More on Obama/Duncan Test Misuse "Stimulus"

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

RACE TO THE TOP EDUCATION GRANT PROPELS REFORMS
USA Today -- November 4, 2009
By Greg Toppo

It's relatively small by Washington standards, but the Obama 
administration's $4.35 billion carrot for schools is already leading 
states to adopt a handful of key reforms.

Tucked into the $110 billion federal stimulus slated for education, a 
comparatively tiny grant known as the Race to the Top requires that 
states that want the money must commit to closing historic achievement 
gaps and getting more kids into college – but they also must show that 
they're attending to a few nitty-gritty details that President Obama and 
Education Secretary Arne Duncan believe are important, including:

- Tying teacher and principal pay – and school assignments – to student 
test scores.

- Adopting internationally benchmarked academic standards.

- Turning around their lowest-performing schools.

- Building long-term student tracking systems.

- Loosening legal caps on the number of charter schools that states 
allow each year.

On Wednesday, Obama plans to mark the first anniversary of his 2008 
election with a speech at a middle school in Madison, Wis., where he'll 
talk about the Race to the Top. The first batch of money isn't scheduled 
to go out until January, but state legislatures over the past few months 
have been scrambling to rewrite laws governing these systems.

If distributed to each of the USA's schools, which educate an estimated 
50 million students, it would equal only $87 more per student. But the 
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools says 10 states already have 
moved to raise or get rid of caps on publicly funded but privately run 
charter schools. Four – Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas – have 
already raised or eliminated them.

And California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called a special legislative 
session last August to goose state lawmakers into repealing a law that 
prohibits districts from linking teacher pay to student test 
performance. He signed it into law last month.

Not bad for $87 per kid.

"We absolutely believe that the activity we're seeing ... is prompted by 
the Race to the Top competition," says Melody Barnes, Obama's domestic 
policy director.

She says Obama plans to detail "the really encouraging steps" that a 
handful of states have taken to be eligible for Race to the Top money.

Charles Barone of Democrats for Education Reform, a New York-based 
advocacy group, says money may not be the issue – there's a more 
important "prestige factor" at play, he says. "You want to be the state 
that competes successfully."

Rick Hess, an education policy analyst with the American Enterprise 
Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, says many of the criteria, 
such as charter school expansion and teacher pay reform, are laudable. 
But he worries that Obama and Duncan are pushing ahead too quickly, 
forcing states to implement new rules "carelessly or without much 
conviction," that are bound to fail.

"We're institutionalizing impatience," he says. "There's not much room 
for thoughtful conversation."

He also says the Race to the Top suffers from the same 
over-prescriptiveness that plagued No Child Left Behind, the Bush 
administration's education reform law.

All the same, Barone says, many of Obama's proposed reforms are 
"low-hanging fruit – things that are no-brainers," so it's easy for 
governors to fight for changes.

"They don't want to be on the losing side of this," he says. "Everybody 
wants to be the education governor, but nobody had asked them to prove 
it in the past several years. This year the onus is back on them."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-11-04-obamatop04_st_N.htm