Rochester Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard says he applauds President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan for the national attention they have brought to education.

But he has concerns, too.

The superintendents of the Big Five school districts, including Brizard, were invited to Albany this week to celebrate New York's victory in the second round of Race to the Top. New York will receive nearly $700 million in federal stimulus education funding, and the superintendents will be the folks implementing many of the winning reform pledges.

But Brizard says he hopes the state's win doesn't amount to politically driven changes in state education policies. He's hoping the win leads to meaningful changes.

For instance, the Rochester district has spent nearly $5 million to create districtwide consistency in curriculum. When he arrived, the same subject at the same grade level was being taught differently from one school to the next, Brizard says.

The problem is not uncommon in large school districts, says Brizard. But consistency is critical, he says, because students preparing to take the state-required exams need to be taught the same content.

The district trained 60 teachers in core curriculum, and those teachers are training others. Students are given what Brizard calls mini-exams to gauge their progress.

Brizard hopes that officials in Albany consider what Rochester's schools have already done before making their own recommendations.

Such nuts-and-bolts concerns are cropping up in discussions about Race to the Top across the country: exactly what does reform mean, and how will it look in the classroom?

To be considered for Race to the Top funds, the most important reforms that states needed to show were raising caps on creating new charter schools and linking teacher evaluations to student performance. Both are problematic to implement.

"Teacher performance tied to student achievement sounds good," says Brizard. "But we don't really have measurement tools in place. We don't have a platform for how to do this, and this is what teachers are concerned about."

Certainly teachers in urban school districts are going to be under much greater pressure than those in wealthier suburbs. School administrators are also not prepared to handle new types of teacher evaluations, he says.

Districts will get instructions from Albany on implementing specific reforms sometime in 2011, Brizard says.