t granted tenure themselves,” he said.

Duncan agreed. “The teaching piece is huge, but by itself isn’t going to get us all the way we need to go,” he said.

“There obviously is still anxiety around [the new teacher evaluation plan],” Iannuzzi said. ”At the moment, [teachers are] not convinced it’s going to be fair.”

But Iannuzzi said that the state’s winning second-round Race to the Top application reflected teachers union input to a far greater degree than in the first round. And he predicted that if the union continues to be involved, support among rank-and-file teachers will grow.

“I think my local members will feel that it’s fair if they feel that they had a voice that was heard,” Iannuzzi said.

With fewer dues-paying members, the United Federation of Teachers is renting out space in its downtown headquarters to help cover its operating costs. (Photo via Flickr)

The bags of swag at the city teachers union’s regular conferences might be lighter this year, the catered dinners less lavish. The recession has caught up with the union and it’s beginning to cut back.

Hit with the combination of a two-year hiring freeze and typical teacher attrition, the United Federation of Teachers has lost roughly 2,000 members in the last year. With them has gone about $2 million in dues.

On top of the membership decline, the union is now funding programs that the state used to support. This year, the state legislature cut all $16 million of its funding for the Teacher Center, a professional development program that trains teachers at over a hundred city schools. To keep a cut-back version of the program going, the UFT has had to kick in $5 million of its own money.

“In many respects, you can say the economy caught up to us,” said the union’s Chief Financial Officer David Hickey. “We’ve done okay in the last couple of years. And so it did, it got us.”

At the same time that it’s losing members and dues money, the union’s political fund is the largest it’s been in 10 years. But the millions it has set aside to wield its influence through campaign contributions can’t be used to cover its operating costs.

To remain in the black, the union has had to renegotiate all of its contracts with vendors and cut back on how much it spends on conferences and other extras. In past years, the UFT hosted an annual parents conference at the Hilton Hotel in November. This year, parents will convene at the union’s less glamorous borough offices.

The union is also cutting some employees’ hours by as much as 20 percent. With more teachers choosing to work past the retirement age due to the poor economy, the UFT needs fewer people to answer questions about pensions or consult on retirement, Hickey said.

“We’re not necessarily cutting things out, but we’re cutting back,” he said. “No full time person was laid off.”

In an effort to bring in new revenue, the UFT is leasing out space in its headquarters in Lower Manhattan. In about a week, a new high school, the Manhattan Academy for Arts & Language, will open on the building’s fifth floor.

Though the union has been able to make small cuts, city officials have warned that next year they may have little choice but to lay off more teachers, costing the union more members.

Hickey wouldn’t speculate about what steps the UFT would take then. “We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it,” he said.

• N.J. Gov. Chris Christie fired his education chief over his costly Race to the Top goof. (Star-Ledger)
• Christie previously blamed federal officials for not checking the clerical error. (NYTimes)
• But USDOE released video showing that the state didn’t give the right data when asked. (USDOE)
• Nine of the 12 winning RttT applicants were supported by Gates Foundation grants. (State Ed Watch)
• Former city schools Chancellor Rudy Crew is “not there yet” in his support for RttT. (Russo)
• La. schools chief Paul Pastorek says most state ed departments aren’t designed for reform.  (Rick Hess)
• And Arne Duncan will appear at the state teachers union on Monday to talk teacher evaluations. (T-U)

And in other news:

• A parallel between Mayor Lindsay’s fire department and Mayor Bloomberg’s schools? (NYSun)
• A Mississippi middle school has ended its race-based rules for class election eligibility. (Jezebel)
• A group of parents write to President Obama opposing the federal turnaround strategy. (Answer Sheet)
• And a portrait of how New Orleans schools have changed since Katrina. (EdWeek)

New data on the increasingly popular ACT college-entrance exam show that city students’ scores have risen to meet the national average, but the gains are spotty.

Since 2005, the average city student’s score has crept from 19.9 to 21.4 — a modest gain, but one that carries weight on an exam that’s only 36 points in total. The bulk of the progress has come from the city’s Asian and white students, while black students’ scores have risen slightly. Hispanic students’ average scores have shown little change, dropping by a third of a point.

In the last five years, the number of New York City students taking the ACT — a test that measures mastery of high school curriculum and predicts college readiness — has risen from about 1,500 to over 5,000.

