Let me offer a few thoughts in response to one of the questions posed, “What is needed to ensure positive education reform?”

A strong focus on educator quality would appear to be all but assured in successful state Race to the Top (RttT) proposals given that the “Great Teachers and Leaders” portion of the application counts for 138 of the total 500 points. However, there is less assurance that an appropriate balance will be struck between innovations such as redesigned teacher evaluation and compensation systems and the provision of customized assistance to strengthen the instructional skills of individual teachers and the leadership skills of individual school administrators.

Our work at the New Teacher Center, of course, is all about developing and strengthening individual educator capacity and developing systems that transform broader cultures of teaching throughout schools and districts.

My hope is that RttT application reviewers will attend to and take seriously several additions made to the final guidance released by the U.S. Department of Education. Two important additions, advocated for by the NTC in our official public comments on the draft guidance, focus on the role of teaching and learning conditions and the importance of high-quality teacher support and professional development.

First, a stronger focus on school leadership and the inclusion of positive teaching and learning conditions in the definition of effective principal were important additions to the final guidance. I am familiar with several states’ RttT proposals that take these issues seriously, building in a strong and robust focus on mentoring and developing school leaders and assessing teaching and learning conditions. I am hopeful that those states will receive credit in the application scoring process for their attention to developing strong school leaders and utilizing a broad set of measures – including “evidence of providing supportive teaching and learning conditions” – to define effective school leadership.

Second, I was heartened that the Education Department gave greater attention in its final guidance to the need for high-quality teacher induction, mentoring and professional development to be built into states’ RttT proposals. For RttT to have an impact on student learning, attention must be paid not only to evaluating and rewarding teacher performance, but also to supporting and strengthening the skills of all teachers. New teacher induction is an important aspect of teacher effectiveness. I am hopeful that application reviewers will look for strong state proposals to use evaluations to inform the provision of induction support and professional development and ensure that participating school and district partners provide effective, data-informed induction, professional development, and common planning and collaboration time to teachers and principals.

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I was going to let the transparency issue lie, having said my piece and my pal Andy Rotherham having weighed in with a link to his thoughtful assessment of the pros and cons of keeping the identities of the RTT reviewers hidden for now. (Though, it's worth noting, that even Andy's response doesn't address whether ED should provide more clarity into how reviewers were selected, especially what qualifications were favored, or the content of their instruction in judging this novel contest).

Yesterday, however, Eliza Krigman posted on this blog Secretary Duncan's emphatic response to questions about the transparency of the whole RTT process-- and the concern that, clumsily or arrogantly executed, it may set back the good and useful ideas it seeks to promote (much as Reading First's frailties ultimately did in the case of reading instruction). Eliza quotes Education Secretary Arne Duncan, on a Wednesday press conference call, asserting: “Our new competitive grant programs like Race to the Top and the Investing in Innovation fund include greater transparency than ever before including publishing winning and losing applications, reviewer comments, and applicant’s presentations.” I’ve been asked, in light of the questions I’ve raised earlier this week (here, here, and here), about the department’s process, and whether this means I’m satisfied and/or abashed. The answer is “neither.”

First, the Duncan claim of “greater transparency than ever before” is just hyperbole. For instance, when contacted by Education Week and asked to share the names of the RTT judges or even the location as to where they were being trained, the department refused. More to the point, none of the stuff Duncan alluded to in yesterday’s call has actually happened yet. At this point, it’s all prospective transparency. When the department does follow through on these promises, in April or so, that will be terrific and will start to provide crucial protection against political arm-twisting, aggrieved members of Congress, and public skepticism.

Beyond that, though, it’s critical to recall that the promised measures will all be after the fact and that none of them actually entails any transparency regarding the RTT process. As far as the actual real-time process, the Department of Education never announced that judges had been selected (until Education Week’s Michele McNeil broke that news), hasn’t explained how judges were selected or who did the selection, never explained where the 19 priorities themselves came from, hasn’t explained how judges are to weigh seemingly conflicting criteria or apply the point system, hasn’t explained how conflicts of interest were determined, and hasn’t explained how much the secretary will choose to be bound by the review process (important because this is a discretionary program, so the reviews are purely advisory). Even the Bush administration, which I used to slam for opacity appalling insularity, did better on some of this. So much for "unprecedented." And those programs were only a tiny fraction the size of the historic RTT fund.

Now, Duncan is obviously free to define transparency as he wishes, but no one should imagine that the department gets to decide what constitutes necessary or appropriate transparency. Come to think of it, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was on the Hill just the other day, getting slammed by House members of both parties, due to concerns that what the Treasury Department and New York Federal Reserve judged sufficient transparency when it came to the AIG bailout wasn’t quite what they had in mind. I know how they feel.

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Maybe the strong response to the first round of the RttT grant competition marks a sea-change in education reform that we all should welcome. This competition has certainly placed new urgency on developing the next phase of education in United States: to create a world of learners who are prepared to lead in global market place.

Having roughly seven out of 10 American students graduate from high school is not going to cut it when students in many other advanced nations have surpassed us in the critical areas of science and math.

For years now many of us have been clamoring for innovative and effective approaches to make our schools better and offer our young people access to a quality education. Now, before our very eyes, state education leaders appear to be stepping up to the challenge. They set politics aside and streamlined policies and procedures that have long inhibited positive education reform. They took bold steps, sometimes in the 11th hour, and muscled themselves past the naysayers to join the RttT competition. These states should be commended for not wasting an opportunity to reach for true reform of an education system which has failed too many.

Adding $1.35 billion for the second round of the initiative is still a fraction of total education spending, but it’s the right thing do – and particularly allowing individual school districts to compete for funds. This is an opportunity for vital change at the local level for school districts who may have been constrained in the past from implementing true education reform by arduous government and/or political barriers. There are plenty of school districts out there with the capacity to meet the RttT reform model requirement who should not be denied the opportunity to compete.

Race to the Top presents a rare opportunity to depart from failed approaches that targeted one or two isolated parts of the education system. The administration’s premise that competition drives innovation and creates the best ideas is sound. Adding more money to the pot shows the administration is committed to long-term reform and helps lessen the concern that too many reformers at the table would dilute RttT’s impact.

One way to ensure greater success during RttT’s second round would be to make funds available strictly to study best practices from first-round winners and look to replicate what works best. By measuring the success of RttT, our nation can create a blueprint of success for our future where failure is not an option.

In any case, the RttT competition has clearly energized a nation and has us not only thinking seriously about innovative education reform, but actually developing approaches that will institutionalize excellence – a sea-change. Moving forward, that’s reason for optimism.

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From the perspective of those of us campaigning for evidence-based education reform at the state level (which can sometimes feel like rolling a very heavy rock up a very steep hill), Race to the Top holds tremendous promise. Indeed, the competition has already catalyzed a remarkable amount of reform activity ahead of the January 19 Round I deadline, especially in states with strong gubernatorial leadership. Never before have I had the experience of talking with colleagues in another state one week to share legislative ideas only to turn around the next week and find these ideas fully enacted into statute. The race really is on.

While things are off to an encouraging start in a number of states, the ultimate promise of Race to the Top is not that it simply facilitates the enactment of policy change in states which already had the leadership to go in this direction, but even more so that it helps foster the conditions for reform even among the laggards. And this means that the overall success of Race to the Top will be driven in no small measure by what happens in losing states between the announcement of the Round I results and the Round II deadline.

