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What Did Race to the Top Accomplish
Joanne Weiss & Frederick Hess:
Race to the Top was the Obama administration’s signature education initiative. Initially greeted with bipartisan acclaim, it has figured in debates about issues ranging from the Common Core to teacher evaluation to data privacy. Five years have passed since the U.S. Department of Education announced the winners in the $4 billion contest. What can the competition and its aftermath teach us about federal efforts to spur changes in schooling?
Joanne Weiss, former chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and director of the federal Race to the Top program, argues that the initiative spurred comprehensive improvements nationwide and in numerous policy areas, among them standards and assessments, teacher evaluation methods, and public school choice. Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, whose books include Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit: Lessons from a Half-Century of Federal Efforts to Improve America’s Schools, contends that the competition rewarded mainly grant-writing prowess and that policymakers should be wary of top-down efforts to spur innovation.
Mixed Report for Race to the Top Education Grants
Education critic Diane Ravitch says test scores went up for 40 years until federal No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top initiatives
Mismatches in Race to the Top Limit Educational Improvement
This report aims to inform current policies as well as policies under debate at the federal and state levels. We hope that lessons conveyed here will encourage the adoption of the positive steps taken in a few states and districts and help states navigate challenges as they enter their final year of Race to the Top. These lessons pertain as well to the many more states that are beginning to implement requirements to attain waivers from No Child Left Behind. Finally, the lessons can help guide a stronger, more thoughtful rollout of the Common Core State Standards. President Obama would like to leave as part of his legacy substantial improvements in U.S. education. Recognizing the flaws inherent in Race to the Top, reversing the damage it has done, and enacting more comprehensive education policies in the administration’s second term could make that legacy a proud one.
The First Race to the Top
FOR the nearly 50 million students enrolled in America’s public schools, tests are everywhere, whether prepared by classroom teachers or by the ubiquitous testing industry. Central to school accountability, they assume familiar shapes and forms. Multiple choice. Essay. Aptitude. Achievement. NAEP, ACT, SAT.
To teachers everywhere, the message is clear: Raise test scores. No excuses. The stakes are very high, as the many cheating scandals unfolding nationally reveal, including most spectacularly the recent indictment of 35 educators in Atlanta.
But we should also be wondering, where did all this begin? It turns out that the race to the top has a lot of history behind it.
Members of the Boston School Committee fired the first shots in the testing wars in the summer of 1845. Traditionally, an examination committee periodically inspected the local English grammar schools, questioned some pupils orally, then wrote brief, perfunctory reports that were filed and forgotten.
Many Bostonians smugly assumed that their well-funded public schools were the nation’s best. They, along with many visitors, had long praised the local system, which included a famous Latin school and the nation’s first public high school, founded in 1821.
Citizens were in for a shock. For the first time, examiners gave the highest grammar school classes a common written test, conceived by a few political activists who wanted precise measurements of school achievement. The examiners tested 530 pupils — the cream of the crop below high school. Most flunked. Critics immediately accused the examiners of injecting politics into the schools and demeaning both teachers and pupils.
The testing groundwork was laid in 1837, when a lawyer and legislator in Massachusetts named Horace Mann became secretary of the newly created State Board of Education, part of the Whig Party’s effort to centralize authority and make schools modern and accountable. After a fact-finding trip abroad, Mann claimed in 1844 in a nationally publicized report that Prussia’s schools were more child-friendly and superior to America’s. Boston’s grammar masters, insulted, attacked Mann in print, and he returned the favor. In December, some Whig reformers, including Mann’s close friend Samuel Gridley Howe, were elected to the School Committee and soon landed on the examining committee.
Wisconsin wins $22.7 million in Race to the Top funds
After losing previous rounds of federal Race to the Top grant competitions, Wisconsin won a slice of funding Thursday: a $22.7 million grant that will help expand and improve services for young children in day care centers, preschools and kindergarten classrooms.
Wisconsin joined four other states – Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico and Oregon – that will receive a share of the $133 million Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge grant, the U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday.
Wisconsin’s grant will be spent over four years on strengthening and expanding the YoungStar child care rating system and also accelerating work on a data system that would track kids in early childhood and target more disadvantaged children for services.
A main goal is to help close the “readiness” gap between children who are white and from middle- to upper-income families and those who are of color and/or from low-income households. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds often enter the K-12 system behind their more affluent peers in terms of social development and academic exposure.
15 Wisconsin groups eye Race to the Top funds; Madison won’t apply
Madison recently completed and is now implementing “an ambitious and innovative plan to improve student achievement and close gaps.” The district had discussed applying for Race to the Top funds in recent weeks, but decided the timing wasn’t right, Belmore told the board.
“A year or two from now, we feel MMSD would be poised to take advantage of an opportunity like this one and make a competitive case,” Belmore wrote to the board. “But based on our implementation time line, we feel this grant does not come at the right time for our district. This year, we will be disciplined in focusing our internal resources on effectively implementing our achievement gap plan and making improvements for all students.”
Related: Budget Cuts: We Won’t Be as Bold and Innovative as Oconomowoc, and That’s Okay.
Race to the Top Competition Slated to Expand to School Districts
Expanding upon President Obama’s signature education initiative, the U.S. Department of Education announced Sunday that it has finalized the application process for the 2012 Race to the Top-District competition. The school district-specific competitive grant program will provide nearly $400 million to grantees to implement local reforms congruent with Obama administration education goals.
Initially launched in 2009, Race to the Top has spawned dramatic education reform nationwide. Grants have led 45 states and the District of Columbia to pursue state-wide education reform programs, including data-driven decision making, professional development programs for teachers and leaders, and turnaround interventions in chronically low-performing schools. This next phase is designed to build on those principles by offering the grants to school districts instead of entire states. According to administration officials, locally directed improvements in learning and teaching will directly improve student achievement and educator effectiveness by addressing local priorities.
Another Race to the top Begins
Kai Ryssdal: The Obama administration’s signature education program Race to the Top added another leg today. The Education Department actually calls it the third heat of the competition for federal school funding. The first two were for the states; this one will let individual school districts compete for a share of $400 million in grants.
From the Marketplace Education Desk at WYPR in Baltimore, Amy Scott reports.
Amy Scott: The latest contest will reward districts that move away from teaching everybody the same thing at the same time, so students can learn in their own way at their own pace. Here’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan at an event announcing the details today.
Madison Superintendent Dan Nerad says that the District may apply for these funds.
States rewrite education rules, with or without Race to the Top
Some of the states rejected for federal “Race to the Top” education grants are proceeding to revamp their school systems anyway — in some cases more ambitiously than states that won.
Colorado, for example, is moving forward with a new system tying teacher and principal reviews to student performance. That sort of linkage is central to the Race to the Top program. “We’ve had dramatic changes,” says Mike Johnston, a Democratic state senator who sponsored the legislation creating the new system. Johnston says losing out on the federal grant “was more of an opportunity to lay out our plan for reform.”
Colorado is one of six states — along with Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and South Carolina — that achieved finalist status in the first two rounds of the U.S. Education Department’s $4 billion Race to the Top competition but walked away empty-handed.
Race to the Top Promises Delayed
After months of work across the state to define multiple measures of student growth, the Delaware Department of Education has asked the United States DOE for, and – word is – will receive, permission to delay implementation of our DPAS II teacher evaluation system, which will impact the roll-out of numerous other Race to the Top reforms.
