Hoping to spur innovation and boost student achievement, the US Department of Education has decided to award Massachusetts $250 million under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.
Massachusetts will be among 10 recipients to win money in the second round of the $4.35 billion competition, said Justin Hamilton, a US Education Department spokesman. Massachusetts was the top scorer in this round.
The program aims to reward states aggressively pursuing innovative educational programs and overhauls of failing schools.
The other winners in the second round of the competition were: Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Rhode Island. The District of Columbia also won.
Tennessee and Delaware were named winners in the first round in March, sharing $600 million.
Massachusetts had been rejected in the first round of grants. The rejection sent shock waves through the state, which has long been regarded as having one of the most rigorous academic standards in the country, and which Obama has held up as a model of educational excellence.
Massachusetts lost points during the first round because a review panel doubted that the state would replace its homegrown academic standards, widely considered among the most rigorous in the nation, with a new set of national standards.
The panel also faulted the state for giving teacher unions too much say in developing plans to overhaul failing schools and for not committing to tying teacher evaluations to their students’ test scores.
Since then, the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has voted to create a task force to examine ways to include student test performance as part of a teacher’s evaluation, and last month the board adopted the national standards. The latter move sparked considerable debate. Many educators supported the switch, while many Republicans and some groups that work on education issues opposed it.
Yet even as state officials tried to strengthen their application for the second round they also experienced an erosion of support. The American Federation of Teachers of Massachusetts, which supported the first application, reversed its position for the second round, outraged that hundreds of teachers in Boston were asked to reapply for their jobs at underperforming schools in Boston — a school overhaul tactic pushed by the Obama administration.
“Massachusetts is already ahead of the nation in education, but we should never rest on our laurels,” Senate President Therese Murray said in a statement. “Today’s great news is the latest example of our ongoing commitment to always do the best for our schools and our students.”