It is critically important that the Round I award process results in very clear feedback to losing states. And not just about shortcomings in their forward looking plans, but even more so about how their existing “state reform conditions” fell short. This will be challenging for the judges no doubt, since lagging states may try obfuscate the actual status of their reform conditions as much as possible. Indeed, the reason that the lagging states are lagging is often because the resistance to evidence based reform is so well entrenched in these states. It will take strong signals from Washington coming out of Round I to arm state-based advocates with the unambiguous fact patterns they need to break through this resistance for Round II.

One additional note—it has been extremely helpful that the Administration has started signaling their intentions to enact the reform priorities of Race to the Top into the reauthorization of ESEA. Once reluctant state policymakers understand that these steps forward on teacher and principal evaluation, common standards, charter school support etc. are coming one way or the other, it makes a lot more sense to get serious about enacting reforms while there is still a chance to get extra money to help implement them.

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This is not an “I told ya so.” It’s an “I told me so.”

I never liked RttT. It had a cocky smirk on its face when it stumbled into Mickey Finn’s one windswept Northshore night, stole the stool by the jukebox, and slugged in enough nickels to play “Free Bird” more times than Skynyrd did in its whole career. I knew it was trouble when it ordered a vodka martini up with three olives, a pearl onion, and a twist—and then tried to pay for it by challenging the bartender to a best three-outta-five at Poker Dice.

Since many of the big players here have already anted up in this discussion, I feel safe getting into the game knowing that better minds have shown their hands, and having done so, have provided thoughtful material to support my own.

I never liked RttT. Not even when others did. Now, it seems that no one likes it—not even the guy with all the nickels.

My reason for being cool on the hottest program in town was and still is very simple: the bigger the grant, the bigger the gaffe. Because of the way the grant criteria were written, I figured big states would try for big bucks by promising big things they couldn’t deliver. And so I’m gratified to see the always thoughtful Sandy Kress weighing in with essentially the same concern: “What if a winning state doesn't follow through at all or at least in certain ways on its pledges, will the feds really pull the plug on funding? How much non-compliance triggers the loss of funding? A little, a lot, some of this, some of that? What? I know the Department is “firm” on these issues today, but I've heard that before.”

I know we’re all hoping that RttT produces some interesting innovations. But as Emily Dickinson told us, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” And this bird flew the coop a long time ago. Several people here have even suggested putting off ESEA reauthorization until RttT innovations show promise. And while, again, that sounds smart in theory, in practice I think we end up waiting for Godot—and if I remember my Theatre of the Absurd class from college, Godot doesn’t show up until the after party.

Here’s something I know about innovation from my work in the software industry: there’s an inverse relationship between cash and cachet. Why? Because committees make horrible innovators. You can bet your bottom tax dollar that a state that gets a cool billion couldn’t produce as much true innovation as a small, distributed group of intelligent, dedicated, and creative people with pocket change by comparison. Don’t believe me? Drop in on www.37signals.com. And while you’re there, read their e-book called “Getting Real.” I know that building great schools is not like building great software, but since I’ve had thousands of hours of experience with both, I feel like this might be one of the few areas where I can offer a perspective on this forum that isn’t derivative of better minds around me.

States don’t innovate, especially in education, because education is political, politics is the art of compromise, and compromise kills innovation. Just because a state promises to do something cool, doesn’t mean it will—and currently DOE doesn’t have a reliable way of telling the difference between prodigies and posers.

(It’s possible that i3 will yield better and more replicable results. And then won’t we feel stupid having sprung for a Bentley or a Jag when we could have done better with a Taurus or an F-150.)

Innovation-via-bribery or even via compensation, doesn’t really work. Yes, Apple made the iPod to make money. But they didn’t make it because they had money. Even with more money than God, Microsoft has produced only the flaccid Zune to compete with it. When it comes to innovation, I’ll take Steve Jobs in a cabin for a weekend with three felt pens and a pad of sticky notes over a building full of Microsoft code jockeys, three years, and all the free Mountain Dew they can guzzle.

So no matter which state gets how much, the best we’ll probably get out of the deal is the vague confirmation of things we already know: better teachers get better results, better leaders run better schools, better data helps us make better decisions. The assumption that Race to the Top State A will somehow inspire Race to the Bottom State B to suddenly replicate a model State A got half a billion dollars to build hangs on two questionable assumptions: (1) That what State A builds is actually innovative; and (2) That State B wants to do build it, too. So even though I understand the intention behind RttT, I know all too well the road with which good intentions is paved.

And then there’s The Rotherham Principle. (Advanced as well by several smart cookies on this blog but apparentely advanced first by Mr. R.)

As Mr. Hess notes about Mr. Rotherham’s insight, if every state that applies gets a piece of the action, the action will be thin indeed and the partaking thereof unsatisfying. Worst of all, Mr. Duncan’s historic investment in education will become so diluted there will be little chance of achieving the game-changing outcomes the policy was based on to begin with. Talk about pulling the rug out from under your raison d’être. I would have thought Mr. Duncan had a trick up his sleeve if too many folks showed up to the party. Perhaps the anonymous scoring process is his answer to crowd control.

What I find both embarrassing and ironic here is how the very culture of education Mr. Duncan abhors may somehow co-opt his own “take no prisoners and shoot the wounded” leadership style. In an odd way, the fact that 40 states applied for RttT funds must have meant that 40 states thought they were going to get funded. This wasn’t exactly the PowerBall or the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes. It wasn’t worth applying if you weren’t gonna win at least a few magazine subscriptions or something.

Perhaps our Secretary has been bitten by the fairness bug.

Every kindergarten teacher knows that we don’t single out some kids for special treatment, even if they really are special. There’s plenty of time for all that “I’m better than you are” stuff later on, and enough kids’ lives will be ruined over it eventually anyway. Why not give the little ones at least a year of relatively judgment-free treatment before we look up their zip codes and track them off to Dartmouth or Dropoutville?

Though I would have voted Secretary Duncan least likely DOE employee ever to act like a kindergarten teacher, RttT may yet turn him into one if he feels some misplaced egalitarian yearning to give money to even half the states that have applied. And if he invites more than half to the party, the other ones will surely cry all the way home, toting their phone-book size Gates-assisted applications all the way back to their state capitols.

In the beginning, Mr. Duncan was adamant that only the best applications would win. I’m sure he still feels the same way. But “best” just got bigger. In a way, he did a smart thing: he made the money so hard to apply for that most states couldn’t get the paperwork done. Then the Gates Foundation stepped in and paid for consultants to help a few select states get their homework in on time. Then the other states got mad, so Gates had a kindergarten moment of its own and gave more states their own ball to play with at recess. Frankly, the Foundation had no choice. Their PR antennae, ever-pulsing with suspicion, should have alerted them to the fact that you can’t give half a class of five-year-olds a cookie and expect the other half to be happy eating paste.

Still, apparently, not every state receive application assistance. Learning Matters posted this re: the application funding fairness issues: “Pennsylvania and Delaware are competing to win a share of the 4.35 billion dollar federal education grant, Race to the Top. But one of them may have an advantage. In fact, of the 41 applications that were submitted to the Department of Education on January 19th, 25 were completed with help from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gave selected states as much as $250,000 to hire consultants. Whether the additional funding will produce a better application remains to be seen. When winners are announced in April, many will be curious to learn who got help and who did not.”

