wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Vetoing New Jersey's gay marriage bill was his first big lapse in leadership—and it won't necessarily help him win Republicans in 2016..

Governor Andrew Cuomo continues to defend his plan to deny school districts additional state funding unless they put in place a method for evaluating teachers. 

The U.S. Department of Education is raising concerns about New York State's ability to fulfill its $700 million Race to the Top grant.

New York State is threatening to withhold millions in federal grants to struggling schools without new evaluation systems for teacher and principals.

From President Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation and President Obama's Race to the Top competition, to education reform experts like NCLB advocate turned critic Diane Ravitch and former Washington public schools superintendent Michelle Rhee, everyone seems to have a solution for fixing the nation's broken education system. It is easy to get lost among all these strategies, solutions and debates. But two educators have developed a strategy that they say is proven to have real results for both low-income students in charter schools and wealthy students in elite private schools.

On the heels of Tuesday's announcement that New York receive $700 million in Race to the Top Funds, WNYC's Beth Fertig spoke with State Education Commissioner David Steiner and Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch about how the funds will be used.

New York is among the winners of the much sought after Race to the Top federal education grants.

It took a little pressure from Washington, but New York State has finally agreed to publicly release its application for hundreds of millions of dollars in education aid known as Race to the Top.

Forty-one states, plus the District of Columbia, applied for the federal funds this month. New York was one of just four states that refused to post their applications on the Internet. The state had argued that going public would hurt its competitive edge if it's turned down and applies for the second round of grants in April. But U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan didn't buy that excuse and promoted transparency. He even said the feds would post the applications on its own website.

New York's application is now on the state education department's website. It details how the state would meet the Obama administration's goals of turning around low performing schools, making teachers more effective, and tracking student achievement.

President Obama discusses Race to the Top

The Obama Administration wants to encourage education reform. As an incentive, it's offering states $4.3 billion in stimulus grants that can be used for a number of things, including better data systems and turning around low-performing schools.

But when the proposed guidelines were released recently, they triggered a big debate over whether New York is even eligible.

The stimulus grants are part of a program called Race to the Top. They’re highly competitive, with only about a dozen states expected to receive funding next year. That’s where the controversy comes in. The U.S. Department of Education has proposed that in order to be eligible, a state can’t have any barriers to using student achievement data, “for the purpose of teacher and principal evaluation.”

Here’s the problem: last year, Albany enacted a law preventing districts from using test scores in teacher tenure decisions. And that automatically disqualifies the state's application for Race to the Top, according to Dan Weisberg, Vice President and general counsel for the New Teacher Project, a non-profit dedicated to teacher quality.