By now you probably know that the official notice for the Race to the Top Fund disqualifies states that prevent the linking of student achievement data to specific teachers for use in evaluation. You probably also know that this is a big problem for states like New York, Wisconsin and California, where legislation bans exactly that.

One might hope that this would pressure states and legislatures to remove the bans and move forward. Instead, so far, the noise from New York and California is a bunch of technical garbage about how their laws don't really disqualify them, if you look at them sideways through a prism and close your left eye.

Charlie Barone has more on New York and California.

Joanne Weiss, the ED official in charge of doling out the nearly $5 billion Race to the Top fund (part of ARRA), talked teacher evaluation at a recent panel in New York City (Gothamschools.org has the story). She said ED would favor states where student achievement was a "predominant" part of teacher evaluations, language that sounds straight out of the National Council on Teacher Quality's State Policy Yearbook. New York's laws prevent the use of student achievement data in tenure decisions, but there are lots of other barriers, like the practice of testing students in the middle of the year and the problem of untested grades and subjects, that make it hard to meet the "predominant" standard at the state level. In fact, only four states passed NCTQ's muster. Working through the details of using student achievement data is the next big challenge in the fast growing teacher effectiveness field. Here's hoping that ED leverages the stimulus money to figure out the how.