But before I go further, I must confess a minor entanglement. As soon as the call went out for RttT application scorers, I signed up. At the time, people thought it might be difficult to find readers who didn’t have an obvious conflict of interest. Since I have no organization to shill for, no ideology to defend, and no job to protect, I figured I had a shot even though I have a lousy résumé and had never done anything like that before.

Fortunately, I wasn’t chosen. And I couldn’t be happier. The government created a program that was so hard to apply for that a philanthropic organization had to pay for it, state legislatures had to call emergency sessions, and the applications are so big that a few weeks ago, I heard that one state’s submission contained an appendix—just an appendix, mind you—that was over 600 pages long. (Can that possibly be right? Or was it a headline I scanned off the front page of a tabloid at the supermarket checkout counter?) The mere thought of perusing a 600-page appendix was enough to convince me that had I been selected, I would have immediately declined in favor of being Mike Rowe’s stunt double on “Dirty Jobs”. So how bad does a program have to be for someone like me—who really is quite low on the education food chain, and really does need the money and the street cred—to end up being thrilled that he wasn’t hired?

With programs like RttT, where the numbers are big, the future is uncertain, and hindsight is 20/20, I always think about the “fly on the wall” thing. I would have given my appendix—or that of any other state!—to have sat in the back of the room while Mr. Duncan and his team brainstormed the revolution. Was there, I wonder, a lowly staffer who may have sheepishly raised his hand and shrewdly raised the notion that many states might apply? And then added (before getting fired) that since the process of applying was so challenging that those taking the trouble to do so might all present applications worthy of something more than merely a toss in the trash?

Mr. Hess has kindly pointed us to Mr. Rotherham who has kindly pointed out that the number of states to be rewarded does, indeed, pose quite a conundrum. Once again, with the class and clarity of Vin Scully calling a Dodger game, Mr. Rotherham has sized up the situation perfectly, leaving folks like the WSJ to add color commentary.

Mr. Hess quotes the WSJ as follows: “…as long as Race to the Top exists, Mr. Duncan ought to use it to reward only the very best reform states that want the money, perhaps only two or three in the first round.” And then goes on to add: “If the department is going to play the numbers game, then play it for keeps. Two or three states is the kind of number that would signal that the game really has changed, and would allow the department to pile serious dollars into a few dead-serious states (Florida? Colorado? Massachusetts?) that really might be ready to kick out the jams.”

Now, you don’t have to be a Wall Street wizard to know that Massachusetts can bust a rhyme better than Mississippi (though you might have to visit the Urban Dictionary to figure that out). As for the Rocky Mountain and Sunshine states, I think we all know they can lay down the Persian to some phat beats as bizz-ad as any-to-the-one.

So I find myself asking one of those uncomfortable questions about our government: If the intent of RttT was to reward only a few leading states, and our government already knew who those leading states were, why did DOE tease all the other kids into changing their laws and filling out those incredibly time-consuming applications when it already knew who it wanted to give the money, too?

Mr. Duncan just turned the educational lives of 40 states inside out. Governors enacted new laws practically by fiat. Neighboring school districts split over the decision to participate. Texas launched another salvo at Ft. Sumter. And, perhaps worst of all, several dozen people who are scoring applications are going to have to put down their latest Dan Brown novel until the cherry blossoms pop up along the Potomac.

Mr. Duncan now has to walk the line in order to keep his program on track amid unwelcome over-subscription. They say that if you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all. But that won’t work here. Like a roll call vote, everyone’s going to end up hearing the “yeas” and the “neas”. It’s hard to see this any other way than the zero sum game that it is. Back when we all thought few states would apply, it seemed like inaction would take care of the zeroing. And Mr. Duncan would come off more like Santa Claus than Scrooge.

So where are we now?

At one end of the spectrum, we have the free-market straightforwardness of the WSJ’s advice. On the other we have an exercise in kindergarten caring. (Sharing is caring, you know.) Almost all the little boys and girls turned in their projects, and even if Mommy and Daddy helped a little with the hot glue guns and the papier-mâché, the little tikes are thinking the Tooth Fairy’s gonna leave at least a little something under each and every one of their pillows.

But what if he doesn’t?

Don’t states already feel jerked around enough by the Feds? Everyone wants the money, of course, and they’re practically willing to do a table dance to get it. But that doesn’t mean it was wise for Mr. Duncan to take advantage of this in his pre-RttT calculations. DOE is yankin’ a lotta chains here. If my state changed its laws, pissed off its teachers, shut down its Department of Education to write the largest book report in history, and then didn’t get a dime, there’d be hell to pay.

One could think of this, of course, simply as collateral damage, necessary losses. Maybe that’s how Mr. Duncan sees it. And maybe that’s how we all need to see it in order to spark true progress in our schools. After all, not every state gets a military base or a highway to nowhere. But to many RttT applicants, it may seem as though the pork was chopped in advance and wrapped neatly in white butcher paper to be given out to a small number of favorite customers.

Then there’s the Hobson’s choice lurking in the Rotherham calculus. If Mr. Duncan is moved by the WSJ imperative, and if he sticks with his nature as a scorched-earth pragmatist, Massachusetts, Florida, and Colorado—or an equivalent trio—WILL get all the money. (Mr. Duncan will get a case a of lobsters, a case of oranges, and a case of Coors. And 37 states won’t get bupkis.)

If Mr. Duncan doesn’t take this small-number-of-winners-take-all approach, he really hasn’t created a Race to the Top at all, has he? More like a Meander to the Middle. So the choice of giving every kindergartener a Certificate of Participation isn’t really a choice at all. (Hence, the Hobsonian nature of the Hess-Rotherham calculus. Mr. Rotherham is right, as he almost always is, about the trade-off between giving a few states a lot and a lot of states a little. But if a lot of states get a little, the program doesn’t make a lot of sense.)

We do know one thing for sure: Mr. Duncan doesn’t play for participation points; he plays to win. And that means others need to lose. He is, fundamentally, an athlete at heart, and a pretty good one, too. The problem is that the “ed reform as competitive sport” metaphor doesn’t always garner the Gatorade shower at the end of the game.

Long before RttT was announced, we all knew which states were making the most progress, especially way up high around the rim. For Mr. Duncan, the funding plan must have seemed like a slam dunk:

1. Get lots of money to give away.
2. Make the application process very hard.
3. Designate a few “franchise” players.
4. Max out the salary cap.
5. Grab a (Coors) beer and watch your favorite teams win the championship.

This “feed the rabbits, starve the snails” strategy works perfectly—but only in “markets” where snails want to become rabbits and have the means to perfect their metamorphosis. Education is not one of those markets. As the song says, “Them that gots shall get. Them that nots shall lose. So the Bible says and it still is news.”

So God bless the state that’s got its own. Cuz most states ain’t gonna get any unless Mr. Duncan becomes a free-market apostate and a certified kindergarten teacher. Needless to say, if free-market apostasy and an affinity for five-year-olds are not in your repertoire, put all your money on the favorites to win, wait two minutes, and cash your tickets at the window.

Or don’t. Maybe your horses toss their rider at the starting gate. Maybe your ponies tucker out as head for the homestretch, and no amount of whip-cracking can push them over the finish line.

You see, Race to the Top only works if it works all the way through. A few states actually are a bit farther along. Feeding them generously, while starving out the weaklings, improves the fitness of the species. Or so goes the Theory of Educational Darwinism. Problem is, kids gotta learn in Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska, and Oregon, too. And since states like these are already behind, losing the Race to the Top leaves them way down low on the bottom.

