Smelling politics in the inclusion of Ohio and New York on the list of finalists for Race to the Top funds, Frederick Hess takes a peak at New York’s application:

New York’s 908-page application … guarantees, “an intense focus on curriculum and meaningful professional development based on student performance; data-driven instruction where teams develop individual student action plans based on data from formative and interim assessments; differentiated professional development and coaching based on data.” It pledges “clear, content-rich, sequenced, spiraled, detailed curricular frameworks” for new assessments. And it promises “to support differentiated professional development closely linked to student growth data, identify coaches and mentors using effectiveness ratings closely tied to student growth data, and build data-driven feedback loops between professional development, coaching/mentoring activities, and teacher effectiveness.” All that “professional development” talk portends sops to the teachers’ unions, of course.