MCPS declined $12 million from the Department of Education’s Race to the Top grant program to avoid changing its teacher evaluation system, a MCPS public information officer said.

Race to the Top awarded Maryland schools $250 million in grants Aug. 24. The program mandates that school systems pay teachers based on merit, or how well students perform on tests. MCPS didn’t want to alter its current teacher evaluation system, which relies on peer evaluations for teachers, to fulfill the grant’s requirements.

“For 10 years, MCPS has used a Peer Assistance and Review process that has led to improved performance for countless teachers, as well as to the dismissal of more than 400 underperforming teachers,” said Lesli Maxwell, MCPS public information officer. “We had many unanswered questions about how the state’s teacher evaluation system would work, and we were not willing to abandon our evaluation system without having those answers.”

Montgomery County Education Association, the teachers’ labor union, strongly supports the county’s decision not to sign on to the state’s application.

Tom Israel, MCEA executive director, called the program “Race to the Test.” He said he believes that the county would have had to increase standardized testing to comply with the grant, which might take away from classroom instruction.

“The regulations make clear that test results will be used for evaluating teachers who teach those grades and subject areas,” Israel said in an e-mail interview. “The standardized tests are not intended to be used for that purpose.”

The $12 million grant, distributed over the course of four years, would amount to less than one percent of the total budget, MCPS budget official Marshall Spatz said.

Principal Alan Goodwin believes that the money was not worth the controversy over the program’s required merit pay, he said.

“There’s a lot of push back on merit pay,” Goodwin said. “A lot of people don’t believe in it, including myself. A lot of strings are attached whenever there’s money from the government. It sounds as though it wasn’t worth giving up things people strongly believe in.”