After all these years of work at the federal level trying to secure equitable educational funding for all, the government itself will have tipped the scales in favor of the elite. Will this make other states want to be Massachusetts Miracles, too? Of course not. And that’s why competitive grants—which are perfect for encouraging private sector innovation (think SBIR, for example)—are less-than-fully moral when applied to public schools.

If Mr. Duncan sticks to his guns, a few states will get a lot of money. That’s how RttT was supposed to work in the first place. If Mr. Duncan caves in to some kind of kindergarten fairness, he wastes our money. If he takes a middle way, perhaps choosing 20 states to receive moderate funding, he betrays not only his program, his personality, and his ideals, but the entire notion of competitive funding for education. After all, if many states that apply win, what’s the difference between how a state gets Title I money and how a state gets its share of RttT? Only the time and tedium of what would then have been a pointless application—and state laws that wouldn’t have been worth changing in the first place.

If Mr. Duncan wins, the nation loses. Those who feel like it and can afford it will move to Massachusetts. The rest of us will, in fine Rumsfeldian tradition, go to school with the schools we have. Perhaps even more perplexing, however, is this: if Mr. Duncan loses, we all lose, too. The point of Race to the Top was to get states racing. Puny pro-rated pieces of the RttT pie won’t even buy roll bars for the rally cars.

However, Mr. Duncan has already secured an important victory. And this is where he wins even if everyone loses. Mr. Duncan loves charter schools. And he was smart enough to make changing charter laws a condition of application, not of receiving money—psych! He also likes tying teachers to test scores. And even though most teachers don’t generate test data, he wants every teacher he can get tied Snidely Whiplash fashion to the oncoming train of new evaluation instruments, forgetting of course that as soon as these folks realize they’re bound to student achievement data, Dudley Do-Right will come along and point out that moving to non-tested grades and non-tested courses is all Miss Fenwick needs to do to narrowly avert disaster once again.

As they often do, free-market education reforms have once again put us in an uncomfortable position. I know we love capitalism in this country. And I also know that it works pretty well most of the time. But so many social issues have these awkward moral inflections. For every kid who gets a great education in Massachusetts, a hundred don’t in Mississippi. Are we really down with that? After all, there’s hardly a more popular or more capitalistic institution in the United States than The National Football League, and even they have revenue sharing.

Our thoughtful editor asked if we were concerned about how the Race to the Top money will be awarded? I certainly am. But mostly, as I said above, I’m concerned that it will be awarded to states that won’t deliver on what they promise. How could any application scorer, or even DOE for that matter, know whether or not Michigan can build a state-of-the-art K-20 longitudinal data system? I’ve been in that business and let me tell you, it’s a crapshoot. Even the best development teams in the world don’t know how a project like this is going to turn out until they’re well into it. And since everything has to be specced out up front to impress the grant scorers, grant-based public funds like these aren’t often optimally applied. Even states with the best intentions aren’t likely to finish what they start, unless what they plan to do is very conservative—and if they’re conservative, they won’t win a grant. In this sense, RttT reminds me of the steroid-era of Major League Baseball. A decade from now, the state of Mark McGwire will finally admit to fudging things here and there in order to “stay healthy” and keep that “competitive advantage.” And, as so many folks on this forum have said, we might even see some new homerun records. But will they be real? And will they be replicable?

I also find it suspicious that the identities of the scorers will be kept secret. I don’t know if this makes a difference but it sure feels odd to me. Anonymity could encourage candor, I suppose. Or it could just encourage anonymity. If the public doesn’t know who is scoring what, and the scorers don’t know either, this makes it hard to compare notes after the fact. In a multi-rater situation, which I assume this would have to be, only DOE’s interests are served by hushing up the internal tallies. When stuff like this comes down, I always imagine that I can hear Justice Brandeis talking about sunlight and disinfectant.

Whatever a press release might say, such secrecy has nothing to do with improving the ability of scorers to focus on their work. If ya can’t focus, take some Adderral. I find it hard to believe that any representative of any state would bother any person scoring an application. And I can’t imagine any lobbyist going off half-cocked and sending those silly hotel fruit baskets all over the place—or opening up a bank account for someone in the Turks and Caicos. But maybe I’m just some naïve sap who doesn’t know how the big boys spend their billions. At the same time, I don’t see why, after all is spent and done, that the tax paying public shouldn’t be able to see all the applications, all the scores they received, and all salient comments scorers might have made regarding why they did the things they did—even if names are changed to protect the innocent.

Finally, our editor asked a broader question which could be taken in or out of the context of RttT: What is needed to ensure positive education reform?

Integrity. Simple as that.

If you visit enough schools in enough places, and you actually teach six or eight classes a day for a few years, you’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t; it’s hard work but it ain’t rocket science, that’s for sure. If you spend time with a few thousand teachers, talk to a couple hundred principals, maybe seventy-five curriculum directors and instructional coaches, and perhaps even the occasional superintendent—I actually mean listen, with your ears open, and their doors closed—you’ll figure out pretty quickly what’s going on, what isn’t, and why.

And if the spirit moves you, you can change it.

Right or wrong, good or bad, I don’t think things like RttT really get down to what needs to be done. But I guess I can wait a few years before the verdict’s finally in.

I do agree with Mr. Vander Ark that “entitlements don’t create excellence.” But I’m not sure what evidence we have in education that competitive grants do—or that RttT will. As with virtually all recent approaches to reform, we tend to pronounce them as stunning success stories even before they start. Such has been the case with RttT.

Mr. Vander Ark also sees the value in change wrought by the qualifying round: “…even before the money has been spent… it has worked better than anyone could have expected. Policy reforms over the last few months have already made this the most effective education grant program in history.” Again, there’s no disputing the widespread changes, but no one as far as I know has brought forth solid data to show that those changes produce better outcomes for kids, or that they strengthen our system as a whole. At best, the phrase “most effective education grant program in history” is premature.

Mr. Vander Ark is certainly correct to point out that the game here may have been more about exerting pressure for new policies than giving states the money they need to implement them. Still, the confidence so many people have in these changes (lifting charter caps and tying teachers to test scores) seems a tad misplaced to me. The simple truth is that it remains to be seen whether even these aspects of RttT will be successful. The mere existence of a law or policy doesn’t automatically make things better. Again, I’m with Sandy Kress here on the “wait and watch” idea.

Patient though I will be, I’m deeply troubled by all this premature extrapolation. I thought we were supposed to be moving into a bright new data-driven age where schools ran like efficient entrepreneurial entities. Many successful business people now work in education. (I’m one, albeit of modest business success.) As professionals, we tend to be “bottom line” or “show me the money” types. At the very least, we carry within us a healthy “I’m from Missouri” skepticism. We’re not given to spending large sums on whimsical notions. We don’t flip coins or consult our Ouija boards to make big decisions. Above all, we justify our actions with arguments based on tightly structured logic and unimpeachable evidence. This is not an easy thing we try to do, but we do it because the alternative is a prescription for failure. I’ve never had a business advisor who didn’t grill me within an inch of my life and force me to back up all my assumptions with solid data or at least well-known precedent.

But business people in education, who hold themselves and others to one standard in the board room, seem to apply a different set of standards in the classroom. All of a sudden, ideas don’t have to vetted quite so thoroughly before they’re funded. Nor do they have to produce quantifiable results in order to have been considered successful. Sometimes, apparently, they don’t even have to be implemented to be considered winners.

