Education writer RiShawn Biddle submitted the following in response to this week's question:

Whether or not states must seek stakeholder support or pursue bold reform in order to win Race to the Top funding – a topic I’ve covered in the May issue of The American Spectator – is sort of beside the point. Why? Because the real issue is whether Race to the Top can actually spur bold long-term reform in its current guise.

Certainly, Race to the Top, along with our woeful economic climate and five decades of education reform efforts, is finally spurring states to actually consider some important overhauls of their public schools. It is also a clever gambit, essentially getting states to take on unfunded mandates (albeit efforts they should have undertaken in the first place) through the guise of a competition. But Race to the Top will not effectively spur long-lasting reform so long as states are the only ones who can participate in the competition. So President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan should take these three important steps:

· Allow school districts, charter school networks and grassroots organizations to compete in future rounds: Obama and Duncan have already said they want to allow districts to apply for Race to the Top funding. They should. Expanding the pool of Race to the Top applicants to include school districts—including reform-minded systems such as New York City and Los Angeles Unified—would force school districts to seriously change their own practices and restructure their relationships with teachers unions. Allowing districts, along with charter school organizations such as KIPP, grassroots activists and even PTAs, would also place pressure on states participating in the competition to embrace bolder reforms.

· Increase the rewards for embracing reform: Temporary funding isn’t enough. School districts must also gain additional rewards from participating and winning funding. One possible reward: Allowing winning districts to become enterprise zones of sorts, freeing them from state laws governing collective bargaining agreements and teacher dismissals.

· Parental engagement must factor into the equation: The fact that California’s Parent Trigger law, along with the expansion of charter schools, is the only tool for parental engagement emerging from Race to the Top is shameful. For the next round, the Department of Education should require applicants to enact policies and laws that place parents in their proper place as consumers and kings in education decision-making.

Until these three steps are taken, Race to the Top will only be successful in nudging states along the path to the school reforms they need to undertake. Given that five high school students drop out every two minutes – and have likely dropped out by the time readers have finished reading my comment – nudges are hardly enough.

…as to suggest that our discussion of Race to the Top may be racing down the rabbit hole. As more of us weigh in, we seem to be arguing over matters of fact while repeating the same tired language in the hope that it might come to mean something new and more exciting.

Stakeholder buy-in in RTTT scoring is a matter of fact, not speculation. As Mr. Bailey points out, it’s right in the rubric. Item (A)(1)(ii) “Securing LEA commitment” is worth a healthy chunk of change. Buy-in also appears to be worth additional points indirectly in sections C, D, and E where states with low stakeholder buy-in will surely take a hit on several items.

Against the quotidian backdrop of scoring rubrics, Mr. Schnur provides us with a helpful recap of encouraging statements from both the Secretary and the President. This gives us two other ideas to consider: the Secretary’s assurance that “only the best and boldest” plans will be rewarded and the President’s insistence that we focus on what is in the best interests of children. But what does the Secretary mean by the word “bold”? And what does the President think is in the best interests of children?

RTTT criteria represent a broad spectrum of reform ideas. In most cases, the jury is still out as to which are in the best interests of children. When it comes to helping kids, only a few RTTT rubric items—mostly the stuff about improving teachers and principals—have been shown to consistently improve student achievement. Overall, the package of reforms encouraged by RTTT is essentially identical to the package we have been selling for the past 20 years, a package that has produced some positive results, some negative results, and hardly any conclusive results at all. I believe that everyone in our nation wants to do what’s best for kids. But I would argue that our approach to reform has been so narrow that we have yet to figure out what that is. RTTT, no matter how successful, is unlikely to settle the matter.

From the perspectives of some politicians, policy experts, union reps, and advocacy groups, some state proposals may appear to have aspects of boldness. But this sense of the term is being defined relative to agendas, ideologies, norms, and traditions—not to the present form of education or the new form it must take in the future. I am certainly this forum’s least experienced policy analyst, but I’ve spent thousand of hours teaching in thousands of classrooms across our country. My definition of bold is based on dozens of horrifying and heart-breaking experiences with schooling in America. From my vantage point at the front of the classroom, RTTT doesn’t have a bit of boldness to it, and the applications of our two first-round winners may as well have been written by Caspar Milquetoast. I’m not saying I’m right about this. I’m saying that school looks very different depending on where you’re looking from. As such, the notion of boldness in RTTT tells us more about reformers than it does about reforms.

I wish you had all been with me some time ago as I addressed a group of graduating pre-service teachers. At one point, I posed the question, “How good do you want to be as a teacher?” The #1 answer: “I want to be the best teacher in the room.” (I resisted pointing out that they would likely be the only teacher in the room.) So I tried again: “How about aspiring to be the best teacher in your school or district or state?” Nope. They didn’t want to be compared or judged, they said. They just wanted to be “good” by their own personal standards—standards they defined mostly in terms of caring about kids, listening to their problems, and cheering them up when they weren’t feeling good. So finally, I asked, “Why don’t you want to be good by society’s standards or by the standards of your profession—or even by the standards set by your favorite teachers when you were in school?” Silence and furrowed brows.

So I cut to the chase: “Ladies and gentleman, if you have no aspirational goals for your teaching, how do you expect your students to have aspirational goals for their learning? Each of you has said this evening that you are driven to teach by your caring for children and your dreams of their future success in the world. You clearly have aspirations for your students, and if you have children of your own I’m sure you have aspirations for them as well. Yet you deny the necessity of having aspirations for yourselves. In my experience, this contradiction will severely compromise your effectiveness and rob you of the respect and recognition you deserve.” Continued silence, more furrowed brows, many looks of utter confusion. Nobody got it. No one understood the two most basic things about education: (1) We teach who we are; and (2) Kids end up a lot like the people who care for them.

As a teacher that night, I failed. But as a perpetual student of schooling, I learned—as I have so many times before—that the problems we have in education are far more severe than any of us can imagine.

I’ve conducted this exercise with pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, principals, district administrators, superintendents, school board members, and parents. Everyone in education wants kids to strive for the highest heights. At the same time, many adults feel comfortable, if not entitled, to languish indefinitely wherever they happen to find themselves. Education doesn’t work well under these conditions. We’re a highly imitative and socially-motivated species. But it’s not just “monkey see, monkey do”, it’s “monkey see, monkey do better.” Part of the American dream is wanting our kids to achieve more than we did; aspiration is the apple pie of education. But such sustenance is rare in the culture of our schools—as is the recognition of its primacy.

Sorry for the soapbox and the sentiment here, but it goes to my point about the meaning of the word “bold” in the context of education reform. I’ve seen nothing in RTTT or any state application that is bold enough to affect issues like the one I encountered this week—or any of the dozens of other similar issues I’ve encountered in my career. While we’re discussing the relative value of boldness versus buy-in, we’re forgetting that, at it’s best, RTTT will change a few laws that will create a few new structures that may or may not encourage a few positive changes over a few years in a few states.

As many smart people have said, RTTT may be the most important education reform in US history, but to the guy with the chalk in his hands, it is not synonymous within any sense of the word “bold.”

Should states trade boldness for buy-in? Personally, I say never. True reform is lead by true reformers. And true reformers remain true to their reforms. They do not trade their ideas for buy-in because they know that anyone who isn’t bought in by the ideas themselves isn’t committed enough to the reform process to make it work. Bribery has never been a sound strategy for lasting social change.

