In an email obtained by GothamSchools, the principal of William Grady CTE High School told his staff that the city had decided to replace him and several other unnamed principals next year. The announcement was not a complete surprise, as principals of the eleven schools set to begin a new turnaround strategy next year have known they could lose their jobs for over a month.

The new strategy, known as the transformation model, is part of a federal program to improve some of the state’s lowest-performing schools. Though it is the least invasive of the four models offered — it doesn’t require firing teachers — it does call for the removal of principals.

In his email, Grady High School principal Carlston Gray wrote that while new principals who have been in their schools for three years or fewer will keep their jobs, others will be replaced. He suggested that some may be able to remain involved in their current schools.

“Several options are available to the principals including, acting as a mentor to the new principals, being reassigned to other DOE administrative position, or phase-out school,” he wrote. He did not say who his replacement would be.

Department of Education officials would not say which principals were being replaced or allowed to keep their jobs. Only three of the eleven principals have been in their schools for three years or fewer: Mary Brouder (Automotive High School), Jeaninne Wallace (Brooklyn School for Global Studies), and Brian Rosenbloom (Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School).

“We are extremely focused on making sure each school has an individualized plan that will give it the best chance for success,” said DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld.

A teacher at Grady High School said the change was warranted.

“The data indicates we haven’t gotten any better,” the teacher said. “There should be a change.”

The 11 schools selected for transformation are:

Automotive High School: Mary Brouder; principal since 2009
Bread & Roses Integrated Arts High School: Larry Wilson; principal since 2004
Brooklyn School for Global Studies: Jeaninne Wallace; interim acting principal since 2009
Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School: Brian Rosenbloom; principal since 2008
Cobble Hill School of American Studies: Kenneth Cuthbert; principal since 2005
Flushing High School: Cornelia Gutwein; principal since 1997
Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School: Geraldine Maione; principal since 2005
Long Island City High School: William Bassell; principal since 1993
Queens Vocational and Technical High School: Denise Vittor; principal since 2001
Unity Center for Urban Technologies: Fausto de la Rosa; principal since 2007
William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School: Carlston Gray; principal since 2006

The analysis that has spurred that idea in the last few weeks actually found something slightly different. The tests aren’t necessarily easier, in the way that a kindergarten spelling bee is easier than the SAT. Instead, between 2007 and 2009, students who hadn’t learned much came out looking like they had.

This is an important distinction because it points to a different culprit behind the dropping standards than simply the individual test items themselves. Instead, Harvard professor Daniel Koretz – the lead author of the analysis commissioned by the state education department — names two possible causes: a phenomenon called “score inflation” and a possible psychometric error tied to an obscure state law.

The actual questions on the test play a role in both, but just as important is the practice of prepping students extensively for tests. Another key is a state law that forces New York to release all test items publicly, making it easier for teachers to practice test prep and making it harder for officials to keep tests consistent over time.

What Koretz found: A dropping hurdle

The question that motivated this week’s scrutiny of the state tests was: Is the increasing number of New York students passing the tests a sign that they know more — or is it a mirage?

In other words, imagine that the passing score of Level 3 out of 4 is a hurdle. Koretz wanted to figure out if more students were leaping over it because more of them could actually jump higher or, alternatively, because the bar had somehow been tugged down.

Maintaining a “proficiency” bar at the same height over time is harder than you might think, because unlike physical height, academic performance is abstract. An entire field of statistics called “psychometrics” exists just to keep the bars at the same height over time.

Likewise, it was a challenge for Koretz to test whether the Level 3 bar for the exam he studied first — the eighth-grade math test — stood at the same height in 2009 as it did in 2007. To compare two abstract things, Koretz needed a stable measurement of students’ raw competence. How much competence did it take to score a Level 3 in 2009 versus 2007? If the hurdle had stuck at the same height, the knowledge needed to clear it would be exactly the same.

To approximate raw competency, Koretz used the NAEP exam, which is the most respect national test and on which — conveniently for Koretz’s purposes — performance was relatively stable overall between 2007 and 2009. Using a mix of national and state test results, he could estimate the rough percentile rank on the NAEP that students had to get to achieve a Level 3 on the New York State test.

The move was like saying, If you gave the New York test to students nationally, what percentage would fail? (Scoring at the 80th percentile on a test means that you have reached a level that 80 percent of people couldn’t.) The national failure rate to match New York’s Level 3 was a rough way of knowing the New York “proficient” students’ raw competency.

