Maine ranks 33rd out of 36 Race to the Top states in Round 2 scoring

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As readers of this blog will recall, Maine applied for the second round of grants under the federal Race to the Top program earlier this year and did not even make it to the final round.  I did a series of blog posts on the state’s application, ultimately coming to conclude that the application was simply too weak to win the state a grant.

How right I was.

We knew weeks ago that Maine did not make it to the final round, but we only found out today, with the announcement of the Round 2 winners and the publication of the Round 2 scores, that Maine ended up ranked 33rd out of the 36 states to apply. We’ll have to do more analysis in the days ahead to determine what the federal scorers thought of Maine’s application, but they evidently didn’t think much of it:

(How bad did we do? The cutoff to make the final round was a score of 400, but Maine would not have made it to the final round if the cutoff score had even been 300! Ouch!)

State Rank Total Score
Massachusetts 1 471
New York 2 464.8
Hawaii 3 462.4
Florida 4 452.4
Rhode Island 5 451.2
District of Columbia 6 450
Maryland 6 450
Georgia 8 446.4
North Carolina 9 441.6
Ohio 10 440.8
New Jersey 11 437.8
Arizona 12 435.4
Louisiana 13 434
South Carolina 14 431
Illinois 15 426.6
California 16 423.6
Colorado 17 420.2
Pennsylvania 18 417.6
Kentucky 19 412.4
Oklahoma 20 391.8
Arkansas 21 389.2
Iowa 22 382.8
Michigan 23 381.6
Nevada 24 381.2
Connecticut 25 379
Utah 25 379
Wisconsin 27 368.4
New Mexico 28 366.2
New Hampshire 29 335.2
Missouri 30 316.4
Nebraska 31 295.8
Washington 32 290.6
Maine 33 283.4
Mississippi 34 263.4
Montana 35 238.4
Alabama 36 212