By ALYSON KLEIN

It's a warning that's etched in the mind of every state and local education policymaker: Beware the funding cliff.

States and school districts are already bracing for the budget crunch that is almost certain to hit when the up to $100 billion in education aid made available under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act runs out starting later this year.

Aware that the fiscal picture in most states will likely remain bleak for the next few years, state and local leaders are trying to pinpoint new revenue sources for education, and are seeking ways to trim spending to blunt the impact of the stimulus aid's end--the so-called "funding cliff."

Since much of the funding under the economic-stimulus measure enacted by Congress a year ago was used to fill budget holes at the local level, many students, teachers, and administrators may not have been aware of just how much of a difference the money made in classrooms, said Jack Jennings, the president of the Center on Education Policy. His research organization, based in Washington, has been tracking the stimulus funds.

But educators are almost certain to feel the pinch once the money runs out.

"The UCLA Civil Rights Project seemingly wants to block minority parents from choosing to enroll their children in better schools simply because it feels those schools aren't white enough. What's up with that?"   

By ALYSON KLEIN

Despite a pledge to hold down spending on most domestic programs, President Barack Obama tonight called for greater investment in public schools in his State of the Union address as part of a push to renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The president's fiscal year 2011 budget, slated to be released Monday, will seek a 6.2 percent increase to the U.S. Department of Education's budget, including up to $4 billion more for K-12 education. The department's discretionary budget for fiscal 2010 is roughly $63.7 billion.

A large piece of the increase, $1.35 billion, would be aimed at extending beyond this year the $4 billion in economic-stimulus program Race to the Top grants and opening up the competition--now limited to states--to school districts. The president highlighted the Race to the Top saying it had "broken through the stalemate between left and right," and pledged to expand the reform priorities of that competition--among them turning around failing schools and increasing the supply of effective teachers--to all 50 states.

"The idea here is simple," he said. "Instead of rewarding failure, we only reward success. Instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform­--reform that raises student achievement, inspires students to excel in math and science, and turns around failing schools that steal the future of too many young Americans, from rural communities to inner cities."

By Patrice Wingert

When the Obama administration first proposed having states duke it out for a share of a $4 billion education-reform fund, critics expected the whole enterprise to either be largely ignored or dissolve into political infighting. But instead, the Race to the Top competition has proved so successful in motivating states to accelerate their education-reform efforts that the administration has new plans to offer such competitions on an annual basis. President Obama will also announce tonight that the Department of Education will be offering a new competition to push states to create more and better preschool programs. During a briefing Tuesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that the country doesn't "need any more studies" to prove that high-quality preschool education can significantly close the achievement gap between rich and poor. Instead, he said, the country just needs to offer such programs to more kids. The president "wants to dramatically increase access and give kids a level playing field," Duncan said. "If kids don't come to school ready to learn and ready to read,  it's very tough for even the best kindergarten teachers to close that gap." During the presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly promised that he would expand early education programs but has focused little attention on the issue during his first year.

By RICHARD WOLF

In excerpts of his speech released by the White House on Wednesday evening, the president praised Americans for "great decency and great strength" in the face of economic adversity.

"After one of the most difficult years in our history, they remain busy building cars and teaching kids; starting businesses and going back to school," Obama was expected to say. "They are coaching little league and helping their neighbors. As one woman wrote to me, 'We are strained but hopeful, struggling but encouraged.' "

The focus of the speech will be "getting our economy moving again," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said earlier on Wednesday. Based on the excerpts released ahead of the president's address, he was expected to press federal lawmakers to continue to press for earmark changes. "Tonight, I'm calling on Congress to publish all earmark requests on a single website before there's a vote so that the American people can see how their money is being spent."

Based on those excerpts, the president also was expected to call for a crackdown on the way lobbyists do business with official Washington.

Statement on President Obama's First Year

Unfettered by inside-the-beltway partisan politics, President Obama indisputably has affected more change in the nation's education policies in his first year in office than any President in modern history.

The boost that the Administration's Race to the Top initiative - which was accompanied by a record $100 billion increase in general federal aid to education - has given state and local education reform efforts is the Administration's biggest domestic policy success of 2009 - all without yet expending a dime of the $5 billion Race to the Top fund. 

What's more, while not a single Republican Congressman and only 3 Republican Senators voted for the economic and education reform stimulus package last February, the policy initiatives that Obama and Secretary Duncan put forth have since been embraced through both words and action by state and local elected officials in both parties across the ideological and geographical spectrum.