To measure whether students are ready for college-level work, the ACT’s makers set cut off scores. If a student scores at or above a certain point, colleges can assume that she won’t need remedial help. In 2010, black and Hispanic students’ average scores on all four tests — reading, English, math, and science — fell below the benchmarks.

White students’ average scores easily cleared all of the cut offs, except on the science test, where they fell short. Asian students exceeded the benchmarks on all four exams.

Nationally, high schoolers’ scores have stagnated and less than 25 percent of 2010 graduates who took the test scored high enough to meet the college-readiness benchmarks.

• Eastern U.S. states dominated Race to the Top’s winners. (Times)
• New York was one of them, receiving $696 million. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News)
• New York City could see as much as $300 million of that. (Daily News, Post)
• The state would have placed third even if it hadn’t raised the charter cap. (Daily News)
• State education officials have ambitious plans for using the funds. (GothamSchools, WNYC)
• Actually seeing all the money depends on serious follow-through. (Wall Street Journal)
• New Jersey missed out on funding because of a data goof, and officials are angry. (AP, Post)
• The Post says the real Race to the Top win came in May when the charter cap was lifted.
• The Daily News says the hard work of making sure the reforms are successful is yet to come.
• Josh Greenman: Teachers unions were the only losers in Race to the Top. (Daily News)

News from New York City:

• City unions want the city to use a federal education job fund to rehire laid-off school aides. (Daily News)
• City teachers spend even more of their own money on their classrooms since funding was cut. (CNN)
• Principal Mark Federman is sleeping in a tent to raise money for his Manhattan high school. (Daily News)
• A Queens secretary spent $10,000 of school funds on her own expenses. (Post, Daily News)
• Employees at Manhattan’s PS 149 misused $30,000 and kept $10,000 in a cabinet. (Post, Daily News)
• After a fight, Girls Prep Charter School will open its middle school in a private space. (WSJ, Times)
• The city has launched a campaign to increase GED test-taking. (NY1)
• A teacher at a Brooklyn charter school was arrested for sexually assaulting a student. (Post)
• Two recent reports undercut the idea that Mayor Bloomberg is a good manager. (Gotham Gazette)
• Some say a state test given this summer glorified Islam and criticized Christianity. (Post)

And beyond:

• Ed Sec Arne Duncan’s goal of overhauling 1,000 schools is foundering because of logistics. (Times)
• Duncan also wants more states to release individual teacher data. (L.A. Times, Washington Post)
• White voters in New York State let school budgets take bigger hits than non-white voters. (Times)
• Thomas Friedman wants readers to see the edu-reform documentary “Waiting for Superman.” (Times)
• Stuart Buck argues that history shows segregated schools are superior. (Daily News)
• Jerry Weast, the longtime schools chief in Montgomery County, Md., is retiring. (Washington Post)
• Two students from New Orleans highlight the wide range in school quality post-Katrina. (NPR)
• Louisiana is getting $1.8 billion for schools that were destroyed in Katrina. (Times)
• Debate is raging over whether chocolate milk should be served in school cafeterias. (Times)

Education Commissioner David Steiner and Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch at yesterday's press conference in the governor's office.

Why should the Race to the Top grant have a greater effect than previous federal money? And why make New York City’s data system statewide if it’s not exactly beloved in the city?

WNYC reporter Beth Fertig put these questions and others to State Education Commissioner David Steiner and Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch yesterday. Clips from the interview ran on WNYC yesterday, but you can listen to the full conversation below.

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And here’s the complete transcript:

WNYC:  This money is not supposed to be plugging the gap that we hear about in the state’s education expenses.

STEINER: That’s correct. This money is dedicated to specific education reforms. Primarily the following areas. First, turning around lowest performing schools. Absolutely critical, it’s a moral dilemma that we face and we’ve got to solve for our students. Second, the preparation and support of outstanding teachers and principals, from the moment that they enter their training programs in preparation, to their entire professional careers. Third, providing our teachers and principals and parents and districts with world-class data systems so that we know in real time what is being done in the classroom, what’s working, what isn’t working, what needs to be changed. And, beyond that, working on our assessments and curriculum, so that the materials that teachers share with children really do prepare them for further education for university, college, and the workplace, and the assessments give us an accurate reading of how those students are doing.

