The U.S. Department of Education announced the 10 winners of the next phase of Race to the Top on Tuesday, and it included a couple of surprises. Many speculated that Illinois, Colorado and Louisiana would be in the top 10. Few folks expected Hawaii or Maryland to make the cut.

The winners, in order of ranking from top to bottom, were: Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii, Florida, Rhode Island, District of Columbia, Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, Georgia and Ohio.

EdMoney.org, EWA’s website tracking funds from last year’s economic-stimulus law, has just become a gold mine of information on that unprecedented influx of federal cash into the nation’s schools.

With data on roughly 39,000 grants to more than 12,000 school districts, the site now provides vastly more information on how funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are being disbursed. Besides listing the amount and purpose of grants awarded to states and districts through June 30 of this year, the database reports how much of the money had been spent as of that date.

The site also lets you compare school districts of similar size, and their spending rates. In some cases, it’s surprising to see how little of the stimulus cash has been spent. For instance, the nation’s capital has only spent $650,000 of its $16 million in additional ...

The US Department of Education will announce the winners of the next phase of Race to the Top on Tuesday. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia were named finalists July 17 out of 36 applicants. During the first round, only two states -- Tennessee and Delaware -- received RTTT dollars.

Place your bets now.

The U.S. House of Representatives today passed the emergency jobs bill that is supposed to save 160,000 teaching jobs around the country.

A spreadsheet on the House Education and Labor Committee website shows how much money each state should receive and how many teaching jobs each state should save.

But reporters were skeptical during a press conference call held today by Arne Duncan after the jobs bill was passed. For example, columnist Peter Callaghan of the Tacoma News Tribune told Duncan that he had a hard time finding districts that needed to rehire teachers in Washington state.

Incidentally, reporters also wondered on the EWA K-12 listserve about the jobs saved. Dave Murray of the Grand Rapids Press noted that the estimates of how many jobs would be saved went from 4,100 to 4,700 while the $318 million remained the same. Ben Botkin, education and politics reporter ...

(cross-posted at EdBeat)

I joined what seemed like half of the Washington ed world today for Arne Duncan’s speech at the National Press Club, where he winnowed the field of contenders vying for $3.4 billion in Race to the Top money to 18 states and the District of Columbia.

Based on how they fare on a complicated 500-point scoring rubric, the second-round winners will be picked from the following finalists: Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.

Duncan predicts 10 to 15 winners when the final cut is made in September. If bigger states—whose proposals require more money—come out on top, the number of winners is likely to be on the smaller end.

For education reporters, the secretary’s announcement of Race to the Top ...

Edmoney is going live with the data from seven states that were audited by the US Department of Education Inspector General's Office.

The inspector general's auditing services division issued its final report on the spot checks it did of various states' ability to monitor how districts and charter schools are spending stimulus dollars.

Tennessee got a clean bill of health from the auditors. Concerns were raised about the six others, though Texas and Illinois were taking steps in the right direction.

The audit wasn't looking to uncover any improper expenditures, just raising questions about whether states had the right controls in place to make sure stimulus money was spent on things it was designed to be spent on. Nonetheless, New York and Pennsylvania seemed to have the most question marks from the federal auditors on their controls. And Philadelphia was marked as a possible "high-risk" grantee by ...

Note: Links for applications updated June 23. The competition for the second round of billions in education stimulus dollars from the federal government will feature 36 competitors, the U.S. Department of Education said Tuesday.

That's just shy of the 41 applicants for Race to the Top in Round One. States have been busily writing new education laws, and begging school districts and teachers unions to sign off on applications to improve their chances at a grant. But some gave up on the challenge, and others said they were concerned about the extent they were required to change their ways to have a competitive application.

While there have been questions about how Round One winners Tennessee and Delaware were chosen and whether reviewers followed rules about scoring as closely as they should, both states did have buy-in from most stakeholders. Round One runners up (who got no parting gift ...

By the deadline earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education had received nearly 1,700 applications for the $650 million Investing in Innovation fund. The program, known as i3, was created under last year's federal stimulus act.

(A few expected grant applications either on paper and from areas affected by flooding in Tennessee had a few extra days to turn in applications, but it's unlikely to change the number of proposals dramatically. The feds haven't provided an updated applicant figure that we can find. Let us know if you know of one.)

Fundwise, the i3 program is only about a quarter of one of the better-known competitive portions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Race to the Top. But it requires winning districts and groups of schools to get private partners to make the innovative ideas reality.