However, my disdain for compromise is irrelevant. Buy-in is clearly important in RTTT because it’s written right into the rubric. When we look at the range separating the high and low scores of the 16 Round One finalists, we see that the average point spread between competitors is small when expressed as a percentage of the total points possible. As Round Two applicants strive to be more like Round One winners, applications will exhibit greater similarity. Therefore, it’s reasonable to expect razor thin margins between winners and losers. A few points here or there matters now more than ever, and buy-in accounts for more than just a few points. The Secretary can send all the signals he wants. But he can’t change the scorecard.

So here we are with the most important education reform in history and we’re not sure if buy-in is better than boldness because our leaders press for boldness while giving points for buy-in at the same time. Mr. Bailey calls this “mixed signals”. He’s right. But I would be bolder in my assessment: I think it’s a reflection of the schizophrenic denial I saw in class the other night. In half of our collective psyche, we know education requires radical improvement. In the other half, we’re afraid to do what it takes to make that happen. This is understandable. Big change is big scary. But big solutions begin with big aspirations, not with mixed messages and hedged bets.

We say we want our states to commit to bold reforms. But anything bold enough to solve significant problems would likely prove too bold for broad-based buy-in. As a result, any state striving for true boldness would likely lose the precious buy-in points it would need to win an award. The irony here strikes me as a metaphor of reform itself.

A bold reform would be one that sent almost every one of the newly-certified teachers I worked with back for more training—and some serious soul searching. Raise your hand, schools of ed, if you’re down for that. A bold reform would be one that would significantly re-orient the institution that graduated them. Raise your hand state legislators if that’s something you could support heading into the mid-term election. A bold reform would be one that would support each of our new teachers in the first year or two of their careers with the most rigorous training they have ever experienced in their lives, send them packing if they weren’t up to it, and reward them handsomely if they did, not through some 35-point evaluation instrument and an opaque value-added statistical model, but through a set of institutional values consistent with the kind of success we want our students to achieve. Raise your hand unions if you would support something like this knowing you'd lose a significant number of early career teachers to the process.

America needs to go to school, teach for a week or two, and then engage itself in a frank conversation with the disconnected halves of its brain about how things really are in education today. Our problems are far bolder than our reforms would indicate. What’s a bold reform? TFA is a bold reform. KIPP is a bold reform. ICEF is a bold reform. The Harlem Children’s Zone is an extraordinarily bold reform. We can disagree endlessly about whether these ventures produce the results we want. But we can’t deny their audacity. Have we seen anything in an RTTT application that comes even close to ideas like these?

I appreciate our Secretary’s words about boldness. I like it when our President tells us to focus first on the interests of children and only thereafter on securing stakeholder support. But RTTT itself lacks boldness in its smorgasbord of categories, and buy-in is the most significant single item in its scoring. We can have it both ways, but we can never reform education with such confusion and compromise.

It won't surprise anyone who reads me to know I think Eliza's question is a no-brainer: it's those plans that are bold about rethinking systems and schooling that deserve to win. Of course, course not all bold plans are smart plans. There is such a thing as overreaching-- bold shouldn't be taken to mean helter-skelter or serve as a license for hubris.

There's a danger in being bold for it's own sake. I think we've got a system that needs to be fundamentally rethought, but that's a project that ought to proceed in stages, and with humility. I worry that too many would-be reformers are suffering from "fix the world in one pass" syndrome. Ed reformers frequently have trouble with the notion that unwinding a century's worth of accumulated policies needs to be a staged process. The first task is to uproot anachronistic policies and structures to create room for smart new solutions to take root. (Think of the first decade of welfare reform in the 1980s). Only after a couple years in which we've had an opportunity to feel our way ought we be getting as prescriptive about desirable state policy as is the current fashion when it comes to reforming teacher policy.

Second, message matters. If the Secretary is going to celebrate buy-in, that's the message that many are going to take away, whether it was his intention or not. Secretary Duncan has tried to correct for his early overly enthusiastic remarks about buy-in, but the Department has suffered substantial headaches due to missteps on that score. This has implications for Duncan in light of the unconditional love he's been showing Harkin's $23 new billion. That threatens to compromise Duncan's claims to be a tough-minded reformer. He could fix this by insisting that any such aid be linked to measures that promote reform (per the The New Teacher Project) or, at a minimum, that boost transparency regarding outlays and cost-effectiveness. That might entail insisting that participating states get a clean accounting of their teacher pension and health care systems, for instance.

If schools are to Rebuild Community than their boldness must rest on the community of the school itself. RTTT is built around a false and community-unfriendly metaphor--a race. Races have only one winner, no matter how fast we run. What we need is neither a return to the past nor schooling built around mirroring bad business or irrelevant sporting practices. We need communities designed around mutual respect not mutual suspicion. Young people need to keep company with strong, smart, powerful, interesting adults who they might possibly respect and wish to emulate, not reforms that undercut and undermine such respect. Reforms that grow out of viewing teachers--singly and collectively--as untrustworthy will--as Seymour Sarason and Theodore Sizer reminded us over and over-- lead us to another false reform. Seeing those closest to the educational process as precisely the people that boldness must overcome, not as collaborators that require "compromising" with , is a recipe for the another faile fad. Strong, smart, powerful and interesting citizens prepared to tackle the complexities and uncertainties of democracy requires a different kind of boldness.

The means behidnd RTTT are in conflict with trulu bold ends--both in their devotion to test scores as a synonym for achievement and in their view of schools as competitor business enterprises. Obama said he was not for reform that is done TO teachers, but reform done WITH them.

Why is our abysmal international standing in terms of inequitable outcomes of such acute interest only when it comes to schools, not incomes, social class mobility, health care, and on and on? Why is Geoffrey Canada's community development not seen as the center of his reform and emulated elsewhere rather than as a business model for reform?

Resistance, rather than burn out, is the most human of responses to being treated like a broken appliance. It's the last resort for those abused.. And this is as true for parents and teachers as for kids--who have long honed their skills at resistance because we haven't engaged them.

I know that with the patience that democrats must have when it comes to human change, schools can produce miracles, a child at a time. Charles Murray is wrong about that. And I've done it and seen it hundreds of times. By placing our trust in willing and able parents, teachers and young people--by reforms that put the power closer to the action. Our schools were meant to represent its citizenry. Let's "compriise" with them.

Deborah Meier

Unions and bold reform should not be mutually exclusive. And we can’t single out unions without including school boards, administrators, and a change-resistant public.

But it’s not really about all of them, either. They are institutions. At the end of the day, education reform is about a vision that places our students at the center and has the “institution” adjusting to their individual needs to learn; not making them adjust to the needs of the institution.

In their 2009 book, “Turning Learning Right Side Up,” the late systems-thinking scholar Russell Ackoff and education innovator Daniel Greenberg actually blame conventional schooling for creating a resistance to change and fear of mistakes. They explain that conventional schools punish mistakes through grading, and those perceptions that mistakes are bad carry over to the workplace. “We can only learn experientially from our mistakes, by indentifying and correcting them,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, as we contemplate what “bold reform” means, it’s important to note – as Ackoff has also pointed out – great change does not happen all of a sudden. There is no “bold switch” that we can just flip to achieve the change we all want to see. Bold change is part of a process that keeps leveraging on itself. It’s creating feedback loops that take the things we do well right now and improving on them. It’s also taking a hard look at the things that are not working and having the will to try to do something else.

This week’s question is certainly a timely one. On Wednesday night, with three hours left on the clock for the 2010 session deadline, the Connecticut General Assembly enacted an omnibus education reform bill seeking to make the state more competitive for Race to the Top after a 25th place Round 1 finish. And to borrow from the 5-point typology in Andy Rotherham’s post this week, Connecticut’s bill falls short of scoring a 1: “stakeholder buy-in and boldness” or a 2: “boldness but not buy-in. Rather Connecticut’s bill is a solid 3—“buy in and weaker reforms.”