WNYC: I want to ask you about that because recently we saw that the assessments were not accurate when you recalibrated the pass rate for the state exams and suddenly the percentage of students meeting proficiency in math and reading fell dramatically. So I guess my question is how do you propose raising the bar and assuring that more students pass? In your proposal for how to spend this money you’ve said that you want to raise the scores for math and reading on the national exams by 10 to 13 points and that sounds very ambitious when only about a third of city’s fourth graders, or a third of the state’s fourth graders, are reading at the proficiency standard. So how are you going to move that many children?

STEINER: I think it’s primarily about two things, though many other factors enter into it. Number one, we want to be the first major state in the country to have an integrated year by year month by month curriculum. Because we have more variation from school to school, district to district, than we can handle. It’s a fragmented system, we will make it unified. Secondly, we cannot just prepare teachers in an academic textbook way and abandon them once they enter the schools. We need a full program of clinical preparation and then continued support for those teachers and, above all, making sure that their preparation and their curriculum line up against the new common core standards. And that then they’re held accountable in a reasonable, but accurate way, for their performance. I think, in short, for the first time, we have that critical triangle of curriculum, assessment, and accountability, lined up for the sake of moving the performance of every student.

WNYC: What will that look like for students and for teachers in classrooms?

TISCH: Generally, I think what it will look like is we’re going to ask that teachers be professionally developed around a common curriculum. And so teachers will know what to teach and what the standards are, rather than … our 700 districts across New York State writing their own curriculum. And it just seems to me that teachers have been asking for this in New York State for 20 years! So it’s very common sense and frankly is one thing that the teachers union was way out ahead in front of all other education reformers in this state in actually seeking a statewide curriculum.

WNYC: Can you talk about the role of teacher preparation because I know that you’d like to have other ways of developing teachers and training them and the principals as well. So what’s going to change with that?

TISCH: Let me say that a year ago David Steiner was hired to be commissioner in New York State and we interviewed a lot of people, but the reason David Steiner was hired to be commissioner is, first of all, he’s a wonderful man with enormous integrity and great capacity in education reform. But it is no accident that he is a national leader in teacher preparation, and so we knew across New York State…

WNYC: Because of his role at Hunter College…

TISCH: Absolutely. Because of his role at Hunter College and because how his work in teacher preparation has been recognized nationally. We knew in New York State that in order to take reform and student progress to the next level, we were going to have to have a very critical look in how teachers come into the system from their beginning entry point to how they ultimately achieve their teacher certification, which they get, their permanent certification, at the end of five years. And that is the window of opportunity that Commissioner Steiner is looking to redefine.

STEINER: I would say that the critical mission here is to shift the emphasis for all teacher preparation programs and all principal preparation programs from learning by textbook, and often textbooks frankly that have little to do with the skills you need in the real classrooms of today, to the practice on the ground supervised by master teachers, supervised by people who’ve made getting good results their life blood. And then, having assessments that instead of being paper and pencil tests, that frankly well over 90 percent of all candidates continually pass, to shifting to an assessment that is skills-based and that for professional certification which as the chancellor just said, is the gateway to a lifetime of professional teaching, that that credential for professional certification be based, in part, on showing that you’ve achieved student growth and academic results.

TISCH: This is a very complicated drill, because we are asking schools of education to rethink what they do. And we’re going to use alternative models to schools of education. Some people are even saying to us, what you’re really doing is starting charter schools in terms of professional development of teachers. And perhaps that is the way to look at it. We need to find alternative pathways to reignite the capacity of schools of education to be focused on where our needs are. And our needs have been the same for 40, 50 years. There are shortages in special education. There are shortages in bilingual education. There are shortages of people who can teach science, math, and technology. We need to change the equation, and that’s what this is.

WNYC: There’s a huge emphasis now on evaluating teachers and, in your proposal and the legislation that was passed, 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation will eventually consist of test scores. And yet you’ve left the actual implementation of that to the local districts and I’m wondering if you’re thinking that it may be very hard to get the districts to agree on the exact evaluation system for these teachers because it’s still a little vague.

