My view is that the Race to the Top still has great potential, but if it's to have the influence we want, we need to scale back our cheer-leading and ramp up our expectations, skepticism, and oversight.

Overall, proposals were not as strong as we might have expected. Many states had remarkably weak plans.

While a few states made major changes to their education laws and policies, far more made minor adjustments or no adjustments at all.

And we have numerous reasons to wonder how well states and districts will implement the initiatives they have proposed (I go into these issues in detail in the report).

Three questions--two big, one huge--remain. First, how many more states will make meaningful changes to their laws in advance of the second and final filing deadline? Second, will the administration only fund worthy applications? Third (the huge one), once the money leaves Washington, how does it actually affect practices and, more importantly, student learning.

I don't think we should render judgment on RTT until these questions are answered.

This week’s sad news of the death of legendary teacher Jaime Escalante (whose story was brought to life via the film “Stand and Deliver”) only serves to re-emphasize my bottom line for evaluating Race to the Top. Will Race to the Top move the needle on the achievement gap? Will it push states to make different and better choices about how they deliver education to all students so we’re no longer facing today’s enormous achievement gap? To my mind, these are the metrics to watch.

The Education Trust keeps us honest on our progress to-date: “. . . gaps between student groups have not narrowed since 2007. Fewer than one-third (32 percent) of our nation’s fourth-graders performed at the Proficient level or above on the NAEP exam. Among low-income students, the proficiency rate is 17 percent. For Latino (16 percent) and African-American (15 percent) students, the results are equally disturbing.”

Escalante’s mantra was that "students will rise to the level of your expectations." President Obama and Secretary Duncan have clearly applied this model to states in their design of Race to the Top. They’re gambling that if they set the bar high and make the reward significant, states will do the hard work of education reform. So far so good. We’ve seen more states make significant policy changes – e.g., lifting charter caps, disassembling student data fire walls – in the past year than anyone could have dreamed of. (The PIE-Network just put out an excellent memo chronicling the changes Race to the Top has spurred across the country, called “The Race to Reform.”)

The true proof of Race to the Top’s success will be clear evidence of improving student achievement and the narrowing of achievement gaps. We won’t, of course, have these data for a few years. However, race to the Top’s emphasis on data and measurement ensures that we will have the necessary data to judge its effectiveness district-by-district and state-by-state. It’s a waiting game until then.

It’s my deepest hope that the resulting data will prove Obama and Duncan’s gamble was the right one. And if this is indeed the case, how could any state official, regardless of a booming economy, walk away from programs proven to be achievement-gap closers?

It is much too early to tell whether Race to the Top has promoted meaningful education reform throughout the United States. The true measure of success based on the four key pillars of RttT will take years.

But, today, we do know the applications of Tennessee and Delaware – the only two states that were awarded grants during the first round – included strong data, cooperation between their school districts and teachers’ unions and comprehensive plans to transform student achievement.

Clearly, states vying for a total of $3.4 billion in the second round of the competition can learn from the winning applications as they reapply in June. Those seeking grants in a third round slated for next year, with a $1.35 billion request in the president’s 2011 budget, could apply with an even greater focus on reform.

While it’s premature to guess about comprehensive reform, I believe the Race to the Top competition has school districts seriously taking on the challenge of reforming their schools – all their schools. To have 40 states submit Race to the Top applications was impressive, especially considering that some states repealed statutes that had stymied education reform to meet RttT eligibility requirements.

Some states may have been motivated by the idea of winning a grant to shore up ever-shrinking education budgets. But I’d rather believe that's not the motivation for most states. Most states want to equip their students with the valuable 21st-century skills they sorely need. That means more schools teaching science, technology, engineering and math. That means more schools in which students are engaged in real-world learning in classrooms that cater to their unique learning needs. We must seize this moment now and continue to push for true, long-term education reform – especially when budget coffers are full again.

At the very least, in a very short time, the Race to the Top competition elevated the discussion about the use of data, teacher evaluations, student achievement and turning around the lowest-performing schools. This elevated discussion supported with action will lead to improvements. And RttT has established a blueprint of sorts to that can help show us the way forward.

Finally, as I wrote in this space a few months back, the competition for education dollars represents a rare opportunity to depart from failed approaches that targeted education reform in fits and starts -- approaches that will institutionalize excellence instead of reform in a vacuum.

