The stern warning comes in conjunction with a set of U.S. Department of Education progress reports summarizing implementation successes and setbacks in each of the states that won federal Race to the Top funds in 2010. Eleven states and Washington, D.C., shared a $4.3 billion pot of prize money.

Department officials said New York was doing better than Hawaii, which last month was deemed as being at “high risk” of losing its Race to the Top funding. But they said the state was falling behind after making progress in Race to the Top’s first year.

“New York has a chance to be a national leader or a laggard and we are only interested in supporting real courage and bold leadership,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement. ”Backtracking on reform commitments could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars for improving New York schools.”

When New York submitted its Race to the Top application in 2010, it promised an ambitious slate of reforms. Officials said they would revamp teacher evaluations, overhaul curriculum standards and assessments, build a comprehensive education data system, and turn around struggling schools. In exchange, the state would receive $700 million over four years.

In the first year after the money started flowing, the state was supposed to begin building the statewide data system, and this year, it was supposed to finalize new teacher evaluations in accordance with a state law passed to help win the Race to the Top competition. Neither project has moved forward as planned.

In August, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli rejected a contract with Wireless Generation to build the data system over concerns about the company’s relationship to News Corporation, which was embroiled in a phone-hacking scandal. Officials said the contract rejection set the data system back by about a year.

Plus, a requirement in the state’s teacher evaluation law that each district hammer out terms with its union has brought its implementation to a standstill. After negotiations fell apart in several districts, including New York City, last month, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that the state’s teacher evaluation law “didn’t work.” Yet state officials have made having new evaluations in place a requirement for receiving most Race to the Top funds going forward.

In a joint statement, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and State Education Commissioner John King called the characterization of New York’s policy standstill “disappointing but not discouraging.”  But they said they approved of the Obama administration’s decision to play hardball with Race to the Top winners — with threats of a funding freeze similar to the one King enacted last week to 10 districts, including New York City, that hadn’t met a state deadline for finalizing new teacher evaluations.

“The RTTT report is a reminder that the federal government will hold us to the commitments we made in our RTTT application, just as we will hold districts and educators to the commitments they made,” Tisch and King said.

Federal officials said they were working with the state to put New York back on track. But it’s hard to see how they could help. Teacher evaluations are being negotiated in local districts, where federal officials said they were not likely to get involved. A lawsuit challenging the evaluation law is making its way through the court system, which could take years. And state officials are trying again to identify a vendor to build the data system, but any contract is subject to review by the comptroller’s office.

The Obama administration issued a similar warning to Florida, saying that setbacks there had followed a strong start to implementation.

Here in New York State, officials for the most part heeded his advice. Last week, Commissioner John King’s proposal to upgrade testing and scoring procedures included three of the four measures.

But state officials ignored one Duncan recommendation: to conduct “unannounced, on-site visits during test administration.” That raised a red flag for Kathleen Cashin, a member of the Board of Regents who supervised schools in Brooklyn and Queens for many years.

“That is a preventive way, if someone is thinking of cheating, they might think twice if they knew someone was in the building touring,” Cashin said at last week’s Board of Regents meeting.

Principals and teachers report they rarely or never see test monitors in their schools, but it wasn’t always that way.

As a former district and regional superintendant in Brooklyn, Cashin said she blanketed her schools with monitors on testing days — uncovered cheating tactics that she said aren’t likely to be discovered in a computerized analysis of answer sheets, which King’s proposal calls for.

Transgressions included test proctors who helped students on questions, guided them toward the correct answer, allowed more time than was allotted and posted instructional materials on walls that would be helpful on tests.

“We caught people cheating even with the oversight,” said Cashin. “Imagine what’s going on without it.”

Cashin was referring to a change in the way test monitors are distributed among schools. Before school support services were restructured around networks, district offices had the responsibility of monitoring and deploying staff members to schools on test days. But district offices were downsized and stripped of many school responsibilities as part of the shift.

Now, test monitoring is coordinated centrally. Monitors are dispersed randomly to cover about 10 percent of schools that administer standardized tests. Last year, they made 99 visits to 97 elementary and middle schools over the six-day testing period.