The revised DPAS II evaluation system would have identified teachers as “highly-effective,” “effective,” “needs improvement,” or “ineffective,” ultimately impacting eligibility for various initiatives. Below are programs and policies that will be affected by delaying DPAS II implementation:
A Race to the Top Wisconsin could win, if it tries
It will be interesting to see if Gov. Scott Walker’s office, the Department of Public Instruction and the Department of Children and Families join forces to make what could be a very strong Wisconsin proposal for federal funding to help young children get prepared for school and life.
On Wednesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a $500 million program aimed at improving and coordinating preschool programs around the country.
This new Early Learning Challenge is the third round of the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” education competition among the states; this time the money is an incentive to encourage states to create or enhance innovative programs that will boost early learning, especially for low-income children.
Test, Lies & Race to the Top
Obama had his “Sputnik Moment,” when standardized test scores around the world pointed to the mediocrity of American students in reading, math and sciences. There is now a major mantra coming from Washington to all state capitals: the “race to the top” is on, and it doesn’t include a continuation of the downward spiral of test scores. The new modus operandi: Leave aside achievement throughout the years in high school, the stream of G.P.As., the difficulty of courses taken during the years in 9 to 12, and any creative projects done by students. Base everything on standardized tests.
When career prospects, prestige, and job security are connected to one and only one criteria — score on a standardized test — human nature is bound to creep in. Baseball players start taking steroids; Olympic athletes try every means to beat the system. Will it happen to dedicated teachers who are working hard to educate our next generation? Will temptation overtake honesty, integrity and ethical behavior?
An analysis of Colorado’s failed Race to the Top application
Colorado’s failed bid for $175 million in federal Race to the Top funding was hampered by concern about the state’s flat achievement data and fear that union opposition would prevent the spread of reform.
Evaluators also docked points for what they describe as the state’s vague plans to ensure effective teachers and principals are in the neediest schools.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday announced winners of the federal grant competition, awarding nearly $3.4 billion to nine states and the District of Columbia. Colorado placed 17th out of 19 applicants for Round 2 of the Race to the Top; the state also was a finalist, but not a winner, in Round 1 of the contest earlier this year.
Getting Beyond the Race to the Top
A whole week of catharsis, yet the Garden State still agonizes over the loss of $400 million in Race To The Top money. Ex-Commissioner Bret Schundler is out on his keister — amid calls for legislative hearings because of a botched question that pushed us into the losers’ column by three points. (NJ came in 11th with 437.8 points; Ohio, the 10th of 10 winners, got 440.8.)
NJ Facebook Group: New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie’s Pay Freeze
More pertinent is the NJ Department of Education’s perceived ineptitude. During the presentation of our application to federal reviewers, five high-level DOE staffers were unable to conjure up basic fiscal information for 2008 and 2009, instead of the mistakenly/cravenly entered information on 2011. And that’s after spending $500K on a consultant.
Was the incorrect answer a clerical error? Was it a ham-handed effort to elude accountability on state school aid cuts?
Final answer: it’s irrelevant.
We didn’t lose the Race To The Top by a grimace-inducing three points because of a whiffed answer valued at less than one-half percent of the total 500 points. We lost because our ambitious reform plans elicited lukewarm support from local school boards and superintendents (about half signed on) and ice-cold censure from NJEA affiliates.
For comparison’s sake, New York State won and had buy-in from every local union president.
Race to the Top: By the Numbers
384K PDF via a kind reader’s email:
Of the record $100 billion in federal education funds appropriated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) in 2009, Congress and President Obama set aside $5 billion to be awarded at the discretion of the Secretary of Education to states, districts, and consortia that develop robust education reform plans. The $5 billon is broken down as follows:
$4 billion – Race to the Top State Incentive Fund (individual states)
$650 million – Investing in Innovation or i3 Grants (local, regional collaborators)
$350 million – Race to the Top Assessment Grants (multi-state consortia)
In total, these funds represent less than 1% of the $600 billion (federal, state, and local funds) spent on U.S. public elementary and secondary schools.
This unprecedented infusion of federal education reform funds, coupled with unprecedented latitude afforded to a U.S. Secretary of Education, catapulted the Obama Administration to the role of top U.S. venture philanthropist in the education policy world.
Race to the Top: The Day After
I had the craziest dream last night, Louisiana, a state that is a leader on all the things that the administration says are priorities didn’t get Race to the Top funding…oh wait…
Anyway, New York never disappoints, the Patterson presser is one for the ages. ‘Race to the cock?’ What the hell?
Big takeaways beyond the RTT issues below, are that the odds of seeing consistent and deep change across all Race to the Top winners got a lot longer with this round of selections. But the two fundamental questions basically remain the same and can’t be answered yet: How durable will the many RTT-inspired policy changes prove to be and will those changes actually improve student learning?
Racing to restore education standards: Arne Duncan on Race to the Top
Anna Fifield; video:
Arne Duncan, US education secretary, tells Anna Fifield, the FT’s US political correspondent, that the “Race to the Top” programme has led to a “quiet revolution” with 36 hard-up states implementing reforms simply in the hope of receiving federal funding. Despite opposition from teachers’ unions, Mr Duncan says the administration will continue to push for change, although it will not raise the proportion of education funding that comes from the federal government.
The promise and peril of Race to the Top
As encouraging as it is to see California in the running to win a Race to the Top grant for its schools, we can’t help wondering how great a price the state will pay for the possibility of receiving as much as $700 million.
The U.S. Department of Education announced last week that California is one of 19 finalists in the second round of grant applications. Should it succeed — and the odds are decent, because officials say that more than half the finalists will receive grants — many of California’s neediest schools will receive infusions of new money. Even so, we see this potential win as mixed news.
Wisconsin Fails to Make “Race to the Top”, Governor Doyle Calls Process Flawed
Wisconsin lost its bid for $250 million in federal education reform grant money Tuesday, as 18 other states and Washington, D.C., were named finalists in the second round of the Race to the Top competition.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the finalists for $3.4 billion in funding during a speech to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Those finalists were Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Washington, D.C.
This was Wisconsin’s final chance to win a piece of the $4.35 billion education reform competition, unless a proposed third round of $1.35 billion in 2011 is approved.
Gov. Jim Doyle criticized the federal government’s system for reviewing state applications, while several outside groups criticized Wisconsin for passing weak reform efforts or failing to show it could dramatically change the course of the troubled Milwaukee Public Schools.
“With the blind judging system used by the federal government, it’s hard to know how the applications were scored, but it’s pretty clear that the quality of a state’s education system was not taken into account,” Doyle said in a statement. “The states in the upper Midwest – Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan – are nationally recognized as having the best education systems in the country, and not a single one was a finalist in either round for Race to the Top funding,” he said.
Wisconsin Democrat Representative Tammy Baldwin votes with David Obey to Reduce Race to the Top Funding and Support Teacher Union Request to Avoid Layoffs
HR 4899 roll, via Democrats for Education Reform.
Sam Dillon:
The education measure provoked fierce debate, especially because it would reduce by $500 million the award money available to three dozen states that have submitted proposals in Round 2 of the Obama initiative, the Race to the Top competition.
To become law, the legislation needs Senate approval. The White House said in a statement that if the final bill included cuts to education reforms, Mr. Obama would most likely veto it.
“It would be short-sighted to weaken funding for these reforms,” the White House said.