If the number stayed the same between 2007 and 2009, then the bar must have stayed put. If raw competency dropped, Level 3 must have sunk, too.

As Koretz put it, “If people have to jump over a similar hurdle, the proportion failing to get there shouldn’t have changed dramatically – because NAEP scores didn’t change very much.”

But this is not what he found. “In fact,” he said this week, “the hurdle had been dropped so much that almost no kids would have failed to jump it.”

In 2007, 12 percent of students nationwide failed to reach the NAEP level equivalent to a Level 2 on the math exam. In 2009, the percentage had dropped to 2. For Level 3, the percentage dropped from 36 in 2007 to 19 in 2009.

Why?

Koretz says he can’t yet be certain why the Level 3 hurdle dropped over time, but he has two guesses. The first — and the one he suspects most strongly — is a phenomenon called “score inflation.”

Score inflation’s primary cause, Koretz told me, is what he calls “inappropriate test prep” — coaching students on material that teachers know will be covered on the test to the exclusion of other material covered by state standards, but that for a range of reasons doesn’t get tested. It can also be caused by deliberate attempts to game the tests, like by barring certain students from taking the test.

The result is that students get better at scoring high on tests over time, but they don’t learn more.

The other possible explanation Koretz cites has to do with the test’s makers, who are charged with “linking” tests from one year to another so that a Level 3 holds the same meaning over time.

In New York, linking is especially challenging because of a law that requires the state to release all its test items publicly. That prevents the state from following the industry-standard method of linking, which is to hide secret test questions from one year to the next, and use them as benchmarks that stay constant between years. New York instead has to use a less-reliable method called field testing, in which the state gives separate tests each year that aren’t attached to high-stakes.

“The problem,” Koretz explained, “is kids know it’s a field test.” They don’t take it as seriously as they take the state test, and the results, therefore, are compromised.

A failure to “link” properly doesn’t mean that McGraw-Hill, the company that makes the state tests, broke rules. But, said Koretz, “Even though the process that the contractor used was kosher, it doesn’t mean it worked.”

Moving forward

How do you fix score inflation and bad linking? Koretz said it’s not enough simply to raise the score that equates to “proficient.” But he said that, so far, state education officials are taking the right steps to do more.

Though they haven’t yet decreed a ban on test prep (something that would be hard to do), they have asked McGraw-Hill to redesign the tests so that they are less easily gamed. That includes trying to test a broader set of subjects within math and reading, as happened with this year’s math (but not English Language Arts) tests. It also includes making the test less predictable from year to year. (See a story we ran last year showing how the annual math tests repeat themselves.)

Koretz also said that McGraw Hill has performed “complicated psychometric work to reduce the affect score inflation might have on the linking.”

And the tests will be entirely re-written when the national common core standards effort to re-make assessments is completed in the next few years.

It’s all a big departure from what New York State was saying just two years ago, when Koretz first requested permission to analyze the state’s tests. Then, a spokesman for the State Education Department told me:

“All of New York’s tests are checked many times to be sure that a score this year means the same next year… The only way for a student to improve performance is by learning the curriculum — reading, writing, and math.”

The full Koretz five-page memo summarizing his findings so far:

Memo: Evidence about the leniency of 8th-grade standards

Principals gave unsatisfactory ratings to 1,813 teachers, 17 percent more than in 2009, according to data the city released today. They also denied tenure to 234 teachers this year, 80 percent more than last year. And principals nearly doubled the number of teachers given an extra year before their final tenure decision is made.

In total, 11 percent of the 6,386 teachers up for tenure this year were denied or delayed, compared to 6.6 percent last year. It’s an even more dramatic jump from 2006, when tenure was denied or delayed less than 1 percent of the time.

By far, the leading cause principals cited for giving a U-rating was quality of instruction and student care. Attendance problems were the second-leading cause of low ratings, followed closely by the nebulous “personal and professional qualities.”

Still, the vast majority of teachers were rated satisfactory and received tenure after three years in the classroom. Just 3.66 percent of teachers up for tenure did not receive it, and about 2.2 percent of tenured teachers received a “U-rating,” which can put teachers on the path to dismissal.

“What we see in the numbers today is that principals are making proactive decisions to retain teachers as well as to evaluate and deny some of them tenure,” said Deputy Chancellor John White. “Principals are basing these decisions on years’ worth of information.”

Most of the teachers who received U-ratings had received one in the past, White said, showing that principals are not assigning the damaging rating capriciously.