This may be appropriate; I’m not exactly sure. But at the very least, it’s an odd calculus.

But as soon as NCLB cranked up, ideas people could never get away with in a business meeting became powerful arguments for far-reaching reforms. Only in government could someone get $4.35 billion on a hunch. And only in the world of ed reform would a person who got this money be lauded as a visionary reformer—long before the money was even spent, let alone converted into meaningful and measurable outputs.

An entrepreneur with an idea like RttT wouldn’t last five minutes in front of a venture capitalist—or even his local banker—because nobody on either side of the deal could make it pencil. The assumptions are loose, the return is unknown, financial and operational controls are limited, vendors (states, in this case) are unproven. Worst of all, there’s no exit strategy. Yet in spite of all that—poof!—yesterday’s whiteboard brainstorm becomes tomorrow’s bankable solution for the future of American education.

They say that a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. Maybe, for many of us business types who’ve found our way into education, plugging a little hope into our spreadsheets catalyzes our optimism and reminds us why we gave up those fat salaries and those cushy corner offices. But I don’t think we can have it both ways. I don’t think we can preach the gospel of data driven-decision-making and then selectively ignore data—or more often a lack thereof—when it threatens our beliefs, our practices, our politics, or our self-interest.

When Mr. Obama kicks in his last pre-freeze pennies, Mr. Duncan will be the Six Billion Dollar Man of education reform. How would I want him to put all those nickels in the jukebox? It’s as easy as 1-2-3:

(1) One billion for innovation. Call it the Education X Prize if you really like competition. Pay big money to small groups of people who can prove that what they do really works.

(2) Two billion for codification. Give the winners of round one time and money to document and package their innovations for use by others.

(3) Three billion for replication. Scale proven programs and practices using these well-defined and well-packaged models.

How do we really race to the top? By starting at the bottom. Instead of working at the state level, we should work at the innovation level. And then scale up to the states.

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The more I sit through R2T symposia or read blog comments, the more mystified I become about some of the criticism. I’ve been at this since 1985 and have watched seven Secretaries of Education in five administrations look for the kind of leverage R2T provides. Yet none had but a tiny fraction of the discretionary funds Duncan has mustered to throw at his objectives, and the early effects are startling – states have already taken action to fix bad laws and policies before receiving a dime, and there’s more to come in Round Two. (Bill Bennett would have killed for that kind of reaction.)

Are the objectives themselves misguided? If so, then a lot of people who contribute to this blog have been off-base for years in arguing for standards, innovation, better teaching, fixing failing schools, and creating data systems that can describe student progress over time. I know some folks are hung up on R2T’s charter school provisions but the program doesn’t require any state to open a single charter school. It simply says that (a) you shouldn’t arbitrarily bar them and (b) if you do proceed, make sure you do it right, with good accountability, strong authorizers, and equitable funding.

Is it too early to ask for another $1.35 billion? Look, we can spend the next quarter-century evaluating the long-term impacts of every dollar spent in Rounds 1 and 2, and this gaggle will still be debating whether it worked. The categories are sufficiently broad, the state-level discretion sufficiently wide -- and the urgency to act so undeniable – that we should keep this train rolling down the tracks.

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With the president's proposal to make Race to the Top an annual competition, funded at $1+ billion, and to allow school districts to compete, I'm concerned.

I’m all for using carrots instead of sticks to spur reform, but we ought to get at least a hint of what we’re going to get from the billions invested in Race to the Top 1.0 before we make it permanent. And do we really want to cede this much control over education policy to the executive branch of federal government? A recent newspaper headline screamed: Duncan Carving Deep Mark on Policy. What will a new administration or a new secretary pursue? Will charter schools be out or vouchers in? Will national standards be scrapped or a national curriculum instituted? Will teacher unions be boosted or based? These are policy decisions that, if they’re to be dictated by Washington at all, should flow from specific legislative authorization that allows the public a voice, messy though that process is. The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Act, now overdue, rather than the 2011 budget bill, is the place to decide whether an annual Race to the Top competition is worthwhile and what reform policies it should impose on states and school districts

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There are good arguments for and against keeping the RttT judges secret. I've laid them out on eduwonk

Read and decide for yourself!

In a press conference call yesterday, Secretary Duncan made the following statement about Race to the Top and transparency:

Our new competitive grant programs like Race to the Top and the Investing in Innovation fund include greater transparency than ever before including publishing winning and losing applications, reviewer comments, and applicant’s presentations.

Yesterday, on his Eduwonk blog, Andy Rotherham weighed in on the brewing controversy over the Race to the Top (RTT) review process. He offers a thoughtful assessment of the pros and cons of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s decision to keep secret the identities of the judges in the $4.35 billion program until after winners are announced, and of Duncan’s decision to release minimal detail about how the reviewers were chosen or the guidance and training they have been given.

In a line of argument that brings to mind the infamous "it depends what the meaning of 'is' is" defense, Andy explains why Duncan’s penchant for secrecy doesn’t necessarily violate his pledge (and the president’s) to ensure an “unprecedented level of openness” when it comes to stimulus dollars. Andy explains, “‘transparent’ is not synonymous with contemporaneous. In other words, a process can be transparent while it is going on or it can be transparent after the fact.” It’ll be amusing to see whether Duncan ventures down this route.

The larger issue here, of course, is not merely whether Duncan should have announced the identity of the judges (though the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli has offered a terrific explanation of why he should, from the perspective of a Department of Education veteran). The larger question is how the department is proceeding on RTT. Let’s remember to keep that question in context. The administration has unprecedented discretion due to the $787 billion stimulus package, more than $100 billion of which is directed to education. Given the control over this kind of money, as well as the terrific intuitions that undergird RTT, it’s essential that the administration does everything possible to reassure observers that it is operating in a credible, non-political fashion. Receiving unprecedented sums implies an oligation to embrace unprecedented transparency. That includes reaching out to skeptics and moving with particular thoughtfulness when it comes to the process. In fact, for all the criticism that the Department of Education justly received under Bush for insularity and a lack of transparency, the names and affiliations of the growth model pilot peer reviewers and the differentiated accountability pilot peer reviewers were disclosed prior to the reviews taking place.

Yet, after President Obama’s assurances that “politics won’t come into play” in the RTT process, after Duncan’s claims about how he’d recruit “disinterested superstars” to judge RTT, and after comments from RTT chief Joanne Weiss on the “unprecedented level of transparency” of the process, the reality has been otherwise. Last summer, the 19(!) RTT priorities appeared pretty much out of nowhere—with the dictate that states would not be rewarded for successes in data systems or teacher quality alone, but would be required to check all 19 boxes in sprawling applications if they were to seek funds. The advisers for the RTT evaluation were named and secretly convened last fall. The 58 reviewers were selected from 1,500 applicants in a process that was never made clear. The department has never explained what constitutes a “conflict of interest” for potential reviewers. The department never announced that reviewers had been named or when or how they’d be trained. Indeed, it took Education Week’s intrepid Michele McNeil to finally leak that story, before Duncan responded (and not in an official department announcement, but in a blog post!).

In yesterday’s post, Rotherham alludes to the controversy over Obama’s back-to-school speech from September, and he’s right to make the point. As Andy notes, that was a needless and ridiculous controversy, but it was one that the administration invited by issuing a raft of curricular materials that reflected fawning Obama-mania and that were tone-deaf to possible concerns. When spending billions in borrowed public funds, openness and working to engage potential skeptics is the wisest course. The problem here is not just the secret judges—it’s the administration’s seeming belief that transparency means whatever it wants it to.