Using stimulus money voted on last year, the Department of Education awarded $500 million to Tennessee and $100 million to Delaware in March, and has promised to distribute the $3.4 billion that remains among additional winning states this year. The House bill would reduce the money available to $2.9 billion.
Teachers’ unions lobbied for weeks for federal money to avert what the administration estimates could be hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs.
Several dozen charter school and other advocacy groups lobbied fiercely against cutting Race to the Top, which rewards states promising to overhaul teacher evaluation systems and shake up school systems in other ways.
Government as Innovation Catalyst The $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” education program is showing how government can successfully drive systemwide innovation
The best use of government is as a catalyst for social system innovation. Yes, that’s right: “Innovation bureaucrat” need not be an oxymoron. Leaders should get the innovation reaction started–and then get out of the way.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is showing how it can be done. The “Race to the Top” program offers $4 billion in grants to states committed to reforming their education systems. Duncan outlined a clear goal of restoring the U.S. as a world leader in preparing students to succeed in college and the workplace and announced the first grants on Mar. 29, 2010–$100 million for Delaware and $500 million for Tennessee.
Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” Program Offers Only a Muddled Path to the Finish Line
William Peterson & Richard Rothstein:
In short, the Race to the Top 500-point rating system presents a patina of scientific objectivity, but in truth masks a subjective and somewhat random process.
This competition was a trial run for Secretary Duncan of a policy approach he hopes to make permanent. The Obama administration has proposed that formula-driven Title I funding16 be frozen at its present level, without future adjustment for inflation, and that increases in federal education spending be devoted entirely to a new collection of competitive grants, some of which have similar requirements to RTT, and some of which, as indicated above, attempt to create incentives for initiatives not included in RTT. Because such a reduction in real Title I funding would further exacerbate state fiscal crises, and because this trial run of a competitive system has proven to have little credibility, the administration should rethink its approach to federal education aid and its relationship to school improvement.
Yet for now, the Department of Education proposes to go through an identical process for judging a second round of applications by July. States that lost in the March competition have been invited to re-apply, and several are doing so, again investing time and expense to re-do their applications. Experts in these states are likely to spend many hours studying the review process employed in March, so they can recommend small changes in their states’ applica- tions to exploit the quirks of the Department’s rating system. Such gaming is unlikely to reflect an actual improvement in the education policies of applicant states.
The ‘Race to the Top’ of the Education Peak
Letters to the New York Times Editor:
Re “In School Aid Race, Many States Are Left Behind” (front page, April 5):
No wonder a Race to the Top that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan hyped as education’s “moon shot” is beginning to look like a wet firecracker. The Obama administration said the competition would be transparent, yet anonymous judges evaluated 40 states’ applications behind closed doors. The administration said it would reward innovation, yet gaining assent from change-averse teacher unions gave the two winning states the edge, not bold new options for students and parents.
In the final analysis, the race may have a good effect if it finally convinces education patrons and stewards that “Waiting for Superman” (to borrow from Davis Guggenheim’s brilliant documentary about deeply flawed public education) is an exercise in futility. The only way to reform education is from the bottom up.
Sweden has the right idea in letting public money follow children to the independent or public schools of their choice, thus sparking a competition that actually enhances quality for all.
Lessons from the First Round of Race to the Top
In Round 1 of Race to the Top, the U.S. Department of Education delivered on its promise to hold states to a high bar for reform. Only 2 states out of 16 finalists and 41 total applicants were selected for awards: Delaware and Tennessee.
These states won because they outlined bold, comprehensive visions of reform and demonstrated the ability to make them a reality. Statewide teacher effectiveness policies were the foundation for their success. They focused on putting effective teachers in every classroom and giving teachers the critical feedback and support they need to do their best work. They shifted to evaluation systems that improve their ability to recognize great teachers and respond to poor performance. Together they set a new benchmark for reform that Round 2 applicants must meet in order to win.
This analysis offers a close look at the scoring of the Round 1 finalists. It refutes some of the most common myths about Race to the Top and offers important lessons for states applying for the $3.4 billion in funding that remains available in Round 2.
At the same time, it examines scoring deficiencies that the Department of Education must address. While these issues did not result in a lowering of the bar for Round 1 winners, they could mean the difference between winning and losing for states applying in Round 2.
Input of teachers unions key to successful entries in Race to the Top
Delaware’s surprising first-place finish in a fierce battle for federal school-reform dollars highlights a tension in President Obama’s education agenda: He favors big change, but he also prizes peace with the labor unions that sometimes resist his goals.
Obama often has challenged unions, even voicing support last month for a Rhode Island school board’s vote to fire all the teachers at a struggling high school. But his administration built the $4 billion Race to the Top contest in a way that rewarded applications crafted in consultation with labor leaders.
The announcement that Delaware had won about $100 million highlighted that all of the state’s teachers unions backed the plan for tougher teacher evaluations linked to student achievement. In second-place Tennessee, which won about $500 million, 93 percent of unions were on board.
Race to the Top Should Be Left Behind
After reading aloud from an essay about the fast-food industry, I threw a typical softball question to the students of a UC Berkeley composition class:
“What’s the argument of the paragraph?”
Silence.
Written by a former student, the paragraph implied that a rise in American obesity is linked to increased dollars spent on fast food.
I called on a student. “Advertising?” she said, a word that appeared in the paragraph only once. Why did this student, a hard-working athlete, so badly misread the paragraph? Because instead of really interpreting the passage, she used a little clue. “Advertising” had been mentioned in the thesis just a paragraph earlier.
Unfortunately, strategies such as hers aren’t uncommon in the college classroom. Within the same lesson, another student made quick assumptions about a sentence’s meaning because of its first words. My colleagues and I often swap stories like these, in which our students use faulty shorthand in place of critical thinking.
Walpole Superintendent Lincoln Lynch says achievement gap may not have been great enough for Race to the Top funding
Massachusetts did not receive Race to the Top school funding but state education officials say they plan to reapply for the grant.
Pres. Barack Obama established the Race to the Top program last summer for states to compete for $4.35 billion in grant funding to pursue education overhauls and innovative reform.
Of the initial 40 states to qualify, Massachusetts was named one of 16 finalists. Early this week, the U.S. Department of Education announced Delaware and Tennessee were the only winners.
The program states winners would be chosen simply on the state’s readiness to rework their education system.
Superintendent Lincoln Lynch said Massachusetts might have been passed up since the achievement gap here may not be as great as in other states. As a finalist, however, Massachusetts will have the opportunity to reapply in for a second round of funding in June.
Input of teachers unions key to successful entries in Race to the Top
Delaware’s surprising first-place finish in a fierce battle for federal school-reform dollars highlights a tension in President Obama’s education agenda: He favors big change, but he also prizes peace with the labor unions that sometimes resist his goals.
Obama often has challenged unions, even voicing support last month for a Rhode Island school board’s vote to fire all the teachers at a struggling high school. But his administration built the $4 billion Race to the Top contest in a way that rewarded applications crafted in consultation with labor leaders.
The announcement that Delaware had won about $100 million highlighted that all of the state’s teachers unions backed the plan for tougher teacher evaluations linked to student achievement. In second-place Tennessee, which won about $500 million, 93 percent of unions were on board.
