Holy Family School

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Department of Education has selected 19 states to vie for $3.4 billion in grants aimed at improving their schools, Secretary Arne Duncan said in a speech on Tuesday.

He added that 10 to 15 of those states are expected to win money from the federal stimulus-funded program known as “Race to the Top.”

The program is President Barack Obama’s pet project, offering federal grants to states for improving education and supporting semi-autonomous charter schools – in what Duncan called the “quiet revolution” in education.

The money primarily covers adoption of standards and assessments, boosting of low-performing schools, creating teaching jobs and building better data systems.

The finalists are competing for $3.4 billion left in the program fund after $600 million was sent to Delaware and Tennessee in the first round of funding earlier this year.

Duncan dispelled earlier concerns over Congress possibly taking $500 million away from the program to help pay for a $10 billion schools measure folded into the U.S. House of Representatives’ defense spending bill.

“This money is going to be there for the finalists, and this money will be committed by September,” he said.

With education funding facing cuts as states grapple with the withering of federal stimulus dollars, the 19 finalists have requested more than $6 billion in their Race to the Top applications – but only half of that money is available.

In fact, the program has come under fire for effectively creating a grand incentive for reforming the schools without appropriate financial support for longer-term implementation and with only some states benefiting.

“Education reform faces impossible odds when schools face massive budget cuts,” said Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers president, in a statement.

The 19 states selected as finalists in this round include those that made it to the final round of the program’s first phase. Depending on the size of the winners, Duncan said between 10 and 15 states will share what’s left of the program’s total $4.35 billion fund.

Part of that original pool, $350 million, has been set aside in another competition between groups of states.

Ohio and Maryland, touted as two of the nation’s best-performing states in terms of their public school systems, are among the second-round finalists.

Also on the list are the financially struggling states of California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island.

(Reporting by Alina Selyukh)