“People know that at any moment, someone could be in there,” said Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky, who oversees implementation of the current system. ”We’re not going to have enough people to hit every single school on every single testing day, but the fact that people are aware that they will eventually get audited as part of that is an effective deterrent.”

Teachers and principals have noticed the drop-off in monitors on test day as well.

“We used to have monitors where you had a body going room to room but now you have teachers who are alone in their own exam,” said Robert Hannibal, a middle school principal in the Bronx. “I haven’t had (monitors) in three or four years.”

One teacher said that while she never saw any of the monitors, their visits were “mentioned during every meeting preparing us to administer the tests and were seen as quite likely to be sent to our schools.”

“In recent years,” the teacher said, “I have never heard of monitors.”

State regulations don’t have specific requirements for school districts when it comes to conducting on-site visits and Polakow-Suransky points out that New York City’s guidelines actually go above and beyond what is required of them from the state.

Still, Cashin believes the random sampling implemented by New York City is insufficient and said districts should boost monitoring statewide.

Many state officials, including Cashin, say that districts should be responsible for providing their own monitors on test days. It is unclear what role, if any, the state would play in forcing districts to do so.

A new regulation that mandates districts to allocate resources and personnel for on-site visits could still emerge if it wasn’t included in this month’s proposal. King said that he would take Cashin’s suggestions into consideration when he consults with his test security task force and return with a more detailed plan at next month’s meeting.

Just before the city and union agreed to postpone any release of teachers’ ratings that included their names, Duncan sent a statement to reporters in which he seemed to take the city’s side.

“I give New York credit for sharing this information with teachers so they can improve and get better,” he said.

Duncan was more elliptical in suggesting whether other school districts should follow New York’s lead and release teacher effectiveness data.

“I also think that parents and community members have the right to know how their districts, schools, principals and teachers are doing. Its [sic] up to local communities to set the context for these courageous conversations but silence is not an option,” he said.

Duncan also supported the Los Angeles Times’ decision to publish teachers’ ratings in August. At the time, he said that releasing the ratings to the public would be a way of singling out and rewarding good teachers.

The statement did not address the teachers union’s concerns that the ratings are not a reliable way of measuring a teacher’s effectiveness.

The schools will test early versions of new third- through eleventh-grade exams that a consortium of 26 states — New York included — is creating. The same schools will get extra funding this year to pilot the new common core standards in their classrooms.

Because New York is a “governing state” in the consortium, its education officials have already agreed to begin using the new tests by the 2014 school year. It also means that New York officials, including city Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky, are helping design the new tests.

The PARCC group — Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers — won a $170 million federal grant yesterday, which it will use to build the tests.

The new exams will complement the new national education standards that New York has also agreed to take on. They will also completely overhaul the form that state standardized exams take, and when they’re given, Suransky said today.

Right now, New York students sit for state standardized tests once a year, and the state reports results months later, over the summer. The tests consist mainly of multiple-choice questions, along with several free-response questions.

The new state test will be designed with four separate parts that students take over the course of the full school year, Suransky said. The first two parts, which students will take earlier in the year, will be shorter assignments that cover material the students should have learned up to that point. The third assignment will be longer and more complex. The fourth will be a comprehensive exam measuring a year’s worth of learning and will be given at the end of the school year.

And the consortium intends to dispense with much of the multiple-choice testing that students currently sit through, Suransky said. Instead, the assessments might take the form of a research paper or long-form math problems, for example.

“Those kinds of assignments are actually closer to the kinds of tasks that teachers are using in classrooms anyway,” Suransky said. “These will function as a way to test some of the new, higher-order skills that are in the common core standards.”

Suransky and other test designers are trying to meet a federal goal to create tests that better reflect student learning. ”By far the number one complaint I’ve heard from teachers, from parents, from students themselves is that state bubble tests pressure teachers to teach to a test that doesn’t really measure what matters,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters yesterday when he announced the grant funds.

At the end of the year, students’ four test scores will be combined into a single score. And teachers will also receive reports of their students’ performance on each of the individual sections weeks after they take them, so that they can use the results to adjust their teaching over the course of the year.