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For the first several years, the rap on NCLB was that it pinched too hard.

Then, all of a sudden, the rap was that it didn't pinch hard enough.

Throughout the whole period, folks like Monty Neill and I went after each other so often and in so many fora that I'm now convinced the readers would be bored to tears if I responded to his same old song with my same old song. So, I won't.

Recently, new folks have come along with a new line: NCLB is "loose" where it should be "tight" and "tight" where it should be "loose." I can't stop thinking of one "education miracle" district in particular where success was made possible, in part, by NCLB being loose where it's loose and tight where it's tight. Do you know which one I'm talking about?

Well - now comes along Ms. Browne-Dianis with the allegation that NCLB has caused a dramatic increase in dropouts. My first instinct was to write a little essay on what NCLB did and what it didn't do and how such a result couldn't have been caused by NCLB or any other federal policy. Then it occurred to me: why not look at the data to see if it was even true. And, lo and behold, it is not.

First, I looked at the most recent Digest of Education Statistics, Table 104, on p. 164, and the facts are pretty clear: the average freshman graduation rate went UP from 71.7% in 2000-2001 to 74.8% in 2008-2009. Here is the link for you to look at these numbers and the trends:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009020.pdf

Then I looked at the status dropout data from the National Center on Education Statistics. This shows the percentage of 16-24 year olds who are not enrolled in school and without a high school credential. That overall rate has gone down from 10.9% in 2000 to 8.7% in 2007.

But, far more important, for African American students, the rate has gone down from 13.1% in 2000 to 8.4% in 2007! And the rate for Hispanic students has gone down from 27.8% in 2000 to 21.4% in 2007.

Here is a link to that data:

http://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=16

These rates are still way too high, and we have much more to do, particularly at the secondary level, to be sure all our students graduate. But we are making progress. I wonder if President Obama will talk about the progress we've made as he discusses the state of the Union in his speech tonight.

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To "ensure postive education reform" the basic concepts under-girding NCLB and RTTT - testing and punishing - must be scrapped. NCLB has discouraged and dispirited most educators, narrowed curriculum, promoted teaching to low-level tests, rapidly escalated the numbers of schools declared failing without providing remotely the help they need, slowed the rate of improvement on NAEP tests. It has also failed to address the powerful inequities of race and class that LaRuth and David point to in their posts. In the process, the federal government has overreached.

RTTT extends the overreach and will intensify NCLB's damage by its demand to evaluate teachers based on the same test scores that President Obama declared inadequate. Its also will not help to promote privatized control over public resources (e.g., expanding charters and EMOs, without evidence that they improve schooling).

The federal government must stop contributing to the damage. This means, first, reducing the amount of mandated standardized testing to once each in elementary, middle and high school. That's enough for accountability; it suffices in virtually every other nation (with some successful countries testsing even less). It also must not foster more testing through such things as the use of 'growth' models that require testing in both fall and spring.

As the most useful assessment is integrated with curriculum and instruction, the federal government should support work in improving teacher assessment capabilities. This includes funding for professional learning and engaging in R&D on such things as creating libraries of high-quality performance assessment tasks that will be available to teachers.

Second, the feds must scrap AYP and the sanctions structure. There are various options that have been suggested as ways for the federal government to help states engage in useful progress monitoring. This includes setting rational rates of improvement expectations or using inspectorates to evaluate each school. Both are predicated on using multiple sources of evidence.

Assistance and interventions should be controlled by states and targeted to meet clearly identified needs and problems. As part of its grant application for Title I funds, each state should indicate how its approach will lead to improved learning outcomes, with a reasonable rate of expected progress, then each year produce evidence as to how well its efforts are working and what it will do to improve those results. The focus should be on Title I schools generally, but the most needy schools particularly.

Changing assessment and accountability is not everything, but it is essential if the federal law is to become a tool for genuine improvements in schools and student learning.

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From those who struggle in state capitols to secure basic fairness in our 50 state school funding systems, we can only say this about Race to the Top: when will Washington ever learn?

Title 1 funding is just too small, alone, to affect the fairness of the underlying state finance systems. The real money, over 90%, is the state and local revenue generated by school funding formulas. But except for a handful of states, these formulas are structurally regressive, and have been so for decades. That is, not only is the funding level insufficient to provide a high quality education, but the distribution of funding favors wealthier districts with low student poverty.

In other words, many states systematically shortchange low-wealth districts with high concentrations of poor students and students of color.

Secretary Duncan’s home state is prime offender. Illinois has one of the nation’s most regressive funding systems. Chicago gets $3,000 per pupil less than surrounding affluent suburbs. The gaps are even wider for smaller high poverty/minority districts right next door. Compared to wealthier districts in the metro region, Chicago pays teachers less, has fewer teachers with master’s degrees, offer fewer advanced classes, and so on. And when you factor in building and work conditions, school readiness at kindergarten, and other factors, Illinois literally has Chicago’s hands behind its back.

It’s just not possible to attract and retain qualified teachers, improve low performing schools, and sustain other structural reforms to advance equity when states chronically under-fund high poverty, high minority districts, especially in their own labor markets.

And we should not reward lawmakers in Illinois, Louisiana, Tennessee, New York and other states with more federal dollars unless they commit to serious improvements in the level and distribution of funding within their states, relative to concentrated student poverty.

It’s amazing that some are already declaring RTTT a success, before grants have been awarded. But getting states to lift charter caps is, at best, working on the margins. What would really help students and schools in high poverty, high minority districts is a “Race to Fair School Funding.” Problem is, given the longstanding, deep and bipartisan resistance to equity in our statehouses, no one would likely apply.

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For a relatively small pot of money, the Race to the Top draws a lot of wonky attention – praise and scorn alike. Part of the reason for this is that it seems like such a good idea. A fund designed to incentivize states and districts to improve, innovate, and replicate successes, who could complain? In other words, it has come to represent a golden opportunity for reform, one worth fighting over. Unfortunately, I agree with Diane and other critics that what we are getting (and what we are now getting more of with the recent funding increase) amounts to a squandered opportunity. Instead the innovation and change that we need to step the pushout crisis, stop the school to prison pipeline, and provide every student with an opportunity to learn, what RttT is offering is a stiffer dose of many of the “reforms” that got us into this mess in the first place. We’re getting more (and better?) high-stakes tests, more (and better?) use of those tests, and more of the same alternatives for schools deemed failing under those tests (charters, turnarounds, etc.) The “innovations” such as merit pay are mostly unproven (or counterproductive) pet policies. In a world with infinite resources, this would be a waste – in the world we live in, it’s a real disaster.

I’m not the first one to complain about the added weight that RttT gives to high-stakes testing, but I want to use it as an example here to point out where we are going wrong. As a candidate, Obama stated that he didn’t want students spending the school year filling in bubbles on multiple-choice tests. Obama spelled out how students might be encouraged to demonstrate those skills through assessments that require that students “use technology, conduct research, engage in scientific evaluation, solve problems, present and defend their ideas.” Sounds good.

But RttT seems to do just the opposite. Instead of deemphasizing the tests, it puts more weight on them by encouraging applicants to link tests to teacher, principal, and even teacher-training program evaluation. Moreover, it also encourages states and districts to pick out the “low performing” schools based on test scores and “fix” them. Whether intended or not, this set of policies is bound to place higher, not lower stakes on the tests. In so doing it will just exacerbate the policies that are suffocating our schools and our students – especially students of color.

