Race to the Top

I am sure most of you have heard about the Race to the Top. It is a competitive grant offered by the U.S. Department of Education to states and could be worth upwards of $400 million for Colorado for education.

Under the guidelines of the grant half the money would go to the districts and the other half would be used by the state. The Race to the top has four assurance areas: Standards and Assessment, data systems, teacher effectiveness, and low performing schools. In addition to these four assurance areas extra points will be awarded to applications that also have a STEM focus.

One of the stated goals of the Race to the Top is to take the pockets of excellence in public education and take those ideas or programs to scale across the state. Currently we are looking for the best ideas of what is happening in STEM education for inclusion in the Race to the Top application. Ideas are being submitted to http://groups.google.com/group/stem-affinity-group.

All submissions should include:
Point of Contact for this Recommendation;

Name of person or group that makes this recommendation (e.g. individual, sub-committee, committee or other);

A brief description the recommendation;

A description of what a participating district needs to do to implement the recommendation (e.g., implement an evaluation system, train teachers how to use data, or report certain data);

A description of what the state needs to do to implement the recommendation (e.g., implement new assessments, create program evaluation criteria, or develop a data system);

A description of what other stakeholders in the education system (e.g., early childhood educators, teacher preparers, community colleges, colleges and universities, the workforce system, etc), need to do to implement this recommendation;

A description of how funds from the R2T grant are to be used to support this recommendation;

An estimate of how much money from the R2T grant should be invested in this reform and what the on-going costs after theR2T grant funds expire will be and how they will be sustained;

A description of the evidence that this recommendation will improve student outcomes (e.g. research, evidence of best practice, examples of places where this reform has been implemented);

Does Colorado have any assets to support this reform (e.g. existing pilots of this reform in some schools/districts, laws or regulations supporting this reform, experts in this reform area, etc)?

Get your ideas in as soon as possible!