Race to the Top, Phase I State Proposal Reviewers
Why Florida didn’t win the Race to the Top
HEY THERE, talented recent university graduate! I’d like to offer you a job in an extremely challenging and rewarding field. The pay is based almost entirely on performance metrics–you know, what they used to call “commission” in the old days. The better you do, the more you earn! Of course the worse you do, the less you earn, but don’t focus on that–you’re a winner, you’ll do great. We can offer you a five-year contract to start. By “contract” I mean we’ll let you work for us, if things work out, but we can of course fire you at any time. And after that you’ll have solid contracts! Each contract lasts one year, and we can decide to let you go at the end if you’re not performing up to our standards. And by that time, you’ll be earning…well, actually, you’ll be paid at exactly the same rate as when you started out. We’re prohibited by law from paying you more just because you’ve worked for us longer. If, however, you want to go get qualified in some new technical field or obtain an advanced degree, then…we can’t raise your pay either. We basically just pay you a flat standardized commission depending on how well you perform on the mission.
Delaware, Tennessee Win US Race to the Top Grants
The Obama administration has decided to award just two states–Delaware and Tennessee–with hundreds of millions in education grants, the culmination of a hard-fought competition that originally drew applications from 40 states, according to people familiar with the decision.
That the administration has picked only two states, and passed up states like Florida and Louisiana that were widely seen as favorites, will surprise many in the education world.
The grants, the first of two rounds under the administration’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, are designed to reward states that are pushing ahead on tough teaching standards to overhaul lagging schools.
The fact that just two states won will placate critics, who warned that the administration appeared to be watering down its own standards for the awards. Skeptics have also raised concerns that the Race to the Top program, a cornerstone of the administration’s education policy, would reward states making big promises instead of only those best prepared to impose real change.
Rhode Island teacher firings, a Race to the Top case study
One of the first high-profile examples of President Obama’s public education reforms comes from Rhode Island, a participant in Race to the Top (RttT).
Superintendent Frances Gallo, overseeing the persistently failing Central Falls High School, decided to fire all the school’s teachers after the teacher union proved to be the road block to reform. The superintendent was set to initiate an intervention program at the high school which involved many changes including a longer school day, lunch with the students, and more after school tutoring. The union rejected the proposal because there was not enough monetary compensation attached. Because the intervention plan was refused, the superintendent had to resort to a different model of school reform – the turnaround model — which involves firing the majority of the faculty and staff. Deborah Gist, Rhode Island’s new education commissioner approved the turnaround model for the school.
Change and Race to the Top
Which brings us to this next item, one with twist and turns not completely understandable at this point, but certainly not held up by people like myself as a model of how to “get the job properly done” — to use Herbert’s words.
Diane Ravitch, an intellectual on education policy, difficult to pigeonhole politically (appointed to public office by both G.H.W. Bush and Clinton), but best described as an independent, co-writes a blog with Deborah Meier that some of our readers may be familiar with called “Bridging Differences.” This past week she highlighted a possibly disturbing development in the Race to the Top competition program of the Department of Education, that dangles $4.3 billion to the states with a possible $1.3 billion to follow. Ravitch’s critique suggests that this competition is not run by pragmatists, but rather by ideologues who are led by the Bill Gates Foundation.If this election had been held five years ago, the department would be insisting on small schools, but because Gates has already tried and discarded that approach, the department is promoting the new Gates remedies: charter schools, privatization, and evaluating teachers by student test scores.
Two of the top lieutenants of the Gates Foundation were placed in charge of the competition by Secretary Arne Duncan. Both have backgrounds as leaders in organisations dedicated to creating privately managed schools that operate with public money.
None of this is terribly surprising (See the Sunlight Foundation’s excellent work on the Obama Administration’s insider dealings with PhRMA). Jeff Henriques did a lot of work looking at the Madison School District’s foray into Small Learning Communities.
Is it possible to change the current K-12 bureacracy from within? Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman spoke about the “adult employment” focus of the K-12 world:
“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).
I suspect that Duncan and many others are trying to significantly change the adult to student process, rather than simply pumping more money into the current K-12 monopoly structures.
They are to be commended for this.
Will there be waste, fraud and abuse? Certainly. Will there be waste fraud and abuse if the funds are spent on traditional K-12 District organizations? Of course. John Stossel notes that when one puts together the numbers, Washington, DC’s schools spend $26,000 per student, while they provide $7,500 to the voucher schools…..
We’re better off with diffused governance across the board. Milwaukee despite its many travails, is developing a rich K-12 environment.
The Verona school board narrowly approved a new Mandarin immersion charter school on a 4-3 vote recently These citizen initiatives offer some hope for new opportunities for our children. I hope we see more of this.
Finally, all of this presents an interesting contrast to what appears to be the Madison School District Administration’s ongoing “same service” governance approach.
Most Calif. schools bow out of $700M Race to the Top Program
Less than half of California school districts and only about a quarter of teacher unions have promised to make key education reforms required for the state to win $700 million in competitive federal grants, officials said Wednesday.
Only 41 percent of school districts and 60 percent of eligible charter schools signed on for changes needed to participate in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top contest in which states can win extra federal funding to ease the impact of steep budget cuts.
Still, state education officials were hopeful California would be among the states chosen in April to share about $4.35 billion. Officials note that districts agreeing to the reforms represent 58 percent of the state’s public school students and almost 61 percent of students from low-income families.
“We’re very pleased with the turnout,” said Hilary McLean, spokeswoman for the California Department of Education. “We think we have a very strong application. We’re competitive.”
Politics of public education reform – exploring Race to the Top’s charter school emphasis
President Obama’s Race to the Top (RttT) state competition has brought charter schools to the forefront of public education reform. Additionally, charter schools are prominent in Obama’s 2011 proposed budget – increasing funding for charter schools and an extra $1.8 billion toward Supporting Student Success (which focuses on Promise Neighborhoods, of which charter schools are the central focus).
RttT relies heavily on charter schools as a tool for reform, awarding more points to states which enable charter school creation than to those which do not:
Race to the Top?: Part II
In my recent post, Race to the Top?: Part I, I described the academic achievement rat race in which students near the top of the educational food chain strive maniacally to win (or at least finish). I argued that the emphasis on testing by former President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) and continued with President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative (RTTT) has only exacerbated the problem better characterized by the title of the powerful new documentary by Vicki Abeles, Race to Nowhere. This post, in contrast, explores how RTTT impacts those students and schools at the other end of the educational food chain, those who are just trying to survive in the turbulent sea of American public education.
The first mistake that this administration made was to call education reform a race. Races connote winners and losers. Yet, we need to ensure that all our students and schools are winners. I think a more appropriate name for this initiative is “Climb to the Top” because the focus should be on how to get to the top.
The administration’s second mistake was to continue Bush’s initial mistake of focusing on testing; instead of being a tool for education reform, testing has morphed into the end-all, be-all of said reform. Yes, assessment is essential for determining the effectiveness of programs such as RTTT, aimed at achieving something as ethereal and elusive as education reform or the more tangible goal of closing the education and economic gaps between the haves and have-nots. At the same time, improved test scores should not be the ultimate objective of education reform.
Wisconsin’s Race to the Top Application
via a kind reader’s email: 14MB PDF:
January 15, 2010 Dear Secretary Duncan:
On behalf of Wisconsin’s school children, we are pleased to present to you our application for the US Department of Education’s Race to the Top program. We were honored when President Obama traveled to Wisconsin to announce his vision for this vital program and we are ready to accept the President’s challenge to make education America’s mission.