And during the floor debate, this question of stakeholder support vs. bold reforms came up explicitly—indeed Secretary Duncan’s recent Wall Street Journal quote that bold reforms needed to trump consensus was repeated multiple times by a handful of Senators complaining that the final version of the bill had been watered down from what had come out of the Education Committee earlier in the process. For example, the final bill requires that student achievement growth be incorporated into teacher and principal evaluations statewide and links each teacher and school leader back to the institution that trained them, but strips references to “teacher effectiveness” and does not attach any consequences to performance ratings.

On one hand, getting stuck in the consensus frame is disappointing—ConnCAN has been working since last July on this campaign, when Race to the Top first hit the street, and we pushed hard for the reforms that we felt would make the most dramatic impact on student achievement, and on our chances of winning Race to the Top. But even in their scaled back form, the reforms that did pass into law in Connecticut are substantial, and are a historic move forward for the state’s children that wouldn’t have been imaginable just a few years ago. This rapid progress is thanks to the significant federal air cover provided by the RTTT competition, and the work of hundreds and hundreds of advocates partnering with a select group of legislators with real fire in the belly for reform (many of them members of the General Assembly’s Black and Puerto Rican caucus).

And notwithstanding the aspirations of reformers for bold reform in the name of what’s right for children, it’s important to note that stakeholder consensus is generally the dominant paradigm in many state legislatures. It’s also worth remembering that as much as all of us have been focused on state legislative change as the arena of competition for Race to the Top, the application process puts the Executive Branch firmly in the drivers seat. Not surprisingly, then, states with strong executive leadership--states where Governors took the lead in convening special legislative sessions ahead of the Round 1 deadline--have been heavily represented among the top scoring tier for Round 1.

But many, many states don’t have the kind of executive leadership that’s needed to quite the consensus model cold turkey—and reformers in these states shouldn’t just sit on their hands in the meantime. And so Race to the Top’s greatest long term, game-changing impact may well be in states where reform has to occur against the odds, where entrenched interest groups have insisted on the consensus model for virtually all substantive education policymaking for decades.

The upshot of all this is that there’s reason to be optimistic in states which right now can only make it to level 3 on Andy’s scale, i.e. achieving stakeholder consensus around a weaker set of reforms. Andy is absolutely right that in Round 2 of Race the Top the Feds must continue to set a high bar, and make awards only to those states that have truly accomplished strong reforms (whether or not they have achieved consensus along the way). But to leave it at that would ignore one of the greatest opportunities that RTTT is creating moving forward. And this is for the Federal government to play an ongoing role in encouraging and incenting those states which fell short of the mark in Rounds 1 and 2, but which nevertheless did push the limits of their existing consensus-based policy making frameworks. These are the states whose children are most in need of sustained systemic reform (CT has the largest achievement gap in the nation), and the Feds have a unique opportunity to support these reforms in partnership with the state-based advocacy groups and courageous state elected officials who have been pushing the envelope of the prevailing consensus in their states.

Much now rides on the implementation question, and if the Feds can ensure that they continue to use funding and the bully pulpit to incent further policy change in the states, even middle of the road reform bills like the one that just passed in Connecticut have the potential to be the foundation for truly sweeping systemic change in the coming years.

"Bold" is best used to describe fonts and coffee; "change" fits oil and babies. Ask any red-blooded man on the street what "bold" and "change" mean in the context of public education - if you're really brave, ask what "bold change" is - and you're likely to get a blank stare.

And for good reason. The two words oscillate between meaning nothing and everything (though as usage increases, it always approaches the former). Despite their ambiguity, as of 9:42pm EST on Wednesday, "bold" appears in our debate 64 times and "change" 27. I won't add to either total.

Jon Schnur has assured those of us who think union buy-in has played - and will play - a significant role in Race to the Top that we are wrong and admonished that our conclusions are “dangerous.” He insists that we've 'misinterpreted' the first-round results, that we've fallen prey to a host of analytical fallacies, and that we "apparently have not read the first round scoring" of the applications.

Schnur continues by lecturing us about the "data" - in reality, a bunch of applications divided up on a 500-point rubric and added together with four-function math that Schnur masquerades as a distant cousin of multivariate calculus. Secretary Duncan agrees that critics have "misread [the administration's] intent" by simply pointing out that states generating the most points, including on that specific section on "buy-in" cited by Andy Smarick, stand the best chance at winning RTTT funds.

A clear message to Mr. Schnur and Secretary Duncan: The intellectual dishonesty stops here.

The simple truth is that union buy-in matters both directly and indirectly. Buy-in mattered to those who lost and won points on the metric in Round 1. Buy-in mattered to the the Alabama Education Association, who created this television ad declaring "charter schools don't work," "Washington is telling us how to run our schools" and that the federal government is "threatening to deny Alabama the funds our kids need to be successful" if they don't go along with reform.

Buy-in also mattered to states like Indiana that won't bother submitting an application for Round 2. Who knew that when Tony Bennett took "Because of You" to #1 in 1951, an eponymous Governor would be able to sing the same song to the annual meeting of the Indiana State Teachers Association 60 years later to explain the state's sluggish progress on education reform?

And, of course, buy-in mattered to state officials in New York, California and other large, diverse states who, upon hitting that section of the application, groaned, gassed up their cars and frantically purchased audiobooks for ~10,000 miles of road-time (they also wished for the first time in their lives that they lived in Delaware).

We know - because we're honest practitioners of common sense and can run different statistical scenarios with 3-figure numbers - that union buy-in is not the only factor for a successful Race to the Top application. It is possible that an exemplary application will emerge in Round 2 despite weak union/LEA buy-in relative to Round 1 winners (I think we'll see a few of those), and it's certain that weak plans will fall short despite a thumbs-up from stakeholders. We saw it in Round 1 and we'll see it in Round 2.

Hopefully every state adheres to the succinct vision of Tom Vander Ark: that states "include consistently high standards, extended learning time, money that follows kids to the best learning option, and performance-based employment." May Colorado pass Senate Bill 10-191, their evaluation and tenure reform legislation mentioned by Jonah Edelman; may New York State's Assembly further today's Senate passage of a significantly higher charter school cap; and may Florida's next governor have a spine.

Education reform is a long, difficult process, and we've got a lot of people left to convince - including some right here in this debate.

Some need to be convinced that alternatives to garden-variety public schools are viable options for taxpayers, education employees and students. If you haven't read Professor Ravitch's book, grab a copy. As she hops over to the Stern School to hear about how the business community frequently - as opposed to "seldom," as she states - ties pay and bonuses to performance, you can read her book and Stuart Buck's definitive analysis in his 5-post, 5-day "Ravitch is Wrong Week."

Some must consider that employment issues - and specifically teacher layoffs - might be the result of fiscally unsustainable, organizationally-unsound hiring and management. David G. Sciarra reminds us that "pink slips are going to hundreds of thousands of teachers and other school staff," and recommends that Race to the Top funds should "help address" the situation. Translation: let's not advance reform, but continue to throw money at our mistakes (including any outrageous public pension liabilities that result).

