The U.S. Department of Education recently published a notice of draft priorities and requirements for applying for "Race to the Top" (RTT) funding--$4.35 billion in competitive federal grants. Even though it constitutes the smallest piece of education stimulus funding in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, "Race to the Top" represents the most significant source of education stimulus funding ever to be awarded to states by competition, with the vast majority of funds awarded by formula to all 50 states and the District of Columbia. While the U.S. Department of Education is under no obligation to spread "Race to the Top" money among all states, that may be what some states expect, since there is so much money available. The authors are betting that is not how the race will go. So, what will it take for Arizona to compete? In this paper, the authors lay out a number of features of "Race to the Top" funding and discuss what states like Arizona should expect from the upcoming competition. They then provide a description of the kind of strategies--including next steps broken down by key actors and back-of-the-envelope cost calculations for implementing such strategies--being promoted both by Department officials as well as the many influential education reform groups that have the Department's ear. The Impact of Teachers' Advanced Degrees on Student Learning (Metin Ozdemir and Wendy Stevenson) is appended. (Contains 53 footnotes.)