The education world is all a-Twitter this morning with reports of 40 states applying for the $4.35 billion in competitive education reform grants being funded through the U.S. Department of Education as part of the $787 billion economic stimulus program – American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – that President Barack Obama signed into law soon after taking office. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is asking for a cool $250 million in her application, which can be found in its 345-page glory here. If you just want what the governor’s office considers the highlights, you can find those in yesterday’s press release.

There are two rounds of competition for the grants, the deadline for the first being yesterday. Awards for that round will be announced in April and the application deadline for the second round is June 1. For the past two weeks, the listserv for the Education Writers Association was full of questions asking if anyone knew if their state had filed for the RTTT funds and/or when states planned to do so. Ironically for anyone who has sat through a teacher lecturing them on getting your work done early, most of the 40 states who applied did as Arizona did – wait until the deadline to turn the application in.

Now the talk on the listserv is about the states who are not posting their applications online, which is a no-no since there was much lipservice given to “transparency” when the stimulus dollars were first announced as part of the ARRA. The bloggers over at the newly launched edmoney.org – which has been set up specifically to track the spending of stimulus funds by state and school district – are calling out the slackers over here, if you want to see which states are dragging their feet in telling the public how public money is being spent in public schools.

For those not up with education stimulus funding, here’s a little background on the RTTT, courtesy of the governor’s office:

With Race to the Top, the U.S. Department of Education is asking states to build comprehensive and
coherent plans built around the four areas of reform outlined in ARRA, including: aid to struggling schools, improving data quality, supporting effective teachers and bettering standards and assessments. Race to the Top will reward states that have demonstrated success in raising student achievement and have the best plans to accelerate reforms in the future. The goal is for states to offer models for others to follow to spread the best reform ideas across the country. The application requires states to document their past success and outline their plans to extend their reforms by using college- and career-ready standards and assessments, building a workforce of highly effective educators, creating educational data systems to support student achievement, and turning around their lowest-performing schools.

Brewer’s office said her application noted the intent to increase and support more options for alternative certification to “attract the most qualified teachers” as well as creating a data system that would allow the public to be able to monitor student academic progress at various schools and adding a strong reading component through third grade and ending social promotion, among other plans. According to this story, John Wright, president of the state’s teachers union, decries alternative certification plans, saying more than 800 education majors graduated from the state’s three university teaching preparation programs in December “and we don’t have jobs for them.”

That’s discouraging news for the hundreds of laid-off workers like yours truly who’ve entered teacher certification programs this year, hoping for jobs in a year when we graduate. As for attracting the most qualified teachers, I still think hiking the base pay for teachers in this state would go a long way toward that. Just sayin’.

If the Times’ headline writers are accurate and Scott Brown’s Senate win in arguably the most liberal state in the Union “stunned” Democrats, then all I can say is the party I’ve voted with most of my life has just not been paying attention. And like Brown said last night in his victory speech, if the Dems have trouble in Mass., they’ve got trouble everywhere.

Remember how Pat “I call myself a Christian but just can’t act like one” Robertson blamed the tragedy in Haiti on a pact with the devil? Well, Lily Coyle took offense and decided to pen a response in the personal of Satan. She sent it to the Minneapolis Star Tribune and it’s starting to go viral on the Internet. You can read the whole thing here, but for myself, I’d like to say thanks to Ms. Coyle for using the letters to the editors page to correct Roberson’s really horrible theology. Here’s a tidbit from Satan’s screed:

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher.

Other thoughts this Monday: It was curious to read that Barack Obama said the following at a black Baptist Church over the weekend in celebration of Martin Luther King day:

“Sometimes I get a little frustrated “when folks just don’t want to see that even if we don’t get everything, we’re getting something.” (Full text of his speech here.)

Taken just as it is, it sounds like Obama – who is biracial but self-identifies as black and is accepted as so by most folks – is asking the black community to settle for baby steps instead of pushing hard for greater equality. That wasn’t the case of course, but he was emphasizing the need to celebrate (instead of bemoan) progress on our way to what we hope would be perfection.

It is true that some black advocacy groups deny any progress has been made among blacks simply because there is still inequity. And it is even truer still that some individuals use the lack of complete equality as an excuse to join gangs, drop out of school, and blame white society for their own poor choices. So, I agree with Obama that the excuse-making has to stop – among people of every color, every race, every age. We are, in most ways, masters of our own destiny. (For a cinematic illustration of that point, go see Precious or Invictus.)

Still, the road is much harder for some due to little more than the circumstance of their birth, the color of their skin or what sex organs they possess, and I admit to wondering if there will ever be full equality for minorites in a society where power is primarily focused in the hands of white, middle-class males. Then again, every time I read the words “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton,” I get chills. We are making progress … it just seems so slow if you are part of a minority. and speaking of minorities…

Two of my favorite newspaper columnists did what they do best last week when pointing out the truth. Leonard J. Pitts Jr. wrote a column saying that Sen. Harry Reid may have been impolitic and out-of-touch when he used the word “Negro” during the 2007-08 presidential campaign, but he was also right. Yes, you read correctly, a black man said that a white man saying Barack Obama could get elected because he was “light-skinned” and didn’t speak with a “Negro dialect” was absolutely right. Read more here.

Also tackling a minority issue, Kathleen Parker had a fabulous (although painfully sad in a way) discussion last week about how people (and the press) treat male candidates one way and female candidates another – more hostile, patronizing – way. Because of that treatment, Parker mused, we may be a lot further away from having a female president than some would hope. Everyone should read it, but especially if you are the parent of daughters.