In a report released last week by Advancement Project, “Test, Punish and Push Out,” (www.advancementproject.org), we examine the way in which high-stakes testing feeds the school-to-prison pipeline. The report examines the way that our punitive testing regime has intertwined with our punitive approach to school discipline to alienate and discourage both students and educators. Our research shows a clear link between the rise of testing, the rise of punishment, and falling graduation rates.

A brief example: Before NCLB and the rise of testing, the majority of the 100 largest school districts in the country saw rising graduation rates. Since the passage of NCLB and the rise of testing (between 2002 and 2006) 73 of districts have seen their graduation rates decline – often precipitously. Of those 100 districts, which serve forty percent of all students of color in the U.S., 67 districts failed to graduate two-thirds of their students. In other words, since the boom in high-stakes testing, many of the student most at risk of not graduating have been pushed out of school.

This is why RttT is such a missed opportunity. As the President acknowledges, we are facing a dropout crisis in our schools. More testing, more consequences, more of the same is not going to help – it’s likely to hurt. In its place, we could be doing a lot of things with that money. We could be incentivizing programs aimed at keeping students engaged in school, we could be devoting funds to counselors and professional development, we could be rewarding programs like restorative justice that have been shown to build trust between students and school, we could be rewarding schools that lower suspension rates and raise graduation rates. We could be encouraging anything that would make school a safer, saner, better place for every student to learn. When you put that side by side with what we have got with RttT, it’s not hard to see why so many of us are opposed to it.

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Entitlements don't create excellence. Race to the Top, the last 5% of the stimulus bill devoted to education, is appropriately structured as a competition to promote step-function improvement. And it obvious even before the money has been spent that it has worked better than anyone could have expected. Policy reforms over the last few months have already made this the most effective education grant program in history.

Rick is right, the judges will play a key role. And, yes, the political pressure will be intense. But Duncan has a great team leading this effort that has been scrupulous in their efforts to ensure fairness. I'm confident that they'll do the right thing (which will disappoint more than 30 phase 1 applicants).

The Secretary and his aides are about to hit the difficult part of the ride.

RttT is indeed a very promising set of goals, ideas, and tools. But the execution, both substantively and politically, gets very tricky now.

If, for example, many or most states get funding, even over several rounds, Race to the Top turns into Race to Send Money to Everyone (RtSMtE?). That would be a sad end to the story. What might we call that movie? Perhaps "RttT Morphs into Title I"! Or, perhaps, "The Return of Revenue (or Debt Proceeds) Sharing"!

If only a few states win, many members of Congress will get furious that their states and districts don't benefit. Many of the howls will be due to the old-fashined expectation that all get to share. Some will actually be based on reasonable arguments that winning states are no better, and maybe worse, than certain losing states.

This has been a concern of mine for some time. If, say, a state that has a beautifully written application but also a so-so track record of reform and relatively low NAEP scores beats out a state with a better reform and achievement track record, how can that be justified? I apologize for this movie jag of mine, but the title, "I Really Really Really Promise to Be Good This Time" won't get out of my head.

What if a winning state doesn't follow through at all or at least in certain ways on its pledges, will the feds really pull the plug on funding? How much non-compliance triggers the loss of funding? A little, a lot, some of this, some of that? What? I know the Department is "firm" on these issues today, but I've heard that before.

What if a state gets money and achieves no increase in student achievement on, say, the NAEP over the next several years? What about a state that does not get money but does get increases in NAEP?

Seriously, I like many of the strategies that are being promoted by RttT. But, as the opponents suggest, we're not altogether sure from research what mix of the favored strategies will yield the best gains in student achievement as opposed, say, to other less favored strategies.

I suspect the beauty of a grant program, if it has the right research and evaluation behind it, is that we can find out the answers to these questions.

I would, however, advise going slow in requiring specific strategies and initiatives until we have those answers.

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Let’s get back to fundamentals. The current school system ill serves the large majority of American students. President Obama has challenged key aspects of the status quo in education and called on states and school dis­tricts to “use data effectively to reward effective teachers, to support teachers who are struggling, and when necessary, to replace teachers who aren’t up to the job.”

If we want all students to achieve at high levels, it’s time to align this new national education goal with the rewards we offer educators, both positive and negative, and with a broad range of supports to help them succeed. That’s what “Race to the Top” was designed to do.

The ad­min­is­tra­tion has left it to the states and school dis­tricts across the nation to develop their own approaches to satisfying the four broad assurance areas. We’ll finally get the rigorous stand­ards and in­ter­na­tion­ally bench­marked assessments we deserve; we’ll build the data in­fra­struc­ture necessary to trace the academic progress of all students and link their growth to the teach­ers who taught them; and we’ll see broad experimentation on the best ways to create effective teach­ers and leaders as well as see different approaches for turning around our lowest performing schools which account for a dis­pro­por­tion­ate share of our student drop-outs.

The newly requested $1.35 billion that will be available to school dis­tricts as well as to states is especially welcome because districts committed to reform will not be penalized for the politically-motivated actions of their Gov­er­nors who refused to submit RTT applications.

The “deep-dive” funding strategy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foun­da­tion will both support sig­nif­i­cant experimentation along these lines and study the impact of the varied approaches. In roughly five years we will begin to see which strategies work best in what circumstances.

Should the federal funding streams supporting these initiatives slow or dry up, taxpayers at the state and local level will be able to decide whether they want to invest additional revenues in school reforms that work. My bet is that sig­nif­i­cant gains in student achieve­ment will win voter support and effective reforms will be sustained.

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Let's set aside for a moment debates regarding ther merits or the design of Race to the Top. There is, unfolding right now, a serious problem with how the Department of Education wants to handle the judging of the state applications.

Late last week, Education Week’s Michele McNeil reported that the Obama administration has secretly selected the reviewers for state grant applications to its $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) fund but has no intention of publicly revealing who these sixty judges are. Whether the Department delivered sixty “disinterested superstars,” as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan promised last September, is unclear.

Instead, apparently fearing that its hand-picked reviewers would be subjected to blandishments or threats from knee-capping state departments of education, the administration hopes to protect their fragile virtue by hiding them until after the RTT winners are announced in April.

So, let’s get this straight. When it comes to the crown jewel of its $110 billion in education stimulus spending and the foundation of its efforts to reshape American schooling, an administration rocked by public outcry against backroom deals wants to hide the judging table from the public?

The old saying goes: “people are policy.” In this case, that’s truer than ever. The reviewers are judging brand-new criteria recently cooked up by the Department of Education; employing a novel, convoluted 500-point rating system to judge 19 (!) competing “priorities”; and being asked to resolve seemingly contradictory dictates—such as RTT’s twin mandates that winners demonstrate buy-in from teacher unions and that they also present bold reform plans unlikely to earn such support.

There are lots of potential pitfalls. Even some key administration allies think that no more than four or five states should win funding in April. However, forty states and D.C. submitted RTT applications, and rumors have been circulating that the fix is in for this state or that. That means a lot of states are going to be disappointed and a lot of governors and state chiefs are going to be looking for grounds to carp. To reassure a public that thinks at least half of the stimulus spending has been wasted and has recoiled at inside deals like the late and unlamented “Cornhusker kickback,” as well as states that come up empty, you’d think Duncan would be at pains to make the evaluation process as transparent and credible as possible.