I still believe this.

I like many of the policies and practices encouraged by the USDOE as part of RTTT and believe that, IF VIGOROUSLY AND FAITHFULLY IMPLEMENTED, they may contribute to student gains. The problem is that Duncan is doling out all the money based on mere words in an application.

I know. I know. The winning states have had to show that they've gotten policies approved by key players and they've gotten "buy-in" from interested parties.

But, really. I've been in this business for 20 years and have seen every sort of initiative at the local, state, and federal levels, as have many of my fellow bloggers and readers of this blog. How many "promising" initiatives have had little, if any, positive effect because of watering down during the process, or loss of interest, or change of leadership, or the onset of yet another fad, or reduction in funds, or mal-administration, or compromised implementation?

We have some of the best policies on the books in Texas. Many are never administered, or, if they are, not particularly well. This is true everywhere. California has some of the best content standards and some of the worst student results. Dare I mention the victorious Tennessee, the state that promised to use the Sanders' model when it was first approved, and didn't?

I believe in conversions. Don't get me wrong. I'm hopeful Tennessee and the others that get the money succeed. But, I won't consider any of this meaningful reform until we see the execution through to the end AND a substantial gain in NAEP scores and/or other trustworthy evidence of student achievement gains.

There are plenty of states that have been laboring in the reform vineyard with far greater success than Tennessee. The bet's been made by judgment on words, promises, and "yes, ma'ams." Let's see what happens in the challenging days when, for example, the details of the teacher evaluation process are established , how the policies play out in practice, how many teachers are evaluated as subpar and what is done with them to improve or be removed, and how much lift there is in real teacher effectiveness.

The USDOE says it will claw back money if there is a failure to implement. I'll believe it when I see it in the cases of ineffectual implementation. I'd be more hopeful if half the money had been held back and given as rewards, first, for major steps taken in real implementation in the field and, second, for meaningful improvement in student achievement.

Bottom line: words on a page are not meaningful reform. Put the champagne back in the fridge.

‘Race to the Top’ meaningful? Serious education reform? To the contrary, the choice of Delaware and Tennessee to be the first demonstration of the Obama Administration’s commitment to breaking the status quo is not a choice at all, but an echo of the establishment’s stranglehold on our leadership in Washington today. That establishment goes far beyond the unions. It includes the chiefs, the principals groups, the administrators associations, school boards, the before school groups, the after schools, the publishers, et al -- all groups who have praised the recent policy prescriptions led by Arne Duncan. Why? Why would the Blob back real reform? Maybe because it’s not real reform.

Delaware and Tennessee scored huge points for having the buy-in of the education establishment. That same buy-in eluded Florida, whose education groups have never liked charters, choice or performance pay. The reviewers were guided by fixed numerical scoring that forced them to score Louisiana low because the teachers union there doesn’t like Governor Jindal’s plan to make a clear connection between student achievement and pay for teachers. The alternative teachers group (more than 7,000 teachers strong), however, loved the idea. But they apparently don’t count as a stakeholder.

Will the Volunteer State’s new bankroll repay charters $570 per student that the Memphis City Schools want to cut from every charter school to make up its deficit? Never mind that those charters already receive almost 30% fewer dollars. This is the same school district that rejected 18 charter applications out of hand last fall during their initial consideration. And this is a state that got one of the first two coveted race to the top awards?

Some people praise Tennessee for raising its cap on charters last year. In reality, the ‘D’ ranked law didn’t do much that was new at all, save for spin a tale about charter changes that have little impact on kids. Those changes simply expanded the number of students in low performing schools that COULD attend a school, if there were more charters. Alas, the responsibility for creating such charters still rests with the school districts, whose hostilities are infamous.

How about Delaware, which, while having an above average charter law, enforced a moratorium for 2 out of the last 3 years that was brought about by “concerned” legislators who wanted to understand better the impact that charters were having on conventional school districts. A few new schools were recently approved, but the regulatory oversight of the state education department is reportedly onerous and has little to do with quality outcomes.

We get that the state’s largest philanthropies and businesses believe that Vision 2015 is a path breaking model for educational change and that with lots of help from educational consultants, they put their best words on paper and offered the feds a blueprint for transforming teacher evaluations from status quo to some value added. But just how much will that evaluation component influence collective bargaining contracts? Will the unions really accept a world in which teachers who do better are paid more? We have reason to be skeptical that it can happen there any more than it’s been permitted to happen in Washington, DC, New York, or countless other locales.