STEINER: Let me be very accurate here: 40 points out of 100 go to academic performance of students. Out of that, 20 and eventually 25 points are based on state tests, so that is not locally negotiated. The balance of the 40 points is indeed locally negotiated, but subject to commissioner’s regulations that are in turn, governed by the Board of Regents. So this is not a free for all. This is a set of responsibilities at the local level that will be constrained that we at the department and the Board of Regents will lay out.

TISCH: And Race to the Top, frankly, gives us the opportunity to incentivize districts to negotiate at the local level on these evaluation systems and I think Race to the Top not only gave us the platform from which to kind of build this, but actually gives us the dollars to kind of force the implementation through the pipeline.

WNYC: You’re proposing to spend $60 million dollars on creating a new statewide data system for tracking the progress of students from prekindergarten through college. And you’ve based this largely on a system that’s already being used here in New York City, which generated a lot of complaints and had a lot of bumps when it was rolled out, in terms of teachers feeling like they weren’t prepared to use it, or they didn’t think it was useful. How do you think you’re going to design a system based on that model when you’ve already seen problems in New York City and mixed opinions?

TISCH: Well across the country there’ve been a number of models that have been successful. There’s the model in Colorado that people are talking about. There’s the model in New York City that people are talking about. The city is actually looking to this as an opportunity, frankly, to take what they’ve done and move it to the next generation. This is a very complicated system to build and I think if you ask Joel Klein what his next level of challenge will be, his challenge is frankly to work on working out the kinks. And together we’re going to learn from what happened in New York City and with the help of New York City, build it out so that it has a statewide applicability.

WNYC: New York City never achieved the kind of social media function of teachers sharing information that you’re proposing to do in this statewide system. So do you see that as an obstacle and you may have to scale back your goals?

STEINER: No, and I think what we can take advantage of is precisely the experience here and elsewhere that is behind us now. So for example, one of the critical components of reform here have been the inquiry teams at the school level. They’ve had their kinks too. They’ve been working out some issues and we absolutely want to learn from that. I think in many ways the good fortune here is that this funding has come at a moment when as we might put it, we’re moving to the 2.0 model of reform. New York City took courageous leadership in putting in place systems of data and school reform that frankly had no track record in the past. They had to invent this. They had to take those risks. They’ve learnt some lessons, they’ve taken some knocks. But by in large, they have made real progress, and we can take advantage of that and we can hand to them now an opportunity to take what they’ve done and move it to the next level as well.

WNYC: What do you say to skeptics who say: does this amount to throwing more money at an intractable problem? The state, through the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, ended up spending billions more on education, although it never committed to spending the entire amount because of the deficit. And yet, test scores are still languishing, there are still problems in education. How do we know that this $700 million is really going to be useful?

STEINER: I think the blunt answer to that, frankly, is that when you write large checks of a generic kind, that are not focused on things that you can hold yourself accountable for, measure, and not focused on the inputs that research shows actually make a difference, you’re unlikely to make a major move. So that I think…the transformation is that we’ve looked not just nationally, but internationally, at what the research tells us, and it tells us that every country in the world that is making serious progress in education focuses on two things above all else: selecting and training the best possible teachers from the labor force that they can find, and providing those teachers with the professional development and the curriculum that children need.

TISCH: I want to add to that. There’s also something else. We’re purchasing a few big ticket items that are going to be in place for generations. A data system is an expensive item. It will be in place. Developing a statewide curriculum is not, as David says, a two-minute drill. It is something that will be in place. These are expensive things to develop, so there are actually going to be tangible purchased goods that will just permeate through the system for a generation. And that I think is different than other federal dollars that have been spent before, where there was nothing really tangible. You tried a little bit of this, you tried a little bit of that. Money flew through this title, through that title. Here we are being given the opportunity to buy real goods and I think that’s significant.

WNYC: But these are goods that some people would say are still untested. These are reforms that are still being tried.

TISCH: Yes, that is true. But in New York State we have the opportunity to build on the experience of the largest school district [New York City], which houses two-thirds of the kids in need, and 40 percent of the teaching force, which has already experimented with this on a very large scale. So we can learn from that experiment, improve on it, and move it forward. You know, no big system works day one to perfection. But that doesn’t mean that you walk away from it because the tool that is, how it informs instruction, how it helps teachers, how it helps in the evaluation of an entire system, I don’t think anyone denies.

