Holliday to school leaders: Don’t Back Out of Race to the Top support

“We don’t anticipate any major changes

in what we will ask of schools:

deploy the new standards,

develop formative assessments,

work on teacher and principal effectiveness,

make sure our statewide longitudinal data systems are working

and turnaround (lowest performing) schools.”

--- Terry Holliday

This from Brad Hughes at KSBA:

Education Commissioner Terry Holliday is asking Kentucky educators not to allow concerns about the possible creation of charter schools or changes in teacher evaluations to lead them to withdraw their support for the state’s bid for $175 million in federal Race to the Top (RTTT) funds.

In a statewide webinar Thursday to update superintendents on actions of the 2010 General Assembly, Holliday acknowledged his push for inclusion of charter school legislation in next month’s expected special session on the budget and that state Department of Education staff are working on new teacher and principal “effectiveness instruments,” two areas where Kentucky did not score highly in the first phase of RTTT.

“Please, before you call and say, ‘I’m not part of phase two,’ give me a chance to talk to you, come meet with your board, your teacher unions.

“We will provide a way for districts to opt out, to withdraw your memorandum of understanding – we hope that won’t happen,” the commissioner said. “If you pull your MOU, you impact your district by losing funding for work you have to do anyway to implement Senate Bill 1 (the 2009 Kentucky school reform law with many elements linked to RTTT goals) and you damage your neighbors’ chances for funding because it’s so important that we have unified signoff for Race to the Top Two.”

One of the RTTT scoring areas Kentucky outpaced most other states in the first round, in which the state was one of 16 finalists, was for local cooperation. Organizations like the Kentucky School Boards Association, Kentucky Association of Schools Superintendents and Kentucky Education Association had encouraged their local units to back the state’s original RTTT application for more than $200 million. However, only Delaware and Tennessee were selected by the U.S. Department of Education for RTTT Round One awards.

Holliday said he knows that many concerns about the state’s plans to rebid for RTTT Round Two funding centered around the issue of charter schools. He and Gov. Steve Beshear met this week Tuesday with teacher union leaders, and the commissioner and the governor’s office are reaching out to other education groups on the charter issue. KSBA has provided Beshear, Holliday and legislative leaders with a list of concerns about House Bill 109, the latest charter school bill which died in the last hours of the just-completed 2010 session. HB 109 has become the starting point for discussions about a revised bill for consideration when the governor calls the legislature into special session next month to reach a compromise on a state budget for 2010-12....