On a day when two California education officials and governors from other states were grousing to The New York Times about the scoring in the first round of Race to the Top, the New York City-based The New Teacher Project released an analysis of the winning first-round applications while also suggesting changes to “scoring deficiencies” that might lead to less-qualified states winning the second round.

Despite the criticisms, The New Teacher Project encouraged states to improve their applications, not back out, to take advantage of “unprecedented window of opportunity for education.”

The report, The Real Race Begins: Lessons from the First Round of Race to the Top, singled out approaches that winning states Delaware and Tennessee and other top-scoring finalists took to Race to the Top priorities:

• Florida would require  all participating districts to report annually on the number of ineffective teachers and leaders dismissed for poor performance plus the number of highly effective teachers lost by the district;
• Rhode Island prohibits giving teacher assignments  solely on the basis of seniority and now would forbid any student from having two ineffective teachers in a row;
• Florida would require teacher evaluations to take priority over seniority when deciding who  would decide the order of layoffs;
• Teacher evaluations in Florida, Louisiana and Rhode Island would be based 50 percent on student outcomes;
• Rhode Island will deny renewing teacher preparation programs that produce relatively high percentages of ineffective leaders who don’t show improvement.

While praising the clarity and vision of the Race to the Top guidelines, the report faulted several key aspects of the 500-point scoring system. It found not enough of a difference between the most ambitious and bold state proposals and other proposals. In addition, judges gave out too many high and not enough low marks.  Sixteen states were rated over 400 out of 500 possible points. (California scored only 337.)

It found that some judges ignored guidelines and scored unevenly. And it found that “outliers” among the five-judge panels exerted too much influence over the final score. The New Teacher Project recommended adopting the method of judging figure skating in the Olympics: throw out the highest and lowest scores and use the ones in between.

The report also recommended more training for the judges;  a review of the first-round judges, with an eye to weeding out those who were inaccurate or ignored guidelines; and better scoring controls.