WNYC: Will $700 million be enough at a time when the state is cutting its own budget? Will the state be able to commit its own resources to make this happen?

STEINER: Look, we can always use more dollars. The fact of the matter is that we spend over $17,000 a child in the public school system in this state. You know, well over $50 billion a year. I think that the first thing we have to do, and maybe the last thing we have to do, is make sure the money is well spent. I think that if we could assure ourselves that every teacher had the training she needed to be effective, every school had curriculum that would take their students to college and career readiness, if we had the data systems in place, then this particular money will genuinely be well spent.

• Nine of the 10 winners are in the middle of competitive executive races. (Eduwonk)
• Could the winning states have been chosen for political reasons? (Center for Education Reform)
• Surprisingly, California, Colorado, Arizona, and Louisiana went home empty-handed. (Politics K-12)
• With all the leadership change possible, how can we know states will follow through? (Rick Hess)
• Mike Petrilli calls the results “a disastrous outcome for the Administration.” (Flypaper)
• What Governor Paterson really said, with video. (WNYC’s The Empire)

And in other news:

• How to use parent volunteers to fill the gaps left by budget cuts. (Insideschools)
• On the many ways schools juke their test score stats. (NY Mag)
• John Merrow’s fans aren’t happy that he’s okay with L.A.’s value-added score release. (Taking Note)
• A new study rates NYC as a top school reform city. Albany is near the bottom. (Fordham Institute)
• A California charter school advocate says Los Angeles gives charters second-tier space. (L.A. Times)
• Three of the nation’s five most expensive public school buildings are in Los Angeles. (HuffPo)

The next step is to flesh out how exactly the funds will be used. Half of the grant money, which federal officials will dole out over four years, will stay with the state education department. The state will pass along the rest to school districts, which have 90 days to pitch the state their plan for spending their share of the funds.

The local proposals must adhere to the state’s school reform blueprint. They can’t be used for other purposes, or to fill budget gaps.

The state’s application centers on four main goals: writing new curriculums and assessments that will be standardized across the state and match the new national standards that the state has adopted; building new databases that track students’ progress from kindergarten through college; finding new ways to train teachers and judge them on their effectiveness; and turn around the lowest-performing schools, sometimes by replacing them with charter schools. (Read our full summary of what the state’s application proposes here.)

Much of the state’s plan relies on expanding programs that the city started under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein, including the city’s Leadership Academy to train new principals, the iZone technology pilot and a new data system modeled on the city’s ARIS program.

“The core of our application is about building on successes, replicating successes,” Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch told reporters today.

New York City expects to see between $250 and $300 million of the total. City officials are just beginning to plan exactly how they will allocate those funds within the state’s overall plan, Chancellor Joel Klein said today. While some districts will have to spend heavily to catch up with New York City, city officials suggested that they would pour the new funds into new initiatives, especially developing the assessments that will soon count for 20 percent of teachers’ evaluations.

Alluding to questions raised about city students’ real progress in the wake of the state’s re-calibrated test scores, Bloomberg said today that he is taking the Race to the Top win as an affirmation of the city’s reform policies.

“In essence, I think it’s safe to say that we’ve received the federal seal of approval for what we’ve done here,” Bloomberg said.

The state will face challenges as it puts its plan into practice. The proposal is built on compromises that state, city and union officials cobbled together after often-rancorous political battles, and the implementation of the state’s plan will likely depend on further compromise.

“Standing behind me is a group whose squabbles have become legendary,” Tisch said. But Tisch said that the fact that state and city officials, union leaders and politicians were able to build consensus around the application’s proposals proved that they would be able to work together to put the plan fully into practice.

“The alignment between this state and this city has never been tighter,” Klein said.

Beyond political battles, the state’s ability to put its plan into action will also depend on its ability to hew closely to its budget, which could be a challenge. For example, the state has proposed using $60 million of the Race to the Top funds on building a new statewide database system modeled on the city’s ARIS system. But the city has already spent more than $80 million on ARIS.

State Education Commissioner David Steiner said that $696 million was a “reasonable” budget for the state’s plan. And Bloomberg swatted away the question.

“The money is useful, but the recognition that we’re going in the right direction and the impetus that gives the people up here is the real benefit,” Bloomberg said. “That’s the long-term benefit.”