We are proud of the steps we are taking to align our assessments with high standards, foster effective teachers and leaders, raise student achievement and transform our lowest performing schools. Over the last several months Wisconsin has pushed an educational reform agenda that has brought together over 430 Wisconsin school districts and charter schools together around these central themes.
Race to the Top funding will be instrumental in supporting and accelerating Wisconsin’s education agenda. While Wisconsin has great students, parents, teachers and leaders we recognize that more must be done to ensure that our students are prepared to compete in a global economy. The strong application presented to you today does just that.
Wisconsin’s application contains aggressive goals supported by a comprehensive plan. These goals are targeted at not only high performing schools and students but also address our lowest performers. For example, over the next four years Wisconsin, with your support, is on track to:
- Ensure all of our children are proficient in math and reading.
- Drastically reduce the number of high school dropouts.
- Increase the high school graduation growth rate for Native American, African American and Hispanic students.
- Significantly increase the annual growth in college entrance in 2010 and maintain that level of growth over the next four years.
- Drastically cut our achievement gap.
These goals are supported by a comprehensive plan with a high degree of accountability. Our plan is focused on research proven advancements that tackle many of the challenges facing Wisconsin schools. Advancements such as the following:
- Raising standards — joined consortium with 48 other states to develop and adopt internationally benchmarked standards.
- More useful assessments — changes to our testing process to provide more meaningful information to teachers and parents.
- Expanded data systems — including the ability to tie students to teachers so that we can ultimately learn what works and what doesn’t in education.
- More support for teachers — both for new teachers through mentoring and for other teachers through coaching.
- Increased capacity at the state and regional level to assist with instructional improvement efforts including providing training for coaches and mentors.
- An emphasis on providing additional supports, particularly in early childhood and middle school to high school transition, to ensure that Wisconsin narrows its achievement gap and raises overall achievement.
- Turning around our lowest performing schools — enhancing the capacity for Milwaukee Public Schools and the state to support that effort; contracting out to external organizations with research-proven track records where appropriate.
- Providing wraparound services, complimenting school efforts in specific neighborhoods in Milwaukee to get low income children the supports necessary to succeed within and outside the school yard.
- Investing in STEM — Building off our currently successful Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology efforts to ensure that more students have access to high-quality STEM courses and training.
The agenda that you have before you is one that builds on our great successes yet recognizes that we can and must do more to ensure our children are prepared for success. We appreciate your consideration of Wisconsin’s strong commitment to this mission. We look forward to joining President Obama and you in America’s Race to the Top.
Sincerely, Jim Doyle
Governor
Tony Evers
State Superintendent
Education reform’s ‘Race to the Top’ features some non-starters
In the brave new world of data-driven education reform, most states have learned how to talk the talk. Start with “global competitiveness,” add in some “longitudinal data” and “transparency,” garnish with “accountability” and serve.
But far fewer states are committed to more than the language of reform — a reality made clear by the applications submitted last week to President Obama’s Race to the Top grant program.
Race to the Top is the crown jewel of the Obama administration’s education reform agenda and the largest-ever discretionary federal grant program for public schools. (In his State of the Union address this week, the president proposed adding an additional $1.4 billion to the pot of $4.35 billion.) The hope is that fiscally strapped states will make changes to ineffective policies and present comprehensive reform plans to be competitive for grants of up to $700 million. Indeed, Education Secretary Arne Duncan says that around a dozen states have changed laws or policies in response to the program thus far.
New Jersey’s 2010 Race to the Top Application; 11 Wisconsin School Districts Don’t Participate
New Jersey Department of Education, 3MB PDF:
In New Jersey, we are proud to be ranked among the top 5 NAEP performers in reading, writing, and mathematics. We are proud to have invested so successfully in admired and effective early childhood programs, high-quality charter schools, and high school redesign. We are proud to see the success of our efforts.
However, while we are making inroads to close the achievement gap, we also recognize that more work is needed to prepare all of our students for the demands of the global economy. The existing minority achievement gaps and the gaps for economically-disadvantaged and non- disadvantaged students are unacceptable. There is an urgent need for these further reforms.
The landmark Abbot decisions over the last three decades in conjunction with the creation of the new school funding formula in 2008 solidified New Jersey’s commitment to equitable school resources and ensuring that all student sin the State have access to needed resources. Although this has been a significant step, we have not yet achieved outcomes commensurate with the State’s investments in education in all districts. Furthermore, we have not yet solved the problems of how to place great teachers and leaders in struggling schools and districts.
Eleven Wisconsin school districts want nothing to do with a highly touted federal grant program that could direct thousands of dollars to their classrooms.
The districts were the only ones out of 425 that refused to take part in the state’s application to receive money under the nearly $4.5 billion Race to the Top grant program.
That means if Wisconsin is awarded the $254 million it seeks, the 11 districts won’t get a cut, and the money they would have gotten will go to the remaining schools.
That’s just fine with Mary Dean, administrator of the Maple Dale-Indian Hills School District just north of Milwaukee. She said the requirements under the state’s Race to the Top application were too onerous for her 500-student district to comply with, so instead of giving itself the option of declining to take part later, it decided not to participate at all.
“We really had too many questions, too many unknowns,” she said. “We thought the costs would outweigh the benefits.”
Milwaukee’s Michael Bond’s Letter to Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle on Race to the Top & Governance
Michael Bonds, President, Milwaukee Board of School Directors [1.3MB PDF]:
January 18, 2010
Governor Jim Doyle
Office of the Governor
115 East State Capitol
Madison, WI 53702
Dear Governor Doyle:
As President of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors, I am writing to express my disappointment with your cynical statement regarding Wisconsin’s Race to the Top (RTT) application. In your release, you predict that the application will fail because it does not include mayoral control of the Milwaukee Public Schools District (MPS). You also argue that the Legislature’s refusal to adopt your mayoral control proposal in Milwaukee will cost other school districts millions of dollars.
Since mayoral control is not a requirement for Race To the Top dollars, your statement can only be interpreted as a political attempt to tum the rest of the state against MPS and to intimidate legislators who oppose mayoral control into supporting your proposal.
The facts are as follows:
via The Milwaukee Drum.
Race to the Top’ – the view from Oakland
We applaud Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums for refusing to join the Race to the Top parade by not signing the letter by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson (“Dellums ducks out of mayors coalition,” Chip Johnson, Jan. 5).
Dellums should not be whipsawed into the frenzy just to run after more federal and state dollars that will do little to address the major issues of educational equity that we need in Oakland.
I was asked for the Oakland Education Association’s opinion on the proposed letter and concurred with others that it would be a mistake to sign it. The lure of a minuscule amount of money is not justification for further decimating a compromised program in Oakland schools, especially when that money comes with serious strings attached.
Davenport pulls support for Race to the Top funds
A requirement to negotiate plans to overhaul Iowa’s lowest-performing schools with teacher unions prompted the Davenport School District to abandon its support of state efforts to nab a portion of $4.3 billion in federal funds, its top leader said today.
Julio Almanza, Davenport superintendent, said the Iowa Department of Education went beyond federal rules in its application for up to $175 million of federal Race to the Top dollars by requiring districts with state-identified low-performing schools to agree with teacher unions on plans to overhaul them.
Currently, school boards and administrators have the sole authority to make those decisions.
