“Race to the Top” – Of What?
Mar 1st, 2010 by Shaun Fink
All across the fruited plain, state governments are scrambling around trying to scrounge their portion of the $1.35 billion expansion of the “Race to the Top” (RTTT) program funds that the Obama administration has added in its FY 2011 budget. This is in addition to the $4.35 billion for RTTT included in last year’s stimulus bill. Under the Department of Education’s (DOE) guidelines for RTTT, states must meet certain requirements to be eligible for a share of these competitive grants. And here in Delaware, the clamor can be heard everywhere.
“Race to the Top” is based on the theory that incentives and guidelines provided by the Department of Education in Washington can spur effective education reforms by state governments and school districts. Unfortunately the pains of the last attempt to do just that are still fresh in the psyche of the administrators, teachers and parents throughout Delaware’s nineteen school districts. “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) served to prove that strengthening federal control may result in a number of unintended consequences.
A central purpose of NCLB was to improve public school accountability through state testing and sanctions for low-performing schools. However, the end result was less effective than the goal. The entire program ultimately failed to improve any measure of accountability, rather mounting pressure from state education departments forced school administrators to insist on improving scores. In turn, those administrators laid the brunt of the responsibility on the shoulders of the teachers and left them with no option other than teaching to the test. This produced an environment that was far from conducive to learning and focused mainly on the results of those dastardly DSTP tests.
Perhaps, instead of rushing headlong into the newest incarnation of the government model of accountability in education, the governor and Secretary of Education should realize that there are several lessons to be learned from the NCLB experience and many reasons to be wary of the “Race to the Top” initiative.
First, the federal government has no jurisdiction or real authority to force states and school districts to comply with reforms. In reality, the struggle to implement real school reforms at the state and local level is a political one. For school reforms to work, the governor, legislators and DDOE officials must all embrace reform strategies and commit to seeing them through to the end. Federal incentives and punishments will have a limited ability to convince state and local politicians to take on the political challenge of education reform.
Second, school districts would likely water down or poorly implement the reforms championed by RTTT. Furthermore, elected officials would be pre-occupied with other issues and unwilling to force their hand. In fact, the most likely scenario is for all the hard work and promises made checking all those boxes on the application to go to waste in relation to actual educational reform.
Delaware will get the money, but will not advance charter schools nor fulfill the other requirements of RTTT. According to Andy Smarick of the Fordham Institute, this is a national concern since several states have already implemented reforms in response to the incentives of RTTT. But it remains to be seen whether legislative changes will lead to successful implementation. Andy notes that Tennessee lifted its charter school cap, and in response, Memphis and Nashville denied all 24 charter applications submitted.
Third, RTTT is aimed at strengthening federal power in setting K-12 education policies for states and school districts, and providing a path for national standards and tests. This is problematic on a number of levels. The federal government does not have constitutional authority to fund or regulate public education. While Washington became more involved in regulating and funding schools during the latter half of the 20th century, this role has historically been limited.
Fourth, the RTTT competition is creating an incentive for Delaware to increase spending and develop new education programs at a time when the budget is facing challenging deficits. The programs required by the initiative do not go away after the funding stops. This will place an even greater burden on future budget negotiations.
A better solution to Delaware’s educational challenge would provide for structural reforms of current Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) programs to enable and encourage effective bottom-up reforms. One way to do this is granting states flexibility and control over the funds received from Washington. These federal funds are currently provided to states and school districts through dozens of formulas and competitive grant programs, many of which are ineffective or duplicative. They also impose significant administrative and compliance costs.
States should be granted greater autonomy over how federal funds are used to benefit student learning. This should include the power to terminate or consolidate programs and redirect funds to state initiatives with limited federal guidelines. Reformation of the Title I program, which aims to improve educational opportunities for disadvantaged children, is essential so that the monies provided can follow students to a school of their parents’ choice.
Recall that school choice was to be one of the shining results of “No Child Left Behind”. Unfortunately, many school districts failed to comply with NCLB’s limited school choice options. “Race to the Top” is focused on charter schools; another admirable goal. Realistically, charter schools will no doubt meet the same fate here in Delaware as school choice. The Delaware State Education Association (DSEA), the state’s teachers’ union, has been trying from inception to slowly destroy the charter school movement in this state. It seems a little more than peculiar that they should now be embracing the idea. The promise of millions of dollars of federal tax dollars can have quite an effect on the affability of an organization. The proof, however, will be in the pudding.