L-R: Education Commissioner David Steiner, State Sen. Suzi Oppenheimer, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, State Sen. Malcolm Smith, Gov. David Paterson, UFT President Michael Mulgrew, Assemblyman Sheldon Silver

State and city officials reacted to news of New York’s Race to the Top win with many I-thought-this-day-might-never-come jokes and one off-script moment from the governor.

Speaking at his midtown offices, where he was joined by state legislators and education officials, Governor David Paterson said the win vindicated the work of those who pushed the state legislature to pass new laws on teacher evaluation and charter schools. Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch described the state’s $696 million dollar win as a “gift,” and State Senator Malcolm Smith referred to it as a “big slab of bacon.”

“I’m actually a rabbi’s daughter, so I’m not bringing home the bacon,” Tisch corrected him.

State Education Commissioner David Steiner, looking tired, said the announcement marked the beginning of years of work.

“It is a very, very good moment,” he said. “It is only the start.”

More than half of the state’s winnings will be distributed among school districts, Steiner said. The remainder will fund work done centrally by the State Education Department. New York City will receive between $250 and 300 million dollars and city and state officials will have to negotiate how that money is spent.

“For the first time, federal dollars are actually going to buy real deliverables,” Tisch said, adding that some of the money will go to improving the state’s lowest performing schools. “The tough work now begins,” she said.

State education officials spent this morning in a meeting as news of the win began to spread. Governor Paterson, State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, Commissioner David Steiner and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein are expected to hold press conferences later in the afternoon. We’ll have updates as we learn more.

UPDATE:  The other winners are Florida, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Maryland, Hawaii, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia.

One big question we don’t know yet: exactly how much money the state has won. But by our math (see below), it seems possible that all of the winners will get the maximum amounts for which they are eligible. And Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch just told me that she’s heard the state will receive almost all of the $696 million it asked for in its application.

UPDATE: State officials have confirmed that New York’s application will be fully funded. New York City is likely to see about $250-300 million of the state’s award.

Here’s our summary of how the state plans to use the money, and here’s our rundown of the lead-up to today’s announcement.

New York received the second-highest score overall in the competition’s scoring rubric, coming behind only Massachusetts. (The list of the winning applicants and their final scores is below the jump.) This is the state’s second try at the funds; in the first round, New York placed second-to-last among all the finalists.

The formal announcement of winners will come this afternoon from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. We’ll have updates throughout the day.

Here’s the U.S. Department of Education’s breakdown of the scores of each winner. New York came in second place overall, a big jump from the first round.

And here’s our calculation of how much money each winning state could receive. We’ve assumed that federal officials are giving each state and D.C. the total amount for which they are eligible; the total comes to just under the $3.4 billion amount federal officials are awarding today.

Here’s a roundup of our coverage of New York’s application, the policy changes that have been made in pursuit of the grant, and what winning or losing will mean for the state.

