President Obama almost broke his arm patting himself on the back over "Race to the Top" (RTT), so Think Progress is baffled that Congress cut it. But the logic here is all over the map:
As Obama Praises Race To The Top's Success, Congress Cuts Its Funding In Half
Earlier this week, a coalition of civil rights groups blasted the Obama administration's Race to the Top program - which provides competitive grants to states that implement education reforms - saying that "by emphasizing competitive incentives in this economic climate, the majority of low-income and minority students will be left behind and, as a result, the United States will be left behind as a global leader."
Today, Obama responded at the National Urban League Centennial Conference:
I know there's a concern that Race to the Top doesn't do enough for minority kids, because the argument is, well, if there's a competition, then somehow some states or some school districts will get more help than others. Let me tell you, what's not working for black kids and Hispanic kids and Native American kids across this country is the status quo...So the charge that Race to the Top isn't targeted at those young people most in need is absolutely false because lifting up quality for all our children - black, white, Hispanic - that is the central premise of Race to the Top. And you can't win one of these grants unless you've got a plan to deal with those schools that are failing and those young people who aren't doing well. Every state and every school district is directly incentivized to deal with schools that have been forgotten, been given up on.
Of course, closing the achievement gap between white and minority students is a huge part of making the education system more effective. The College Board has set the goal of having 55 percent of 27-34 year olds holding a college degree by 2020 (currently 40 percent do), and "by eliminating the severity of disparities between underrepresented minorities and white Americans, it is estimated that more than half the degrees needed to meet the 55 percent goal would be produced."
But Race to the Top has been a key driver for education reform across the country. So far, 32 states have implemented reforms in order to compete in the program. "While Race to the Top has only been in existence for a short time, it has yielded some of the most dramatic state education reforms the country has seen in many years," said CAP's Cindy Brown. "These changes include a new law in Colorado that ensures all teachers receive a meaningful evaluation, a raise in standards for teacher tenure, and measures that ensure that ineffective teachers who don't improve are not teaching students."
So it's completely baffling that the Senate has seen fit to slice the program's funding in half for 2011, after the administration itself requested far less than it had in 2010. The House cut the $1.4 billion request down to $850 million, and the Senate reduced it further to just $675 million. This year's program had $4.3 billion, and with the country's economic future at stake, it makes little sense to slice a program that's showing tangible results.
Just one of the things that's totally missing here--as the civil rights group tried to point out--is any realistic reason to believe that minorities will be helped rather than hurt--as seems to be far more likely.
Earlier this week, the edublogosphere was swarming with links to this memorandum from the US Department of Education warning of the "vulnerabilities in the oversight of charter schools." (h/t The Frustrated Teacher)
Since 2005, there have been 40 investigations of charter schools using public funds fraudulently. What these investigations have found is that charter school officials have used taxpayer money to pay for things like "an extravagant lifestyle" (Minnesota), "spa treatments and personal vehicles" (California), "purchases at stores such as Louis Vuitton" (Illinois), and "funeral expenses" (Wisconsin - that's what passes for fun there).
There have been 18 indictments, 15 convictions, and 24 cases are still being pursued. But because this memorandum was sent as a warning for further vigilance in regard to this type of crime, it's easy to assume that the problem is apt to get much worse. And in fact there's ample proof that it is.
A man who worked for the Urban League back in the 60's once told me a story about how people's perceptions are influenced by the powerful in our country. He was working on a project to encourage local business start-ups in a rural black community, and one of their first projects involved setting up an icehouse run by a black family. This was before most poor rural communities had refrigeration, so ice was a necessity that they felt the community would buy into right away. Unfortunately they were wrong, and the business struggled.
What they found was that the blacks in the community continued to purchase their ice on the other side of the tracks at the white-owned icehouse. So they sent a task force back to the neighborhood to interview the locals and ask why they weren't buying their ice from their black-owned neighborhood icehouse. What they were told again and again in their interviews was "the whiteman's ice is colder."
This story is analogous to the way that school reform is being sold to us. Just as ice can be made colder only by its chemical substance being altered, schools can only be made better if the very substance of them - their safety and inclusiveness, the curriculum and instruction, and the involvement and engagement of the community - is altered.
But in the face of this undeniable fact, what we're hearing from the Obama administration is that a strange alchemy of "test scores," "data tracking," and "charter schools" are going to alter the substance of education.
