Schooltastic

Today, instead of looking at proposed policies of candidates, I’m looking at the major education reform policy of the sitting president in anticipation of it becoming a topic of debate following the Republican nomination.

Race to the Top (RT3) is a grant program, part of the 2009 stimulus, that allows the US Department of Ed to award federal funds to states implementing targeted education reforms. The objectives, laid out by the federal government, are fine, in and of themselves:

1) preparing students for college and work
2) high quality teachers and administrators
3) using data to improve teaching
4) turn around lowest-performing schools

Those are certainly things I’d like to see done.  However, how do you accomplish these things?

#1 is being addressed by a new set of state learning standards.  Revamping objectives is a fairly regular occurrence, regardless of federal initiatives.  This early on, I can’t comment on the efficacy of this particular iteration, but I find that the process of program review itself is usually positive.

#4 is being addressed by a secondary set of grants, awarded by the states, to schools identified as consistently low-performing. 

For #2 and #3, it’s testing.  Standards-based testing is, increasingly, the yardstick being used to measure quality of teachers, administrators, and schools.  No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the big education initiative of the previous administration, raised the stakes on state tests by threatening low-performing schools with decreased funding.  Now, RT3 raises those stakes even higher by offering a share of its $4.3 billion purse to schools that systematically link test scores to teacher and administrator evaluation.  A specific stipulation of RT3 is value-added modeling, which means that, as a group of students progresses through school, the efficacy of each of their successive teachers is judged by how much better they score on the state tests than the previous year. 

The goals of RT3 may be noble, but the means of attaining them don’t necessarily align with best educational practices.*  I’m definitely not sold on the “carrot and stick” approach to education reform.

*See previous post about standardized assessment.