35 States, D.C. and Puerto Rico Submit Applications for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge

The U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services announced today that 35 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico submitted applications for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, a $500 million state-level competitive grant program to improve early learning and development. Applicants include: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

"The strong response from states shows there is a shared commitment to raising the bar on quality across early learning programs, including those serving low income children who too often start kindergarten already behind their classmates," said Secretary for Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. "By investing in our children's early years, we can put them on track to success in school and in the 21st century job market while boosting our long term competitiveness as a nation."

In May, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius joined business, law enforcement and military leaders to announce the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, highlighting how investments in high-quality early learning programs help reduce crime, strengthen national security, and boost competitiveness.

Since then, applicants have created comprehensive plans to improve early learning and development programs around five key areas of reform: establishing Successful State Systems, defining High-Quality, Accountable Programs, Promoting Early Learning and Development Outcomes for Children, supporting A Great Early Childhood Education Workforce, and Measuring Outcomes and Progress.

The early learning stakeholder community has also joined education leaders across the country in improving early learning and development programs by providing technical assistance to states in preparing their applications.

"I'm thrilled to see so many states taking advantage of this opportunity, and advocacy groups and policy experts have shown tremendous leadership in supporting states' efforts to coordinate their early learning systems," said Secretary Duncan. "Their collaborative work is helping ensure that all children enter kindergarten with the skills they need to be successful in school and beyond."

Over the next several weeks, applications will undergo peer review by early childhood experts from across the country. In mid-December, the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services will award the highest ranked applicants within funding availability. Awards will range from around $50 million up to $100 million, depending on a state's population of children from low-income families and proposed plan.

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Room For Debate: Do States Need Schools for the Deaf?

Michael Paulsen/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press After several years learning to listen and speak without sign language, four graduates of the Melinda Webb School at the Center for Hearing and Speech in Houston will join mainstream kindergarten classes this fall.

Recent protests in Indiana showed today's budget shortfalls fueling an old debate among deaf people and parents of deaf children: Should students be encouraged to sign, at a separate school for deaf and hard-of-hearing children, or should they attend "mainstream" schools and use the so-called listening and spoken language approach? The question becomes urgent as states, under pressure to cut spending, set their sights on expensive state schools for the deaf.

Do states have a moral or legal obligation to provide separate schooling for deaf and hard-of-hearing children who could be "mainstreamed"?

?Read the Discussion ?

Perry A. Zirkel, professor of education and law

Lance T. Izumi, Pacific Research Institute

Sandra Jowers-Barber, historian

Lisa Snell, Reason Foundation

Josh Swiller, author, "The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa"

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On Education: Pa. Joins States Facing a School Cheating Scandal

While few know of The Notebook, many know of Ms. Mezzacappa. For 27 years, until the newspaper industry’s near collapse, she was a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. She is also a former president of the Education Writers Association.

People trust Ms. Mezzacappa to get it right. After the panel discussion, an executive for a testing security company suggested she ask state officials if they had done a study flagging schools with suspicious numbers of erasures on state tests. In May, the state responded, sending Ms. Mezzacappa a file so large she needed technical assistance to download it.

For two months, that 2009 study sat unexamined. (Being one-third of the reporting staff, Ms. Mezzacappa doesn’t have a ton of free time.) Then last month, The Notebook’s editor, Paul Socolar, entered into a partnership with the local public radio station, WHYY, which enabled him to hire a fourth reporter, Benjamin Herold.

Mr. Herold’s first day was July 6. On July 8 about 9:30 a.m., Ms. Mezzacappa suggested he look at the enormous state file, and by 11:30 that night The Notebook had posted its biggest scoop. A total of 89 schools — 28 in Philadelphia — had been flagged by the state for, among other things, an improbably high number of erasures, as well as questionable gains on reading and math tests.

Mr. Socolar, a data fanatic, calculated that at some of these schools, the odds that the erasures had happened randomly were one in 100 trillion, and Ms. Mezzacappa verified those numbers with Andrew Porter, the dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

And that is how Pennsylvania became the latest in a growing list of states facing a cheating scandal.

Never before have so many had so much reason to cheat. Students’ scores are now used to determine whether teachers and principals are good or bad, whether teachers should get a bonus or be fired, whether a school is a success or failure.

Will Pennsylvania do what it takes to root out cheating? Few school districts have. Most inquiries are led by educators who are not first-rate investigators and have little incentive to make their own districts look bad.

The Pennsylvania investigation is only a few weeks old, far too early to judge. But the first step is not encouraging: State officials have directed school districts and charter schools with suspicious results to investigate themselves.

For places that are serious about exposing cheating, there is a new gold standard: Atlanta. In the bad old days, Atlanta school officials repeatedly investigated themselves and found they had done nothing wrong. Then, last August, the governor decided that, once and for all, he was going to get to the bottom of things, and appointed two former prosecutors to oversee an inquiry.

Sixty of Georgia’s finest criminal investigators spent 10 months on it, and in the end turned up a major cheating scandal involving 178 teachers and principals — 82 of whom confessed — at 44 Atlanta schools, nearly half the district.

Will Pennsylvania do an Atlanta? It’s a big commitment. First, schools with test score gains that seem too good to be true need to be identified. The Philadelphia Inquirer has looked at Roosevelt Middle School, where 63.8 percent of eighth graders were proficient in reading in 2009, compared with 28.9 percent in 2008.

Next, to get a sense of the scope of the cheating — there are 3,300 schools in Pennsylvania — a comprehensive erasure analysis is needed. In Atlanta, investigators calculated erasure rates for every teacher in the district.

In Pennsylvania, the 2009 statistical analysis that was unearthed by The Notebook has provided many good leads. Chester Community Charter, one of the state’s biggest schools, with 2,700 students, was among those most often flagged for suspicious erasure results. It also was flagged for questionable test scores: in 2009, 65.4 percent of eighth graders were proficient in math, compared with 22 percent the year before. To his credit, the state’s secretary of education, Ron Tomalis, has requested two more statistical studies, for 2010 and 2011, to better identify cheating patterns.

Once the questionable schools have been pinpointed, the serious work begins. In Atlanta, the investigators chosen to conduct the cheating inquiry were given the necessary legal tools (subpoena power) and generous resources (over 100 people were involved). Then they went out and worked the schools like police detectives, flipping one cheating teacher, who in turn would identify others.

E-mail: oneducation @nytimes.com

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