“What you are going to have is unions determining intervention models for schools,” Almanza said. “If you can’t reach an agreement (with the union), the district loses money for the school. There are no penalties for anyone else, and the kids lose.”
The Iowa Department of Education also excluded parents, students and the community from the decision-making process, which goes against the intent of U.S. Department of Education, Almanza said.
Race to the Top — Buyers Beware
Every American leader, from Barack Obama to Arnold Schwarzenegger, would agree that if there’s one lifelong lesson to be learned from the implosion of the housing market, it is that before you sign on the dotted line, you’d better know what you’re getting yourself into. You’d better ask clarifying questions. You’d better read the fine print. And you’d better make absolutely sure that there are no hidden clauses or trap doors that take you and those dependent on you to the dog house.
While our local districts are comprised of well intentioned, highly educated and reflective leaders who are doing their best to find resources to fill the budget shortfall, we are perplexed that some districts agreed to submit a “Memorandum Of Understanding” with the Governor’s Office to participate in California’s application for the federal Race to the Top (RTTT) competitive grant program. Many of our local teachers’ associations hope that since more than half (60%) of school systems in California did not sign on to the State’s MOU, that there is change in the RTTT program language so that district leaders, teachers, parents and stakeholders can work together with their local districts to come up with solutions that are based in research-supported strategies for all.
Earlier this month the governor signed California’s RTTT legislation that includes: promoting national education standards, using test scores to evaluate and compensate teachers and principals, lifting a cap on charter schools, and allowing parents to transfer their children out of the state’s lowest performing schools — while providing no provision for transportation costs — leaving this last piece a true hollow victory for parents.
School contracts and Race to the Top
A couple of things – first, the Neenah Schools contract settlement – I read the Post-Crescent account Friday and interpreted the recent deal as a total 4.4% over two years. No.
I talked with Neenah School District HR folks and the increase is an average 4.4% per year. Wow. Where are they going to get that kind of money? (December 29: Teacher cuts, not pay freezes recommended) And as much to the point, how will other districts in the area afford that?
As many of you know, if a school district (or municipality) can’t come to terms with their union(s), they can choose to go to arbitration – where neutral arbitrators decide which party’s last offer is best. That “best” includes which offer may be closest to other settlements in the area. And thanks to your legislators and mine, the state budget passed last June (yup, policy in the budget – imagine) says arbitrators are no longer required (point 3) to take local economic conditions or a district’s ability to pay into consideration.
Do you see a referendum and higher property taxes coming?
Race to the Top Dollars
Several Wisconsin school districts are considering not applying for Race to the Top (RTTT) dollars.
Race to the Top Vagueness & Commentary
Some of the most contentious areas of the new legislation include the option to close failing schools, convert them to charter schools or replace the principal and half the staff. Parents could exercise greater power within the public school system, with the possibility of moving children in the lowest-performing schools elsewhere or petition to turn around a chronically failing school.
The transfer option would be available to parents of children at the worst 1,000 schools. Parental petitions would be limited to 75 schools.
However, the implementation of any reforms is hazy, as the federal guidelines for the program cite broad goals, such as “making improvements in teacher effectiveness.”
Mekeel assured the board members that supporting the state’s application would not bind the district to accept the funds, if California is selected as a recipient.
“You’ll have another decision to make before we’re actually involved in this,” he said.
The legislation package also provides a method for linking teacher evaluations to student performance — an aspect arousing the fury of educators statewide.
Race to the Top Insights: Part 1
Mchele McNeil:, via a kind reader’s email
I spent the morning in a U.S. Department of Education technical-assistance planning seminar on Race to the Top, and have picked up a lot of interesting tidbits. Many states are in attendance–including Hawaii, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Tennessee (including education commissioner Tim Webb), just to name a few. Interestingly, Texas is also in attendance, I’m told.
The seminar will continue well into the afternoon, but so far, here are the insights I’ve picked up about this $4 billion competition:
Race to the Top Director Joanne Weiss emphasized that there will be a lot of losers in Phase 1 of the application, so states shouldn’t worry if they want to wait until the second round of competition. “We promise there will be plenty of money left in Phase 2,” she said.
Race to the Top: View from Monona Grove
The district received an initial solicitation from the state DPI regarding “Race to the top” funds. The race to the top funds will be divided into two parts, with half of the funds going to districts that agree to implement programs in 5 areas outlined in the memorandum:
Wisconsin Race to the Top: Governor/DPI Letter and “Memorandum of Understanding”
via a kind reader’s email; Letter from Governor Doyle and Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers [107K PDF]:
We are excited to invite you to participate in Wisconsin’s Race to the Top application to the federal government. Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, President Obama and Congress provided $4 billion in competitive grant funding to states that move forward with innovations and reform in education.
Earlier this fall, at our request, the Wisconsin Legislature passed bills to make Wisconsin both eligible and more competitive for the Race to the Top grants. Now our local school district leaders – school board members, superintendents, principals, teachers, and other staff – need to prepare their district for participation in Wisconsin’s grant application. Enclosed is the Race to the Top district memorandum of understanding (MOU) that the federal government requires participating districts to sign as part of the state’s Race to the Top grant application. The MOU provides a framework of collaboration between districts and the state articulating the specific roles and responsibilities necessary to implement an approved Race to the Top district grant.
The MOU is divided into two parts – Exhibit I and Exhibit II. To receive any Race to the Top funding, a district must agree to the activities in Exhibit I. Districts that agree to Exhibit I are eligible, if they so choose, to participate in Exhibit II. In Exhibit II districts will receive additional funding for participating in the additional activities. Exhibit I is included in this information and Exhibit II will be forthcoming in the very near future.
“Memorandum of Understanding” [208K PDF]:
I’m told that Madison’s potential intake of “Race to the Top” funds is less than 1% of the current $400MM budget.
Related: US National Debt Tops Debt Limit.
Schools race to — where, exactly? California’s pursuit of federal Race to the Top grants seems directionless, even reckless.
What wouldn’t California do for $700 million right now? That’s not a rhetorical question. With U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan parceling out more than $4 billion to states that conform to his vision of school reform, California’s Legislature is just one of dozens that are frantically revamping their states’ education systems for some of that cash. Should California succeed, its share would be somewhere between $350 million and $700 million.
To obtain the money, Sacramento must pass legislation that would serve as the basis for an application. This has given Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a perfect opportunity to push for more parent choice and fewer restrictions on charter schools, while the teachers unions have pushed an agenda that would handcuff the charter movement. There is some merit to both sides’ proposals — charter schools should be more accountable, and parents should have more say in the education process — but they have been poorly executed in ways that could have negative repercussions. Applications for Duncan’s “Race to the Top” grants are due in January, so who has time for a thoughtful debate?
Related: Joe Williams DFER blog. Mike Antonucci looks at the California Teachers Association lobbying.
The Race to the Top Starts Now
It is far past the time for California to step up and reform its education system. As a state, our schools were once the fourth-highest in the nation in reading and math. Now, we now rank below 40. In science, our students were once proudly some of the highest in the nation and now they are now some of the lowest.
This is simply unacceptable.
We have to reform the way we educate our children and, thanks to the Obama administration, we have a chance to do just that.
Thanks to the Race to the Top funds – $4.35 billion worth of competitive grants – states have the opportunity to compete for these funds that are intended to “encourage and reward states that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform.” Essentially, the White House and Department of Education have issued a challenge to states – come up with a workable plan to fix your failing schools and they will reward you with funding.
