Three years after winning a Race to the Top federal education grant, Rhode Island is in its last year of spending the $75 million award.
As of August, Rhode Island has used $44.4 million of the grant, said Elliot Krieger, spokesperson for the Rhode Island Department of Education. Half of the grant money was allocated to local school districts, with the remainder going to the state, he added.
The remaining funds will be spent by October 2014, Krieger said, though the department does not plan on using the grant to initiate any new projects with the grant this year.
So far, the grant has been used to implement teacher evaluations and establish and expand four local charter schools, Krieger said.
“One of the biggest parts of the grant is preparing educators for the Common Core,” he said.
The state’s Department of Education has trained and prepared 5,700 teachers for the national standardized curriculum, which takes effect across the state this fall.
Much of the Race to the Top grant money has helped alleviate schools’ budgetary shortfalls, said Timothy Ryan, executive director of the Rhode Island Superintendents’ Association and former superintendent in North Providence, a district that has recently undergone budget reductions.
“The money was very helpful in providing professional development that teachers needed,” Ryan said.
Eighty percent of the educators in his district — 250 teachers — attended the workshops, which the grant funded and that the district could not afford on its own, Ryan said.
The Race to the Top funding helped the department implement a new educators evaluation system, which is partially based on test scores and student performance.
Krieger said the evaluations were contentious but are still “very popular with many people.”
Lawrence Purtill, president of the National Education Association Rhode Island— the state’s largest teachers union, with 12,000 members — said he disagrees with many aspects of the Race to the Top grant, including its focus on teacher evaluations and charter school expansion.
“The fact that charter schools get a million dollars and some other school didn’t ... goes into the whole question of how we fund charter schools and how we fund public education,” Purtill said.
The charter school expansion raises a number of issues, including the subsequent weakening of the local public school system, he added.
“The whole issue is private corporations wanting to take over a public school,” Putrill said. “We don’t think schools should be a money-making operation.”
At the Paul Cuffee Charter School in Providence, educators used their $250,000 allocation to expand the school to offer 13 grade levels, according to Krieger.
Maria Monteiro, an administrator at Paul Cuffee, defended the charter school’s record and its funding sources against teachers unions.
“There’s a lot of misinformation about charters,” Monteiro said. “The misperception is that we take the cream of the crop,” she said, but the school is legally compelled to conduct a lottery for admission.
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