And some could stand to admit that a little bit of freedom has, in many demonstrable, well-documented cases, achieved amazing results. Lisa Guisbond and her co-author, FairTest's Monty Neill, decry everything about Race to the Top: "In fact, based on the evidence, the ideas behind RTTT are reckless, not bold, and definitely not worth imposing on our schoolchildren." Reform efforts, however proven, can fail, and we shouldn't jettison promising reforms because of that possibility. "So when unions stand in the way" of reform, they aren't "performing a great service to the vast majority of our schoolchildren and to the future of education," as Guisbond and Neill state so confidently. They're keeping ineffective teachers in the classroom, including in schools that need quality instruction the most; they're enforcing certification rules that keep the most talented students and accomplished professionals from becoming teachers, filling our schools with hordes of staff who can't crack the mean on the GRE (which means they can't perform basic algebra/geometry, reading comprehension or English composition tasks despite a college education); they're placing professional comfort and stability ahead of kids. If the results at BASIS Tucson (illustrated in the film Two Million Minutes: The 21st Century Solution) and in Albany, NY's Brighter Choice schools are "snake oil," then put me down for a hogshead.

When it comes to Race to the Top, we're nearing the end of the beginning. But in the grand scheme of education reform as it relates to organized labor in education, we've barely heard the starting gun.

Sunday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan used a commentary in the Denver Post (entitled "Education Status Quo is Unacceptable") to demolish last month's conventional wisdom that consensus is more important than courage in President Obama's Race to the Top competition.

In Sunday's commentary, Duncan corrects those who "have misread our intent in designing Race to the Top, believing that watered down reforms with broad-based buy-in is the best strategy."

Duncan says that "nothing could be further from the truth. Only the best and boldest plans will win. Above all, we will reward the political will, leadership and courage to make the best choices for students."

That clear statement on behalf of children and young people shouldn't surprise those who have been reviewing statements from Duncan, listening to President Obama, or carefully reading the oft-mischaracterized scores from the first round of the Race to the Top competition. However, it may surprise those listening to false interpretations now circulating about first round results: that states can only win Race to the Top funding by watering down bold reform agendas in the pursuit of buy-in.

At an historic moment that former U.S. Secretary of Education Dick Riley calls a "once-in-three-generation opportunity" in education, state leaders who heed last month's conventional wisdom will place children in their states and hundreds of millions of dollars for their schools at needless risk.

As state educational leaders enter this fateful week and month (when many states enact laws, promulgate regulations, and finalize education reform plans leading up to the June 1st deadline for the second round of Race to the Top), I hope their own conscience leads them to make decisions that are right for children even when they are hard or unpopular.

But for those seeking evidence about the implications of their reform plans for federal funding, it may be helpful to understand the fallacy of common misinterpretations of first-round results.
And it may be helpful to understand why President Obama's convictions, Secretary Duncan's statements, and the actual score analysis from Round 1 applications depicts far greater opportunity and federal funding for courage, children, and closing achievement gaps than for consensus.

Three recent misconceptions on first-round Race to the Top results and corresponding pieces of advice:

First, some observers make unfounded claims that gaining "stakeholder buy-in" and "100 percent sign-on” is the best approach and the only way to successfully win Race to the Top funds – that consensus is more important than effective reforms. This view has been propagated by reporters, columnists, and other commentators who apparently have not read the first round scoring of Race to the Top applications or carefully reviewed statements from President Obama or Secretary Duncan.

Second, others have taken the exact opposite approach, arguing that "bold education reform" initiatives that assail - rather than involve - key stakeholders are what's needed to be successful on the ground. These advocates worry that such "boldness" will disqualify states from Race to the Top funding because they won't maximize stakeholder buy-in and secure universal district and union sign-on. Their recommendation is that "bold" states drop out of the Race to the Top competition instead of water down their reforms or listen to those with other perspectives.

The third misperception is the seemingly innocuous - although false and risky - belief that only states with bold reform AND consensus (e.g., 100 percent sign-on) will win Race to the Top funding. They advocate pushing reform as far as you can go without jeopardizing consensus.

In yesterday's commentary and other statements, Secretary Duncan suggests a different direction from these paths of least resistance. Yes, a better path appropriately includes a respectful and inclusive dialogue with stakeholders to try and reach agreement on the courageous steps to do what's right for children. In many cases, that dialogue can identify important - and even surprising - areas of agreement. But if conflict remains even after dialogue, children should beat consensus every time.

Moreover, a careful review of scores from first round Race to the Top application conclusively debunks the myths that watered-down reform plans can win or that universal buy-in is a necessary ingredient for a state to get a winning overall score.

Indeed, many of the lowest-scoring states had consensus around weak reforms. And with ten more states potentially winning in the next round, it is significant that many of the "top 10" states remaining in the competition lacked buy-in from most districts or unions.

The data shows simply no correlation between overall scores and levels of stakeholder sign-ons. While some of the highest-scoring and lowest-scoring applications had substantial buy-in, other high-scoring and low-scoring applications had much less.

But states earning the highest scores had bold reform plans and concrete ways to ensure those plans could actually happen. And the surest way to lock in confidence that a plan will happen - and to drive statewide impact - appears to include statewide legislation, regulation, or other statewide policy.

For example, Tennessee’s strong legislation on teacher quality and closing achievement gaps - enacted in a special session of the legislature called by Governor Phil Bredeson just before the first deadline - helped that state win 85 percent of the Round 1 Race to the Top funding. Other state legislatures are rightly considering whether to follow Governor Bredesen's example and leadership to achieve statewide impact.

Importantly, President Obama has been unshakable in his public and private statements that we must boldly pursue education policies that are in the best interests of children. In December 2008, I sat in the Presidential Transition offices with then President-elect Obama, Arne Duncan, and senior advisors in the Presidential Transition at a key meeting leading up to the Race to the Top and other Obama Administration education policies.

Obama stopped the conversation half-way through the meeting and said, "I'd like three core principles to drive this conversation and policymaking." His three principles were:

First, focus the entire policy debate on what is in the best interests of children. He wanted all of us to listen to different views about - and then determine policy based on - what is best for children.

Second, figure out how to enlist adult and organizational support for what is best for children. The President-elect made clear that the role for his political strategists was to secure political support for the right policy goals rather than to craft policy in order to support political goals.

Third, don't poke people or organizations in the eye if there is disagreement. Respect others, avoid finger-pointing, and focus on substantive areas of agreement and disagreement.

So what should state educational leaders do with this evidence from President Obama, Secretary Duncan, and Race to the Top's peer reviewers as the starting gun sounds in this final month before the June 1 deadline?

Here are my recommendations.

Heed the evidence - and listen to other perspectives - on what's best for children. Have a respectful dialogue and debate that drives agreement where possible and avoids finger-pointing or playing the blame game.

In the end, set policies that put children first. To make strong reform happen statewide, your very best bet may be bold action by state legislatures, state boards of education, or other vehicles for statewide agreement and policy.

Importantly, state policymaking that drives bold reform can be entirely consistent with protecting collective bargaining rights that allow districts and unions to negotiate local implementation of a state law. Indeed, this blend of state policy and local negotiation provides a natural incentive for districts and unions to sign on to Race to the Top in order to secure resources that will help fund implementation of these state policies. When a state passes legislation or regulation, there is less reason for a local community to decline signing on - since that would mean foregoing funding for policies they will implement anyway. Furthermore, passing statewide legislation or regulation will ensure statewide impact even in those districts that don't sign on.

Finally, careful state applications and MOUs should make clear that the primary Race to the Top funding for districts will only begin --and continue -- flowing to systems that implement all of the Race to the Top reforms.

This historic "once-in-three-generation" opportunity that Secretary Riley described gives states the chance to write the next great chapter of the Civil Rights Movement and finally ensure that every child has a chance at success regardless of zip code or family income or background. Enlarging the opportunity for that great hope lies in the hands of state policymakers over the next 30 days.

If states are to fulfill our long-standing promise of equality and preserve our long-term economic competitiveness (not to win substantial Race to the Top funding for their schools in difficult economic times), their leaders must rise to the challenge our President has so clearly laid before them: choose kids first.