And so, yes, ‘Race to the Top’ is a catchy slogan, and yes, it seemed to come with the best of ambitions. But like all good ideas that Washington embraces, it went from ambitious to technical when the regulatory and legal framework of the federal bureaucracy took over. And alas, that’s where the fate of not just R2TT but future ESEA proposals will be determined – not in the policy offices or hallways of the Secretary’s political appointees, but in the program offices where every ‘I’ and ‘T’ counts more than the kid behind them. And that’s exactly where the establishment wants it; safe and predictable and subject to rules and regulations that it can influence and depend on for its stability.

It’s been that way since the Department was created and hasn’t changed. The only hope for achievement focused people and groups is to reinvest time and energy into state reform efforts that don’t depend on Washington for approval and bypass the establishment, by letting money follow kids, allowing parents to make fundamental choices in where their kids attend school, and setting ambitious standards for all schools and employees against which they are held to account with clear sanctions for failure and rewards for success. That vision isn’t one that R2TT can accomplish, but it is one that the states – who once did – can accomplish again, if they are willing to make touch decisions and avoid the allure of new federal monies that follow style more than substance.

My compliments to Andy Smarick for his excellent analysis, “The Full Story on Race to the Top.” The forces of the status quo and inertia are indeed powerful within education. This leads Andy to question if “the federal government can bring about massive positive change through large competitive grant programs.” The answer to that question will remain unknown for many years, as RttT proposals are implemented in some, but not most, states.

But the converse question must also be asked: Can the federal government bring about massive positive change by continuing its past habit of spreading formula funds deeply and evenly across the country? Based on decades of evidence, the answer to that question is clearly “no.”

“Has Race to the Top already promoted meaningful education reform across the country?” This question was posted before it was announced that Delaware and Tennessee had received the first two RTT awards.

How can we pride ourselves on being data-driven and outcomes-oriented and then even pose such a question before the first dollar of Race to the Top funds has been spent or even allotted?

Education reform is not a vending machine, in which dollars are deposited and instantly yield “meaningful” results. Our education system didn’t develop in a day, and it won’t be reformed in a day. We are in this for the long haul, and we need to stop looking for immediate returns on initiatives that are going to take a while to produce transformational results.

That said, there are strong indications that Race to the Top is headed in the right direction. First, and perhaps most important, the number of states that have applied or expressed their intention to apply suggests that we have taken the first steps toward a national education policy. Having more than 15,000 education policies—one for each of the more than 15,000 public school districts in the country—may have made sense when our economy was made up of local economies, when people went to school and then to work close to home. Today our economy is national and international. Employers need to know that wherever they set up business, they will find a well-prepared workforce. And workers need to know that wherever they go, their education will qualify them for jobs on whose salaries they can support their families and communities. Accepting the necessity of a common national framework of shared goals and shared measures of success is a critical step toward national reform.

Second, although, as the AEI report points out, not every state has made as full a commitment to some of the components of reform as might have been desired, as the report also documents, almost all states have made some changes, some of them substantial. This is one of the advantages of grant competition initiatives: Although only a few states will win grants, many states will make changes to qualify for the competition, and thorough those changes, many of the program’s overall goals will be accomplished.

Viewing with alarm before a single result is in, before a single dollar has been spent or even committed, the AEI report rolls out a parade of imaginary horribles, things that could go wrong: “Perhaps a nontrivial number of states will not apply. Maybe a significant number of those that do apply will disregard or halfheartedly address the administration’s priorities. Potentially, states could give lip service to Race to the Top initiatives in their applications while having little intention to execute them down the road…Charter caps could resurface, data firewalls could be rebuilt, performance-pay plans could be defunded, and meek interventions for failing schools could return.” We are indebted to the report for its list of things to look out for.

I believe that Secretary Duncan has plotted a true course. I believe that it should be judged by its outcomes. And I believe that instead of allowing imaginary horribles to turn us back, we should follow the advice President Kennedy proffered in his first inaugural address: Let us begin.

RttT already produced more policy reform than any other grant program in history. The high bar maintained today will increase phase 2 results. I think the skeptics were proven wrong today.

