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RALEIGH — North Carolina’s school systems need to decide soon whether they will agree to teacher evaluation and incentive policies — including at least one controversial criterion — that would help the state land federal “Race to the Top” funding, Gov. Bev Perdue said Monday.

“You’ve got to make up your mind if you’re going to be a player,” Perdue told a gathering of school superintendents from across the state at a downtown Raleigh hotel meeting room.

Federal economic stimulus legislation that passed earlier this year created Race to the Top grants.

On its face, it’s a chance for states to land a piece of a $4 billion pie.

But the grant program, Perdue said, seems to lay out the broad strokes for public education policy that President Barack Obama will emphasize for at least the next three years.

“We’re going to have to live with the concepts behind Race to the Top whether we sign the memo or not,” Perdue said, adding later, “Let me suggest, we’re going to play one way or another.”

Perdue laid out few details of what the state’s application might look like, although she did say that schools would need to provide incentives to good teachers to work in low-performing schools, alluding to policies that would pay more to teachers depending on where and what subject they taught.

Others involved in education policy agreed that Race to the Top was a portent of things to come.

“It’s not just a matter of the specific dollars,” said Sheri Strickland, president of the North Carolina Association of Educators, the state’s largest teachers association and lobbying group.

“It is more the bigger picture of where the administration is heading in terms of all the federal funding and legislation that may impact on school systems.”

North Carolina School Superintendent June Atkinson said the program emphasized areas such as increasing graduation rates, reducing the need for remedial math and language education at colleges, increasing the rates of students going on to college and increasing student achievement.

Perdue said that she planned to file North Carolina’s Race to the Top application in time to meet the Jan. 19 deadline and that school leaders needed to let her know now whether they would cooperate.

“Many of the tenets of the Race to the Top proposal —and what you’re hearing at a local level in Guilford County Schools all the way through the state and federal level — is quite similar,” said Guilford County Schools Superintendent Maurice “Mo” Green. “Obviously, a lot will be in the details.”

Green and his fellow superintendents were helping to work through some of those details Monday, offering their thoughts on what the state’s application ought to look like.

North Carolina officials were pleased when federal education leaders backed off plans to make state funding for charter schools an overriding part of the grant guidelines. North Carolina has capped the number of publicly funded — but privately run — schools at 100, and legislative leaders have been leery of raising that cap.

But another part of the grant application promises to be contentious. Federal grant guidelines require states to factor student test scores into ratings of teacher performance.

“That is the part of all the guidelines that is still causing us the most concern,” Strickland said. NCAE has resisted previous efforts to tie teacher pay or other evaluations to student test performances, and Strickland said the group still opposes the idea.

“We’ll see if we can find ways we can meet the guidelines yet not impose these kind of things on our schools and our teachers,” Strickland said.

Green likes the idea of tying ratings of teacher performance to how their students do.

“I think it’s important that we look at how our students are doing, and student growth is critical,” Green said. “Our district has already been providing value-added data to our teachers in tested subjects. And so they have that information...I think it’s important that we continue to reinforce at the end of the day what’s important is (whether) our students are growing academically.”

Green said his staff would be presenting information on the Race to the Top grant to the Guilford County Board of Education tonight, adding that he hoped school board members would make a decision later this month as to whetherto participate.

Tijuana Hayes, president of the Guilford County Association of Educators, said she was concerned that test scores not be the only criterion upon which teachers were judged. Factors such as whether teachers were mentors to newcomers or whether they took on other leadership positions in the school needed to be taken into account as well.

Not doing so, she said, would  “not be fair to the profession.”

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker@news-record.com