Putting aside pronouncements from inside-the-beltway pundits, there is no research to support continuation of competitive grants in general, and Race to the Top (RTTT) in particular. There is simply no evidence that RTTT has improved, or even has the potential to improve, education opportunities and outcomes for the our nation’s students, especially those in attending public schools in high need communities.

There is, however, growing evidence from the states that the latest batch of top-down “reforms” attached to RTTT are either unworkable or ineffective, as in the overall lackluster performance of the charter sector, or will weaken public education, as in the proliferation of voucher schemes that have ridden the coattails of the RTTT wave.

As I’ve argued before on this blog, it’s time for an entirely new set of federal policies, carefully designed to move the 50 states to build strong public education systems, preschool to grade 12 and beyond.

And it’s high time to face up to the mounting evidence that school and district, and even teacher, centric strategies, such as RTTT, will fail to bring about the high performing systems of public schools our nation’s children so urgently need, and are legally entitled to.

Competitive grant programs can be a way to spur states to reform and innovate. After three Race to the Top competitions – the most recent of which focused on early learning – we’ve seen states change their laws and practices around teacher evaluation and charter schools and work to improve data systems and struggling schools among other things.

The Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC), at the very least got states thinking about how to coordinate their fragmented early learning systems. This in and of itself was an important exercise. Unlike K-12 education, early learning programs are funded and administered by numerous state – and federal – agencies that don’t naturally share information or data, much less collaborate on how to improve the quality of programs to ensure all children, especially high-need children, are developmentally and cognitively ready for kindergarten.

But competitive grant programs aren’t without challenges. Not all the winners have lived up to expectations. We’ve seen the K-12 Race to the Top winners scale back their plans, fail to meet requirements, or show little improvement in student achievement. And it’s hard to say if Race to the Top made any difference in the states that didn’t want. Will they be better able to put together high-quality plans for the next round? We’ll have to wait and see.

Still I think high-profile competitions are the best way for the federal government to drive change in certain reform areas as long as research and evaluation are a component in guiding future funding. Competitive grants, however, should not replace regular federal formula grant funding, like Title I to support disadvantaged students, for states and school districts.

What’s next for Race to the Top? The trend so far is a shrinking budget. In the fiscal year 2012 omnibus spending bill, Congress allocated $550 million for a new competition. That’s not a lot of money, especially when considering that the first and second round awarded $4 billion to states. It’s possible that the pot will be diluted even further if the Department decides to hold another Early Learning Challenge as a separate program. But Secretary Duncan doesn’t necessarily have to set aside any funding for another competition. With significantly less funds, it makes sense for the Department to narrow its focus.

What I’d really like to see is early learning integrated into another Race to top competition, as a pre-K-12 competition that encourages states to continue connecting the birth-to-five and K-12 systems, improve school readiness as well as the early grades of elementary school. Providing children with the right start will lead to less intervention and remediation in later grades.

 Race to the Top should end because it perpetuates and exacerbates the wrong-headed and damaging ideas of No Child Left Behind and betrays civil rights principles. The federal law’s use of high-stakes testing to spur achievement and narrow gaps did neither. Instead, it narrowed curriculum, led to too much teaching to the test and test prep, and prompted an epidemic of various kinds of cheating in schools across the nation. By promising winnings for a few, RTTT “succeeded” in getting many states to ignore all of these problems and agree to continue down a failed path. Even worse, it got states to adopt new high-stakes uses of test results, such as linking them to teacher evaluations, against the advice of many researchers who say that using student test scores in this way is inaccurate and unfair.

It’s no surprise that many civil rights and education groups have expressed concerns about RTTT’s use of competitive grants, which guarantee many more losers than winners. In what moral universe does it make sense that needy students are denied the potential benefit of federal education funds simply because their state lacked access to high-priced consulting help to devise a winning proposal? A group of civil rights organizations including Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Schott Foundation for Public Education, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Coalition for Educating Black Children, National Urban League, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc, issued a statement in July that sums things up well:

“The Race to the Top Fund and similar strategies for awarding federal education funding will ultimately leave states competing with states, parents competing with parents, and students competing with other students..... By emphasizing competitive incentives in this economic climate, the majority of low-income and minority students will be left behind and, as a result, the United States will be left behind as a global leader.”

Let’s quit this race before we fall further behind.

At least on alternate Thurdays, I'm some sort of a Republican, but I'm generally approving of Race to the Top and kindred competitive approaches to stimulating education reform. Reform cannot really be mandated--the signal failing of NCLB's and its architects--but it can be (in today's jargon) incentivized. And making the incentives scarce and competitive is a good thing.

There is, of course, a risk that states (or districts, whatever) will promise to do things if they get the money and then not keep their promise (either because they don't win the money or because they do win but then slack off, there being not much of an enforcement mechanism attached).

I still think this is a more promising approach for Washington than expecting either mandates or formula grants to yield real reform.

As for what the future holds, that depends a great deal on the 2012 election outcome, doesn't it?

For me, let mandates be used for "musts" like civil rights enforcement. Let formula grants be used to transfer resources from one place (or mission) to another. And let competitions akin to RttT be used when the goal is to induce worthy reforms.