Race to the Top was always too good to be true. President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan sold the $4.35 billion stimulus program as education reform’s 21st century “moon shot.” But as this week’s announcement of the first two state grant recipients shows, it’s just another expensive sop to the education establishment, no less beholden to politics and bound by bureaucratic red tape.
Fifteen states and the District of Columbia made the list of finalists, but only two applicants – Delaware and Tennessee – made the grade.
Delaware will receive about $100 million and Tennessee about $500 million to put their comprehensive school reform plans into practice over the next four years.
Cash-strapped states passed over in the first round are scrambling for a piece of the remaining $3.4 billion in Race cash. Any state that lost out should take a close look at not simply what plans passed muster with the Education Department but why those plans succeeded.
What exactly set Delaware and Tennessee apart from the rest? Like the other contenders, both states passed new laws to comply with 19 federally prescribed criteria. Both states focused their applications on teacher and principal effectiveness; giving administrators power to remove poorly rated teachers even if they have tenure; providing cash incentives for teachers to work in “high-need” schools, and using data to evaluate teacher performance.
But that wasn’t all. “Perhaps most importantly,” Duncan said at Monday’s announcement, “every one of the districts in Delaware and Tennessee is committed to implementing the reforms in Race to the Top, and they have the support of the state leaders as well as their unions.” In fact, Delaware had 100 percent union support and Tennessee had 93 percent support.
And there you have it. Innovation, the Obama administration’s watchword from the beginning, wasn’t nearly as vital as “statewide buy-in” from “stakeholders.” And in education politics, the teachers union is the most powerful stakeholder of all.
Both Tennessee and Delaware made substantial compromises with teachers unions to win political backing in Washington. The unions are willing to allow changes in tenure laws and tougher evaluation rules if it means higher salaries and benefits down the road. Missing from the Delaware and Tennessee applications was any innovation in school choice or competition. Both states have middling charter school laws.
Florida, Louisiana and Rhode Island, which also made the finals, made the mistake of emphasizing proposals to promote charter schools and impose rigorous teacher evaluations. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for example, New Orleans has become a laboratory of educational reform and progress, which officials had hoped to replicate around the Pelican State. But Louisiana’s teachers union wouldn’t buy in 100 percent. Neither would unions in Florida and Rhode Island, where the state is already laboring under federal mandates to turn around failing schools. And so those states lost out.
California’s proposal, which was cut from the competition in March, met with fierce union opposition from the start. United Teachers Los Angeles, the largest teachers union in the nation’s biggest school district, flatly refused to cooperate with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state education officials in crafting reform legislation last year.
As one Race to the Top application reviewer noted on California’s application, “The lack of union buy-in at this stage raises serious concerns.”
The Obama administration has said Race to the Top will be its model for funding education in the coming years. Yet despite the rhetoric about improving teacher training and tying pay to performance – certainly laudable goals – Race to the Top seemed only to pay lip service to real grass-roots innovations such as school choice and “disruptive technologies” that give students access to first-class learning tools from a laptop computer.
“No one is protecting the status quo,” Duncan said. Nonsense. Placing so much importance on “stakeholder buy-ins” forces states to appease special interests instead of going for what best serves students. As a result, Race to the Top will be little more than a pricey public relations gimmick.