Education Week‘s Alyson Klein reports that the U.S. Department of Education will announce the first-round Race to the Top winners on Monday — giving us something besides March Madness to hold our collective breath about over the weekend.

A reliable source, Klein’s assessment is that the number of winners will be small. While I think that would be bad news in the short run for Colorado, that would be good news for the cause of education reform.

Yesterday the American Enterprise Institute released its latest “Education Stimulus Watch” report by adjunct fellow Andy Smarick. I’ve come to respect Smarick for his thorough and credible Race to the Top analysis, and his reasonably defended skepticism of the process and likely outcomes. It’s worth taking careful note of his four recommended “corrective courses of action” for RTT:

• First, program cheerleaders should temper their predictions and observers should ratchet down their expectations.
• Second, policymakers should halt efforts to expand funding until more is known about the existing program’s implementation and consequences.
• Third, the Department of Education must understand the limitations of what it can control (for example, how closely it is able to investigate the promises made in state applications and how it can make sure that states execute their proposed plans).
• Finally, unless the department is convinced that a state application is perfect, every single submission should be returned to sender with a detailed list of needed improvements. The second round should be the ultimate contest where all interested states fight to win a share of the funding in a one-time-only competition.

If nothing else, Smarick’s 13-page report is worth reading for the (compressed) breadth of his study (and the footnotes!) comparing the 16 state finalists’ different processes and proposals. As you might imagine, Colorado doesn’t fare very well for the reasons explored here and elsewhere. He notes “state leaders decided to weaken provisions related to teacher evaluations, tenure, pay, and dismissals in order to get more stakeholder support.” And later he adds: “Colorado and Tennessee compromised on provisions related to teachers.”

I highly doubt the department will hold up a standard of perfection to deny all the finalists a share of the initial Race to the Top awards and make everyone come back for Round 2. And while I agree it’s good not to expect too much, the smaller number of awards given out the better RTT’s reform potential. Three or fewer would send out a healthy signal.

To me, that means either: 1) Colorado will need to come back and try again for the second round, or 2) I didn’t “ratchet down” expectations far enough.

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