This week, the blogosphere was seething with accounts of the deteriorating state of public education in the United States. On OpenLeft alone, there were far more than the usual number of posts related to public schools.
In a Quick Hit, Paul Rosenberg pointed to some of the gory details that appeared in an op-ed by Derrick Z. Jackson in the Boston Globe entitled "The death of public education: Lack of money is killing our schools." Specifically:
• Detroit is closing more than 40 schools
• Kansas City wants to close more than 40 percent of its school buildings
• Boston is slashing custodial staff and postponing building repairs
In a comment to Paul's QH, VLazlo linked to a news story about how charter schools in Philadelphia put taxpayer money is "at risk" by using public funds to develop lucrative side businesses that have nothing to do with educating kids.
In another QH, Bruce Dixon sent us to his insightful post at HuffPo where he made us aware that "Obama's version of school reform will dis-employ tens of thousands of highly qualified teachers, mostly minority women between 35 and 55 and pillars of whatever social life exists in those communities where unemployment is already at historic levels."
And in a diary on OL frontpager Adam Bink warned about the unprecedented influence that private foundations are having on public education. He questioned, quite rightly, whether giving rich foundations such as those backed by Bill Gates and WalMart's Walton family a "seat at the table" might lead to these institutions -- which tend to favor so-called reform measures such as charter schools and teacher merit pay -- "setting education policy."
Elsewhere on the 'net, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal reported that America's longest and most ambitious experiment on using private school vouchers to create competition with public schools has produced absolutely nothing in terms of academic gains for students:
"About halfway into a five-year evaluation of Milwaukee's 20-year-old school voucher program, new data shows that groups of low-income students in the city who use public vouchers to attend private schools are still scoring about the same academically as their peers in Milwaukee Public Schools."
In the education press, alarm bells were also sounding. Susan H. Furman warns in an op-ed at Education Week that the Obama administration's most-favored methods of tying teacher evaluation to student tests scores, called "value added measurements," are being wildly over-sold. The problem:
"• Many tests cover sufficiently different content from one grade to the next that score gains do not have the same meaning across grades. Many state assessments, in fact, are not scaled to measure grade-to-grade growth or to make growth comparisons.
• Value-added estimates for a teacher can fluctuate for a variety of reasons, many not necessarily related to actual effectiveness at producing student gains on achievement tests. For example, high turnover of students throughout the year can affect the gains students make on achievement tests; and, if the class size is small, the scores of only a few students can affect the size of the gains.
• Factors other than an individual teacher's efforts affect student performance in any given year."
In the same issues of Education Week, William A. Proefriedt stated that today's "reformers" are "are blind to the complexity of the task" of improving teacher performance through changing teacher education and preparation.
"We go beyond all reasonable limits when we take the test scores as a proxy of student achievement or as a measure of the quality of the programs from which teachers graduated. We have been bewitched by the real promise of quantifying certain abilities, by our understandable desire to hold our institutions accountable, and by the significance we attach to our calling."
Among educators themselves, the American Association of School Administrators reported that a majority of school districts have eliminated personnel -- and anticipate further cuts. A total of two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents reported having to eliminate personnel positions for the 2009-10 school year, and 83 percent anticipate having to eliminate further positions in 2010-11. The reason for the cuts? Lack of state funding.
According to the National Governors Association:
"Due to the revenue declines, 43 states cut $31.3 billion in 2009. For fiscal year 2010, even with nearly $30 billion in new revenue, 36 states have been forced to cut $55.7 billion, with 30 states having cut both K-12 and higher education."
States foresee fiscal year 2011, which starts for most states July 1, 2010, to be the most difficult to date, and few see fiscal year 2012 much better. 36 states will have to fill a collective gap of at least $16.5 billion to return to fiscal 2008 state spending levels for K-12 education."
In fact (via multiple sources), about half of all states are poised to slash spending on K-12 education in fiscal 2011, while another handful are expected to keep funding level. Only a small number of states-Massachusetts and Pennsylvania among them-are proposing any kinds of increases, and those are modest.
Last but not least, an article in Education Week revealed the large number of rural high schools in the US that are "drop out factories." What makes the problem especially perplexing is that there is no widely agreed-upon method for measuring dropout rates. And schools that are rated as dropout factories by some methods are given top notch ratings by state officials and outside sources such as U.S. News & World Report.
