States rewrite education rules, with or without Race to the Top

Ben Wieder:

Some of the states rejected for federal “Race to the Top” education grants are proceeding to revamp their school systems anyway — in some cases more ambitiously than states that won.
Colorado, for example, is moving forward with a new system tying teacher and principal reviews to student performance. That sort of linkage is central to the Race to the Top program. “We’ve had dramatic changes,” says Mike Johnston, a Democratic state senator who sponsored the legislation creating the new system. Johnston says losing out on the federal grant “was more of an opportunity to lay out our plan for reform.”
Colorado is one of six states — along with Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and South Carolina — that achieved finalist status in the first two rounds of the U.S. Education Department’s $4 billion Race to the Top competition but walked away empty-handed.