In that way, the new tests are designed to replace both the annual state tests and the diagnostic tests that many city schools already give students over the course of the year to track their progress, Suransky said. Suransky and federal officials said the new exams could lessen or roughly equal the amount of time students currently spend hunched over exams.

“I would argue we actually over-test now, in many places, in ways that aren’t helpful to the child and to the school and to the teacher,” Duncan said.

There’s also the possibility that the consortium’s tests for high school students will eventually replace the state’s current Regents exams. The state’s Board of Regents have not made a decision on the fate of the high school exams yet, though Suransky said he expects them to take up the question in the next few years.

The consortium is currently in the earliest stages of designing the new tests and will likely evolve over the next three years as designers build the new exams and test their validity.

Read the PARCC Consortium’s full grant application, which lays out its plans for building the new assessments in detail, here. Section A(3), which begins on page 43, gives a good description of what the new tests will look like.

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.

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.

The “edujobs” legislation is meant to stave off teacher layoffs. But in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg avoided layoffs by revoking planned teacher pay raises, leaving the use of the $200 million unclear. The law requires that districts use the funds to pay for teachers salaries and benefits — not any administrative costs.

One possibility is that pay raises could go back on the negotiating table. The money could also be used to prevent the elimination of 2,000 teaching positions that the city is still planning to lose this year through attrition and not replace.

Overall, New York State will receive an estimated $622 million. Districts will have until September 2012 to use the funds.

Speaking to reporters this afternoon after the bill passed the House, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that states could see the influx of money in a matter of weeks. “We feel a huge sense of urgency here,” Duncan said.

The bill passed after months of Congressional wrangling. Last month, it faced the threat of a presidential veto after lawmakers wanted to pay for the measure by cutting funds originally meant for Obama administration education reform efforts, including Race to the Top. The final version is paid for by other budget trades, including a $12 billion cut to the federal food stamp program.

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.)

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will announce second-round finalists tomorrow during a speech in Washington, where he is set to discuss what he is characterizing as the “quiet revolution” of education reform.

New York State surprised many observers by being named a finalist in the first round of awards even though, at the time, the state legislature had not yet lifted the cap on charter schools or passed legislation overhauling the way teachers are evaluated. In the final first-round scoring, New York placed 15th out of 16 finalists.

But in part because of those legislative changes, some observers are predicting that the state’s chances of winning, or at least being named a finalist, are better this round.

New York’s chances could also be boosted through pure statistics. Only Delaware and Tennessee won in the contest’s first round, leaving most of the pot —  $3.4 billion — left to award. Duncan has said that there are likely to be 10 to 15 second-round winners, out of a total of 36 states applying.

You can read New York’s full, second-round Race to the Top application here, and more about what it proposes can be found here and here.

A first-grader at Brooklyn's P.S. 214 told U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan about the story of Rumplestiltskin today.

City, federal and union officials clash on the best way to lift the state’s charter school cap. They dispute the fairest way to lay off teachers. And they could barely agree on what school U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan should visit today.

But brought together for that visit, Duncan, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and teachers union president Michael Mulgrew could agree on one thing — the city needs federal dollars and it needs them soon.

Duncan was in town to promote his $4.3 billion Race to the Top grant competition and to call attention to the effect sweeping budget cuts could have on city schools. Duncan also took the opportunity to call on Congress to quickly pass a proposed $23 billion bill to avert teacher layoffs. A swift move on the bill is required, Duncan said, because districts like New York City are planning next year’s school budget now.

“The consequences of inaction are huge,” Duncan said. “We need emergency action and we need it now.”

The schools Duncan visited today were chosen to draw attention to two major policy changes city officials see as key to winning up to $700 million in Race to the Top funds. Bloomberg cited Kings Collegiate Charter School as the type of school the state’s charter cap is preventing the city from replicating. Cypress Hill’s P.S. 65 was selected as an example of a school whose young teachers would be hard hit by layoffs, the Daily News reported.

And P.S. 214 was added to Duncan’s itinerary at the last moment at the insistence of national teachers union president Randi Weingarten. Mulgrew told reporters the school was chosen because it is a high-needs school staffed by teachers with a range of experience levels and would lose both teachers and many special services in the case of harsh budget cuts.

