On June 1, the US Department of Education will receive a second round of bids from states competing in the ‘Race to the Top‘, the federal funding mechanism being used by President Obama to incentivise state-level education reforms. Money – from a pot of $4.3 billion – will go to states that can demonstrate progress against a set of the administration’s reform priorities. In the competition’s first round, forty states made bids for funding, and just two – Delaware and Tennessee – were successful. Yet with money so tight, states are again lining up to compete – and they’re straining to win. It all amounts to a quiet revolution in America’s schools.

To understand the shape of that revolution, it’s useful to look at the scoring system for Race to the Top bids. Graded out of a maximum score of 500, there are three substantive ways for states to score points: 70 points are awarded for demonstrating robust systems of assessment and testing; 47 points go to states using robust data systems to track student and teacher performance; and 138 – the largest set of points on offer – are reserved for states that have strong systems for improving teacher quality, and holding teachers to account.

Politically, these are radical demands for a Democrat administration, representing a direct challenge to teacher unions, a hugely powerful force in US education politics. For decades, unions here have focused their energy on building a fortress out of teacher contracts, strongly opposing any attempt to increase accountability or reduce job security. In most states, teachers receive tenure after three years’ work, meaning a job for life. In 15 states, education boards are compelled to make any redundancies by order of seniority; when budgets are tight, the most junior teachers – rather than the worst – must go first. Many teacher contracts ban the use of student attainment data in the assessment of teacher performance. Some place caps on the number of times a principal can enter a teacher’s classroom each year.

After decades of stalemate, only a growing sense of crisis has forced the administration to attack this status quo. Having led the world in the 1960s, the US education system today ranks in the bottom third of OECD countries. For the first time ever, the latest generation of students is no brighter than their parents; on international tests in maths, reading and science, US students made no improvement from 1964 to 2003. Even these results mask deep inequalities. Today, at eighth grade, US Latino students score below students in Malta and Serbia. Black students score below students in Romania. In terms of outcomes per dollar spent, the US system is the least efficient in the world.

In that context, the administration has had little choice but to disregard historical loyalties, and focus on the evidence of what works. Thus, the laser focus on teacher quality, and the development of new ways to find, assess, and reward the best teachers. Evidence shows beyond doubt that teacher quality matters far more than any other input in education, including even dramatic reductions in class sizes, and large increases in funding per pupil.

Throughout Labour’s thirteen years, efforts to raise teacher quality were always near the top of the agenda: increases in basic pay, high-profile campaigns to raise teacher status, the move to redefine teaching as a masters-level profession and, more recently, the introduction of a Licence to Teach and ‘golden handcuffs’ for good teachers joining the most challenging schools.

With the arrival of the new government, attention has focused on the coalition’s two most high-profile education priorities, the pupil premium and ‘free schools’ model. Whether or not they are the result of good intentions, both are experiments, the first unproven and the second with a record of failure. Longer term, though, it’s not risks like these that will define whether this is a progressive government, but whether ministers are willing to maintain a basic focus on what matters most: the effort to get the best people into the profession, and keep them there.