Education Week reports that school officials in North Carolina are reshuffling the state’s $400 million federal Race to the Top grant.
North Carolina says it needs more time and to devote more money—about $2.9 million more—to plan and implement a new “instructional improvement system” that aims to use technology and data to drive continuous academic improvement in the classroom. And the state wants to scale back a plan to make “every new teacher” in its low-performing schools eligible for retention bonuses, as its application originally said, turning it instead into a pilot program in which 181 teachers are eligible each year.
The North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE) should be outraged that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of teachers at low-performing schools will not be eligible for retention bonuses. Perhaps the NCAE could organize a boycott of the NC Department of Public Instruction.
