After staying out of the Race to the Top round-two fray for weeks, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is finally starting to take the gloves off and wade into the middle of a big debate over just how important "buy-in" is in a state's application. Today, in a routine conference call with the business community (he does this sort of outreach regularly), he declared: "At the end of the day we're going to [fund] the strongest proposals whether they have tremendous buy-in or not." (The department invited me to listen in on the call, which was to encourage ...

Politics K-12 wants to know, as does Rick "Straight Up" Hess. Race to the Top started out as a new, exciting adventure with the promise of billions of dollars in prize money to help the nation's students. And now, reality is setting in—and the adults are fighting. In the run-up to the first round of the competition, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was a dominating presence, not hesitating to praise the well-behaving and model states (think Louisiana, and all the kudos he gave them for its teacher-education and student data linkage). And he also didn't hesitate to shake...

There's been a lot of talk about how fair the scoring was in the first round of Race to the Top. Did reviewers follow the guidance and always award the correct number of points? Did a few outliers skew the results? Did some states get the luck of the draw and benefit from a bunch of easy graders, or did others draw the short end of stick and get all of the hard graders? The Education Department, as part of its technical assistance seminar in Minneapolis yesterday for state applicants, said it did its own statistical analysis to examine these ...

Education Department officials gave some insight into what Race to the Top peer reviewers liked and didn't in states' applications.

Want to know how much money your state could get from the education jobs legislation introduced by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, last week, or similar legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last year? Check out this chart from the Education Commission of the States. Or this one from the National Education Association, which also compares the potential boost to the size of potential grants made available under Race to the Top competition....

The application deadline for the second round of Race to the Top isn't until June 1, but we've got one good gauge of which states may be applying, and which may be sitting the competition out. Today, in Minneapolis, the U.S. Department of Education is holding an all-day technical assistance seminar for potential round two applicants. (People can also participate via conference call.) Forty-twoForty-three states plus D.C. are attending, or tuning in remotely. The states that, for whatever reason, are not participating, are: Alaska, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming. UPDATE: Michigan is apparently ...

The U.S. Department of Education has posted a spreadsheet listing the more than 2,000 districts, schools, and nonprofits that plan to apply for the $650 million Investing in Innovation grant. If the thought of opening an Excel spreadsheet intimidates you, there's also a convenient summary of the intents-to-apply. This list is a compilation of those who told the department, by April 1, that they plan to apply for these competitive grants. This was more of a courtesy for the department so officials could figure out what kind of workload is in store for them and the peer reviewers. ...

So now that the first round of winners have been announced, powerful members of Congress are starting to question the scoring system for the Race to the Top program. During a hearing of today of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees education spending, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., went off on the Race to the Top's 500-point scoring system. (Remember, Louisiana was a finalist and widely viewed as a front-runner, but then came in 11th.) Some folks said that Louisiana's plan was bolder than the two winners, Delaware and Tennessee. But those states had near universal support from districts and unions. ...

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today officially called on Congress to pass a second round of funding to help states thwart layoffs and programmatic cuts. This is a big deal because, up to now, the administration hadn't officially asked for more education jobs money, even though the House passed this bill last year. So far, the Senate has been the holdout. But Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations panel that oversees education funding, is set to introduce a bill that would provide $23 billion in education jobs aid. Duncan testified before Harkin's panel this morning. I ...

More money for schools contemplating layoffs, furloughs, and other cuts? It could happen if a bill set to be introduced this week by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, gains traction. Harkin, who is the chairman of both the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees education spending, is set to release a bill that would provide $23 billion to help schools keep teachers and other staff on the payroll, once funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act dry up (the so-called "funding cliff" you've heard so much about). The measure's $23 billion Education ...