"Work Hard -- Get Smart!" -- ARRA and "Race to the Top"

By John Ballard

Via Michael Wade and Arts & Letters Daily this great link to The Atlantic.

...Over the past year, President Barack Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have started talking quite a lot about great teaching. They have shifted the conversation from school accountability� the rather worn theme of No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush�s landmark educational reform�to teacher accountability. And they have done it using one very effective conversational gambit: billions of dollars.

Thanks to the stimulus bonanza, Duncan has lucked into a budget that is more than double what a normal education secretary gets to spend. As a result, he has been able to dedicate $4.3 billion to a program he calls Race to the Top. To be fair, that�s still just a tiny fraction of the roughly $100 billion in his budget (much of which the government direct-deposits into the bank accounts of schools, whether they deserve the money or not). But especially in a year when states are projecting $16 billion in school-budget shortfalls, $4.3 billion is real money. �This is the big bang of teacher-effectiveness reform,� says Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that helps schools recruit good teachers. �It�s huge.�

Despite the perky name, Race to the Top is a marathon�and a potentially grueling one; to win, states must take a series of steps that are considered radical in the see-no-evil world of education, where teachers unions have long fought efforts to measure teacher performance based on student test scores and link the data to teacher pay. States must try to identify great teachers, figure out how they got that way, and then create more of them. �This is the wave of the future. This is where we have to go�to look at what�s working and what�s not,� Duncan told me. �It sounds like common sense, but it�s revolutionary.�

Here is a link to a thirty-minute report about "Race to the Top" that aired yesterday.

At a time when everyone is bashing the administration for allowing the defense industry to continue sucking the national tit while the rest of the budget gets proportionally reduced, it should be pointed out that before they left the starting gate this administration had the foresight to get money appropriated into the stimulus package (ARRA) that not only anticipated later budget cuts but allowed executive decision-making to use those funds "outside the box" in ways that bypass the bureaucratic red tape and plant meaningful seeds that can grow in spite of, rather than through, but-that's-how-we-always-work.

With the same gesture they knowingly challenged unions -- a traditional Democratic support base -- with programs that were sure to cause waves in union ranks. The Wall Street Journal, which keeps up with such topics, took notice of this looming conflict as early as last July, wrapping up their analysis with a prediction of failure. "

...The Administration can expect more such opposition to �Race to the Top.� School choice is anathema to the nation�s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which also oppose paying teachers for performance rather than for seniority and credentials.

NEA President Dennis Van Roekel told the Washington Post last week that charter schools and merit pay raise difficult issues for his members, yet Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said states that block these reforms could jeopardize their grant eligibility. We�ll see who blinks first. The acid test is whether Messrs. Duncan and Obama are willing to withhold money from politically important states as the calendar marches toward 2012.

Race to the Top is bound to have some impact, and lawmakers in several states�including Tennessee, Rhode Island, Louisiana and Massachusetts�already have passed charter-friendly legislation in hopes of tapping the fund. But the exercise will fail if it is merely a one-off trade of cash for this or that new law. The key is whether the money can be used to promote enough school choice and other reforms that induce school districts to change how the other $800 billion or so is spent.

Charter schools and voucher programs regularly produce better educational outcomes with less money. But as long as most education spending goes to support the status quo, Race to the Top will be mostly a case of political show and tell.

Guess what? Money talks. And any state that wants to turn up its nose at federal money is free to do so. Ask Louisiana how that worked out. Or check out what our governor has done here in Georgia, quietly easing the federal dollars into Georgia Work Ready, a program started before ARRA was ever conceived but which was waiting for funds.

Transcript snip here with three journalists addressing, among other subjects, the union issue.

CONAN: Here's an email from John in Oklahoma City. I teach at one of those dropout factories. The RTTT, that's Race to the Top - and Larry, you're going to have to help me out here - ESEA?

ABRAMSON: That's the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which is the original name for No Child Left Behind, the big law.

CONAN: Could be helpful or even worse than No Child Left Behind. Use primitive bubble tests run through some primitive statistical engineering models, and there will be complete exodus of qualified teachers from neighborhood secondary schools like mine.
I've had more than 40 students killed or kill someone. We just had another kid murdered. How do you factor that into growth targets?

ABRAMSON: Well, you know, there was originally a consideration of dangerous schools under No Child Left Behind. I don't think it gets a huge amount of attention anymore, and yes, there's a lot of concern that the Obama administration actually is going to end up ratcheting up the pressure on schools that are failing to spend more time preparing for tests, and that's a complaint I hear all the time.

