The Education Department has awarded $3.3 billion to nine states and the District of Columbia to enact school-improvement proposals. The states—Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Rhode Island—join Delaware and Tennessee, which won federal grants in March, as winners of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition.
Educators in other states criticized the competition, saying its guidelines favored densely populated Eastern states. The critics said the administration’s favored programs, such as creating charter schools to compete with conventional public schools, aren’t as useful in rural, less-populous states.
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