South Carolina has been tapped as a finalist in the heated federal Race to the Top grant competition.

South Carolina heard good news after turning in its January application to receive a chunk of $4 billion for education from federal money.

Fifteen states and the District of Columbia were named as finalists. The states are: Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee and South Carolina.

“Dr. (State Superintendent of Education Jim) Rex seemed to think South Carolina was ahead of the game a little bit,” said board member Lee Attaway in December.

After attending grant meetings, David Jenkins, Title I and Elementary Education Consultant for the district, also said he thinks South Carolina has a good plan in place.

The district signed a memo supporting the state’s pursuit of the Race to the Top Fund in December, which opened the door for Newberry to apply for what the state receives, Jenkins said.

“I think that it will provide us, as a school district, some opportunity to apply for some funds for our district,” said Jenkins.

“Some people in South Carolina might be surprised that we’re a finalist,” said Rex. “But nationally, our state is viewed as being on the cutting edge of making the changes that will make schools stronger.”

The 16 state finalists beat out 25 other states and earned the highest scores from the peer reviewers who rated states’ commitments to improve teacher effectiveness, data systems, academic standards, and low-performing schools.

The list of finalists is supposed to reflect U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s promise to set high standards for the federal education-reform competition. At stake is $4 billion from the economic stimulus package approved by Congress last year, and bragging rights. South Carolina’s application is for about $300 million.

“In a head-to-head competition with 41 other states, these independent judges found that South Carolina has the potential to be a school improvement leader in the 21st Century,” said Rex.

South Carolina is sending a five-person team to Washington, D.C. this week to make a presentation to the judges. They will adjust states’ grades based on how they answer the judges’ questions, then come up with a final score. Duncan hasn’t decided how many states will win money in the first round, but he said there probably will be more losers than winners and that investments will be made in states that can be national leaders in reform.

Winners will be announced in April, and states that don’t win can reapply June 1 for Round Two. Final awards will be given out in September.

Betsy Carpentier, the deputy state superintendent of education who oversaw South Carolina’s more than 1,200-page application, said the announcement was in line with her predictions that the state would be a strong competitor.

State applications are being scored on a 500-point scale, with more than half of those points assigned to initiatives already in place. The remaining points are given to state’s plans for the future.

Carpentier said South Carolina has a number of programs that should earn it points, such as a statewide system for evaluating teachers, high academic standards for students, a system to roll those out to teachers and a pilot project that links teacher effectiveness to their college alma mater. The state has a well-developed data system with extensive capabilities in terms of linking student performance to areas such as crime, health and social services, she said.

Carpentier said the biggest change the state would see, if it were to receive the money, would be a shift in the way the state defines an effective educator. Businesses have used performance measures for years, but schools haven’t, she said.

Some federal money would be used to create a system that measures how much students grow in a year, she said. An effective teacher would be one who moves a student one grade level, and a highly effective teacher would move students more than that, she said. Teachers would be evaluated on their students’ performance, and training and pay would be based on that review.

Of the $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funds, the federal education department will distribute approximately $4 billion directly to states to drive education reform, and $350 million to consortia of states that compete in a separate competition to create new college and career-ready assessments. The assessment competition is still in the design phase.

“We are setting a high bar, and we anticipate very few winners in Phase 1,” Duncan said. “But this isn’t just about the money. It’s about collaboration among all stakeholders, building a shared agenda, and challenging ourselves to improve the way our students learn. I feel that every state that has applied is a winner — and the biggest winners of all are the students.”

Based on Race to the Top’s early positive effect on national education reform, President Barack Obama proposed to continue the program next year by requesting $1.35 billion in the administration’s fiscal year 2011 budget.