"Race to the Top" Squeezes State

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

OBAMA PUSHES STATES TO SHIFT ON EDUCATION
New York Times -- August 17, 2009
By Sam Dillon

Holding out billions of dollars as a potential windfall, the Obama 
administration is persuading state after state to rewrite education laws 
to open the door to more charter schools and expand the use of student 
test scores for judging teachers.

That aggressive use of economic stimulus money by Education Secretary 
Arne Duncan is provoking heated debates over the uses of standardized 
testing and the proper federal role in education, issues that flared 
frequently during President George W. Bush's enforcement of his 
signature education law, called No Child Left Behind.

A recent case is California, where legislative leaders are vowing to do 
anything necessary, including rewriting a law that prohibits the use of 
student scores in teacher evaluations, to ensure that the state is 
eligible for a chunk of the $4.3 billion the federal Education 
Department will soon award to a dozen or so states. The law had strong 
backing from the state teachers union.

Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Tennessee and several other states have 
moved to bring their laws or policies into line with President Obama's 
school improvement agenda.

The administration’s stance has caught by surprise educators and 
officials who had hoped that Mr. Obama’s calls during the campaign for 
an overhaul of the No Child law would mean a reduced federal role and 
less reliance on standardized testing. The law requires schools to bring 
all students to proficiency in reading and math by 2014 and penalizes 
those that do not meet annual goals.

The proposed rules make testing an even more powerful factor in schools 
by extending the use of scores to teacher evaluations. The proposed 
rules for the $4.3 billion in grants, which the administration calls the 
Race to the Top, require states to show they are fostering innovation, 
improving achievement, raising standards, recruiting effective teachers, 
turning around failed schools and building data systems.

Just to be eligible to apply, a state must have no “barriers to linking 
data on student achievement or student growth to teachers and principals 
for the purpose of teacher and principal evaluation,” the rules say.

While many educators and advocates support the administration, there has 
also been an outpouring of complaints, including in comments on the 
rules filed with the Education Department. (The department will issue 
final rules after the comment period ends Aug. 28.)

“The proposed regulations are overly burdensome,” Robert P. Grimesey, 
superintendent of the Orange County Public Schools in Virginia, said in 
written comments. “They give the impression that stimulus funds provide 
the federal government with unbridled capacity to impose bureaucratic 
demands.”

Much of the grumbling is from educators who say they supported Mr. 
Obama’s candidacy.

“I am a public school teacher who vehemently wanted to vote for a 
president who would save us from No Child Left Behind,” Diane Aoki of 
Kealakekua, Hawaii, wrote to the department. But linking test scores to 
teacher evaluations, Ms. Aoki said, means “the potential is there for 
the test frenzy to get worse than it is under No Child Left Behind.”

An Education Department spokesman, Peter Cunningham, said, “There’s a 
healthy debate around this grand application, which is what we were 
hoping for.”

“We’re mindful of all the criticisms about federal overreaching, about 
too much testing, of all the complaints about No Child Left Behind,” Mr. 
Cunningham said. “These complaints come up all the time in conversations 
about all our programs, not just this one, with education officials 
across the country. The context that No Child has generated is the 
context that we have to live with.”

The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group, published a report this 
month handicapping states’ chances. Florida and Louisiana, it said, were 
“highly competitive,” New Jersey and others were “competitive,” and 
Connecticut was “somewhat competitive.” California, New York and 
Wisconsin, the report said, were not eligible because of state laws 
limiting the use of achievement data in teacher evaluation.

Lawmakers and officials in California and Wisconsin are debating whether 
to make legislative changes.

In New York, officials are pushing back against suggestions that the 
state is ineligible. Merryl H. Tisch, chancellor of the Board of 
Regents, said Friday that because the law banned the use of student data 
in evaluating teachers only for tenure decisions, New York should be 
eligible.

Also, Dr. Tisch said, the state law is scheduled to expire in June 2010, 
and “there is no appetite to renew that law.”

Not everyone is upset with the administration’s tactics.

“We like the way the administration is using Race to the Top to send a 
message about its priorities,” said Joe Williams, executive director of 
Democrats for Education Reform. “We like that it’s gotten states to take 
a close look at their laws and practices.”

Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University, disagreed. 
“The Department of Education should respect the requirements of 
federalism and look to states to offer their best ideas rather than 
mandating policies that the current administration likes,” Dr. Ravitch 
said in comments filed with the department.

An early sign that the promise of education financing could induce state 
changes came after several blunt statements by Mr. Duncan this spring 
that states limiting the growth of charter schools would have trouble 
getting an award.

Lawmakers in Illinois, Louisiana, Tennessee and several other states 
responded by lifting caps on the numbers of charter schools or by 
expanding the pool of students eligible to attend them. Charter schools 
are publicly financed, but they are managed by groups separate from 
school districts and are largely free from traditional school work rules.

In Indiana, lawmakers beat back an effort to impose a moratorium on new 
charters and, after Mr. Duncan warned that states prohibiting the use of 
test data in teacher evaluations would be ineligible for awards, revoked 
such a prohibition.

Union lobbying was crucial in passing such laws. The two national unions 
have not formally commented on the proposed rules. They have opposed 
using test scores in evaluations, saying misuse of ambiguous data could 
lead to unfair dismissals.

California got attention in June when Mr. Duncan noted in a speech that 
it was among states that had created “a firewall between students and 
teacher data.”

“In California, they have 300,000 teachers,” he said. The top 10 percent 
are the “best in the world,” he said, the bottom 10 percent, “should 
probably find another profession, yet no one in California can tell you 
which teacher is in which category.”

“Something is wrong with that picture,” he said.

In response, the state’s superintendent of public instruction, board of 
education president and education secretary jointly wrote to Mr. Duncan 
saying his concerns were “based on a misunderstanding.”

California’s law, they argued, bars state officials from using test 
results to evaluate teachers but does not block local districts from 
doing so. Only a few do.

State Senator Gloria Romero, a Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate 
Education Committee, said in an interview that because “disagreement 
continues” between the state and Obama officials, she was drafting 
legislation to clarify the law. Ms. Romero has scheduled a hearing on 
the issue for Aug. 26.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/education/17educ.html