Part of the confusion surrounding this issue is the mixed signals communicated by the scoring criteria and review process.

Securing LEA commitment (A1 ii) is the single highest point value among all the selection criteria: 45 points out of 500 or 9% of the total. Put in context, that one selection criteria is worth nearly as much as the point value for the entire Data Systems section (47 points) or Turning Around Low Performing Schools (50 points). And as Education Week noted, local district participation is involved in nearly 70 point (14%). It is easy to understand why some states would see this as a signal that they should increase their LEA participation even if it means lowering the bar on some of the reforms.

Reviewer comments also suggest a bias toward greater participation. For example, Florida received lower scores in this area then Delaware and Tennessee. One reviewer noted, “the fact that only 8% union leaders (5 LEAs) in the participating LEAs endorsed the state’s application raises a concern about barriers that may need to be addressed…” The problem is that the bolder the reform, the less likely the local unions are to endorse it, which means lower points granted by the reviewers. Take the New Jersey teachers union which rejected RttT in general much less New Jersey's specific application. Indiana recently announced that they would not pursue a Phase II grant precisely because the union would not participate.

States competing in Phase II face tension between heeding the Secretary’s call for bold proposals and the scoring results and reviewer comments which suggest that maximizing LEA participation and union buy-in is key to winning. Stakeholder buy-in should matter, but sometimes reform begins with a small group of LEAs that generate the momentum for broader statewide buy-in over time.

I think Andy hit the nail on the head, “If there is a problem here it’s that there was some randomness to the scoring and more unevenness than there should be between scorers in a competition like this. The two states that won deserved to; but other states with bold plans were denied in some inexplicable ways.” These challenges have been highlighted by TNTP and EPI, among others, and should be used to help refine the scoring system for future rounds.

I commend the Secretary for challenging states to be bold with their proposals. And I still believe in Race to the Top as a means to drive systemic reform, particularly in important areas like pay for performance and more charter-friendly policies. But the scoring criteria and review process need to be modified to ensure that bolder reforms win out.

Is RTT really bold reform? Or – as Yeats phrased it – merely passionate intensity. Take charters. Charles Murray notes in today’s New York Times, that when it comes to test scores, research does not support the notion that choice programs yield better test results. Murray still favors charters for the choice they offer parents, but choice goes both ways. We need to look not only at the number of parents anxious to get their children into these schools, but the number who leave as well.

For example, in a generally terrific Times article earlier this week, Trip Gabriel highlights two of New York’s miracle charters: Williamsburg Collegiate and Harlem Village. Both sound stellar, but what Gabriel probably did not realize is that 39% of Collegiate’s students left the school between 5th and 8th grade. Those figures are based on the size of the 2006-2009 ELA state testing cohort, and are typical for that school. At Harlem Village the reduction was 32%. And as students left these schools, the percent of proficient students (and I suspect the percent of intrinsically motivated students) soared. If stellar charters are mostly polishing stars, then it is hard to see what they will do for students who do not shine as brightly at first glance.

Charters are one of the two “bold” and controversial reforms in RTT. The other is the evaluation of teachers by test scores. But what, exactly, is so bold about evaluating teachers by formulas eerily akin to the formulas used on Wall Street that almost brought the country down? There is plenty of agreement that these formulas are somewhat limited in what they can do, and teachers are absolutely right to ask states to proceed sensibly and with caution before putting all their evaluation marbles in this “bold” reform.

But let’s think about truly bold reform. Murray points out that many parents want schools that offer “a [strong] curriculum, taught with structure and discipline. …” Many public school teachers want that too, and it is of eternal frustration to us that the bureaucracies that rule us have pushed these matters aside even as these same bureaucracies advertise them as selling points for charters. These reforms won’t solve everything because there are enormous obstacles to success that schools cannot control. But reforms that encourage a strong curriculum (as opposed to micromanaged pedagogy) and also push bureaucracies to assist schools in creating cultures that sustain focused learning – these reforms are worth a race.

Ultimately, union buy-in is the appropriate check on enthusiasts who are running after RTT’s money and miraculous reforms. In fact, who knows? Maybe union buy-in (which is really teacher voice) will turn out to be RTT’s boldest reform of all.

Race to the Top provides powerful incentives for states to adopt reform strategies that are both bold and sensible. Buy-in from union leaders and other key stakeholders is ideal for any major education reform effort, but the first priority has to be doing right by the kids. We need work for consensus, but not to the extent that we sacrifice what’s critical in our reforms. Otherwise we risk reducing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to truly transform public education into a fruitless exercise in incrementalism.

It is worth noting that while Delaware and Tennessee enjoyed significant support from stakeholders in their applications, their policy proposals were grounded in established practices that have been in place long enough to win over skeptics. Tennessee, for example, was one of the first states to begin using value-added assessment for teachers. Teachers in Tennessee know from experience that robust evaluation systems help them better support student needs. Some teachers who lack that experience may resist the idea of being evaluated in this way, but Race to the Top is designed to encourage states to overcome that resistance so that the benefits of this strategy can reach more students across the country. Broad-based support for these initiatives will grow over time as the reforms take root and their benefits become evident in improved schools and increased student achievement.

In school communities across the nation, principals, teachers, parents, and community leaders have joined district and state officials in embracing this opportunity for change, even as some labor leaders and advocates continue to resist it. These dedicated individuals recognize that we can’t afford to sit by and wait for minds to change while another generation falls through the cracks. We must take bold and immediate steps to improve our public schools today.

Ideally, there would be bold reform legislation with union agreement, as happened in Tennessee, where Stand for Children worked closely with Governor Bredesen on the “First to the Top” bill and in Delaware.

Where agreement isn’t possible, we should disagree as agreeably as possible (because there’s so much else for us to work on together) and move ahead with legislation that benefits students and treats educators as the skilled, high level professionals they are.

Take Colorado, a state where Stand for Children has an affiliate, where the legislature is currently considering Senate Bill 10-191, which ties principal evaluations to student achievement and teacher effectiveness, ties teacher evaluations in part to student achievement, ends forced teacher placement (which is bad for students and teachers), and ties promotion to and maintenance of non-probationary (tenure) status to effectiveness.

This legislation will give a vital boost to Colorado students, a quarter of whom aren’t finishing high school on time and specifically to Denver students, 50% of whom aren’t graduating high school on time, and it has the support of a broad coalition of more than twenty leading education, advocacy, community, civic, and business groups and is backed by thousands of individual Coloradans.

Securing the Colorado Education Association’s support should not hold up a policy that benefits students in key ways. And let’s be clear. While the point of the legislation is to improve student outcomes by getting the best teachers and principals educating Colorado students, and the legislation should happen for that reason alone, SB 10-191 will strengthen Colorado’s Round 2 Race to the Top application in the two areas, Great Teachers and Leaders and Implementation where it received low scores in Round 1.

That said, whether Colorado’s Round 2 application is successful or not, long after RTT has come and gone, the benefits of SB 10-191 will continue for students. And long after RTT has come and gone, Stand for Children and other community-based groups in Colorado will be holding the state of Colorado and school districts across Colorado accountable for implementing SB 10-191 effectively and providing the job embedded professional development, pay, and promotion opportunities that teachers and principals need to do their best work.

What President Obama noted in a recent commencement address in reference to the partisanship in Washington is equally true of education politics right now: there’s far too much overheated rhetoric and polarization regarding bills like SB 10-191. If you read SB 10-191 closely and analyze it from the perspective of what’s right for students and what’s fair for teachers and principals, it’s eminently reasonable and sensible and a far cry from the distorted and exaggerated characterizations being put out by the Colorado Education Association.

