MCPS recently declined a $12 million grant from the federal government because accepting the funds would require the county to change its teacher pay policy.  This forced choice between keeping current policy and receiving money reflects a major fault in the guidelines of the Department of Education’s grant program.  

The program, called “Race to the Top,” requires school systems to adopt the state’s teacher evaluation system, one that bases teacher salaries on HSA test results.  MCPS, however, uses a peer assistance and review process to evaluate teachers and determine their salaries.

Race to the Top guidelines should be more accommodating and allow school systems with working teacher evaluation systems to be eligible for the grant.

The county was reluctant to switch to the state’s system because it lacked details on how the teacher evaluation system would work.  The proposal also didn’t specify how teachers who don’t teach tested subjects (such as art, music, and physical education) would be evaluated for pay, said Lesli Maxwell, the MCPS senior communications specialist.  The county’s current evaluation system worked successfully for ten years, and the county didn’t want to switch out a working system for one with ambiguous guidelines, regardless of the grant.

The Race to the Top program is designed to improve student achievement across the country by raising teacher standards.  MCPS’s teacher evaluation system achieves this goal, but does so in a different manner.  Teachers are evaluated on a regular basis on a variety of measures including classroom observation, student performance and improvement—a method that has produced high results for the past decade which should, but currently doesn’t, satisfy the guidelines of the federal program.  MCPS shouldn’t have been penalized for having a system that works, even if it differs from Race to the Top’s standards.

If MCPS had accepted the grant, money would have gone into the development and implementation of the goals of the Race to the Top program.  These include developing a “high-quality” statewide K-12 curriculum, increasing the use of data to improve teacher effectiveness, achieving equity in teacher distribution and turning around low-achieving schools.

The application guidelines for this federal money need to be more flexible.  A school system like MCPS, with a successful method for teacher evaluation and pay, should be able to receive a substantial federal grant while keeping their already efficient system.