Mulgrew also insisted, as he has done often, that the union opposes the State Senate’s version of the charter cap lift bill, not charter schools overall. “I’ve been very upfront that I support the lifting of a charter bill, with reforms,” he said.

And Duncan, when asked to assess the root of opposition to the charter school movement, denied that opposition exists.

“I don’t think there’s anybody not in support” of good charter schools, Duncan said. “I think there is honest disagreement about what we should do.”

The other three methods either turn schools into charter schools, close them down, or force their principals and at least half of the staff to be fired. “Transformation” calls for the principal’s removal, but keeps the school’s staff in place.

Yet crucially, it also requires that schools use students’ test scores as a significant factor in evaluating teachers, that merit pay be put in place, and that teachers whose students don’t show enough improvement be fired. Since New York state law bars principals from using student data in teachers’ tenure decisions and the teachers contract only allows merit pay for entire schools that perform well, not individual teachers, city officials claim they cannot use it.

That’s despite the fact that the city actually wants to use the transformation model at some of the 34 schools on the state’s turnaround list, a Department of Education official said. He mentioned (but did not name) a small group of schools that are improving and have above-average graduation rates despite their overall-poor performance.

The Department of Education official said that transformation would only be a possible option if the United Federation of Teachers overhauls its contract. He said the city had met with the union, but union leaders would not agree to merit pay for individual teachers or linking students’ test scores and tenure.

The union disputed that characterization. “We are willing to talk to them to work out different things,” said UFT Secretary Michael Mendel. “They have never come to us and asked us to work anything out with regard to the transformation model. If they have no desire to work it out, then it’s easy to say the contract is preventing it.”

Mendel would not say what issues the union would consider being flexible about. “But we’re willing to talk about these things in the hope of being able to satisfy the transformation model,” he said.

The current teacher contract has expired, and negotiations between the city and the union to write a new one are stalled.

The DOE has until May 24 to submit its plans for all 34 schools to the State Education Department and those plans will go into effect next school year.

While states have been competing for millions in Race to the Top funds, high schools have had their own contest for President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s attention.

Duncan announced today that Kalamazoo Central High School, a large comprehensive school in Michigan, beat out over 1,000 other high schools to have Obama as its graduation speaker this year. Schools that entered the competition had to show that their students were learning and that most, if not all of them, were going from graduation to college.

Hand picked by Obama from among three finalists, Kalamazoo’s school district runs a program called Promise that pays up to 100 percent of students’ college tuition for in-state schools.

No New York City high schools made it into the finalist round, but put your nominations of equally deserving NYC schools in the comments.

Duncan told reporters this afternoon that he was surprised to learn that Paterson’s proposed budget appropriated $750 million in Race to the Top funds even before the competitive fund’s application deadline today.

“This is going to be very, very competitive, so for anyone to assume they’re getting this — that’s a bit of a leap of faith, I would say,” Duncan said. “And obviously if this money is seen as simply something that is going to be plugging budget holes, that’s not something we’re going to be interested in.”

Duncan made the statement in a conference call where he explained President Obama’s intention to open the Race to the Top competition up to local school districts, instead of just states. That change would be a boon to New York City, which Duncan has cited as a model district but whose access to the grants is dependent on state-level policy decisions. If Obama gets his way, the district-level grant program will come online next year, along with a $1.35 billion expansion of the program.

Local officials said Paterson’s proposed budget showed a strong effort but could end up disproportionately hurting the city.

“The proposed reduction in school aid will affect funding for our city’s students at a time when we are still waiting to receive our just due as a result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, adding insult to injury,” said City Comptroller John Liu.

Mayor Bloomberg said he would reserve final judgment on Paterson’s budget plan until after his visit to Albany on Monday.