The bottom line is no one who has children’s best interests in mind supports policies that keep bad teachers and principals in our schools and, at the same time, only narrow minded ideologues would deny that ensuring all students have effective teachers and principals requires far more than better evaluations and increased consequences for consistently poor performance.

As the deadline for RTT Phase II approaches, pink slips are going to hundreds of thousands of teachers and other school staff, and districts are budgeting for growing class sizes and the elimination of essential K-12 education programs next year. And programs and services needed to raise achievement for at-risk students, such as summer and after school programs, preschool and full day-kindergarten, are being shuttered in districts across the country.

Those who work on school funding in the states know all too well how the "Great Recession" has caused revenues to dramatically plummet. And states are hitting their public schools unusually hard. While ARRA funds softened the blow this school year, that money is running out.

The projected staff layoffs across the country are staggering. Next year, 15,000 teachers in New York, 17,000 in Illinois, 22,000 and possibly more in California will be gone. Schools are struggling to reduce costs, some by going to four-day weeks or a shorter year.

Senator Harkin has introduced an emergency bill calling for $23 billion to save education jobs, but prospects of passage are doubtful.

Secretary Duncan has called the crisis an "education catastrophe." He's right. So it's hard to fathom how the Education Department (ED) can forge ahead with the RTT competition in the face of this near 50 state financial meltdown. Putting aside the expert debate about the educational value of the RTT reforms, ED needs to rethink the RTT strategy in light of the extraordinary fiscal stress in state education budgets. As Richard Rothstein so aptly put it, "the substitution of competition for uniform funding has no place in this time of state fiscal crisis."

State school finance systems are in a shambles as states rush to cut -- and cut -- deeper into education budgets. It's time for Secretary Duncan to, at the very least, ask the states whether it makes more sense to use the next round of RTT funds to help address this "catastrophe." If the states agree, then ED should allocate the RTT funding to help states and school districts stop, or at least slow, the downward spiral.

If RTT goes forward as a competition, millions of children will lose because federal funds will go to a relatively small number of states. If California loses, its six million students lose. If New York, Texas and Florida lose, more than 10 million students lose.

Are students in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts any less worthy of our support than those in Delaware and Tennessee? There's still time to call it off.

The question of buy-in and boldness in Round 1 is now completely confused because of contradictory statements, misinformed speculation that was not grounded in the actual data from RTT, and the nature of the competition itself.

The fact is that there is no real causal connection between stakeholder buy-in and Race to the Top success in the Round 1 scores. Day of spin when the winners were announced that was calibrated to the politics of the moment confused matters and was then echoed by commentators and bloggers who had not analyzed the actual scoring. Besides, because this is a 500-point competition and the states that were competitive in Round 1 were bunched above 400 points observers can point to just about any category and say it was the cause of success or failure.

If there is a problem here it’s that there was some randomness to the scoring and more unevenness than there should be between scorers in a competition like this. The two states that won deserved to; but other states with bold plans were denied in some inexplicable ways.

So assuming there is more coherence to the scoring in Round II, here’s a way to think about the buy-in v. boldness question. In rank order:

1. Buy-in and boldness

2. Boldness but not buy-in

3. Buy-in and weaker reforms

4. Buy-in and no real reform

5. No real reform and no buy-in

Given the amounts of funding in play, let’s hope the winners are not found below that second tier because while 4 and 5 are probably not an issue, tier 3 is the one to watch.

Is it better to strive for bold reforms or greater buy-in? This classic question is relevant to RTTT and virtually all political change in our country. Yet successful reformers never ask it because it’s the wrong question. The right question is, “To what reform will we dedicate our efforts?” Those who aren’t similarly dedicated should be left alone to pursue their own vision. Commitment, not compromise, is the path to success.

It’s true that change is hard. It’s also true that most people oppose change when they are the focus of it. This invites a pitched battle. Trading boldness for buy-in is the olive branch.

But successful reformers don’t fight pitched battles or hand out olive branches. I don’t see Geoffrey Canada talking much about teachers’ unions. I see him working on the next ten blocks of the Harlem Children’s Zone. I also see other people from other cities asking, “How can we do that?”

Change is viral. It works best when we focus our efforts on those who are most susceptible. Within every large group, there is a small group pre-disposed to change. Everett Rogers taught us this in 1962 when he gave us his famous “innovation adoption curve.” Give or take a point or two, ten to fifteen percent of the people in a given population are eager to adopt any innovation that makes sense to them. Another thirty percent or so are eager to follow right behind once these “early adopters” have demonstrated an innovation’s value.

The problem we have with education reform is that some reformers are just as intransigent as the people they seek to reform. It’s always “Us against Them.” If you’re one of the many people in favor of changing education, it should just be “Us.” Let “Them” continue to do as they have always done—and watch their world slip away one Rogers Adoption Curve segment at a time. This doesn’t mean banishing critical exchange within the group. But it does mean giving up on the tactic of forcing widespread structural changes on the working lives of huge numbers of people, most of whom are either too scared, too angry, or just too tired to support our ideals.

Most people think teachers’ unions stifle reform. They don’t. But by repeating that message over and over we give them the power to do so. Very few teachers that I have worked with support the positions held by their union leaders. Some of these teachers are eager for change; some, but not nearly all. At the same time, union leaders insist that their members be included in the reform process. But this only makes sense if union members have reform ideas to contribute. While I’m certain the gamut of reform choices has yet to be run, I don’t recall a single reform invented or initiated by a teachers’ union. While I do believe that teachers know best, I have not found that teachers do best when it comes to proposing bold reforms. There seems to be quite a gap here between action and aspiration. This is why stakeholder buy-in is irrelevant. Many groups with stakes in important situations never seek to exercise their dominion. Rather than fight them, we should respect their right to sit out the process, and move on with our own.

Stakeholder buy-in is not required for change. With a small change-ready group already waiting, we can begin there with little friction. Ten percent of any group is plenty to work with. But in education, we don’t seem to think so. We say everyone must play our way. This means that either no one plays, because our desire for all-out control energizes and justifies the opposition, or that everyone plays poorly, because the change is spread across such large groups that we end up spending most of our resources on people who have no intention of supporting what we propose. This is one reason why large-scale federal, state, and even district-wide reforms so often fail. Even changes implemented across an entire school are often unsuccessful for the same reason. And why shouldn’t they be? Rogers tells us that initially 90% of any group will resist any innovation. Who wants to play against those odds? Apparently many education reformers do.

The fact that unions oppose many reforms is what some folks call “TBU”, or “true but useless” information. Teachers’ unions oppose reforms that they feel threaten their members. But this is useless information in light of the fact that many union members feel differently. What I notice working in schools is that throughout this country, a significant number of teachers and principals are chomping at the bit for change—bold change. Not coincidentally, these are almost always the top performers (and those who aspire to become top performers), so they’re the perfect people to work with. Why don’t we focus our efforts here?

Does this idea scale to RTTT-like proportions? I think it might. Why not look for the largest states with the boldest plans and the lowest stakeholder buy-in? For example, say we had a Florida-sized state eligible for a large award with comprehensive teacher quality reforms but only about ten percent of districts willing to participate. That’s exactly what we want, isn’t it? By concentrating an extraordinary amount of resources in support of serious change among a small group already predisposed to that change, we have the greatest chance of success—and the greatest likelihood of spreading the reform virus to the next group up the line once that success has been documented. Why fight the natural adoption curve when following it would be so much easier?

