The Department of Education today released the final application for its Race to the Top Fund after a period of public comment and revisions. With the release, the department officially parts the curtain on an ambitious education initiative, one that may well prove to be the closest the Obama reform agenda comes to an unqualified success.
The seriousness with which the administration takes education policy can be seen in gestures substantive – Race to the Top – and symbolic, such as the decision to mark the anniversary of President Obama’s election with an education event in Wisconsin.
The department’s rules for Race to the Top offer states a guideline on how best to steer their education policy. At stake: a $4.35 billion pool of funds that the department will award to states based on their performance in more than 30 criteria. Of that $350 million goes to states to create common-standard assessments. The remaining $4 billion will be up for grabs.
The program’s assessment process involves scoring states in a detailed system that goes up to 500 points. The department’s thinking on reform can be gleaned from the breakdown of scores. Under the rubric of “Great Teachers and Leaders,” the department plans on awarding up to 138 points, 28% of the total, more than any category. That category breaks down into subcategories, with points awarded for measuring student growth, developing evaluation systems, and using evaluations to inform key decisions, among other measures. The message is clear: student improvement and teacher excellence are at the heart of reform.
The other category that receives a large share of the points — 25% — is dubbed “State Success Factors,” which enumerates the ways in which states can present to the department their comprehensive vision for reform. The section asks states to articulate its plans for reform, prove its capacity to carry it out, and enlist the support of school districts. Joanne Weiss, the director of the Race to the Top program, explained in an interview with Education Week that the category aimed to encourage states to really think through their reform strategy. “It became clear that a lot of states were treating [the criteria] as a checklist. There was no big picture,” Weiss said. “Now this is where they build their case.”
The key now is the judging process. The department will select 125 judges from 1,400 applicants to go through and grade the state applications. As the Eduwonk blog points out, “If they’re not strong and keenly attuned to change and reform then this initiative won’t succeed.” Here’s hoping that the department applies the same rigor to that process as it wants the states to apply to theirs.
Tags: Education
Elbert,
You previously wrote:
“Among some progressives, there is a kind of denial about the nature of American reform. They fail to grasp that change, when it has come, has happened incrementally and evolutionarily.”
You were absolutely right, at least in terms of urban education which is the field I know.
I hope you’ll listen to other reformers, not just the data-driven people who claim to be the only true “reformers.” I hope you’ll consider the social scientists’ devasting critiques of proposals for using no-ready-for-prime-time Value Added Models for evaluations. I hope you realize there are two sides to every story, at least, and if you get “comparability” wrong, there will be an exodus of high-quality teachers out of high-poverty schools like mine. I hope you realize how factually incorrect Newt was on Meet the Press, but that he isn’t the only reformer to continually repeat falsehoods about successful charters turning around school without “creaming” or dumping the the most challenging students on neighboring schools. I hope you’ll check footnotes, and ask why “reformers” mis-state facts so much.
I hope you’ll listen to actual practioners who will be nearly unanimous in explaining that the challenge of turning around high-poverty NEIGHBORHOOD schools and magnets or selective schools are not comparable. I hope you’ll listen to why there has never been systemic turnarounds, and not associate with the scapegoating.
Newt and Al may not know much about schooling but they recognize the wisdom of building on the 70% of issues where we can agree. I hope you’ll understand, however, why I want my union and my fellow teachers to fight to the end against the “reforms” that we see as disgusting and destructive to students as well as schools, and the values of democracy and education. And if the “reformers” had real-world experience in inner city schools, you’d understand why we feel that way.
Work with us on the 70% and we can make incremental improvements.
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