$3.4B for 9 states, D.C. in Race to the Top grants

“The outcome has little bearing on good education in Colorado,” Schaffer said. “As a state, we are perfectly capable of meeting the needs of our public education system. Federal funds come with strings and request. On balance, there is as much to gain as there is to lose by taking these federal funds.”

Like Colorado, at least 17 states vying for the money reformed teacher evaluation systems to include student achievement, and more than a dozen changed laws to foster the growth of charter schools. Dozens also adopted Common Core State Standards, the uniform math and reading benchmarks developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association.

“The change unleashed by conditioning federal funding on bold and forward-looking state education policies is indisputable,” the Democrats for Education Reform said in a statement. “Under the president’s leadership, local civil rights, child advocacy, business and education reform groups, in collaboration with those state and local teacher unions ready for change, sprung into action to achieve things that they had been waiting and wanting to do for years.”

In a speech announcing the finalists last month, Duncan called the change a “quiet revolution.”

“This is not about funding a few states on a pilot basis. This is about a national movement,” he said.

But some education groups said Race to the Top rewarded states that have weak reform efforts while leaving out those like Colorado and Louisiana that have made strides to overhaul their schools.

“It becomes clear that the vagaries of peer reviewers and the prowess of grant writers are what drive results in such competitions, not true policy change, political courage, leadership or public commitment to reform,” said Mike Petrilli, a former ED official who is now vice president at the Fordham Institute.

Between both rounds of the competition, 46 states and the District of Columbia applied.

The competition for many states was an uphill battle, with teacher unions hesitant to sign on to reforms directly tying teacher evaluations to student performance on standardized tests, and education leaders concerned winning meant giving up too much local control.

Florida was among the states that got resistance from many teachers unions in the first round of the competition but won their support after taking a more collaborative approach in round two.

“I think it shows that when the governor brought all the stakeholders together, we came up with an application that was strong and doable,” said Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, the statewide teachers’ union.

Other states, like Indiana, dropped out of the competition because of the lack of union support for the state’s application.

Some states that did not win the competition said they still planned to proceed with the reforms they had proposed, though they acknowledged change would take place at a slower pace without the financial boost of Race to the Top.