IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/publus/v41y2011i3p522-546.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Competitive Grants and Educational Federalism: President Obama's Race to the Top Program in Theory and Practice

Author

Listed:
  • Paul Manna
  • Laura L. Ryan

Abstract

We use the Obama administration's Race to the Top (RTTT) program to address two questions about competitive grants. First, what does RTTT and its competitive approach reveal about the current state of educational federalism? Second, and more generally, how do large federal grant programs operate when state governments compete for funds? Our analysis indicates that although RTTT has expanded federal involvement in state education policy, its success still depends crucially on subnational implementation. We also note the important role of state capacity in predicting states' abilities to apply to and perform well in the RTTT competition. We conclude by suggesting implications for educational federalism during the coming years and offering more general insights about the operation of competitive federal grants to states. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul Manna & Laura L. Ryan, 2011. "Competitive Grants and Educational Federalism: President Obama's Race to the Top Program in Theory and Practice," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, CSF Associates Inc., vol. 41(3), pages 522-546, Summer.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:41:y:2011:i:3:p:522-546
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/publius/pjr021
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrew Saultz & Lance D. Fusarelli & Andrew McEachin, 2017. "The Every Student Succeeds Act, the Decline of the Federal Role in Education Policy, and the Curbing of Executive Authority," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, CSF Associates Inc., vol. 47(3), pages 426-444.
    2. Antony S. Cheng & Lisa Dale, 2020. "Achieving Adaptive Governance of Forest Wildfire Risk Using Competitive Grants: Insights From the Colorado Wildfire Risk Reduction Grant Program," Review of Policy Research, Policy Studies Organization, vol. 37(5), pages 657-686, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:41:y:2011:i:3:p:522-546. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/publius .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.