The new numbers come after nearly three years of a sustained push to usher more weak teachers out of the system. Principals are encouraged to give weak teachers low ratings before they earn tenure, and a team of lawyers helps principals assemble the evidence needed to enable the city to fire low-performing tenured teachers, although their efforts have netted only a handful of dismissals.

This past year, the city also started using student test scores to advise principals about how to make certain tenure decisions. Of the 6,386 teachers up for tenure this year, about 700 taught for two years in subjects where students take state tests. The city ranked those teachers according to how much their students advanced, then advised principals to give tenure to top teachers and to deny tenure to those on the bottom. In the end, only one of the 96 teachers in the top tier was denied tenure, compared to 14 of the 81 teachers in the bottom tier. Half of teachers in the bottom tier had their probation extended.

Using state test scores to drive teacher evaluations is a problem, considering that state officials now say the scores have been hugely inflated, said Michael Mendel, a teachers union vice president.

“The DOE should immediately review and reconsider the cases of those teachers denied tenure on the basis of the now-discredited state test results,” he said.

White said test scores were only one factor principals considered when making tenure decisions. Still, he said, the city remains committed to using test scores in teacher evaluations, especially because state law now requires it.

As the state’s and city’s data collection becomes more sophisticated, principals will have even more information about how successfully teachers are helping students learn.

“I think we will see more thoughtful decision-making because there will be greater evidence of growth,” White said. “If that level of rigor results in fewer teachers granted tenure, then good. But it will also result in better teachers retained and better quality of instruction in our classrooms.”

Of the 200 principals eligible for tenure last year, seven did not receive it. Nearly a quarter more had their probation extended.

Nearly a third of probationary teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers who have been working as substitutes after their permanent positions were eliminated, were denied tenure. The city has said teachers should be fired after four months in the ATR pool.

That’s the message of a memo Schools Chancellor Joel Klein sent principals this afternoon.

“I expect each of your teacher teams to continue to identify your students’ areas of strength and areas that require extra attention,” Klein wrote. “This is particularly critical for those students who received low scores but did not participate in summer school, and I urge you to work with those families closely to provide the support they need.”

His message echoed what Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a press conference yesterday.

“We’re going to tell the schools to keep an eye on these kids,” Bloomberg said, saying he did not know how much more remediation schools could provide. “Less money means fewer employees, and we’re just going to have to find ways to do more things with less,” he said.

Klein’s full email to principals and letter to parents is below:

From: Klein Joel I.
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2010 5:00 PM
To: &All Principals
Subject: Yesterday’s Test Scores Announcement

Dear Colleagues:

As you know, yesterday the State released the results of the annual New York State math and English Language Arts (ELA) exams for students in grades three through eight.

This year, the State changed the way the tests were graded, holding students to a considerably higher bar than in previous years. As a result, a scaled score that last year was high enough to earn a rating of 3, or “proficient,” may only have earned a rating of 2, or “basic,” this year. The tougher grading system resulted in a significant drop in overall ratings across the entire State, and here in the City, our schools saw a big decrease as well.

Despite the drop in overall ratings, New York City students this year generally earned ELA and math scaled scores that were consistent with last year’s results. And whichever way the scores are cut, whether using this year’s method or last year’s, our students are undeniably making dramatic progress — see the attached chart (entitled “2010 Math ELA NYC Highlights”).

I know that for many of us, receiving considerably fewer proficient scores is dispiriting and disappointing. But we must see this not as a roadblock, but as an important next step in our commitment at every grade level to graduating all students ready to succeed after high school.

I applaud the State’s effort to continue to raise the bar and set higher standards for our students. Together with the new Common Core standards, we can help our students take that next big step to a whole new level of learning. With more writing, problem solving, and critical thinking, you and your colleagues will better connect learning across different subject areas and grade levels.
I ask each of you to lead your school communities in analyzing the data and in galvanizing them for the work ahead. These results will challenge all of us to make the necessary adjustments to curriculum and supports for students so that they can reach and eventually exceed the higher standards. I expect each of your teacher teams to continue to identify your students’ areas of strength and areas that require extra attention. This is particularly critical for those students who received low scores but did not participate in summer school, and I urge you to work with those families closely to provide the support they need.

I am attaching a letter for parents and guardians in English and in nine other languages. You may scroll through the attachment box to view all of the files. Please distribute this letter to parents this summer through whatever channels you may have available (e-mail lists, previously-scheduled meetings, backpacking with summer school students, if applicable). I understand that you may not be able to contact some parents until September, so we are also posting the letter on our Web site and will distribute it centrally via e-mail to parents for whom we have contact information.

