Race to the Top funds were a windfall for Delaware. Ranked first in the country for its application, the Diamond State was awarded $119 million over four years to implement programs aimed at closing student achievement gaps by 50 percent.
This is the first year for full implementation of several programs at the state, district and school level. The goal is to make students “Career and College Ready,” but some of the basics still need to be addressed and the questions remain about the timeline for improvements and program sustainability once federal funds run dry.
In some schools, curriculum needs to simply come up to speed with the requirements of state testing. In others, administrators hope to attract more students to their rolls by offering more diverse coursework. Statewide, teachers are meeting in small groups to look at student growth and how to work together to improve student performance and some principals are learning how to not only be building supervisors, but also instructional leaders.
Improvements are necessary on every level and the Race to the Top application process itself helped Delaware schools, said Daniel Cruce, deputy secretary/chief of staff for the Delaware Department of Education (DDOE).
“Part of it is for years we’ve had pockets of excellence in the state and we focused on those pockets,” Cruce said. “It was accepted at the federal and state and local level. Failing schools just added another bullet point to improvement plans every year and price tags were put on them. This process has given us the largest, most visual catalyst in ages to turn (schools) around.”
State goals were set at the federal level and Delaware designed specific programs to address each of those areas:
| Federal Race to the Top Requirement | Delaware Program to Satisfy Requirement |
| Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy. | Delaware has adopted new statewide curriculum standards. |
| Building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction. | Staff meet in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) 90 minutes a week to share classroom success and failures. Data coaching is used to analyzing grades, test scores, behavior and classroom experience to improve student growth. |
| Recruiting, developing, rewarding and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most. | There are several programs to achieve this goal, including new teacher evaluations and incentives, development coaches and School Administration Managers. |
| Turning around the lowest-performing schools. | Designated Partnership Zone schools are intensively addressing their shortcomings to kick-start student growth. |
So pages and pages of proposals were written, discussed and rewritten at the district and state level. Once Delaware was approved for $119 million in funding, individual districts were given 90 days to submit their proposals that also had to be approved in D.C. After asking for an extension for rewrites, DDOE officials sat back down with district teams to revise their applications. Every district was approved and they will all together receive half of Delaware’s Race to the Top funds.
More new initiatives, more training, more classes that include everything from culinary arts to aerospace management, mean bigger budgets. Finances are tight any time a new program is implemented by the government, particularly in public schools where budgets are hard-fought annual events.
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Race to the Top did anticipate the future, however, every plan submitted had to have a sustainability consideration. During the interviewing process for the grants, Cruce said states and districts were asked specifically about keeping programs going if they proved successful.
“These costs are sustainable overall,” Cruce said. “Some programs might be need capital investments to jump-start progress, but in exchange, we’re going to be in the building every week and checking on progress.”
Many of the programs, Cruce said, will not need large maintenance budgets. For example, a private company provides data coaches in schools to train staff on how to interpret and analyze student data. Once school staff is up to speed with facilitating PLCs, the outside personnel won’t be necessary.
“The goal is to put those 29 data coaches out of business,” Cruce said. “We don’t want to fund those positions in perpetuity.”
Sustainability is not necessarily all about the price tag, said Rebecca Taber, deputy chief of staff at DDOE. Calling on staff to carve out 90 minutes every week for PLCs can be another hurdle.
“Fitting that into every week, it’s not going to be a home run on all counts,” Taber said. “But we did anticipate issues and we are getting feedback from the field on how to make this sustainable.”
Victoria C. Gehrt, superintendent of New Castle County Vocational Technical School District, agreed. “I always feel my role is to create an environment where we can get these things done. If people are feeling too much stress and strain (from added expectations and requirements), then we won’t be successful. I feel that responsibility to keep the momentum about high expectations, rigor, etc., but also in keeping people grounded.”
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DDOE is using a lot of “end user” feedback on Race to the Top initiatives to fine tune programs and also, as the year progresses, the department is sending staff to every building to evaluate first-hand the progress being made.
“Each area of funding had to have measures of success,” Cruce said. “They had to be quantitative, like what percentages of teachers must be labeled ‘effective.’ We go in for progress reports, performance evaluations, the targets and actual success.”
He said the largest districts in the state will start evaluations in February, with the smaller ones finishing up in June. “If we’re not seeing growth, then we need to talk about continued funding as part of Race to the Top.”