Value-Added Education in the Race to the Top
Bill Clinton may have invented triangulation – the art of finding a “third way” out of a policy dilemma – but U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is practicing it to make desperately needed improvements in K-12 education. Unfortunately, his promotion of value-added education through “Race to the Top” grants to states could be thrown under the bus by powerful teachers’ unions that view reforms more for how they affect pay and job security than whether they improve student learning.
The traditional view of education holds that it is more process than product. Educators design a process, hire teachers and administrators to run it, put students through it and consider it a success. The focus is on the inputs – how much can we spend, what curriculum shall we use, what class size is best – with very little on measuring outputs, whether students actually learn. The popular surveys of America’s best schools and colleges reinforce this, measuring resources and reputation, not results. As they say, Harvard University has good graduates because it admits strong applicants, not necessarily because of what happens in the educational process.
In the last decade, the federal No Child Left Behind program has ushered in a new era of testing and accountability, seeking to shift the focus to outcomes. But this more businesslike approach does not always fit a people-centered field such as education. Some students test well, and others do not. Some schools serve a disproportionately high number of students who are not well prepared. Even in good schools, a system driven by testing and accountability incentivizes teaching to the test, neglecting other important and interesting ways to engage and educate students. As a result, policymakers and educators have been ambivalent, at best, about the No Child Left Behind regime.
“Value Added Assessment” is underway in Madison, though the work is based in the oft-criticized state WKCE examinations.
School Reform Retreat? Duncan eases the rules for states to get ‘Race to the Top’ cash.
The Obama Administration’s education rhetoric, with its emphasis on charter schools and evaluating teachers based on student performance, has won plaudits from school reformers–and from us. But this month the Department of Education laid out in detail the eligibility requirements for states seeking federal grant money, and it looks like the praise may have been premature.
In the spring, when the White House announced its $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” initiative to improve K-12 schooling, President Obama said, “Any state that makes it unlawful to link student progress to teacher evaluations will have to change its ways to compete for a grant.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters, “states that don’t have charter school laws, or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools, will jeopardize their application.”
The Administration appears to be retreating on both requirements. The final Race to the Top regulations allow states to use “multiple measures,” including peer reviews, to evaluate instructors. This means states that prohibit student test data from being used to measure a teacher’s performance may be eligible for the federal funds, even though the President clearly said that they wouldn’t be.
Race to the Top in Education We can get real reform if the president resists pressure to dilute standards
Harold Ford, Jr., Louis V. Gerstner & Eli Broad:
For decades, policy makers have talked about significantly improving public education. The problem has been clear: one-third of public school children fail to graduate, there are embarrassing achievement gaps between middle-class children and poor and minority children, and the gap between our students and those in other countries threatens to undermine our economic competitiveness. Yet for the better part of a quarter century, urgent calls for change have seldom translated into improved public schools.
Now, however, President Barack Obama has launched “Race to the Top,” a competition that is parceling out $4.35 billion in new education funding to states that are committed to real reform. This program offers us an opportunity to finally move the ball forward.
To that end Mr. Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are pushing states toward meaningful change. Mr. Duncan has even stumped for reform alongside former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Yet the administration must continue to hang tough on two critical issues: performance standards and competition.
Already the administration is being pressured to dilute the program’s requirement that states adopt performance pay for teachers and to weaken its support for charter schools. If the president does not remain firm on standards, the whole endeavor will be just another example of great rhetoric and poor reform.
Wisconsin Governor Doyle’s “Race to the Top” Press Conference Today @ Madison’s Wright Middle School
Via a kind reader’s email. It will be interesting to see the intended and unintended consequences of the recently passed (47-46 in the Wisconsin Assembly) legislation. The news conference is scheduled for today @ 12:45p.m. at Madison’s Wright Middle School.
A reader mentioned that the Madison School District’s budget, has, in the past been approved by the City’s “Board of Estimates“. A return to this practice has its pros and cons. However, it may actually improve financial transparency, which, in my view has declined recently. Susan Troller’s recent MMSD budget article mentions a $350M 2009/2010 budget while the District’s budget site does not include the November, 2009 budget update 1.1MB PDF, which mentions a $418,415,780 2009/2010 Budget ($412,219,577 2008/2009 and $399,835,904 in 2007/2008).
Related: Doug Newman – For Debate: Who Picks School Board?. Greg Bump covered Doyle’s most recent press conference, which included a relevant discussion.
Comments on Obama & Race to the Top
The Department of Education will be accepting proposals for projects aimed at four reform areas:
To reverse the pervasive dumbing-down of academic standards and assessments by states, Race to the Top winners need to work toward adopting common, internationally bench marked K-12 standards that prepare students for success in college and careers.
To close the data gap — which now handcuffs districts from tracking growth in student learning and improving classroom instruction — states will need to monitor advances in student achievement and identify effective instructional practices. To boost the quality of teachers and principals, especially in high-poverty schools and hard-to-staff subjects, states and districts should be able to identify effective teachers and principals — and have strategies for rewarding and retaining more top-notch teachers and improving or replacing ones who aren’t up to the job. Finally, to turn around the lowest-performing schools, states and districts must be ready to institute far-reaching reforms, from replacing staff and leadership to changing the school culture There is one issue standing in the way for Wisconsin: a state law that prevents standardized test results from being used to evaluate teachers, which makes WI ineligible for “Race to the Top” funds. A bill in the legislature aims to repeal that law.
Gates Foundation Pays Consultants to Help Ohio (and other states) Apply for Federal Tax Dollar “Race to the Top” Grants
Ohio appears well-positioned to win a share of $4 billion in federal education money, but the state’s budget problems and limits on charter schools could prove costly.
Although education officials believe Ohio can meet the requirements for funding, the most creative proposals will win out. “We have to think innovatively,” said Scott Blake, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education.
Blake’s department is preparing the state’s application for the federal aid. Called “Race to the Top,” the money was set aside to create rigorous academic standards, data systems for measuring student success, tougher teacher evaluations, and to turn around low-performing schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is paying for private firms to help Ohio and 15 other states prepare their grant applications.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said the Obama administration wants to reward states willing to commit to significant education initiatives, including tax-funded, privately operated charter schools that have been controversial in Ohio and elsewhere.
“I think, based on outside evaluations that have been done by the Gates Foundation and others, Ohio is fairly well positioned for Race to the Top dollars,” said Terry Ryan, vice president for Ohio programs and policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Dayton.
Join me at the REACH Awards Day next Wed 8/5; Education Reform’s Moon Shot; A $4B Push for Better Schools; Taken to school: Obama funding plan must force Legislature to accept education reforms; President Obama Discusses New ‘Race to the Top’ Program
1) I hope you can join me a week from Wednesday at the REACH Awards Day from 10-12:30 on Aug. 5th at the Chase branch on 39th and Broadway (see full invite at the end of this email).
REACH (Rewarding Achievement; www.reachnyc.org) is a pay-for-performance initiative that aims to improve the college readiness of low-income students at 31 inner-city high schools in New York by rewarding them with up to $1,000 for each Advanced Placement exam they pass. I founded it, with funding from the Pershing Square Foundation and support from the Council of Urban Professionals.