These accomplishments reflect campaign promises kept - in recognition of the relationship between education reform, jobs, and economic growth - to make education one of three key components of a long-term U.S. economic recovery strategy (the other two being energy and health care which obviously, and to say the least, have not fared as well), an augur well for the work on education reform that is yet to come.

Some effects are immediate - for example, more than a hundred thousand slots have already opened to parents across the country who want to choose a high quality public charter school for their children.  Others, such as changes in state academic standards to ensure that students are college and career ready, the development of better tests, more rigorous qualification criteria and better pay for teachers, and fundamental overhauls of chronically failing schools, will pay dividends later this year, and over the next several.

These changes reflect an ongoing and historic realignment in education politics. First, the politics of education reform, at least once one gets outside the Beltway, increasingly have less to do with inter-party politics than with pragmatism and the imperative need to get children out of schools to which no parent would voluntarily choose to send their children.  

Second, and equally important, it represents forward thinking by the President which reflects a broader base of support for real education reform within the Democratic party.  The days when the interests of adults completely overrode those of children and parents, when elected officials not only did some of what they were asked to do by the education establishment but everything they were told, are slowly but surely coming to a close. This is the beginning of the end of monolithic control by powerful interests over education policy that has stymied sensible education reform in the U.S. for decades.

The fights are far from over. While some states that have been historically intransigent to real education reform, such as California, have enacted  ground-breaking policies as part of their Race to the Top effort others, notably New York, succumbed to back room tactics and bullying by lobbyists trying to preserve and defend an educational system that is failing hundreds of thousands of children in that state alone.

Moreover, the real challenges for the Administration, the real tests of its resolve, remain. Especially in an election year, government officials will have to work hard not to succumb to political pressure to reward states that have proven to be unwilling to advance credible and ambitious reforms. A retreat to this old way of doing things in Washington would represent a squandered opportunity of epic proportions.

But if the Administration continues to keep the bar high for Race to the Top, and stays on the path of real change by making major investments only in those states and school districts that have shown the willingness to break out of the old ways of doing things, it will mark a major turning point in U.S. education policy, the effects of which will reverberate for decades.

To download DFER's handy 5-page fact sheet on "Educational Change We Can Believe In", click here.

By CHARLES UPTON SAHM

Unconscionable. Shameful. Deplorable. Despicable. Those are just a few adjectives that come to mind to describe the New York State Legislature's failure to pass commonsense education reforms that would have qualified New York for a share of the federal government's $4.35 billion Race to the Top initiative. As a result, New York taxpayers have probably lost out on some $700 million in federal education funding, and the state has missed a golden opportunity to improve the educational prospects of its neediest schoolchildren.

When the Obama administration announced the criteria for its Race to the Top grants competition last summer, it seemed that the education-reform movement had reached a tipping point. Here was a Democratic administration backing cutting-edge reforms like rigorous academic standards, data-driven instruction, performance pay for teachers, and the takeover of struggling schools. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made it clear that states that inhibited the growth of charter schools or prohibited the use of students' test scores when evaluating teachers would be deemed ineligible for Race to the Top grants.

Most states responded by embracing the tenets of Race to the Top. Tennessee, Rhode Island, Louisiana, and Massachusetts passed charter-friendly laws that lifted caps on the number of charters and allowed public money to be used for their construction. California, Indiana, and Wisconsin scrapped laws that barred the use of student test scores in teacher assessments. Just two states still have such data firewalls: Nevada and New York.

By NANCY MITCHELL

Will Colorado's desire for collaboration doom the state's chances of winning the Race to the Top?

That question lingered Tuesday after the state submitted its application to try to secure $377 million of the $4.35 billion federal grant.

Analysts who've followed the highly competitive national education reform competition for the past year have typically placed Colorado among the top 10 contenders for the prize.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan acknowledged as much during a conference call with reporters on Tuesday.

"We're expecting to get a great application from Colorado," Duncan said, declining more specific comment on any individual state's chances.

But others were quick to point out what they see as the plan's greatest weakness - the creation of a council to figure out how to link teacher pay, retention, dismissal and tenure to student academic growth rather than the details of a plan doing exactly that.

Nationally, a former U.S. Department of Education official noted Colorado was among the states opting for buy-in from stakeholders such as teachers' unions over the creation of a definitive proposal.

"The state decided against making tough calls on teacher evaluations, potentially knocking a frontrunner back several spots," wrote Andy Smarick on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's blog.

Be bold, or collaborative?