Here’s Bloomberg’s full statement:

Not only is New York City willing to do its fair share to help Albany get out of its financial mess, but we’re eager to do so. An implosion of State government would have horrible consequences for the City. Some areas of the Governor’s budget proposal today appear, at first glance, to be proportional and fair in the way they affect New York City, and he deserves credit for those areas. Unfortunately, the proposal to eliminate two years of New York City’s revenue sharing payment — more than $650 million, which is 94 percent of the statewide cut and more than 15 times the cut for entire rest of the state together — appears neither proportional nor fair to New York City. I’m going to Albany to testify about the specifics of the Governor’s proposed budget on Monday, and will speak in detail then about the effect this and other parts of the budget will have on New York City.  

And here’s the full statement from Liu:

The Governor has worked hard to put forth an ambitious plan aimed at closing our State’s widening budget gap and putting New York back on track, and to do so with minimal use of one-shots. Some of the initiatives proposed today, however, impose a disproportionate burden upon New York City.

The proposed reduction in school aid will affect funding for our City’s students at a time when we are still waiting to receive our just due as a result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, adding insult to injury. In addition, the elimination of more than $300 million from the Aid and Incentives for Municipalities funding will leave an immediate hole in our City’s budget. And with more than $1 billion set aside in the State’s Rainy Day Fund, it’s time to recognize that it is now pouring rain, and the use of these rainy day funds can and must be managed more tightly.

 

The report, prepared by the USDOE’s Office of Inspector General in a round of “initial” audits of four large states, calls into question state oversight practices that monitor how federal grant money is disbursed to school districts and then spent. The report concluded that the state needs to upgrade its regulatory systems in order to provide “a reasonable assurance of compliance” with federal law.

The Obama administration has made a clear accounting of how education stimulus money is spent a top priority, and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that the funds should be tracked on a district-by-district level.

Last week, in an interview with Washington Post reporter Jay Matthews, Duncan said that flaws in states’ data and reporting system will count against them in determinations of who receives Race to the Top money as well.

The inspector general’s office gave the state education department a preliminary copy of the report at the beginning of October for response, the audit states. NYSED provided comments two weeks later, but the auditors did not modify their recommendations based on New York’s response.

In September, the federal Government and Accountability Office placed New York on a list of states that are at “high risk” of misusing federal Title I funds, which provide assistance to districts and schools with high proportions of poor students. The office did not include New York on the list of states most at risk for problems with their education stimulus spending, however.

Here’s the complete final audit report:

On Monday, the State Education Department will release a comprehensive plan to overhaul teacher training, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said today. Tisch called the proposal a “very aggressive package” that will be a major element of New York’s Race to the Top application.

The strength of a state’s teacher training program is a heavily weighted component of the final Race to the Top criteria unveiled today. At a speech in New York City last month, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called for states to better prepare new teachers.

But even with a new teacher training initiative, it remains to be seen whether two controversial state laws — one that bans the use of student test scores in teacher tenure decisions and another that caps the number of charter schools allowed in the state — could derail the state’s application.

In a conference call with reporters today, Duncan emphasized that states with such policies will be at a distinct disadvantage compared to states that are “vigorously challenging the status quo” by eliminating such caps and barriers. Some states are changing their laws to improve their Race to the Top chances, but New York has not.

Duncan also made clear that he wants states to use teacher evaluations to make personnel decisions. ”These evaluations have to drive decisions about tenure and placement,” he said. And he said states whose local districts have policies, as New York City does, prohibiting student test scores from being used in teacher evaluations would “put themselves at competitive disadvantage.”

But Tisch insisted, as she has before, that the state’s current teacher evaluation practices hew to the spirit of Race to the Top’s requirements. “There is no barrier to using student data in teacher evaluations in the state of New York,” she said, adding that the state law applied only to teacher tenure decisions. “We evaluate teachers on the basis of student achievement every year in New York.”

Much of New York’s hope in the competition rides on the promise of the strong reputations of Tisch, new state education commissioner David Steiner and new deputy education commissioner John King, as well as that of a charter school movement considered one of the strongest in America.

Tisch has frequently pointed out that state education leaders’ priorities match the Obama administration’s goals on issues ranging from teacher training to raising academic standards and overhauling testing. Changing the tenure law and lifting the charter cap might not be necessary, officials have argued.

But critics say that new leadership and vision may not be enough to spring New York ahead of the pack in a highly competitive field.

State Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, who last month introduced a bill designed explicitly to align state law with Race to the Top’s priorities, said it is too risky to leave the laws unchanged.

“If in fact [the tenure law] is interpreted as not meeting the criteria that Arne Duncan set forth, it would be tragic if we lost that money,” Hoyt said. “So why risk it? Let’s address it now. So then there isn’t any risk involved at all.”

Hoyt’s bill, which the Assembly and Senate have not yet taken up, calls for broad changes in state education law, including an immediate repeal of the teacher tenure law and a lift of the charter cap.

Joe Williams, head of the lobbying group Democrats for Education Reform, said New York will have to change its laws to compete against states that have already changed theirs. But he said he is not confident that there is political will to overhaul state law.

“It seems like the mood is just to go with what we’ve got and to put our trust in Steiner and Tisch,” he said. “And I love what they’re talking about with teacher training, but I just can’t imagine that we’re going to win with all of these other states making big moves.”

States that bar districts from using test scores to evaluate teachers and principals are ineligible for the fund. The language of the requirement remains exactly the same as in the draft rules released in July. The draft proposal sparked a debate about whether a New York State provision that bars using student data in teacher tenure decisions will exclude the state from the competition for grant money.

However, the final criteria does provide more context on how student data should be used to evaluate teachers and principals than did the draft proposal. The regulations call for states to develop evaluation methods that use student test scores as a “significant factor” in rating teachers and principals, but notes that it should be one factor among several categories for which teachers should be judged.

New York’s teacher tenure law sunsets next June, and some state officials, including State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, have said the provision’s expiration date allows the state to be eligible. State education commissioner David Steiner has argued that the law does not exclude New York from the competition because it relates exclusively to tenure decisions and not other forms of teacher evaluation. And several state officials, including Governor David Paterson, said they have personally lobbied U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to boost the state’s chances.

The U.S. Department of Education’s time line for the application specifies that states “that are ready to apply now” should do so in a first round of applications due in mid-January; other states that need more time to comply with the eligibility requirements or to develop their grant proposals can wait until June.

According to the executive summary of the final regulations, states’ applications will be evaluated using a point system. States will earn points based on their plans for turning around the lowest-achieving schools, efforts to develop rigorous common national standards, improving the ways states collect and track student data, and improving teacher training, certification and evaluation programs. States’ plans to train, support and evaluate their teachers and principals are the most heavily-weighted factor in the application.

Here is the executive summary of the final regulations:

U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan speaking at a meeting of the Children's Aid Society at Teachers College this morning.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan called this morning for states to link student test data not only back to teachers, but also to the programs that trained them. New York State education officials said they are already working on it.

Speaking to a packed auditorium at Columbia University, Duncan criticized education schools for failing to graduate classroom-ready teachers. He said there needs to be a way to determine which programs are working.

“It’s a simple but obvious idea,” Duncan said. “Colleges of education and district officials ought to know which teacher preparation programs are effective and which need fixing. The power of competition and disclosure can be a powerful tonic for programs stuck in the past.”

Duncan said he will use the competitive stimulus package funds known as the “Race to the Top” program to pressure states to use student data to evaluate teacher preparation programs.

After Duncan’s speech, state Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and education commissioner David Steiner said that Duncan’s speech was in line with their own visions of change.

“It was a clarion call to do what needs to be done,” Tisch said of Duncan’s speech. “The secretary articulated the vision that [Steiner] has been talking about.”

Plans are already underway to link student data back to teachers and their training programs, Tisch added. “It’s all done,” she said, noting that the state had already begun discussions with school districts, teachers unions, and universities.

Steiner cautioned that before the state began casting judgment on education schools, it had to revisit and perhaps rethink the state’s tests, which have been criticized for being too easy.

“The richer the data system, the more able we are to track back to the education schools,” he said.

Steiner noted that the purpose of linking student data to teachers and training programs is informative, not punitive. “The core of this is to give teachers tools,” he said.

Margaret Crocco, head of Columbia Teachers College’s department of arts and humanities, said that figuring out how to link teacher training programs to student achievement will be a complicated process. “It’s not a simple direct line of relationships,” she said. “But in the spirit of the secretary’s approach, we do need to understand what works and what doesn’t.”

