Possibly the biggest surprise of RTT scoring was that Louisiana came in 11th place (out of 16 finalists). I had them in second.
With all of the talk about the importance of stakeholder support and LA's modest sign-on from unions and districts, the state might feel compelled to abandon some of its reforms in order to capture more stakeholders. For example, Colorado's??RTT leader, who already backed off of some reforms in round one to make the application more palatable to stakeholders, is planning to round up more district and union support before applying in round two.
But, just like Florida, LA would be better served by pushing ahead rather than watering down its proposal.
First, it is true that LA was punished for not having more stakeholder support, but it lost fewer points than FL; I peg it around 15 or so. Also, LA did a great job in some RTT sections, particularly the one on teacher quality, coming in first place among all finalists.
But like FL, LA left lots of points on the table elsewhere. The most glaring is the STEM section, which as a "competitive priority" area was either up or down. LA didn't make a strong enough case and as a result lost all 15 points.
LA also lost points in sections related to data systems and failing schools. The latter is particularly hard to explain given the state's important Recovery School District and valuable new schools strategy. But after reading the reviewers' comments, I suspect LA can recover points here by better explaining what they already have in place and plan to do.
One issue completely out of the state's control but deserving mention is that one peer reviewer was abnormally harsh in his/her evaluation of LA's proposal. The??state has complained about this publicly; and Eduwonk and Ed Week alluded to it here and??here.
A few states had large variances between their reviewers' scores. In some cases, like Colorado, South Carolina, and New York, the five reviewers were all over the map. In Georgia's case, one outlier judge was on the high side, inflating the state's final score.
But with Louisiana, one judge's scores were far below his/her four peers. This significantly depressed LA's final mark. For instance, if the highest and lowest scores were removed, the scores of GA, NY, CO, and SC would have changed by -6.6, 5.5, 0.1, and -0.6 points respectively. Do the same to LA, and it gains 10.1 points.
So here's the bottom line: if Louisiana tightens up its STEM section (15 points), does some work on data issues (~10), better explains its activities on struggling schools (5), and avoids an unusually (unfairly?) critical judge (~10), it can most certainly win in round two without watering down its plan.
Fortunately, it appears that the state is headed in this direction. State chief Paul Pastorek has??said,?????I am not convinced that 100 percent participation is the right answer for Louisiana," and,?????I hate to adjust what we think is right just so that we can get a bigger score on collaboration. We want to remain as ambitious as we've been in the past.???
So Louisiana: Don't. Back. Down.
--Andy Smarick
Update: The figure-skating adjusted scores above have been corrected. Thanks to Michele McNeil for helping me figure out why our numbers were at odds.