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The frenetic legislative season now finished or wrapping up in many states has brought big changes to education policy, some forged through bipartisan compromise, others only after hyperpartisan battles. From teacher issues to vouchers, the 2011 state legislative season saw widespread action on education. Republican leaders who swept into office last fall wasted no time pushing through ambitious and often controversial education agendas. Their hardest-fought victories include the passage of laws that curb teachers' collective bargaining rights and tie educators' tenure, advancement, and pay to their performance, including their ability to improve student test scores. Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker's successful push to strip teachers and most other public employees of many bargaining powers drew strong objections from Democrats and massive protests from teachers and other public workers, who took part in some of the largest demonstrations the state had seen since the Vietnam War. Similar Republican-backed laws that passed in Indiana, Ohio, and Idaho also drew major protests. Yet many states, with much less fanfare, passed significant measures in areas including the creation or expansion of voucher programs, academic standards, teacher certification, and charter school expansion--in some cases with the backing of both major political parties.

A pair of Ohio school districts, a short drive down Interstate 70 from each other, share similar goals. Each wants to improve student achievement by strengthening curriculum and instruction and giving teachers and principals the tools to make it happen. But the Huber Heights and Brookville school systems diverge in their approach to meeting those targets in one important respect: One of them elected to take part in the federal Race to the Top initiative, while the other did not. The experiences of the two districts, located outside Dayton, reflect the challenges that school systems in Ohio and other winning Race to the Top states are likely to face in the years ahead. Districts that signed on to the program will have to meet a number of academic and administrative mandates as part of their states' plans, but will receive federal money to help them. The districts that opted not to participate will have more freedom to pursue their own agendas, but without that same infusion of money and other resources. This article reports on how districts divide on race to top but share similar goal.

With the conclusion of the second round of the federal Race to the Top competition, states across the country--winners and losers alike--are vowing to move forward with ambitious plans to reshape teacher-evaluation systems, fix struggling schools, revamp antiquated data systems, and make other changes aimed at raising student achievement. Yet predicting the long-term impact of those proposals is difficult. States will attempt to make complicated and controversial policy changes, in some cases with uncertain levels of support from powerful interest groups. Nine states and the District of Columbia were named winners in the second round of the competition last week, and they will receive a combined $3.4 billion in federal funding. They join the two states, Delaware and Tennessee, that were winners in the first round in March, bringing the total funding for the 12 Race to the Top award recipients to $4 billion. The winners of the $4 billion now face the task of meeting the goals and deadlines spelled out in their applications, which they acknowledge will be challenging. The winners have four years to spend the money to implement their plans.

Whether they're organizing events, buttonholing legislators, or simply trading ideas and information, a growing number of "parent unions" are attempting to stake out a place in policy debates over education in states and districts, amid a crowded field of actors and advocates. As the term implies, some of these organizations see themselves as countering the political might of teachers' unions, though others see the labor groups as allies. Still other parents' unions are less concerned with teacher and labor-management issues than with advancing their own tightly focused--or very broad--agendas. Those agendas include improving school gifted-and-talented programs, for instance, and closing achievement gaps between minority and white students. Many parents' unions are still in their infancy, and can count few outright successes or failures in trying to shape policy. Whether such groups emerge as powerful voices, or fade into obscurity, remains to be seen. In Connecticut, a parents' union currently is attempting to play an active part in shaping state legislation on school choice, teacher tenure, and other issues. In Ohio and Texas, efforts to establish such unions are just getting started, and are being led by parents working out of their homes and sharing information with counterparts in other states. In Washington state, a former Microsoft executive, frustrated by what he sees as poor state and national school performance, has begun raising money and is preparing to launch a union this year. As they take a more forceful role in education debates, some parents' unions have drawn more scrutiny, and criticism, for their work and their alliances with education advocacy organizations representing various interests and ideologies. If there is a common thread linking the parents' organizations, though, it's the belief that parents' voices have been shut out of policy debates for too long.

States are pushing ahead with efforts to make sweeping changes to education policy through the Race to the Top program, despite some of them having seen individual schools and districts back out of the process because of concerns over the time and money required to make those plans a reality. The Obama administration has envisioned Race to the Top, a $4 billion competitive grant program, as driving innovation in education across the country by supporting new approaches to turning around struggling schools, paying and evaluating teachers and administrators, and crafting better and more uniform academic standards and tests across states, among other policies. In total, 12 winners were named in the two rounds of the competition, out of 46 states that submitted bids. While some of the winning states in the $4 billion competition were able to keep all their local participants on board, others, such as Ohio and Massachusetts, have seen schools and districts peel off and give up their right to a slice of federal cash. All of the winners in the second round of the federal competition--nine states and the District of Columbia--were required to turn in detailed blueprints explaining how they will carry out their plans to the U.S. Department of Education by Nov. 22. Those plans include "scope of work" documents from local participants. Most states said their local commitments had held firm. But some saw schools and districts back away, as local officials questioned whether they could carry out state plans, or objected to core elements of those plans.

The deadline pressure states faced in submitting applications in the federal Race to the Top competition is now being felt at the local level, as school districts scurry to craft work plans that show how they will execute ambitious changes in education policy. Eleven states, plus the District of Columbia, have won a combined $4 billion this year through the program, which was intended to support changes in teacher evaluation, data systems, math and science education, and other areas. All of the winners secured varying degrees of commitment from local school systems and teachers' unions to help carry out their Race to the Top plans. Now the winners in the second round of the competition, which was part of the 2009 economic-stimulus package, have until Nov. 22 to submit "scope of work" plans from their school districts and other participating local education entities to the U.S. Department of Education. Completing that work is crucial: States are not allowed to give Race to the Top money to schools and districts until the plans outlining their goals, timelines, and budgets are approved, and if enough local entities fail to submit plans, the winning states' funding could, at least in theory, be jeopardized. The Education Department gave the round-two winners 90 days from the time the awards were announced, in August, to submit the local plans. For inspiration, the recent awardees can look to the two first-round winners, Delaware and Tennessee, both of which met their 90-day deadlines earlier this year.