Duncan also called for an increase in the amount of time teachers-to-be spend in class, praising programs that pair student teachers with mentors for year-long “residencies” in the classroom. New York’s first residency program was launched this year by Hunter College, and Columbia’s Teachers College will launch a similar program next fall.

Earlier this morning, Duncan gave the keynote address at the Children’s Aid Society’s Biannual Community Schools Practicum. Echoing previous comments, he called for community schools like the ones he helped develop in Chicago to be come the “norm.”

“The more our schools become community centers, offer GED classes, ESL classes, potluck dinners … the more families are engaged, the more schools become the heart of family life, the better our students will do,” Duncan said.

In districts that are fighting poverty and high drop out rates, schools can no longer operate from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. he said. Once regular school hours end, nonprofit after-school organizations such as the YMCA or the Boys and Girls Club have to keep students engaged and out of trouble.

Speaking to an audience of philanthropists, Duncan warned that community schools won’t work as one-time investments. “This has to become every school. This is not something you can invest in for three years. You have to stay the course,” he said.

In the question and answer session that followed, president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, pressed Duncan on how the federal government would force local school districts to create community schools.

“There has to be leverage in the federal role or regulations pushing mayors or others who don’t want to do it,” Weingarten said.

“The number one issue that we’ve seen that stops the kind of work that you just talked about is not money and not the use of time but the lack of coordination,” Weingarten said. “I’m wondering, whether the department can find a way to incentivize that coordination so it’s not always coming from the bottom up.”

A tired-looking Duncan, who was minutes away from delivering his speech on teacher preparation, said that part of the solution could be installing mayoral control in more cities. “Thinking through that is a really important thing for us to do,” he said.

Ed Week’s Politics K12 has the latest on his priorities:

Duncan didn’t say anything he hasn’t said before, but he used the high-profile forum to stress some priorities, including extended learning time, using data to track student and teacher effectiveness, and systems to better measure individual student progress. (That’s code for growth models, which are expected to be a given in this reauthorization.)

He also said about the current law:

“But the biggest problem with NCLB is that it doesn’t encourage high learning standards,” Duncan said. “In fact, it inadvertently encourages states to lower them. The net effect is that we are lying to children and parents by telling kids they are succeeding when they are not.”

Next step: a bunch of “stakeholder meetings” to take the temperature of the field. The U.S. Department of Education web site has the dates.

Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the Board of Regents (file photo)

Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch is challenging President Obama and his secretary of education to a verbal duel over New York’s access to a special pot of federal stimulus dollars for schools.

“I am willing to debate the president and Arne Duncan in public space at any time of their choosing on the impact of this law in New York State,” Tisch said in a telephone interview this evening.

Obama administration officials have said that states that ban the use of test scores to evaluate teachers will not be eligible for the dollars, called the Race to the Top fund. A New York law prohibits something very similar, using student test scores to decide whether teachers deserve tenure.

A nonprofit group, The New Teacher Project, today said the law should exclude New York from receiving Race to the Top funds. (Founded by Michelle Rhee, the D.C. schools chancellor, The New Teacher Project brings non-traditionally trained teachers into school districts and advocates for teaching policies that often clash with teachers unions’ positions.)

Duncan himself has suggested that New York’s law does not make the cut. “Believe it or not, several states including New York, Wisconsin, and California, have laws, they have laws that create a firewall between students and teacher data,” Duncan said at a June conference where he previewed the guidelines around the fund.

The administration’s aim is to spur states to change laws and policies it disapproves of. Duncan has vowed to dole out the dollars in two batches, one this fall and the next in 2010, in order to give state legislatures time to change their laws.

But New York officials, including Governor Paterson and Tisch, have refused to accept that the state might be disqualified. Teachers union officials, including American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who lobbied state lawmakers to pass the law last year, are also lobbying hard for New York not to be disqualified.

Tisch said that she has spoken personally to Duncan to explain the “the context of this law.” She said that New York’s law was the result of a personal dispute between the city schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and Weingarten, then head of the New York City union. That dispute should not overshadow the other ways in which the state is in line with the White House’s goals for improving schools, she said.

