New York State had the misfortune to win that pig in a poke known as Race to the Top. The state got $700 million.

Our political leaders licked their chops, thinking that this was new money that could be used to offset budget cuts.

Silly them.

Every dollar of RTTT must be used for designated purposes, not a dollar can be moved to make up for deficits elsewhere.

And many districts are now learning that whatever money they get from RTTT will require them to spend two, three, four times as much complying with its requirements.

The State Education Department has been designing an “educator evaluation” system that is so complex, so punitive and so demoralizing that more than a third of the principals in the state signed a petition opposing it and calling for a pilot test. The system, known as APPR (annual professional performance review), assigned 40% of a teacher’s rating to student test scores; if a teacher is “ineffective” in that portion, he or she cannot be rated effective overall no matter how many of the other 60 points are accumulated. In other words, the 40%=100%.

The principals know that this approach will demoralize their staff and harm their students. In these times, it takes tremendous courage and moral fortitude for a principal to take a public stand against any decision made by the State Education Department and the Board of Regents. It’s easy to castigate them as “opposing accountability,” when in fact they are opposing a deeply flawed and ill-conceived, mechanistic approach to evaluation.

The State Education Department, led by Commissioner John King, a young man with experience in the charter school sector, has described the creation of APPR as building a plane in mid-air. In a training session, the principals were shown a video in which the passengers were strapped in their seats while mechanics worked around them to build the airplane as it flew high off the ground. One principal noted that the mechanics (State Education Department bureaucrats?) were wearing parachutes, but the passengers had none.

One of the signatories of the principals’ protest letter was Southold, Long Island, school superintendent David Gamberg. He is a thoughtful, dedicated educator and leads a district where parents and the local community are dedicated to their public schools. Gamberg described the plane as a Spruce Goose.