In what must be the most startling development of the past month, year, and perhaps decade, the U.S. Department of Education is now launching a Race to the Top competition for districts. It has nearly $400 million to award, but as we have seen in the state-level competition, the amount of money was sufficient to compel almost every state to rewrite its laws so as to be eligible.
So with this relatively small amount of federal discretionary money, Arne Duncan has set the stage to impose his will and his flawed ideas on districts across the nation.
Districts will have to show that they have the data to track students from pre-k through post-secondary education, as well as to tie test results to individual teachers. The data systems will be elaborate and they will track everyone from age 3-21. And teachers will be held accountable!
What is worse, as the article in Education Week cited above noted, is that “districts will have to promise to implement evaluation systems that take student outcomes into account–not just for teacher and principal performance, but for district superintendents and school boards. That’s a big departure from the state-level Race to the Top competitions, which just looked at educators who actually work in schools, not district-level leaders.”
Think of it. Who will evaluate superintendents and school boards? Will they be evaluated by test scores? Will the federal government fire school boards if test scores are flat? Will it fire district superintendents and replace them? Will Arne Duncan tell school boards and superintendents to raise test scores or resign? Did anyone in Congress approve this bizarre program of federal over-reach?
Even conservative blogger Rick Hess was taken aback. As he put it, “My only reaction to reading the info on this new Race to the Top-District was, “You have…got…to…be…kidding.” It’s like they read all their admiring press clips from RTT, strenuously tuned out any criticism or lessons learned from the, um, uneven track record when it comes to implementation, and wanted to see whether they could take the hubris meter up to 11 (with apologies to Spinal Tap).”
Hess disapproves because he thinks that the new competition will result only in vague promises and punch-list compliance. I am appalled because the U.S. Department of Education should not be in the business of telling districts how to do their job. They lack the competence to do so, and by doing so they ignore decades of history, tradition, and precedent. Is it really appropriate for Arne Duncan to take control of the nation’s schools?
Has anyone at the U. S. Department of Education ever heard of the principle of federalism? Does Arne Duncan think he was appointed the national Superintendent of Schools? Is there no limit to his desire to impose his bad ideas on others? His belief in the value of standardized testing is startling, to say the least. One might even say it is faith-based.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It seems unlikely that the money awarded by this grant will even cover the cost of the test-score based teacher tracking system.
Also, kindergarten teachers will continue to get off scot-free, with the crazy excuse that their students don’t have the fine motor skills to fill in a scan-tron sheet. Just more whining to avoid accountability, right? (/snark)
Sometimes it’s better to just leave the money on the table.
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Can’t you just see school boards jumping on this? Of, course, a Chamber of Commerce might like the idea. However, I think they might even have difficulty selling this!
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Yes. You are most correct: how horrible it is to encourage school districts across the nation to use reliable tracking methods. That might ensure that instruction was driven by data as well as knowledge about a child’s living conditions. We might actually be able to shed new light on some of the systemic issues that effect high school dropout/college graduation rates and employment opportunities.
To offer incentives for tracking students with money attached is just plain intrusive and conspiratorial. I think the federal government should stop it. Yes, they should stop offering incentives or even making statements about that sort of thing. It’s an intrusion into states rights. The children’s rights? Well, the teachers and administrators of public schools have that covered, they sure do. And we have the evidence because student scores in the US were rising really fast before the feds got involved! (Oh, wait, student scores don’t tell us anything about teachers or administrators or schools. Sorry to mention scores.) Instead lets looks at our soaring graduation rates that put other nations to shame. Let’s look at our employers, who are so very pleased with the capabilities of students entering the workforce today. Yes, there is evidence every where that shows that the feds are just dangling another carrot in our faces to try and get us to track students.
Yes. It would be terrible to hold teachers accountable for what happens behind their closed classroom doors by looking at student scores as part of a performance review. After all, student scores do not correlate with teacher effectiveness, does it? Certainly not. There is no research out there that says that the most important component to a child’s success in school is the teacher. I mean, I could take a class of honor roll students, and if they suddenly began to fail all their courses, I wouldn’t blame the new teacher because it must be something else. The new teacher is very very important, but you can’t hold them responsible for something like quantitative results. That would be unfair.
Actually, maybe we should do away with scores all together. Teachers should only be judged on their degrees, how long they’ve been in the system, how punctual they are, and if they attend the right meetings. The should never be held accountable for decades of poor performing students and generations of below basic literacy and math skills. Yes. Teachers are the most important thing to a student’s success — but you can’t determine that by student scores. Hmm… maybe we should give students performance reviews based on the same criteria as we do teachers. After all, students have parents and can’t be held accountable for poverty, abuse, and parent absenteeism. Instead we should judge students on whether they follow the dress code, come to school every day, turn in their homework (like a lesson plan, they only have to submit it; the quality of the homework would be a “score” and that would be unfair). Maybe we could grade them on punctuality too and how many clubs they join. But we certainly should not hold them accountable for situations which are out of their control.
Race to the Top is so unfair: to offer money with a criteria attached is simply taking things too far. It’s really unheard of in capitalistic U.S.A., to attach obligations to money. The feds just need to appropriate money to the states without any “strings” attached. The states are all really doing so well managing their state budgets, not just in education! When I was younger, my parents gave me money every single day and I didn’t have to do chores or do anything at all. I could spend it how I wanted and just go about my way. It was great. And I think that’s what the feds need to do with education. Just give out the money and ask for nothing in return. And as for asking applicant states to have passed innovative legislature that provides another option to meet the needs of students (yea, the ‘c’ word): STOP THAT! We have only one option: public schools where students have to go to a school based on zip codes. We have to be sure that the district continues to get the money the need. We don’t want the money to follow the children; we want the children to follow the money! That’s a great choice! I don’t see why anyone complains about it! And the bureaucracy is working really well. Every local DOE I’ve ever worked with is incredibly efficient, so we really don’t need anything different than public schools, parochial schools, and private schools. We don’t even want to make it possible to have anything else!
The feds don’t need to be doing anything– all teachers and all administrators all over this nation work really hard and they are doing the best they can and the feds don’t know how to fix the problems that schools have. The teachers will fix it; the administrators will fix it. I mean, they are fixing it now. Wait! Did they already fix it? Ahhh… right. There are no problems at all in public education except: the feds, the parents, those students, and drugs. Schools are modern, effective, kids love going, they feels safe, and like their teachers care about them, their lives and their future. Public schools every where do not need accountability, they do not need collaboration across districts, they do not need to track their student population or look at scores to find out how good a teacher may be doing. Nope. Public schools are great. Every one else is to blame for our students falling through the cracks and out of the system, especially the feds.
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Your sarcasm is over the top, rude, unnecessary, and insulting.
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Anne, if they want us to have a tracking system, why don’t they just build one and fund it? Why pretend they are giving money to supplement instruction when the data system prerequisite costs more than the grant?
By the way, in California, the money largely does follow the kids to whatever public school they attend. I think this is a good thing.
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