Race to Top winner list raises questions of urban, geographic bias

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Tuesday the second round winners of Race to the Top funding demonstrated the boldest plans for turning around public schools, but they also share another factor: geography. "Of the dozen states that have won major grants to date in the two-part grant contest that is the Obama administration’s signature education initiative, 11 are east of the Mississippi and most hug the East Coast, including Florida and Georgia in the South and New York and Massachusetts in the North," Sam Dillon of The New York Times reports. "Among the winners, Hawaii is the lone geographic exception."

Educators in many of the states that didn't win or participate in the competition said "the competition’s rules tilted in favor of densely populated Eastern states, which tend to embrace more of the ideas that Washington currently considers innovative, including increasing the number of charter schools and firing principals in chronically failing schools," Dillon writes. Experts agreed "those rules have seemed a poor fit for the nation’s rural communities and sparsely populated Western regions." Duncan said of the prevalence of Eastern winners, "We went as far west as we could go. We want to work with Western states. Geography was irrelevant."

"This whole effort had more of an urban than a rural flavor," Armando Vilaseca, commissioner of education of Vermont, whose state did not participate in either round of Race to the Top. Delaware and Tennessee were selected as winners in the first round of competition, and the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island were selected as second round winners. Among the surprise losers were Colorado and Louisiana, which each "endured divisive legislative battles to change education laws in ways favored by the administration, to improve their chances of winning Race to the Top money," Dillon writes. (Read more)