Make no mistake about it — we have already made tremendous progress, but we realize we must do even better. We will not give up until every child is receiving a high-quality education and until every graduating student is ready for college or a career. Looking back, and looking ahead, I’ve never been more hopeful that we can reach this goal. I thank you and your staff for all your good work.

Sincerely,

Joel I. Klein

And here is the city’s letter to parents:

Caught between two sets of conflicting test standards — one produced by the city, one by the state — over 10,000 students were wrongly labeled as passing or failing.

Some of them, about 1,807, will get to skip the last week of the summer session, which they had attended unnecessarily. The new state standards show that these students passed their exams.

But the vast majority of them, about 8,500, were initially told they passed and will shortly learn that they actually failed. City education officials have decided to promote these students to the next grade level, though in a typical year they might have been held back.

A teacher emailed to say that a few eighth graders at his school were told they passed the test, but the state’s cutoff scores now show that they failed. Still, they will begin high school in the fall.

On the flip side, the school sent a fourth grader to summer school for initially failing the test, meaning the boy could not spend the summer with his father. Now, the new standards show the student didn’t need to attend.

The problem began when a new exam schedule and the state’s decision to adjust test standards meant the exam results wouldn’t be released until late July. With summer school beginning in June, schools had to know which students to require to attend, so the city set its own preliminary cutoff scores.

The state’s cutoff scores came out yesterday and they don’t quite match up.

“I think it’s fair to say we were surprised at how many kids we under-identified,” said Department of Education spokesman Matt Mittenthal.

For the reading test, in particular, the state set higher cutoff scores than the city’s own estimates for grades three through eight. Of the students who were wrongly identified as passing, 7,000 of them met the city’s standards in reading, but not the state’s.

The city also lowballed the math test for third and eighth graders, but overshot for grades four, five, and seven. About 1,000 students in grades three and eight will be told in a few weeks that they failed the math test, though the city initially passed them. And about 1,807 students in grades four, five, and seven, will get letters today telling them they can leave summer school early, as the new standards show that they are proficient.

Mittenthal said that students who failed the test according to the state’s standards, but passed the city’s bar, would be promoted and given additional help next year.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, flanked by Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, defended the city's test scores at Tweed Courthouse yesterday.

Talking about the definition of academic proficiency yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg struck a relativist note.

“Everybody can have their definition of what it means,” he said. Later, he added: “The last time I checked, Lady Gaga is doing fine with just a year of college.”

He even asked reporters not to refer to students who score above a Level 3 out of 4 as “proficient.”

The request follows new revelations that the bar for “proficiency” on state tests seems to have dropped over time, so that even though more students statewide were meeting it each year, they were not actually learning more. In response, the state this year took steps to tug standards higher.

Yet even as he called the definition of “proficient” into question, Bloomberg vigorously defended the administration’s tough accountability system, which uses the Level 1 to 4 system to determine which students move on to the next grade and as one piece of schools’ report card grades.

Bloomberg has also used rising numbers of students scoring at Level 3 as a referendum on his education policies, arguing over and over again that because the rates are going up, the policies must work. Just last year, announcing that more students were “meeting or exceeding grade-level math standards,” a reference to more students scoring Level 3 or higher, Bloomberg called the results “proof” of New York City schools’ excellence.

“Our schools have made a remarkable turnaround since 2002,” he said in a press release. “New York City is now proof that you shouldn’t have to choose between living in a big city and sending your children to excellent public schools.”

For years, city officials also rebuffed critics who suggested that rapid gains might not represent increases in student learning. ”I’m sort of speechless,” Bloomberg said in 2008, after GothamSchools editor Elizabeth Green (then a reporter at the New York Sun) asked whether rising graduation rates might reflect inflation. “Is there anything good enough to just write the story?”

Now that state officials have acknowledged that test scores have inflated — and they’ve adjusted them accordingly — the city is scrambling to adjust its message.

In one step, they are referring to the statewide re-calibration, which aims to offset years of apparently dropping standards, as a hiking of the bar.

“Whether the new expectations will instigate all of us to try harder, one can only hope,” Bloomberg said.

City officials are also defending their accountability measures — like the grades given to schools, based strongly on test results — by arguing that the measures don’t look at proficiency rates but rather progress from year to year. Indeed, the report card formula weights progress more heavily than how many students score at a level 3, the state’s minimum bar for proficiency.

