The first winners in the Race to the Top competition were two small states: Delaware and Tennessee.  Good for them.

Being small compared to say California, they managed to get all school districts and teacher’s unions on board.  Not only that, it seems the two states wrote decent, clear proposals.

Too bad the other states didn’t take their lumps without fussing and excusing themselves, without criticizing the judges and scores on the proposals as if they were unfairly disqualified.

This is like any competition: the grant writers, state departments of education, and state legislatures knew the rules of the game.  Some states refused to take the cap off the number of charter schools.  Some states couldn’t persuade all school districts to collaborate.  Some states couldn’t manage to change their education laws to allow reform of teacher evaluation combined with state testing.

For some states-like California-the depths of fiscal collapse is the real reason that the state didn’t win a prize.  Like many contestants, the state needed the money to compensate for its own deficit and now complains because of a cap on the next set of awards.  California, for instance, asked for $1 billion in the first round and has found out it can only max out at $700 million if it wins in the second round of application.

Now, now, swallow your pride and dig in.  That’s what students are told to do.

For one, rewrite the grant to allow small rural schools and big urban districts to reform the issues that affect each individually.  If the school is persistently low-performing (whether large or small), there are at least two ways to restructure, not counting change to a charter, the least best of the ways to reorganize for most schools.  An adept grant writer could show how a school might combine parts of all the possible models; the point is to design a reform model and stick to it along with improvements as needed over time.

The most difficult issue to resolve and the one that held up many proposals is linking teacher evaluation and state testing.  There are those who can’t imagine how to design a teacher evaluation that is fair and accounts for the variables that lead to discrepant test results.  How can the two be combined?

Above all content standards must be agreed upon and assessments must be improved.  Common content standards are being revised right now.  A multiple choice test doesn’t assess all the learning skills a student needs.  Not all teachers are working in a grade or subject that the current state test assesses.

Next, systems must be set up to provide a community of accountability in a public school.  For example, yearly a principal with a formal evaluation rates plans to reach the many groups of student abilities in the class and analyzes assessments for improved student growth. Also observers come into the classroom frequently, using a checklist of items that teachers collaborate on to design a successful classroom.  Those are the techniques to observe.  Feedback is provided immediately, either from the check list or by conference and an ‘action plan’ is developed to help the teacher with any strategies that might improve class work.

Of course, this kind of reform needs financial resources to include administrators to take on school operations and observers who agree to help with this type of accountability, leaving the principal to attend to the learning in the school.  Please note that the district’s school board must focus on academic achievement for each school, high as well as low-achieving.

It will not do to leave the teachers to take on all of the above and then be handled roughly if achievement doesn’t immediately improve.  This blog has long maintained the relentless, consistent nature of reform for an entire school community.

So the moral for state is “try, try again.”