Rogers’ idea also implies another important lesson for RTTT-watchers: Any innovation that more than ten to fifteen percent of people want to adopt isn’t an innovation. Innovation is never adopted all at once to this degree. So any state that sells high stakeholder buy-in is really selling stakeholder “lie-in”. When most districts in a state sign on to "bold reforms", many aren’t really “bought in”; they’re “compromised in” via modest ideas and false promises of compliance. There is no truly bold reform that even half a state would sign on for. This means that if stakeholder buy-in is significant, reforms will be weak and much of the money RTTT doles out will be spent on people who are unlikely to use it for its intended purpose.

The fact that the “boldness v. buy-in” issue has popped up at this time suggests to me that the more we learn about RTTT, the more we will come to see its weaknesses. Despite our hope that boldness is the key to success, and despite Secretary Duncan's courageous commitment today to "only the best and boldest", we have no control over the applications themselves, many of which may be far less bold than we would like precisely because of efforts to secure stakeholder buy-in. In addition, as recent analysis of the use of education-focused ARRA funds has shown, RTTT dollars may not go directly to reform programs. Propping up the status quo is clearly not the purpose of RTTT, but it is still unclear what controls we have in place for ensuring that this doesn’t happen.

It is worth noting, I think, that Round One applications were surprisingly tepid, even those of the two winners. Despite all the cheerleading and continual insistence that a “high bar” exists for the competitive process, most analyses have shown that the bar is lower than many of us had hoped—and with some points awarded specifically based on buy-in, it’s obvious that buy-in matters to some degree. If optimizing for boldness was the original intent of the program, we probably wouldn’t have created such a complex scoring system to begin with. Not only does the number of RTTT categories encourage the trading of boldness for buy-in, it waters down what winning states can do with the funds they receive.

When RTTT first came out, my initial reaction was that it was far too broad. While each area it requires states to address is important, what states have to do to address them is exactly what we’re talking about now—compromise boldness for buy-in. In hindsight, a more focused approach would probably have avoided many of the program's potential weaknesses. For example, we all seem to believe these days that the quality of teachers is the most important factor in student success (even the unions believe this). Why couldn’t RTTT have focused on this category alone? This would have concentrated resources in the most important area and allowed states to do some truly bold things without having to secure so much buy-in.

RTTT shares an interesting characteristic with the American school curriculum: it’s a mile wide and an inch deep. The program itself is a compromise between boldness and buy-in. While I remain hopeful that some reforms in some states will produce some gains, the more I learn about the applications and the scoring process, the less inclined I am to think that bold reforms will be proposed or faithfully executed.

The question presents a false dichotomy. You can have bold reform and union buy-in when you put kids first in the equation. Union buy-in means that the state has actually involved educators in the development of the bold plan for reform. It means that they sought out the opinions of the teachers and education support professionals who spend their days helping children grab their dreams and reach their goals. For far too long, not enough has been said about the bold reforms happening because of such collaboration.

We will have many more stories to tell in the months and years to come in Delaware and Tennessee due to the discussion that took place among all stakeholders before, during, and after those states applied for and won their RTTT awards. But here are some stories that usually don't garner the public's attention because rather than a public fight, the 'drama' is the discussion and development of a bold reform plan that works for students and is jointly developed by administrators and educators. Let's look at Evansville, IN, where the Evansville Teachers Association and the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation joined together to dramatically improve three of the district’s lowest-performing schools. The effort already is producing positive results, with graduation rates improving and a renewed commitment by all in that community to keep the progress going. And let's look at Westminster, CO, where administrators and educators decided to forge a bold path and create a different kind of school system that acknowledges students' ability to master skills and knowledge at different rates. The system is designed to help them reach their highest potential rather than restricting students to grade levels that don't allow them to move ahead for one year even if they are ready. That is bold reform—and it was done with educators, not to them.

If you want a solution that helps all children achieve, ask an educator and ask an administrator and ask a school board member...somewhere in the midst of all those ideas is a solution that will lead to the educational outcome we seek: great public schools for every student.

Today’s question implies that obtaining union buy-in for Race to the Top (RTTT) would mean losing something valuable, i.e., “bold reform ideas.” That’s a false dichotomy, created by politicians searching for an educational “magic bullet” and their wealthy donors who are selling modern-day “snake oil.”

In fact, based on the evidence, the ideas behind RTTT are reckless, not bold, and definitely not worth imposing on our schoolchildren. Many students, teachers and parents are beginning to realize this, as demonstrated by Florida’s ground swell against Senate Bill 6 (the legislature’s failed effort to get in the RTTT game) and the thousands of New Jersey students who rallied last week in support of their teachers and against budget cuts and standardized testing. Teachers should just say no to this RTTT lemon, and they know it.

We’ve said it here before and we’ll say it again: the “bold ideas” of linking teacher evaluations to student test scores, lifting caps on charter schools and the list of interventions required for underperforming schools are all unproven at best or, too often, well-proven to fail. (See Page 1 of the Sunday May 2 New York Times on charter schools’ uneven to poor record, for just one example.)

These reckless ideas are cut from the same cloth as the misbegotten No Child Left Behind law itself, and would likely intensify the damage it’s already caused: narrowed curriculum, test prep instead of real learning, and a demoralized teaching force, with many of the best teachers racing for the exit. With good reason, many teachers see RTTT as a race to the bottom and they want nothing to do with it.

First Lady Michelle Obama spoke for many when, on the campaign trail in 2008, she said, “No Child Left Behind is strangling the life out of most schools,” and “If my future were determined by my performance on a standardized test I wouldn’t be here.” The president and his wife have seen to it that their daughters’ schooling will not be controlled by test scores. They chose Sidwell Friends, a private school that deemphasizes standardized testing and offers the kind of well-rounded, stimulating, creative and nurturing environment that is more and more difficult to sustain in public schools. As the Sidwell web site puts it, “We offer these students a rich and rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum designed to stimulate creative inquiry, intellectual achievement and independent thinking in a world increasingly without borders.”

RTTT takes us farther away from giving all children the opportunities the Obamas and many other parents want for their children. So when unions stand in the way of RTTT, they are performing a great service to the vast majority of our schoolchildren and to the future of education. If teachers, students and parents raise their voices and are finally heard, perhaps we can move past RTTT and the failed ideas of NCLB in order to tackle the real issues: equitable resources for equal educational opportunity and schools that prepare all our children to be able to think, create, reason, debate and participate in our democracy.

It speaks volumes that Secretary Duncan has responded to this question. His insistence that states choose reform over buy-in is valuable. Hopefully states that have been on the fence will take heed. He deserves credit for pushing reform--I'm sure that many on the left, including unions, are deeply displeased with his position and letting him know about it.

But we have to stay aware of a couple additional facts. First, there are a certain amount of points in the application directly tied to "buy-in." We can debate exactly how many (partially because a number of peer reviewers seemed to have penalized some states in multiple locations for lack of buy-in), but the number is nontrivial. Without question, reform is worth more, but in some cases the level of stakeholder support could be determinative. The administration may ultimately regret how it constructed the application.

Second, compared to round one we aren't seeing nearly as much state reform activity in advance of round two. There are several explanations for this. Some states mistakenly believe buy-in is more valuable than reform. Some states understand that reform is worth more but still don't want to antagonize their stakeholders. Some states simple aren't going to apply.

But one explanation that can't be overlooked is the Department's huge mistake in naming 16 finalists in round one. That had the unfortunate consequence of suggesting to the 14 non-winning finalists that they were in very good shape. It is conspicuous how LITTLE activity is now taking place in those states.