RTTT is good initiative but poor head work. The Feds still believe they can drop money on a problem and voila it gets better.
Mike Protack
RTTT is a scam by the federal government to lead to national education standards which they will create based on international standards. It’s a payoff to the teachers union and a “dumbing down” of our kids. This isn’t going to HELP any of our children. I did extensive work studying this (great post by the way Shaun, excellent insight) program and even sat through a brutal explanation of the program to the Christina School Board by Secretary Lowery. I
t claims to hold teachers accountable but the entire problem with that is that this program STILL makes the teachers union ultimately responsible for deciding who stays and who goes. This addresses SOME of the pay issues by ensuring that some teachers get the opportunity to become psuedo instructors and therefore qualify for more pay but it doesn’t do the simple things. It doesn’t (at least the way Delaware is implementing it) address the heart of the educator epidemic in Delaware, the fact that too many educators have lost what I call “the will to educate”. It doesn’t provide adequate felixibility to identify, retrain or replace teachers whose students consistently fail to meet the grade. It doesn’t provide adequate increases in pay for teachers whose students do perform without taking these teachers out of the classroom and it also doesn’t fully address the problem of sending our brand new teachers into hostile schools rife with violence, drugs and students who are struggling.
It suggests the best way to turn around a failing school is to make it a charter school as if changing the status of the school would alter it’s character. If that’s the case, why don’t we just turn all of our schools into charter schools first and go from there? One reason is because charter schools don’t count in the national education statistics. This isn’t the answer. The answer is going to take some time, there is no “quick fix” unfortunately but there are some common sense things we can do to help. The only real “fix” for our failing schools is to address the communities around the kids. Ever notice which schools are failing? It’s the ones whose feeder patterns flood them with children from communities that are infested with drugs, violence and gangs. The places most people try not to go into at night.
This brings us to the solutions portion. RTTT demands adequate measuring of student progress be developed and this is another area where Secretary Lowery thinks Delaware is a leader nationally. Despite the failure that was DSTP and the untested soon to be released DCAS, Secretary Lowery assures us that we already have the answer. The problem is that DCAS is PC based and I, for the life of me, cannot see how our children are prepared fro a computer based test given that some of our schools barely have working PC’s. The DCAS idea is certainly impressive, a test that can dynamically update it’s questions to match the level of the previous answer is really amazing. Also, I like the idea of pulling from a regional pool of questions (although Bill Ayers might be concerned that kids in Philly might not know what a porch is) and thereby pushing the expansion of kids knowledge bases outside of their immediate surroundings. The problem is still lying with DCAS being “the measurement”. Teachers will still be “teaching to the test” instead of teaching to educate the kids. Our kids need to focus on learning, soaking up knowledge and as they progress through their years they need to fine tune that broad base of knowledge until they THEMSELVES find their niche. No test will adequately track educator results. We need a COMPREHENSIVE assessment that covers all aspects of our kids learning. We also need a tech refresh on our buildings to give our kids the tools they need. Let’s put some money into rebuilding our infrastructure.
Let’s not be coy about this. Secretary Lowery, Dr. Lyles (Christina School Board), Secretary Duncan and Jack Markell are all directly connected to Eli Broad (progressive billionaire education mogul) and it’s the Broad model that is being pushed out by RTTT. Dr. Joe Wise (you might remember him for his “questionable purchases” as head of the Christina School District) was also a Broad affiliated official. Delaware is a likely place to start pushing these reforms because we’re small, we’re under the radar if things go south and because we were easy to get people into top positions. It seems pretty clear to me that this was their plan and I’m really glad to see more people seeing the light. Our districts all signed on to this plan and now we’ll have to see what happens. My guess is that in 2012 we’re going to have to redo everything they’re doing now.
First, the federal government has no jurisdiction or real authority to force states and school districts to comply with reforms.
Who needs ‘authority’ when you have blackmail, i.e., the withholding of highway funds?
The solution is simple; vouchers, choice and the resultant competition.
*clapping for Rick* In total agreement…problem is that the progressives have done a really good job of convincing the regular folks that we’re too stupid for “school choice”. We’ve got to start convincing people we’re too SMART for progressive centralized education.