• We begin back in March, when New York State was told that it would not collect $700 million in the first round of Race to the Top. Few expected New York to win — many were surprised it was named a finalist — and it ultimately placed second to last among the 16 finalists.
• The two states that won, Tennessee and Delaware, were small enough that $3.4 billion remained for other states to fight over. At the time, Duncan said he expected between 10 and 15 states to win in round two. New York education officials responded to the loss by calling for the state legislature to improve the state’s round-two chances by voting in a new teacher evaluation system and raising the charter school cap.
• In May, the state and the state teachers union reached an agreement on a new teacher evaluation system that would base 40 percent of a teacher’s score be based on student achievement — 20 percent from state tests and 20 percent from “local assessments.” City officials were not thrilled at the prospect of having to negotiate the local assessment portion with the city teachers union. Many union members were anxious as well.
• State legislators also spent much of May locked in negotiations over how to raise the state’s cap on the number of charter schools allowed to open. An aborted attempt to raise the cap in January was widely cited as one reason New York didn’t win in Race to the Top’s first round. At the beginning of May, the State Senate introduced a bill that would raise the cap to 460 to 200 and require the schools to enroll more special education students and students learning English. Charter school advocates hailed the bill, but the state teachers union said it glossed over their concerns about oversight and accountability. The bill passed the Senate by a wide margin, but city union chief Michael Mulgrew insisted it would go no further.
• For the rest of the month, New Yorkers were treated to a heavy advertising battle between the teachers union and charter school advocates. Both sides took to the airwaves, each urging voters to ignore the other. The charter school lobby spent millions of dollars on its campaign, which included heavy online advertising and door-to-door picketing.
• Negotiations between the two factions began again at the end of May, focusing on how charters should be opened and monitored, how many special education students and students learning English they enroll, and how they share space in city district school buildings. The two sides hammered out a deal in the early morning hours of May 28, and both the Assembly and the Senate passed the new charter cap lift bill that day.
• The new law lifted the cap on charters to 460 over the next four years; created a new RFP process for opening them; required charters to enroll needy students in comparable numbers to nearby district schools; banned for-profit companies from operating charters; allows the state comptroller to audit the schools; and creates new rules governing how charters share space. But questions about how exactly some of the provisions would be put into practice remain.
• The state submitted its second-round application, incorporating the evaluation deal and charter cap lift, on June 1, and made the application public an hour later. The state’s proposal asks for a total of $696 million in grant funds, down from $830 million state officials asked for in the first round. In the first round, the application suffered from what judges deemed a lack of support from the state’s teachers unions. But this round, the application picked up greater teachers union support.
• At the end of July, Duncan announced that for the second time, New York reached the final stage of competition. This time, federal officials named 19 finalists and estimated that 10 to 15 of those states will win grant funds. Together, the finalists have asked for a total of $6.2 billion in grant funding, almost twice as much as the $3.4 billion in the Race to the Top fund that remains.
• If New York wins, the money would go to boost four main goals for reform, according to the application: writing new tests and curriculum based on the new national common core standards; building new databases to track students from the time they enter school through college; using the new teacher evaluation system to improve the quality of classroom teaching; and overhauling low-performing schools, often with the help of charters. Many of the details of the application are based on expanding programs that were launched in New York City, often to great controversy, under Klein.
• If the state loses the competition, it’s unclear how state education officials’ reform efforts will fare. Duncan has said he expects even losing states to press forward with their reform agendas. But Tisch warned that the state’s financial situation is so dire that state goals will be jeopardized without an influx of federal funds.
• Two weeks ago, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch traveled to Washington, D.C. with State Education Commissioner David Steiner and Deputy Education Commissioner John King to make a final pitch directly to competition judges. In an effort to bolster the state’s case that its proposal will have a broad impact, the three were joined by city schools Chancellor Joel Klein and teachers union President Michael Mulgrew. Tisch, Klein and Mulgrew have all said the presentation went well but are making no predictions. “We will see,” Tisch said.

• Investigators found and fined 13 DOE staffers for taking sick days when they weren’t sick. (Daily News)
• One of them, a school aide at PS 55, even lied that her mother had died. (Post)
• Parents at some of the affected schools aren’t happy about absentee teachers. (Daily News)
• Changes at Rikers Island’s school are meant to consolidate the city’s authority there. (NY1)
• One change will have student-inmates start planning for their release from day one. (NY1)
• New York City’s public schools are an outlier in the trend toward older kindergarten students. (Times)
• Despite test score declines, charter school students still outperformed students in district schools. (Post)
• The Daily News says UFT president Michael Mulgrew can learn from L.A.’s teacher data dump.
• Two former city teachers are among readers weighing in on the racial test score gap. (Times)

From beyond:

• New York school districts still don’t know exactly how much state aid they’ll get. (Albany Times-Union)
• The trend in South Korea is toward Western-style schools, complete with creativity. (Times)
• Los Angeles is opening a $578 million school on the site of the Ambassador Hotel. (AP)
• Spending on private tutoring is up nationally, and parents want results. (Times)
• Los Angeles’s teachers union will restart evaluation talks, but value-added’s role is unclear. (L.A. Times)
• Michelle Rhee’s tenure in D.C. could be decided by the mayoral primary next month. (Washington Post)
• Teach for America’s green recruits are playing an expanded role in many places. (Washington Post)

And from GothamSchools:

• We’re going to lie low this week and plan for the new school year (just two weeks away!). We’ll be right here if anything big happens. In the meantime, please take your last chance to fill out our reader survey if you haven’t already. And don’t hesitate to send along your news tips. We’ll be back in full force Aug. 30.