The proposals must expand implementation and investment ...

Last February, I had the honor to be among several trainers teaching computer-assisted reporting and data analysis to 20 education reporters during the Education Writers Association statistics boot camp held at Arizona State University in Phoenix.

Besides teaching some basic sessions on database managers, such as Excel and Access, and how to use these tools for everyday reporting  and complex stories, I had five reporters, which I’m currently coaching as they work on their proposed projects. They all came armed with data, mostly related to stimulus funding, to work with during the bootcamp.

Lisa Schencker, an education reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah, was among these reporters.

A story began to emerge as we discussed the data she brought to the bootcamp after she realized that some of her largest school districts in Utah had not spent any Title I or IDEA funds, a year after the ...

Is the high bar Education Secretary Arne Duncan set after awarding the first Race to the Top awards getting lower? In the first round, there were 41 applicants. Kentucky is saying its lack of charter laws may make it pointless to reapply -- but it has decided to forge ahead. Minnesota was considering it, but the governor said it's not realistic without reforms and they are not going forward. The U.S. Department of Education's own analysis seems to indicate that major changes alone won't net a state a win in the future. "Both of the winning states built on their unique strengths and track records, rather than trying to manufacture a reform agenda from whole cloth," it reads.

Nevertheless, it's looking like the odds will be better than last time for states that do apply, since the number of states bowing out appears to be getting ...

Hoping to spur databases that track students from pre-K to college, the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences awarded $250 million in three-year grants this week to 20 states with money from the 2009 federal stimulus act.

The grants, which ranged from $5.1 million for Ohio to $19.7 million for New York will also promote links between students and teachers. A familiar refrain from Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been linking teacher pay to student test scores. All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands applied.

While these grants were funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, they are not entirely new. In 2009, a total of $150 million in multiyear grants was awarded to 27 states -- and many of the states are the same as those who won this year.

One of the interesting recipients ...

Today, Steven Brill offers his own analysis of how Race to the Top applications were judged, and it isn't pretty. (He wrote about RTTT for The New York Times Magazine, but delves into the administration of the contest in the piece for Education Week.)

Brill, also author of the piece in the New Yorker about teachers killing time as they awaited their fate,  analyzed judges scoring sheets and written comments to draw some conclusions.

He doesn't mince words.

"A review of the vetters’ score sheets and written comments juxtaposed against the applications they judged suggests that their standards were inconsistent, that some were naive about the difference between promises and the capacity to deliver, and that others fell victim to the propensity of many states to misstate the status of their programs and overstate the buy-in they had from key stakeholders, especially the teachers’ unions," Brill writes.

We ...

The White House announced recently that its $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funded 682,779 jobs during the first quarter of 2010, including teachers, cops and road construction workers.

The figure reflects the number of people whose jobs were directly paid for with stimulus funds, a number reached after assessing more than 179,000 reports filed by state, local and corporate recipients.

But a recent report conducted by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington in Seattle, suggests that education jobs remain in an unprecedented decline. The analysis, "Schools in Crisis: Making Ends Meet," by Marguerite Roza, Chris Lozier and Cristina Sepe, found that while federal stimulus dollars have prevented states from making massive cuts to the education workforce, it had not helped in creating jobs.

Further, the analysis estimated a loss of 87,019 positions, including teachers, during the 2009-2010 school year.

To ...

A review of how Race to the Top finalist applications were scored by the Democrats for Education Reform, the Education Equality Project and Education Reform Now found that in some areas, scorers ignored the rules about scoring applications created by last year's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In others, states were given a pass undeservedly. And they found that states may have a misconception of what is important in other arenas.

"In some places, raters actually ignored the instructions given by the USDOE. For example, some raters awarded points in Data Systems according to a different set of criteria than the 12 specified," they wrote. "In the next round, USDOE will need to provide explicit instructions to reviewers and do more to ensure that those instructions are followed."

The Economic Policy Institute wasn't so thrilled with how the states were graded, either. "Because the awards were based on ...

Videos of Race to the Top finalists chatting with judges are now online. It will take us a while to wade through them all to see if any question or point in a presentation was a sticking point for the reviewers, but we'd love to hear what you think if you've watched a presentation from a specific state.

As Maura Waltz, of GothamSchools.org, put it, "There’s a lot here to sift through."