CONAN: Claudio - and teachers are the biggest complainers about those tests.

SANCHEZ: That's right, and I think it's worth saying here, and I think our previous caller kind of, you know, pointed out that this is fundamentally, as Secretary of Education Duncan and Mr. Obama himself have said, this is really the civil rights, you know, issue of our day. This is an issue about getting kids who have been neglected, have been forgotten, have been warehoused. This is a chance for this country to do the right thing, to fulfill the promise of Brown vs. Board of Education.

The issue of teaching, however, is going to be central to that. I mean, in tackling teacher quality, the administration is really changing, I think, the landscape, the school-reform landscape, as well as the focus of federal education funding.

It's shifting dramatically by saying, you know, we you know, the jargon of No Child Left Behind was teacher quality. Now it's become teacher effectiveness, and there's a lot of money there for states to examine and re-examine and rethink how they train teachers, how they create those pipelines to attract the best teachers, the most talented teachers, and I think that in the end, more than class size, more than, you know, the latest pedagogy on how to teach math or science, I think that the quality and the effectiveness of that teacher is going to be an enormous lynchpin to the rest of where this administration goes with school reform, because I think that's going to be the key.

CONAN: Let me ask you both a sensitive political question, and that is one aspect of No Child Left Behind was to make it easier for school systems to fire teachers. A lot of union contracts made it almost impossible to get rid of teachers in a lot of places. Unions were among the president's biggest supporters in that last election. Larry, does this proposed reforms address the issue of a - well, how we get rid of teachers we can't get rid of?

ABRAMSON: It doesn't directly. I mean - I think, you know, Claudio was saying that the stars maybe aligned for reauthorization of this law. One of the things that's become a law, and that the unions have moved into line more. The head of the American Federation of Teachers, couple of weeks ago, sort of, made an important speech that said that she was more comfortable with the language that was being used that said that teachers would be judged according to the performance of their students.

So, the unions, I think, have endorsed some of these basic ideas more, but as Claudio and I were talking about yesterday, each of these reforms has to be negotiated into an individual contract between a local union and their school district. So, whatever broad position statements the unions take about what is or isn't acceptable, nationally, it gets really complicated when it amounts to, you know, the Tuscaloosa school board, figuring out how they're going to be compensate or fire their teachers. And I don't think Barack Obama or Arne Duncan are going to be in the room trying to help him hammer that agreement out.

CONAN: And - go ahead, go ahead.

SANCHEZ: Neal, if I may just jump in for a second. You know, Secretary Duncan made a point the other day, in talking about, you know, the president's budget for education. He said that 600 local teachers' unions had pretty much looked at Race For The Top, and what the administration was doing with the No Child Left Behind, and had pretty much agreed or endorsed some of the ideas that the administration was pushing.

What it didn't say, of course, is that the rank and file, really - and we're talking about a lot of other local units and many, many teachers -are very, very skeptical. I think that there was a lot of potential in this - in what the president has proposed, both in terms of time teach -students' test scores and performance to teacher evaluations or even time paid to the way kids - a teacher's students do on tests.

That has the potential for a lot more teacher bashing, more than under No Child Left Behind. And that, of course, was one of big undoing of No Child Left Behind. Teachers who said were being blamed for things that we have no control over. We're not being given the resources. Now, the Obama administration is saying, well, you know, we're not going to evaluate you based on how your students do, and that has the potential for, again, to, of course, to blow up in Mr. Obama's face.

Clearly, Race to the Top is a crap shoot. The administration is gambling that even if it is not a spectacular success, at least it shook things up, which is a step ahead of allowing the status quo to continue to erode education in America.
As Sanchez said at the conclusion...

The feds have never really funded more than 12 percent of schools or the education funding in the state levels. And it's now an average of about eight to 10 percent. So that means that local and state legislators, lawmakers, policymakers are the ones who decide which schools are poor, which ones are not.

And again, if we're always - schools are still tied to property taxes. Well, that's the ultimate inadequacy of school funding where you rely on local wealth. And, you know, we know where kids that are really needy live, they live in poor neighborhoods, and the wealthy kids don't. And so that is what's reflected in the way schools are funded.

I think, though, the point is well taken. I mean, we really do need to address the impoverished school systems, kids who are really way behind, and do a lot more for these kids. And, you know, who knows, it's still unknown whether this is going to be the way to do it...