“The virtue of our accountability system is that it’s not tied to a line in the sand,” Klein said yesterday. ”Level 3 is simply a single line,” Klein said. ”We will look at what we’ve always looked at — not at how many are level 3, but at how much progress they have made.”

Even that may prove problematic this year, since city schools’ raw scores on the tests flattened out this year as well. Anticipating the changes, city officials announced earlier this year that schools will be graded on a curve for next year’s progress reports.

Still, critics of the city’s accountability system, like teachers union chief Michael Mulgrew, said yesterday’s scores call into question not just the mayor’s record but also the wisdom of using test scores as a measure of school improvement.

“In light of the state’s more rigorous standards, the DOE’s success in raising pupil proficiency has turned out to be illusory,” Mulgrew said.

State officials defended the city against charges that the gains it has boasted are imaginary. In an interview this week, State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said that the city’s efforts under Bloomberg and Klein prevented the shock of the score re-setting from being even more severe.

“If you haven’t noticed that the city school system is improving, then you’re walking around with blinders,” Tisch said.

Stephen Lazar

Test scores are important. But so are skills that students can never demonstrate on a pencil-and-paper exam.

That’s the lesson Stephen Lazar has learned in his seven years as a city teacher. Writing in the community section, Lazar, a social studies and English teacher at the Bronx Lab School, outlines the non-academic standards he’s realized he wants his students to meet.

Here’s an excerpt from Lazar’s list:

• I want my students to have a set of tools to deal with conflicts other than fighting, yelling, or shutting down.
• I want my students to seek support or help for clinical depression and other mental illnesses. …

In other words, I want my students to be able to deal with the most challenging parts of the world in a healthy way. I want all that in addition to wanting them to be effective communicators, thoughtful readers, and active citizens working to improve the world.

That’s because in addition to having the state call fewer students proficient, both the city and state saw students’ average raw scores stagnate.

For years, state and city students average scores on the math and reading exams have risen. But from 2009 to 2010, the city students’ average reading exam scores held steady at 662. This trend continued on the math test, which also saw no significant increases or decreases in students’ average scale scores.

When the scores were separated out according to students’ ethnicities, they showed the same result: a flat line.

Speaking at Tweed Courthouse today, Mayor Bloomberg said the steady scores were a sign of progress. “The numbers that really matter are the actual scores,” he told reporters, adding that the state had made the tests more difficult this year.

This is true for the math exam. In an effort to cut down on the math tests’s now-predictable nature, state officials said they broadened the subjects it covered by 30 percent. Officials said they did not do the same for the reading exam because it was already a harder test than the math exam.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein offered another possible explanation for the scores: the tests were given later in the year, allowing for more material to be covered. In past years, the math and ELA exams were given in January and March.

“There are so many different things that could be going on,” said Harvard University testing expert Daniel Koretz, who has been pushing the state to create harder tests. “The test was at a later day; it had broader content. It could be that the effects of coaching are petering out.”

Chancellor Joel Klein and United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew will go with state education officials when they travel to Washington, D.C., in two weeks, Tisch announced today.

The three will accompany State Education Commissioner David Steiner and Deputy Commissioner John King, both of whom also represented the state in its first-round presentation in March.

For the first-round presentation, Tisch sent a lower-profile, more technocratic team comprised mostly of state education officials responsible for building the grant application. Things didn’t go well, and the presentation cost the state points.

The addition of Klein and Mulgrew — as well as of Tisch herself — represents a shift in strategy. Klein is known nationally as a proponent of the style of education reform favored by the Obama administration, and the state’s Race to the Top plan relies heavily on replicating programs Klein has launched in New York City.

And Tisch will likely count on Mulgrew to convince federal judges that the state’s plan has the full support of its teachers unions. In the first round, New York was one of three finalist states that lost points after the presentation round, largely because judges doubted that the state’s proposals could reach all students in the state without more union buy-in.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has repeatedly said that the in-person presentation is a crucial step where states can demonstrate that their leadership teams have the ability to pull off the reform plans they have proposed.

Source: New York State Education Department

The day of reckoning has arrived.

After weeks of warning that adjusted standards would mean far fewer students passing state exams this year, state education officials released the exact numbers today.

Average raw scores on the state third through eighth grade math and reading exams remained flat. But because the state decided to raise the scores required for a student to be deemed proficient, the number of students passing fell sharply.

