The U.S. Department of Education last week announced the 10 winners of the second round of Race to the Top awards, and almost immediately the parsing began. The Hechinger Report, at Teachers College, Columbia University, included early education in its overall analysis of the applications, and the New America Foundation’s Early Ed Watch blog looked specifically at early learning. Hechinger noted that losers mentioned early education more than winners – but gave a shout-out to Massachusetts for mentioning early education “a little more often than most states did.” Early Ed Watch found seven of the winners included early education.

The Race to the Top competition focused on the K-12 educational system but included an “invitational” priority on early education that did not earn applicants points.

“Ideas for improving early learning programs are peppered throughout the applications from most of the 10 Race to the Top winners announced yesterday, which might be a surprise to those who have considered the program to be primarily for the more traditional K-12 field,” Early Ed Watch reports. “But what is yet to be teased out is whether the competition actually spurred states to focus on early education or whether they simply threw it in as an ‘add-on.’”

Early Ed Watch makes specific mention of three states in its initial review: Massachusetts for “linking early education standards to K-3 curricula and assessments,” the District of Columbia for promising to increase enrollment in its publicly funded preschool and pre-kindergarten programs, and Georgia for pledging “to improve the quality of state-funded pre-kindergartens that feed into low-achieving elementary schools” and for participating “as a lead state in an initiative coordinated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation to improve reading outcomes for children by age 8.”