The combination of presidents strong stand on teacher effectiveness backed up by $4b have already changed conventional wisdom on teacher evaluation--quite suddenly there is national consensus on data-drive evaluation.

Additionally, RttT reinforced adoption of Common Core, improved charter laws, improved data plans--all before a dime was spent.

It would be very premature to say the “results” from the Race to the Top funds were successful in enacting positive education reform. The states receiving the awards were just notified a short time ago. Education reform takes time to implement and it takes time to evaluate the results of the reform measures. There hasn’t been enough time to evaluate the success of any of the programs. I am not determining if the programs will eventually be effective, but there hasn’t been time to implement a program, let alone determine if the initiative has increased student achievement.

As we all get ready for the Final Four this weekend, a thought occurred to me: What if Duke, West Virginia, Butler, and Michigan State sent their JV teams instead? Would the competition be as keen? Would we regard the winner as praiseworthy? Would we think the tournament was even valid?

This strikes me as the perfect metaphor for RTTT.

RTTT was supposed to spur states to craft bold plans for reform. But as Andy Smarick points out, even the applications of the finalists were relatively weak. And with Tennessee and Delaware racking up tiny totals for timid reforms, I find myself wondering if the rest of the RTTT tournament is even worth playing out.

Mr. Smarick’s work on RTTT has been nothing short of spectacular. His report is a must-read, not only for today’s reformers, but for tomorrow’s as well, for it contains within it the lesson we must—apparently—relearn when it comes to the crafting of education policy and the funding of education initiatives: education is not a business, it is a cultural institution; it does not have competitive markets for change, nor are the players hungry for championships.

If you add to Mr. Smarick’s comprehensive analysis, the thoughts Frederick Hess has been sharing on his blog recently, I would give all the grant money to The American Enterprise Institute. Clearly, their work on RTTT has been superior to everyone else’s.

But first, a moment of candor. We all got this one wrong, didn’t we? Did any of us predict so many applicants? Did we predict the secretive scoring process? Did we predict with any real degree of accuracy who would make the Sweet 16? Would even a Volunteer alum have predicted Tennessee over Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Colorado? Did anyone see Delaware coming either?

Second, I’ll take a personal mea culpa for my prediction that states would turn in applications promising huge reforms they could never implement. As Mr. Smarick has revealed, exactly the opposite was true. Even the finalists’ applications were tepid. And in those rare cases where an interesting idea may have been floated, most states agreed only to long-delayed implementations, thus allowing themselves the luxury of being well into Round Two before they even have to begin. I thought states would go big and fail big. Instead they went small, and I believe they will fail small, too, because even a small success in what has already been hailed as “the most successful reform in the history of American education” is really just another way of failing to live up to the promise and potential of the program.

Big stakes, heady competition, and a “high bar” from the Secretary has ended Round 1 of RTTT not with a bang but a whimper. The only good news I can see is that by picking Tennessee and Delaware, the Secretary spent just a tad over 10% of the total funds he’ll eventually be working with ($6 billion, I think, once President Obama’s extra contribution kicks in). So this leaves lots more for Round 2. Unfortunately, as Mr. Smarick points out, now that everyone knows how low the bar is, there’s little incentive to risk proposing meaningful reforms next time out.

RTTT is the first test of Secretary Duncan’s theory of competitive grant funding. I would give it a C-minus at best. Competition was clearly lacking in these Round 1 efforts. And clearly the “high bar” was not so high as to require a Fosbury Flop. Perhaps this was really a limbo competition all along, and we just got our metaphors mixed. Regardless, today’s results do little to validate competitive grant programs, in general, and RTTT, in particular. The best we can do is wait for Round 2.

Why didn’t the competitive nature of RTTT inspire states to create more aggressive reform proposals? The economic situation could not have been more hospitable to risk taking. And with 41 applicants, the pool was much larger than expected. Clearly, the conditions couldn’t have been better.

Unfortunately, the theory of competitive grant funding in education is based on two false premises: that public education is a business and that markets exist to foster competition. As I noted above, and have noted many times before in this forum, public education is not a business, it’s a cultural institution—and a non-competitive one at that.

When it comes to academics, schools don’t compete against schools, districts don’t compete against districts, and states certainly don’t compete against other states. Unless you count high school quiz bowls, I don't think there's an ounce of institutional academic competition at any level of public education.