This is especially true because there are real concerns about who the judges might be. Wags have noted that the various restrictions, especially regarding conflicts of interest and the extensive required time commitment, may have made it difficult to attract the best and the brightest.

This is all especially troublesome because the state grant applications are sprawling, phone-book thick lists of promises that run to hundreds of pages and can be interpreted in myriad ways. Which components to weigh, which promises to believe, and how to parse hundreds of pages of edu-jargon will not be a simple or scientific task.

An administration that has stumbled over concerns about backroom deals and that it has used stimulus funds for political ends might be well-advised to mount more than a “trust us” defense. Maybe it’s time for the President to roll those C-SPAN cameras over to the Department of Education.

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The Race to the Top is a collection of ideas that have no basis in research or experience. Taken together, the Rttt will do little to improve American education and might even set it back.

First, there is no evidence that charters will be a positive force for school reform. There are 5,000 charter schools in the U.S., and most evaluations conclude that they are no better (on average) than regular public schools. On NAEP, where charters have been tested since 2003, charters have never outperformed regular public schools. And let's be clear: charters may be called "public," but they are a form of privatization. Will it help U.S. education to privatize a large number of public schools? Again, the evidence says no. What we now see in many cities is that charters skim the most able students from the poorest communities, excluding or minimizing the number of students they accept who are disabled or ELL or homeless, leaving the neighboring public schools with disproportionate numbers of the students who are most challenging to educate. In NYC, where charters are given public school space, they have set off "wars" between public and charter parents and destabilized communities.

There is also meager or no evidence that teachers should be judged by their students' test scores. Every test publisher says that tests should be used for the purpose for which they were intended. Numerous studies, including those of Jesse Rothstein, have shown that student scores are only weakly, if at all, related to teacher quality. (I review the evidence for this and charters in my new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, which comes out next month.) Judging teachers by student scores will only heighten the demand to teach to woefully inadequate tests, and lessen the time available for non-tested subjects.

Last but not least, the fundamental principle of American education is, or is supposed to be, equality of educational opportunity, not a "race to the top."

Sorry to say, I believe that this $5 billion, give or take a few million, will be squandered, and a decade from now, we will look back and wondered how our elites were captured by so many bad ideas.

Diane Ravitch

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To date, the administration has received much fanfare for the flurry of activity sparked by RTT. Observers have appropriately noted some of the beneficial legislation that RTT has prompted when it comes to charter schooling and data systems. Meanwhile, boosters have glowingly packaged this federal grant program as a transformational initiative, while setting a remarkably low bar for what the administration needs to do in order for the effort to be branded successful.

My good friend Andy Rotherham (author of the widely-read Eduwonk blog) has been perhaps the administration’s most effective foil/ally on this. Andy has repeatedly argued that the measure of the Obama administration’s seriousness on reform is its willingness to award RTT grants to only a small number of exemplary states (at least in the first round). Otherwise, Andy has noted, RTT turns into the kind of race “where everyone gets a medal at the end.” The caution has been widely echoed (even Education Secretary Arne Duncan is singing the tune) and is generally treated as a bracing warning to the Department of Education.

But that interpretation is blind to the broader calculus at play and fails to note how useful this marker is to the administration. For Duncan and his team, the terrific thing about Rotherham’s standard is that it is both elastic and absolutely doable. What constitutes an appropriately “small” or “select” number of states is ambiguous, giving the Department of Education’s spinmeisters much room to work. Moreover, a seemingly tough bar that focuses solely on the numbers game means that all Duncan has to do to claim success is limited to the number of grants awarded. That may pose some political challenges, but is a whole lot easier than spending this spring inviting questions about the substance and sincerity of the phonebook-thick state grant applications.

With that in mind, the Wall Street Journal recently offered Duncan some terrific advice, noting, “Race to the Top represents less that 1% of what the U.S. spends annually on K-12 schooling, so the heaviest reform work still has to get done at the state and local level. We sympathize with those, such as Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry, who say his state can do better without federal meddling. But as long as Race to the Top exists, Mr. Duncan ought to use it to reward only the very best reform states that want the money, perhaps only two or three in the first round.”

If the department is going to play the numbers game, then play it for keeps. Two or three states is the kind of number that would signal that the game really has changed, and would allow the department to pile serious dollars into a few dead-serious states (Florida? Colorado? Massachusetts?) that really might be ready to kick out the jams. Such a move would be a promising sign that the department is ready and willing to walk the talk. But if it doesn’t, we might all want to take a closer look at just what’s contained in those hulking grant applications.

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If federal funding to states and school districts is to be used as an “engine of reform” in our nation’s schools and in particular our nation’s poorest, underfunded, underserved school districts, why should these school districts have to face the inequities in the construction of how RTTT funds are handed out by the states? Making the federal grants to reform schools competitive means that only a chosen few will have an opportunity to improve their schools. Furthermore, improvement will be narrowly defined by the policies required to be eligible for the grants. The researched educational change and improvement is heavily weighted to local conditions and capacity, so simple prescriptions for improvement do not translate into transformation of the wildly unequal public and private human and fiscal resources (the effects of deep persistent poverty) available to public schools in our country. Unequal public and private human and fiscal resources is a major source of unequal educational outcomes. Competitive grants that end after 3, 4 or 5 years do nothing to permanently mitigate the massive variance in resources and as such do not in turn, impact desired long-term improvements. Rather carefully targeted assured funding streams with clear goals are much more effective. In addition as Title I and IDEA have clearly demonstrated assured formula driven funding develops a cadre of teachers and administrators who have specialized skills and knowledge in improving educational outcomes for low income students and that temporary grants cannot provide.

To be clear, my overall concern is not the premise for the program which is: To encourage states to experiment with reforms that ensure academic success for all children attending schools, districts and systems that have failed them; or to encourage more people with nontraditional backgrounds to go into the teaching profession; or to add rigorous data analysis to the educational system and to generally create a public conversation about what works and what does not.

In 1965 when the Federal government, under the leadership of President Johnson and the 89th Congress, made its foray into funding for public education, it was the intent that equity and equal opportunity were to be a basic tenet of that funding. Our country was in the middle of a social upheaval and equity as a basic principle for the schooling of all of our children (In spite of the Supreme Court Decision of 1954) was awry. The term disadvantaged was a marker to identify children and schools in need. Today we use the markers of low income, minority, black and brown.

The Federal government’s role in education should be to enable states to carry out their constitutional responsibility to ensure equal protection for all of its citizens; to assure the civil rights of its citizens; to ensure equal opportunity for access and to ensure parity and equity for its citizens as states educated citizens.

It is exactly in these ways where the RTTT process is flawed .Based only on the criteria to apply the competitive process leaves some states out and lets some states in. As such, many children in select states will be left out. The poorest children in the United States are in schools such as the heart of Appalachia (the Allegheny and Cumberland Plateau county of West Virginia and Kentucky) poor children in those states are denied opportunities that might be available as a result of criteria (West Virginia has the fifth highest poverty level in the country and 5% higher than the poorest urban community). And in Alabama large numbers of poor whites and minority students live in poverty (72% of poor childrens’ parents in that state have not earned a high school diploma).

Today, poverty is the elephant in the room for far too many of children in our schools. The flawed process for accessing RTTT funds will deny these children of poverty equal opportunity as the states set up their criteria for accessing the federal dollars.

We would urge President Obama‘s administration and Congress to revisit the process in the next generation of funding. Equity must be at the core of any federal funding.

Excellence is undermined if Equity is ignored.

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