Moreover, on May 11, Tisch and Steiner announced that in anticipation of the June 1 deadline for the second round of Race applications they had gotten the unions to agree to a four-tiered evaluation system for teachers — “highly effective,” “effective,” “developing” and “ineffective” — that would replace the old satisfactory-unsatisfactory regime. In part the evaluations would be tied to state standardized test scores, though they would count for only 20 to 25 percent of an evaluation. This would seem to make it easier to remove ineffective teachers, because the agreement calls for a teacher’s removal if judged ineffective two years in a row, and, as such, it’s a reform that would have been unimaginable four months ago when the first-round application was filed — or even two months ago, when Mulgrew and I had breakfast. But it still does not allow for these evaluations to be linked to teacher compensation, and the small print allows for a drawn-out collective-bargaining process over what the other 75 to 80 percent of the evaluation criteria would be — before which the evaluations could apparently not begin. Nonetheless, it will make New York’s second-round application stronger.

One reason New York may have gone even as far as it did in the first round could be that good intentions can’t guarantee perfect execution in a federal bureaucracy. Joanne Weiss, who runs the Race program for Secretary Duncan, began last summer to recruit experts, called “peer reviewers,” to score the applications in a way that would inoculate the decisions from charges of political favoritism. Five vetters were assigned to each application, and the score was the average of their individual scores. Duncan would reserve the right to override the point scores, but if he did, he would have to explain himself because the scores would be released publicly. (He told me that he doesn’t plan to override the vetters.) Department of Education regulations required that the scorers not only have no financial interest in the outcome of their decisions, but not even an appearance of a conflict, both in terms of money and potential bias. This pretty much eliminated people involved in operating school systems or those who are active in Schnur’s reform network, yielding vetters who were academics, education foundation staff members (but not at places like the Gates Foundation that finance reform projects) and long-retired educators.

“When I found out that the reviewers would be people who are not directly involved in K-through-12 education, I got concerned,” recalled Paul Pastorek, the Louisiana schools superintendent who is widely admired in reform circles. Pastorek’s application included impressive details of what Louisiana had already achieved in creating data systems, described the state’s overhauling of New Orleans schools following Hurricane Katrina and presented a comprehensive plan for more progress. Pastorek and I had this conversation about the scorers about three weeks before he found out that his state came in 11th. According to the tallies, he’d have come in much higher but for the rating he received from one scorer, who gave Louisiana a surprising 349, which was lower than New York’s average score.

However the mechanics of the process might be improved in the second round, some of the reformers were also concerned, as three of them told me, all using the same phrase, that Duncan’s language was “too collaborative.” What they meant was that by emphasizing how the unions had bought into the plans of the two first-round winners, Delaware and Tennessee, he was suggesting that the unions could block a state from winning by not signing on.

When I talked to him in April, Duncan denied wanting to send that signal, noting that Georgia and Florida, with no union sign-offs but far-reaching plans, finished third and fourth in the first round. And he nodded when I speculated that Florida’s chances seemed even better for the second round because a new law — passed by both houses of the Legislature after the first round ended — would force accountability on all teachers without the union’s agreement. “What we want are the plans that touch the most children,” Duncan said. “Ideally we want the adults working together, but at the end of the day, this is about doing reform.”

After we spoke — in another sign not only of the turmoil caused by the Race but also of the union’s continued power — Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, who is in a hotly contested Senate race, vetoed the teacher-accountability bill. He said he did so because “the people spoke, and they spoke loudly.” Those on the other side pointed to a ferocious lobbying campaign by the state teachers’ union that generated more than 100,000 e-mail messages and phone calls to Crist’s office.

As the Florida fight suggests, this is not a battle that is going to end soon. In fact, even as the battle lines have now been drawn in communities and state capitals across the country, the fight is about to come back to Washington, where turning a grant program into a contest started it all. President Obama was so pleased with the reaction to the Race that he recently proposed a new $1.3 billion contest after the first two rounds are completed, this time directed at individual school districts instead of states. More significant, Duncan has said that some of the billions in more traditional annual federal aid that has flowed to states according to population formulas should now be based on Racelike competitions aimed at various pieces of the reform agenda. “This is the chance of a lifetime,” Duncan says. “We have to move the country in a fundamental, dramatic way.”