“If the federal government wants to leave over 3 million youngsters in this country out of their ability to benefit by Race to the Top dollars because of a law on the books that is due to expire and a law that has not impacted one teacher or one youngster in New York State, then I am really living in an alternate universe,” Tisch said, her voice raised. “Because everything I hear them say is they want to help kids who are sitting in progressive classrooms across this country.”

She added, “And that’s the last I want to say about this tonight because I’m getting really aggravated.”

Tisch has also said previously that New York’s law does not disqualify the state because it has to do with teacher tenure decisions, not teacher evaluations. When I asked her how deciding whether a teacher deserves tenure does not constitute an evaluation, she replied, “What can I tell you? Then Arne Duncan should have that fight with Randi, okay?”

In another sign of New York’s commitment to winning the funds, Tisch said the state has appointed an outside consultant to head its efforts to apply for Race to the Top Funds. JoEllen Lynch, who formerly served as a top deputy to Klein, is working on a contract to head the project.

A spokesman for Duncan, Justin Hamilton, would not say whether New York will qualify for the funds. “Just as we’re not going to predict who will win the Race to the Top, we’re not going to predict who isn’t,” Hamilton said in a statement. “We have a process in place that allows everyone to put their best foot forward, and we encourage all states to apply.”

I just asked Hamilton for a comment about Tisch’s statements and will add that when it arrives.

Rupert Murdoch and Arne Duncan. (Images via Creative Commons)

The New York Post patted its own back today, hard, for helping the state renew the mayor’s control of the public schools. The surprising thing is that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined in, thanking the newspaper, owned by the ambitious Rupert Murdoch, for its “leadership” and “thoughtfulness.”

New York City newspapers have a proud tradition of waging campaigns both on and off the editorial page, and then congratulating themselves when they hit their marks. But having a cabinet member for a sitting president join the cheering is more unusual.

“I think that must be out of context, that Arne Duncan is giving the Post credit for mayoral control,” the president of the principals’ union, Ernest Logan, said when I called to ask his impression.

The news series the Post ran extolling mayoral control

Richard Colvin, who directs the Hechinger Institute for education journalism at Columbia University, said he found the whole news story baffling. “It reads like nothing I’ve ever seen. It reads like the worst kind of back-patting, self-congratulatory press release that has no perspective whatsoever,” he said.

Duncan’s quote does illustrate a strange alliance that fought hard for mayoral control’s renewal, Murdoch and the secretary of education among them. In addition to running a series of news articles highlighting victories of mayoral control in the past seven years, Murdoch’s Post also published an aggressive slew of editorials mocking anyone who stood in the path of a full-throttled renewal of the mayor’s power. (Remember Randi Weingarten, puppet master?)

Murdoch also played a behind-the-scenes role in his position as co-chairman of the Partnership for New York City, a lobbying group that represents business interests. (The other co-chair is Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs.) The group kept a low profile during the mayoral control fight, but worked behind the scenes to broker a compromise between groups fighting over the law, including the city teachers union and the Bloomberg administration.

Duncan fought for mayoral control, too, and he often did so in the pages of the Post. It was in that newspaper that he first entered the local fight, offering an exclusive interview previewing remarks he made the next day at the Sheraton, where the National Action Network was holding a conference on education. Duncan then sat down with the paper’s editorial board, where he criticized a cut to charter schools by the state. Later, he penned a letter to a civic group that got into the nitty-gritty policy question of whether or not to give school board members fixed terms. (Like the Bloomberg administration and the Post, Duncan opposed them.)

While the efforts of the newspaper and the secretary probably did play a role in renewing mayoral control, the accuracy of the stories that the Post ran is arguable. The paper called the city’s racial achievement gap “the incredible shrinking race gap,” yet a recent New York Times story, a story I wrote in the New York Sun, and analysis by academic researchers suggests much more modest language is in order. The paper also wrote story after story about turnaround schools — without once profiling the schools that have remained failures despite mayoral control.

Not to be a Grinch, or even to argue that “balance” could have solved the problem. But is a little editorial independence so much to ask for?