Race to Top Winners Feel Heat on Teacher Evaluations

Federal-grant recipients must live up to promises made in winning awards

Winners of the federal Race to the Top competition are facing difficult questions about how to make good on their ambitious promises to link teacher evaluation with student performance, a task complicated in some cases by resistance from educators and practical questions about how to judge job performance fairly.

For some states, that means wrestling with how to evaluate teachers in subjects for which no statewide test now exists. Others face a tough task of setting specific evaluation requirements based on relatively broad laws that established those systems, which in some cases were designed to boost the states’ chances in the competition.

Eleven states and the District of Columbia split $4 billion in awards through the Race to the Top grant initiative, which was championed by the Obama administration and financed by the 2009 federal economic-stimulus package.

Applicants that vowed to create new evaluation systems for teachers and administrators, turn around struggling schools, support charter school growth, and improve the collection and use of data, among other steps, picked up points in the competition. Hopefuls also were rewarded if their proposals had strong buy-in from teachers’ unions.

Executing Goals

Now states have to execute the goals they put on paper. One of the clearest examples of the challenges in doing so can be seen in New York, which won $700 million through the competition.

Last year, New York lawmakers, aiming to bolster the state’s Race to the Top bid, approved a measure that called for 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation to be tied to students’ academic gains. The state’s largest teachers’ union, the 600,000-member New York State United Teachers, or NYSUT, and state education officials came together in support of the law.