The 12 winners of the federal Race to the Top competition have experienced near-universal challenges in turning their sweeping, multifaceted proposals into reality, among them a limited state capacity to execute fast, dramatic change and deeply rooted teacher-evaluation systems that have proved hard to transform. Reports unveiled by the U.S. Department of Education detail for the first time where the 11 states and the District of Columbia are hitting their targets, and where they're falling short, as they carry out the plans that earned them grants under President Barack Obama's high-profile $4 billion education initiative. Even the states that are living up to their promises best--Maryland, Massachusetts, and Ohio, according to the department--have suffered setbacks as they struggle to find high-quality staff members and contractors to do the work, whether it's overseeing implementation of common academic standards or constructing new data systems. Nearly all states have also struggled, in some way, to build or complete sophisticated data systems that not only can track students' performance from early education through college, but also link the data to individual teachers and programs and make the information available and easily understood by educators and other stakeholders.