In New York City and other big cities, the number of students passing reading exams dropped by more than a quarter — from 68.8 percent of city students passing last year to 42.4 percent this year in reading, for example.

Just over 53 percent of third through eighth-grade students statewide passed the reading exam, compared to 77 percent last year. Around 61 percent of students passed their math exams, compared with more than 86 percent last year.

Pass rates of students learning English, students with disabilities, and poor students fell the farthest. The percentage of students learning English who passed the reading exam fell by more than half, from 36 percent to under 15 percent. Just 15 percent of students with disabilities passed the reading exam, compared to 39 percent last year.

Right now, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and Education Commissioner David Steiner are presenting the exam results in Albany. We’ll have more updates from the state and city presentations throughout the day.

But for now, the state’s slideshow presentation is below. An analysis of this year’s test results begins on slide 13.

Race to the Top:

• N.Y. is among 19 Race to the Top finalists. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, Post, NY1, WNYC, WSJ)
• State officials say they won’t be able to execute promised reforms without the money. (GothamSchools)
• Where states are increasingly united, Congress is divided on education policies. (Washington Post)
• A Democrats for Education Reform staffer says N.Y. should up charter school funding to win RttT. (Post)
• Excerpts from Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s RttT speech emphasize the urgency of reform. (Post)
• The Post says it’s all on Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch to make sure the state brings home money.

In recent months, state officials have committed to changing teacher evaluations, creating new databases to track students’ grades and scores, revamping standards, and upgrading tests. But those changes can’t happen unless New York takes home the $700 million it asked for in its Race to the Top application, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch told me today.

“The reform agenda is very contingent upon an infusion of these federal dollars that are earmarked for reform efforts,” Tisch said.

For a cash-strapped education department in a state whose budget is now nearly four months late, it’s not clear where the money to fund costly reform initiatives will come from without federal backing. And New York is not alone among states whose budgets may not support the changes they have promised or even enacted into law.

But speaking to reporters today, Duncan said that states should carry out their reform plans even if they don’t receive Race to the Top funds.

“Race to the Top is an important pot of money, but there are many other sources coming from us,” Duncan said, referring to another $7 billion the department plans to make available in the coming months. “And obviously thinking through, if these are truly priorities, even in tough budget times, how you’ll help to reallocate local resources behind these efforts is hugely important.”

Tisch said that she agreed that states should not be dependent on federal dollars. “But we need to understand, the New York State taxpayers are quite clearly tapped out, and they are looking to the federal government for help,” she said.

“I think that New York State really did significantly well in terms of meeting [Race to the Top's requirements] and I believe that we can, should and will be rewarded,” she said. “But make no mistake — dollar amounts matter.”

Duncan also praised New York today for its efforts to bring state policy into line with federal reform goals. ”I think New York’s come a heck of a long way,” he said.

But other states also boosted their odds by changing education policies, he said. The 19 finalists named today all submitted applications that scored more than 400 points on the federal education department’s 500-point evaluation rubric. (You can read the competition guidelines and rubric here.) Overall, the average score of finalists in the second round was 25 points higher than the first round finalists’ average score, Duncan said.

Duncan has said that in the second round he will likely fund the grant proposals of between 10 and 15 winning states. Together, the 19 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 to be awarded.

“My goal is not to fund every state,” Duncan said. “My goal is to fund as many strong applications as we can.”

In the competition’s next step, New York will send a team to Washington to present the state’s application to a panel of judges during the week of August 9. Tisch said that she would announce her appointments to that team tomorrow.

As in the first round, Duncan said today that the presentations will be an important part of the final judging, as reviewers gauge whether state education leaders have the capacity to put the plans they proposed into practice. During the first round, New York was one of three finalist states who lost points in the interview round, largely because judges questioned whether proposed reforms would reach every school district in the state.

(Update: this post has been changed to clarify the jump in average points between the first and second round.)

New York was one of 16 finalists in the first round of competition, but then came in 15th in the final scoring. Only two states, Delaware and Tennessee, won grants in the first round of the contest.

For this round, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said that there are likely to be 10 to 15 winners of the competitive grant money. New York could be in a better position to win the $700 million grant this round after legislative wrangling last spring resulted in a new teacher evaluation system and a lift on the number of charter schools allowed to open statewide.

The other finalists are: Arizona, California, Colorado, Washington, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and South Carolina.

In a few minutes, Duncan will formally announce the finalists during a speech at the National Press Club. We’ll have more on the announcement later in the afternoon.