One D.C. insider slotted Colorado behind states such as Tennessee, where the teachers' union signed on to a plan linking 50 percent of a teacher's annual evaluation to measures of student academic progress.

Florida also is favored over Colorado, though that state's union president publicly fought a proposal linking teacher evaluations to student growth and requiring that data be used to implement merit pay.

By CARA MATTHEWS

ALBANY -- Other states changed charter school laws to increase their odds of getting federal "Race to the Top" education funds, but New York officials couldn't reach a compromise on last-minute legislation to do that and submitted their application minutes before Tuesday's deadline.

By MICHELE MCNEIL

A year ago, Arne Duncan was known as a long-serving urban district chief who had used his collegial management style to push innovation and close failing schools in Chicago.

This week, he enters his second year as U.S. secretary of education pursuing a similar national policy agenda that could place him among the most influential leaders in his department's 30-year history.

Empowered by up to $100 billion in economic-stimulus aid for education--and the support of President Barack Obama, whom he has long known--Mr. Duncan has pressed hard on such priorities as charter schools, teacher performance pay, common academic standards, and turnarounds of low-performing schools.

He has used his bully pulpit to assess blame for a K-12 system he sees as marred by mediocre student performance, dismal graduation rates in some cities, and stubborn achievement gaps between minority and white students.

Observers are now watching to see whether Mr. Duncan will succeed in codifying the administration's agenda through the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, last revised eight years ago as the No Child Left Behind law.

And as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act enters its second and final year, Mr. Duncan is expected to continue wielding the leverage that the stimulus law's nearly $10 billion in competitive-grant programs for education gives him.

Already, he has held out the prospect of $4 billion in Race to the Top Fund grants to persuade states to lift their caps on charter schools and to ease the way for teacher merit-pay programs. ("States Change Policies With Eye to Winning Federal Grants," Jan. 6, 2010.)

By HARRISON BLACKMOND

By JESSICA FENDER and JEREMY MEYER

The U.S. Education Secretary's $5 billion "Race To The Top" Fund, as included in the federal stimulus package, represents a historic opportunity to establish clear reform priorities and to back them up with signifiant resources to bring change to America's schools.

CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW NEW YORK STACKS UP (Updated Jan. 19 2010)

CLICK HERE FOR AN UPDATE ON HOW STATES ARE LINING UP (Updated Jan. 8 2010)

CLICK HERE TO READ DFER'S HANDY RTTP FAQ+A PAPER! (Updated, Dec. 13, 2009)

CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW STATES ARE LINING UP (Updated, Dec. 14, 2009)

Click below for some concepts that DFER supports as part of the Race To The Top competition between states:

-- Race To The Top Issue Brief #1 -  Public Charter Schools and High Quality Pre-K  (June 17, 2009)

-- Race To The Top Issue Brief #2 - Unleashing Innovation In America's Schools (June 18, 2009)

-- Race To The Top Issue Brief #3 - Enhancing Entry Points To The Teaching Profession  (June 19, 2009)

-- Race To The Top Issue Brief #4 - World Class Standards and Assessments  (June 22, 2009)

-- Race To The Top Issue Brief #5 - Growing Innovative Charter Schools (June 23, 2009)

-- Race To The Top Issue Brief #6 - A Great Teacher For Every Child (June 24, 2009) 

By KAREN BOUFFARD

By NANCY MITCHELL

Jaw-dropping amounts of money flowed into the 2009 Denver Public Schools' board elections from would-be education reformers near and far while state and local labor unions united in a covert push to fight them.

Friday's campaign filing deadline provides more details about what became a battle between those who want to shake up the city's public schools - and those who'd like their change with a little less shaking.

But, as in years past, the final vote tallies showed neither big money nor union backing guaranteed a win.

Money matters - or not

Thomas W. Gamel, with little recent history of political activity but supportive of DPS reforms such as school autonomy, contributed a total of $237,558.84 to three candidates, giving $144,350 to at-large candidate Mary Seawell - or 60 percent of her total dollars raised. She beat her opponent Christopher Scott by taking 71 percent of the vote but the other recipients of Gamel's largess did not fare as well.

Gamel contributed more than half of the $104,138.84 total raised by Vernon Jones in northeast Denver but Jones was defeated by Nate Easley, whose final tally was $41,470. In southwest Denver, Gamel's $36,950 in donations helped push Ismael Garcia's fund-raising total to $85,830. Garcia was defeated by Andrea Merida, who raised less than half that amount - or $30,116.