In order to have competition, you have to have two things: rewards worth risking for and people who love to play. RTTT certainly offered worthy rewards. But there’s no “love of the game” when it comes to education in any of our 50 states or the District of Columbia.

States do not like to “play” education. It sucks up way too much of their tax dollars and appears to give little back in return. Property tax-based funding systems have inherent inequities and conflicts of interest. Special kids need special programs. There are all these rules and regulations, and tests now, too. As with many things, states would prefer to be left alone when it comes to education. It’s strictly a private matter.

No state wants to engage in any form of direct competition with regard to how they educate their young citizens. They just don’t enjoy the game. If states enjoyed educating their kids, we wouldn’t need so much federal “inspiration” in these times of reform, and we certainly wouldn’t have needed the last 60 years of Supreme Court decisions.

I don’t mean to suggest that states don’t care about their kids, they do. But with poor funding mechanisms, poor infrastructure, little control over individual districts, and a complete disconnect between what teacher training institutions deliver and what schools really need, the states are ill-equipped for the task at hand.

Competition in education doesn’t make states jump higher or run faster, or at least not higher and faster enough to really make a difference. Again, there is no “love of the game”, no place from which to draw that crucial reserve of strength and courage that we see this time of year in college basketball’s finest teams. States love to play basketball. They love their championship teams, their “bigger than life” coaches, their star players. That’s why the NCAA tournament is such a phenomenon. The competition is keen and it brings out the best in everyone.

What does RTTT bring out? Forty-one sets of uninspiring lukewarm ideas and two states promising to take many years to implement modest reforms for around $700 million dollars.

One shining moment? I think not.

Some don’t like ‘Race to the Top’ (RTTT) because it won’t intensify damaging aspects of NCLB even more, while others (such as myself) don’t like it because it intensifies those wrong-headed approaches even beyond NCLB. The most obvious one is rating teachers based on student test scores, an idea rooted in market ideology and lacking any meaningful evidence it will improve student learning. It will however tie teachers ever closer to tests that Sec. Duncan agrees are inadequate. Two other key components of RTTT that lack evidence they will help:

- lifting the cap on charters. Except the largest national study finds charters on average about, well, average – except more of them are below average than above.

- the misbegotten ‘menu’ RTTT applicants must apply to schools with low test scores (school improvement grants include the same). Duncan tried these in Chicago, and evaluations from the conservative business group, the Chicago Civic Club, that concocted the Renaissance 2010 scheme and the Consortium on Chicago School Research, partly funded by Chicago Public Schools (at least it was), found the schemes were educational and social failures.

The mystery is why anyone believes this concoction of unproven or already-proven-failed patent medicines will lead to improved learning or higher-quality schools. Or why anyone then decides that, since it failed, one should do more of it (as the Chicago Civic Club hectored the city’s schools to do). That was Einstein’s definition of insanity.

Now we’ll get to see if these atrocious ideas will make their way into federal law. Fortunately, there are real countervailing pressures and alternative ideas as to what ESEA should be and do. See, for example, the recommendations of the Forum on Educational Accountability.

One more interesting fact: Of the two winners in the first round of RTTT, Tennessee had the lowest portion of its gross state product spent on schools, while Delaware was a rousing 4th from the bottom. How about a reform campaign to get states to spend enough on schools to provide a good education for every child?

Has Race to the Top already promoted meaningful reform? This is a trick question, with "already" being the tipoff. RTTT is structured to produce more action in Round 2 than in Round 1 - -and by selecting just two states for awards today, Arne Duncan took a big step toward getting the intended long-term payoff. A lot of governors and state supes will now scrutinize the Delaware and Tennessee apps and write new legislation doing more of what they did.

We take note that both winners expanded access to charter schools this year. And also note that states taking action on charter issues this year did pretty well in the overall rankings, while clustered at the bottom are 4 of the 11 states without charter laws (although Kentucky managed a 9th-place showing). So even though charter schools accounted for just 32 of 500 points, they seemed to be a pretty good lever.

Of course, there's a claque still insisting that whatever activity has been or will be generated, none of the RTTT criteria amount to "meaningful reform" anyway. To me, the four pillars of Race to the Top (standards, teaching, turnarounds, and data) are about as encompassing and fundamental as could be hoped. They don't solve every problem of curriculum and funding and discipline -- but they sure do provide wise leaders in the statehouse and the classroom the tools they need to boost achievement.