Third, and largely because of the two issues above, Secretary Duncan needs to prepare to use the nuclear option. Although he has enough money left in the program to fund about 12 winners, I'm all but certain that we aren't going to see 12 exceptional applications in round two (there were only 7 truly serious applications in the first found). The secretary should be willing to only fund those that warrant it and send the remaining dollars back to the US Treasury (the money must be spent by the end of the year).

Yes, lots of losing states will protest that their proposals deserved to win. And yes, lots of governors and members of Congress will say that given the huge budget shortfalls across the nation, he should have spent all of the money available to him.

But by holding the line and funding only outstanding proposals, Duncan will not only do a service to the cause of education reform, he'll also increase his credibility with congressional appropriators. They'll be more willing to fund his future reform requests if they know he's fully committed to spending the money wisely.

The question suggests an “either/or” response, but this is a false choice.

We want bold reforms because we have to find out what generates sig­nif­i­cant gains in student achieve­ment. We need buy-in from the unions because the reforms will only work if they are embraced by teachers making a good faith effort to support them.

But requiring statewide buy-in is the wrong goal. It unavoidably will water down the reforms and spread the funds too thinly, thus minimizing impact. Our national strategy should be to choose a select number of school dis­tricts with progressive lead­er­ship from both the union and ad­min­is­tra­tion and invest heavily. We want to see what works best and experiments across the country carried out by committed educators is the best way to go.

If this is the goal of “Race to the Top,” as Secretary Duncan argues, we should all welcome the results of the second round of competition.

I appreciate Secretary Duncan's comment and believe that, if he and the Department follow the more specific guidance given here by Jon Schnur and Margaret Spellings, Race to the Top could end up making a positive contribution to further reform of our system.

I do remain concerned about how execution in states that make rosy promises, even in the form of legislation, will truly be assured when the parades are over and the federal money is spent. But, Eliza, maybe that will be a topic for another day.

In the meantime, I, for one, am rooting for the program's success.

Tom Vander Ark hits the mark in his passage below...

"To achieve excellence and equity, the big reforms of this decade must include consistently high standards, extended learning time, money that follows kids to the best learning option, and performance-based employment. Employee groups oppose all of the above. "

I recently attended an ASU / SKySong conference here in Arizona that presented all of the latest and greatest in learning technologies, new school models, and around -the-next-corner methodologies in education. Keynoters were the leaders of places like Yahoo, Google, and a myriad of the nation's fastest moving companies.

They are in sync with their markets and they are in sync with their students. It blew my mind, and it made me want to cry.

Because the children who need these cutting edge technologies are in very little danger of being touched by them. Where is this fabulous work taking place? Mostly in private settings and post secondary markets. Because everything that Tom cites as essential for the next decade of reforms is essential for the advance of new, more effective technologies. And all of it is actively blocked by teacher unions in every state. Every state.

My advice to beautiful Arizona - and others like us whose applications were awash with half-measures and obfuscation in hopes of not alarming teacher unions - is simple. Use RTTT and the current financial crisis to completely rethink education and student finance. Put money into backpacks instead of into stale systems. Let parents choose, and let new learning models advance.

If that wins us RTTT funding beautiful. If not, do it anyway.

Broad support is helpful for widespread implementation, but RttT is a package of big ideas meant to be implemented in a handful of places to show the way forward. It's far more important that a thoughtful package of reforms be implemented in a couple dozen districts in a state than funding a lame plan that no one opposes.

To achieve excellence and equity, the big reforms of this decade must include consistently high standards, extended learning time, money that follows kids to the best learning option, and performance-based employment. Employee groups oppose all of the above. RttT should fund states that have a viable shot at implementing an aggressive package of reforms in at least a handful of places as a demonstration of what's possible. More pictures of what good looks like will change the opportunity set--and the next generation of education policy.

Race to the Top is chock full of bad ideas for improving education. The states should just say no. It is tough to turn down a barrel full of federal cash when your budget is crashing, but RTTT will not improve schools. The program--over $4 billion of federal dollars to promote privitization and to double down on NCLB's testing strategies--was never authorized by Congress; it is highly unlikely that a Democratic Congress would have lent support to this approach, which apparently was cooked up in the inner sanctums of the NewSchools Venture Fund.

It is now clear (see a summary in yesterday's NY Times or in my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, chapter 7) that charter schools in aggregate do not produce higher test scores than regular public schools, yet the U.S. Department of Education is laying out cold hard cash to push states to open more privately managed schools. Some charters do an outstanding job, most don't. Why does the Department think it will strengthen education by urging the opening of more mediocre charter schools? This is a strategy that gladdens the hearts of the hedge fund managers and other billionaires who are behind it, but will do little to help the public school system that still enrolls 97% of our children.

The strategy of judging and paying teachers based on student test scores thrills the business community (which seldom uses such an approach in paying their own employees or their CEOs), but it would not win the approval of any respected testing expert. In fact, testing experts specifically advise not to link diagnostic tests to decisions about pay, tenure, or sanctions.

RTTT predictably is opposed by teachers, not just teacher unions. It is profoundly demoralizing. RTTT is NCLB on steroids. Ten years from now, we will look back and wondered why the federal government committed itself to a program of privatization, closing schools, and judging teacher performance in ways guaranteed to drive thoughtful educators into a different line of work.

Diane Ravitch

Our education system has historically been resistant to change. Change challenges us, and change can be uncomfortable. Undeniably, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has forever changed the conversation about education reform. Prior to the law’s enactment, we spent our federal taxpayer dollars on a broken system that fostered a wide achievement gap and failed to help our students, especially our poor and minority students, succeed. Recognizing this was a bold – if uncomfortable – first step.

Today education reform has come a long way, but we’ve got a lot further to go. Just twenty years ago, charter schools were a new idea. Now we have nearly 5,000 of them across 40 states and the District of Columbia that are improving the lives of 1.5 million students.

Stakeholder buy-in matters, but when stakeholders are behind the times we must press onward. Today, the teachers’ unions are demonstrating their severe resistance to change. Their efforts to gut NCLB by walking away from annual assessments, eliminate consequences for failing schools, thwart the use of student achievement data in evaluating teachers, and derail the success of charters prove they are uncomfortable with any change that puts students before their own vested interests.

The time has come for bolder, more innovative ideas to better our education system and the future of our nation. We must challenge everyone – especially those in the system – to commit to changes that will make students’ needs our top priority.

The theory behind the Race to the Top (RTT) competition is that, with the right financial incentives and sensible goals, states, districts, and other stakeholders will forge new partnerships, revise outmoded laws and practices, and fashion far-reaching reforms.

In the program’s first phase, we received 41 applications. We set a high bar for success because we know that real and meaningful change will only come from doing hard work and setting the highest expectations.

Two states, Delaware and Tennessee, won $600 million in grants based on the strength of their proposals, their broad stakeholder buy-in and their statewide impact on children. Both states presented bold and comprehensive reform plans that have the potential to reach every student.

More than $3 billion remains for the second round of Race to the Top. Educators and lawmakers across America are engaging in open, spirited debate around a host of issues from teacher evaluation and compensation to school governance, curriculum, testing, academic rigor and turning around underperforming schools. Those robust conversations are both healthy and necessary, but as the Phase Two deadline approaches, relationships are fraying. A handful of states have indicated they will not apply. A small minority of stakeholders have threatened to withhold support.

Some have misread our intent in designing RTT believing that watered-down reforms with broad buy-in is the best strategy. Nothing could be further from the truth; only the best and boldest plans will win. We are challenging all elements of the educational system to get better, not in one or two areas that can lead to incremental improvements, but in every area simultaneously. Above all, we will reward political will, leadership and the courage to make the best choices for students.