With all the bad news about the state of public education in the United States emanating from multiple sources around the country, anyone who is at all concerned about the welfare of our nation's children and youth would want to get some sense that progressive leadership in our country has a grasp of the situation. Fortunately, that message was delivered at the end of the week in the form of an email from the Center for American Progress.
This past Monday, the National Conference of State Legislatures released a new bi-partisan report, "Education at a Crossroads: A New Direction for Federal and State Education Policy" that's sharply at odds with the common conservative/neoliberal thrust of both Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program and Obama's new "Race To The Top". While acknowledging that federal mandates played a crucial role in getting states to educate all their students, based on enforcement of compliance with processes and procedures, NCSL says that the same approach is fundamentally at odds with the current goals of improving educational outcomes, which should be met by focusing on results, and giving state the freedom and responsibility to craft their own policies about how to meet those goals.
The report was produced by a 15-member task force of state legislators, with co-chairs from both parties, along with a co-chair representing legislative staff. The report overview began:
In recent years, driven by members of Congress and presidents from both parties, federal involvement in the day-to-day operations of the K-12 system has radically increased and is "upside-down," overemphasizing compliance with federal process requirements and underemphasizing results-specifically improving the academic achievement of all students, especially poor and minority students. Student achievement is improving marginally on the same trajectory as it has for the past decade, but the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students persists. Clearly neither federal top-down mandates nor categorical and competitive grant resources have significantly affected student achievement.
The commonalities between Bush and Obama's approach to education "reform" are characteristic of the Versailles consensus between conservatives and neoliberals in opposition to "the left" and in defiance of both objective reality, and broad political sentiment in America as a whole. The NCSL report is a bracing reminder that there are sane alternatives that offer real solutions--and that have bottom-up bipartisan support in sharp contrast to sort of elite bipartisanship so prized by Obama, but so barren of actual results.
Specific recommendations of the report include:
Concentrate available federal funding on those populations most at-risk, using a research-based formula that emphasizes the neediest students instead of trying to leverage system-wide reforms with the 7 percent federal contribution.
Funding IDEA [the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] at promised levels would immediately free $16 billion annually that, because of federal maintenance of effort requirements, would be redirected to reform and innovation at the state and local levels.
Make permanent changes to the tax credit provisions of the bonding laws that apply to school construction. This action also would free tens of billions of dollars in state and local resources that would otherwise be spent on debt-service for school bonds.
Revitalize the federal focus on research and reporting on what works and why without picking or mandating how and when "winning strategies" should be required by law or "encouraged" by withholding additional federal resources.
Use any remaining funding to reward and encourage true innovation-not conformity with others or compliance with a checklist of reforms, but progress toward performance gains.
I participated in a press conference call the day the report was released, and asked a question specifically about the contradiction between the need for broad, large-scale aid to fill state and local budget gaps and the highly-competitve, narrowly targeted Race To The Top program. Extended quotes and additional comments on the flip.
On Friday, vastly overshadowed by the push for "health care reform", Obama announced his plans for "education reform," dubbed "Race To The Top". In it's coverage, the Boston Globe was depressingly typical of the shoddy reporting around education that greases the wheels for this travesty.
The "Race to the Top" initiative is designed to identify new, effective ways to teach, reward states for innovation, and give state authorities a chance to patch rapidly widening holes in education budgets.
It also spurs states to voluntarily make sweeping reforms the administration wants - including linking teacher pay to how well students do on tests, and expanding the role of charter schools in public education.
"This competition will not be based on politics, ideology, or the preferences of a particular interest group," Obama said, flanked by Education Secretary Arne Duncan at an afternoon press conference in the Department of Education headquarters. "Instead, it will be based on a simple principle - whether a state is ready to do what works."
Of course, as I blogged recently, there's no evidence that charter schools "work"--they do not differ dramatically in performance, but rather slightly underperform standard public schools. Nor is there any substantial research showing that merit pay tied to test scores is an effective way to improve educational outcomes. Thus, Obama's competition is based entirely on ideology--an ideology that is primarily about shifting control of education as far out of the classrooms and into America's boardrooms as possible.
In fact, Obama is stabbing his union allies in the back:
