Race to the Top and Kids Count
Posted by Josh McGee | Arkansas, Education, Politics | July 27, 2010
There are a couple of items in the news today that our readers might find interesting. First, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is scheduled to give a speech at the National Press Club today during which he will announce the Race to the Top finalists. The Arkansas Department of Education is hopeful we will be among the states that are listed after having narrowly missed the cut last time. You can find the Department of ED press release here and can watch the speech live at 11:30 a.m. CT here.
UPDATE: Arkansas was not named as a second round finalist. Check out the Ed Week article here.
The finalists, which beat out 17 other states that applied in the second round, are: Arizona, California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina. These finalists all scored above 400 points on the 500-point grading scale.
Second, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has released their annual Kids Count report. There is a wealth of interesting data at their web site here. Check out the widget below for a quick look at the data.
The Dem Gaz has a summary article here. The report uses measures of child well-being to rank the states. The measures span several dimensions of well-being including education, health, and economics. Arkansas slipped one place in the overall rankings to 48th, but picked up ground in several key areas. Here are a few stats from the Dem Gaz article.
Arkansas has improved in five areas since 2000: infant mortality rate, child death rate, teenage death rate, teenage birth-rate and the percentage of teenagers without high school degrees who are not in school.
The state fared worse in low infant birth weights and the number of children in single-parent families.
*****
The state saw no change in the percentage of children living in poverty, which was 25 percent in both 2000 and 2008. The federal poverty level for a two-parent family with two children was a household income of $21,834 in 2008.
*****
Arkansas’ highest ranking was 37th in infant mortality rates.
While 8.4 of every 1,000 live births in the state ended in death in 2000, that number dropped to 7.7 in 2007. The U.S. infant mortality rate was 6.7 of 1,000 live births in 2007.
*****
Arkansas ranked 50th in percent of teenagers ages 16 to 19 not working and not attending school, at 12 percent in 2008 compared with 8 percent nationwide.
We only missed the cut by 6 points in Phase 1. Is it possible that we sent in the exact same grant and again just missed the cut?
I cannot imagine Arkansas Phase II grant being so remarkably different that it caused us to LOSE points from round 1. Shouldn’t we expect this grant-scoring process to be rather standardized? In which case, if we were to resubmit keeping all the areas where we scored high from Phase I and changing the areas where we scored low on Phase I – it seems like we would have been a lock for some of the funds.
I guess the likelihood of the grant-scoring process being strictly standardized is a pipe dream – especially if we got a different slate of reviewers than what we had last time.