By now, most people are aware that the Department of Education has millions of dollars to hand out to states that are willing to jump through all of the bureaucratic paperwork necessary to get some of the funding that was made available through the Race to the Top program. Now, even the Department of Education is acknowledging that the process is quite tedious and time consuming. In fact, the New York Times is reporting that the Department of Education has officially determined that it should take states precisely 681 hours to prepare their grant proposals.

“Nice round number – how’d they come up with that one?” commented Lee Sensenbrenner, who is the chief of staff to Gov. James E. Doyle of Wisconsin, in the New York Times article.

According to the thousands of state officials who are already working on their proposals, however, the Department of Education’s estimate grossly underestimates the number of hours it is taking them to complete their grant proposals.

“We’ve put in well above that already,” said Rick Miller, who is the deputy superintendent at the California Department of Education, in the New York Times article. “It’s all I’ve done for months, so my time alone would almost get us there.”

The New York Times reports that the 681 hour figure is equivalent to one civil servant working on a full time basis for a total of 17 weeks. Still, Joanne Weiss, who is the director of the Race to the Top competition, says the 681 hour timeframe is just an estimate and that “states are welcome to spend more or less time.” Still, she maintains that she and her team came up with that figure based on “ground-up analysis of what it would take to answer each question, prepare budgets and so on.”

In its original draft guidelines, the Department of Education has estimated that the project would take 642 hours to complete. After making the rules even more complicated last month, however, the Department decided to add an additional 39 hours to the estimate.

Currently, states have until January 19 to get their applications submitted in order to be part of the first round. Those who wish to be part of the second round have until June to complete their applications, which must include an outline of the state’s long-term agenda for improving education while also demonstrating the progress that the state has already made. The applications must also detail how the state plans to develop and implement higher academic standards as well as how it intends to make changes to the methods use for evaluating and compensating teachers. Furthermore, the application must describe how the state plans to use data more effectively in order to improve the learning of students and how the state will improve its worst schools.

At this point, about 40 states have notified the Department of Education that they intend to be part of the first round of applications and most of those states say they have already put in more 681 hours to complete the application, which the Department suggests should be no longer than 100 pages long with appendices no longer than 250 pages. Officials report that one of the most time-consuming tasks in the process has been obtaining the written statements of support from superintendents and other officials from the school districts that would receive grant funding. In California alone, this meant obtaining statements from about 1,000 different districts.

As would be expected, competition for the federal grant money is turning out to be quite intense. After all, may states are working with distressed budgets that are in desperate need of bolstering.