dave.stafford@heraldbulletin.com
ANDERSON - Anderson Community Schools is one of a handful of Indiana school systems that did not seek money through a state application for $500 million in federal Race to the Top education funding.
"There were only about 25 school corporations out of more than 300 in Indiana that chose not to go through this initial phase," said Indiana Department of Education spokesman Cam Savage, "Anderson being one of the larger ones that chose not to go forward.
"Anderson's take would have been $1,872,289" spread over four years, Savage said. "That would have been one of the larger amounts."
Race to the Top funding is not assured, however. It is a competitive grant program in which 41 states and the district of Columbia submitted school-reform proposals before this week's deadline.
ACS Superintendent Felix Chow said he signed the plan, but under program rules it could not be submitted to the state without the support of School Board President P.T. Morgan. Chow said Morgan did not support the plan.
Anderson Federation of Teachers President Rick Muir said he could not support the state's application because he said the state Department of Education would not share the plan before the deadline.
Muir also declined as president of the Indiana Federation of Teachers to endorse the state plan, after being involved in discussions at the state level in which he said his questions went unanswered.
"Some people are a little gun-shy, and I'm one of them," Muir said. "I know what No Child Left Behind did, there were a lot of broken promises from the federal government. ... It left a lot of unfunded mandates that were promised to be funded."
Savage said because the plan was competitive with other states, it was not released before it was filed with the U.S. Department of Education. "It's correct to say they hadn't read every word," he said, "but school systems had a good idea" of the plan's broad aims.
"The whole key of reforms is you only get money if you are willing to make changes that are going to drive academic achievement," Savage said.
The competing state plans will be evaluated by the U.S. Department of Education before the first state awards are made in April from a pool of more than $4 billion.
But because ACS did not file an application to participate in the state plan, the money it might have received from a successful application would be divided among other participating school systems.
The Race to the Top plan submitted by the state proposes that 51 percent of teacher evaluations would be based on student progress. Muir said the state has not perfected those measurements, and doing so would cost. He said revising teacher evaluations would force ACS to abandon a peer-review teacher evaluation system that he said shows promise.
"Have I heard that will be a sticking point for some?" Savage said of the proposed teacher-evaulation reform. "Yes," he said, "Those that aren't moving the needle on student achievement."
But Muir said school districts are in such financial straits that they will seek any available money, perhaps overlooking requirements that could prove onerous.
But Muir said school districts are in such financial straits that they will seek any available money, perhaps overlooking requirements that could prove onerous.