This past year was the first full year of the program and I’m delighted to report very substantial gains in the overall number of students passing AP exams at the 31 schools, and an even bigger gain among African-American and Latino students (exact numbers will be released at the event). As a result, more than 1,000 student have earned nearly $1 MILLION in REACH Scholar Awards! Next Wednesday, the students will come to pick up their checks, Joel Klein will be the highlight of the press conference at 11am, and there will be a ton of media. I hope to see you there! You can RSVP to REACH@nycup.org.
2) STOP THE PRESSES!!! Last Friday will go down in history, I believe, as a key tipping point moment in the decades-long effort to improve our K-12 educational system. President Obama and Sec. Duncan both appeared at a press conference to announce the formal launch of the Race to the Top fund (KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg also spoke and rocked the house!). Other than not being there on vouchers, Obama and Duncan are hitting ALL of the right notes, which, backed with HUGE dollars, will no doubt result in seismic shifts in educational policy across the country.
Here’s an excerpt from Arne Duncan’s Op Ed in the Washington Post from Friday (full text below — well worth reading):
Under Race to the Top guidelines, states seeking funds will be pressed to implement four core interconnected reforms.
— To reverse the pervasive dumbing-down of academic standards and assessments by states, Race to the Top winners need to work toward adopting common, internationally benchmarked K-12 standards that prepare students for success in college and careers.
— To close the data gap — which now handcuffs districts from tracking growth in student learning and improving classroom instruction — states will need to monitor advances in student achievement and identify effective instructional practices.
— To boost the quality of teachers and principals, especially in high-poverty schools and hard-to-staff subjects, states and districts should be able to identify effective teachers and principals — and have strategies for rewarding and retaining more top-notch teachers and improving or replacing ones who aren’t up to the job.
— Finally, to turn around the lowest-performing schools, states and districts must be ready to institute far-reaching reforms, from replacing staff and leadership to changing the school culture.
The Race to the Top program marks a new federal partnership in education reform with states, districts and unions to accelerate change and boost achievement. Yet the program is also a competition through which states can increase or decrease their odds of winning federal support. For example, states that limit alternative routes to certification for teachers and principals, or cap the number of charter schools, will be at a competitive disadvantage. And states that explicitly prohibit linking data on achievement or student growth to principal and teacher evaluations will be ineligible for reform dollars until they change their laws.
Civics: Ban on mandatory training of certain race topics “is a naked viewpoint-based regulation on speech.”
The speech orientation of the law is clearly not neutral: It censors only one position on the controversy based on its viewpoint. Walker further rejects the state’s attempt to say that the act aims to regulate conduct, not speech. (This argument may be familiar to libertarians, who have seen states use it to try to unduly control who is and is not allowed to give advice.) Walker notes that laws against racist conduct at the workplace can be identified separately from speech. But IFA can only be understood through the lens of what is and is not said. It is entirely a regulation of speech, not conduct.
Walker then subjects the law to strict scrutiny, requiring the state to prove that it has a compelling interest to justify engaging in such censorship. To put it mildly, constitutional law is not on the state’s side here.
“The First Amendment does not give the state license to censor speech because it finds it ‘repugnant,’ no matter how captive the audience,” Walker writes. “And even assuming the IFA serves a compelling government interest—like prohibiting discrimination—it is not narrowly tailored. In large part, this is because the [Florida Civil Rights Act of 1992] already prohibited much of what Defendants claim the IFA aims to prohibit. For example, a diversity and inclusion training could be so offensive, and so hostile to White employees, that it could create a hostile work environment. That is already illegal—as both parties acknowledge.” Walker concludes that the IFA attacks ideas, not conduct, and so the plaintiffs are likely to win the case.
Walker also agrees with the plaintiffs that the IFA is “impermissibly vague” in how it defines the forbidden ideas, leaving it for the state to resolve and leaving employers unclear about what sort of discussion about race is and is not forbidden.
Race, Postoperative Complications, and Death in Apparently Healthy Children
OUND: That African American (AA) patients have poorer surgical outcomes compared with their white peers is established. The prevailing presumption is that these disparities operate within the context of a higher preoperative comorbidity burden among AA patients. Whether these racial differences in outcomes exist among apparently healthy children (traditionally expected to have low risk of postsurgical complications) has not been previously investigated.
METHODS: We performed a retrospective study by analyzing the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program–Pediatric database from 2012 through 2017 and identifying children who underwent inpatient operations and were assigned American Society of Anesthesiologists physical status 1 or 2. We used univariable and risk-adjusted logistic regression to estimate the odds ratios and their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of postsurgical outcomes comparing AA to white children.
More Race to Top Winners Push Back Promises
The list of delays states are encountering in implementing their Race to the Top plans keeps getting longer.
Every state but Georgia has now amended its Race to the Top plan in some way, usually to push back a timeline or scale back an initiative. In all, the dozen winners from the $4 billion competition have changed their plans, so far, 25 times, according to the list of amendments approved by the U.S. Department of Education. Remember, the winners were chosen based, at least in part, on their promises in those plans.
The changes includes a 32-page amendment with dozens of changes to New York’s plan, including one of the first amendments I’ve seen that doesn’t just push back a timeline, but eliminates a small piece of the state’s plan. That particular amendment eliminates a $10 million program to provide competitive grants for charter school facilities in New York, and redistributes the money across a few other programs, including a general “school innovation fund.” This may–or may not–be a big deal, but it’s at least worth noting.
The Escalating Arms Race for Top Colleges
It is no secret that the children of certain families (and we all know who we are) are primed to take a disproportionate share of the places at the best–or at least the most prestigious–colleges. That’s because we’re already sending our kids to the kinds of excellent schools that help prepare them for admission to such colleges.
But just in case our children don’t quite have the stats to make it into, say, Georgetown or UNC on their own steam, you can bet that we, as parents, will do everything in our power to make it happen. We are all caught up in a crazy arms race, where the order of the day (to borrow a useful term from the Cold War) is “escalation dominance.”
Committee vote may endanger Md. Race to Top grant
A Maryland legislative committee voted Monday to reject a new regulation requiring that half of teachers’ evaluations be based on student progress, calling into question the future of a $250 million federal Race to the Top grant.
The move is a challenge to a core component of the education plan proposed by Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) and State Schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick in the spring. The federal money was awarded in part because Maryland promised that student progress would be such a large component of the evaluations, and President Obama has encouraged such changes.
But opponents of the policy, including the state’s teachers unions, say that standardized tests are not designed to give information about teachers and that teachers should not be held responsible for outside factors that affect achievement.
Race to Top Buy-In Level Examined
States significantly increased buy-in from local teachers’ unions in round two of the Race to the Top competition, but made far less progress in enlisting districts or expanding the number of students affected by the states’ education reform plans.
Those patterns emerged from an Education Week analysis of applications from 29 states and the District of Columbia, all of which entered both rounds of the $4 billion federal grant contest.
Although the changes made in applications from the first to the second round varied widely from state to state, union buy-in increased on average by 22 percentage points, with states such as Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin making big leaps.
At the same time, the overall level of district support and students affected in the 30 applications barely budged, mostly owing to California’s loss of support from about 500 districts representing nearly 2 million students. That negated progress other states made in improving buy-in.
Little-known San Jose educator lands atop heap in race for California schools chief
Some neophyte politicians spent megabucks gained from their famous companies to persuade California voters Tuesday to grant them a spot on the November ballot.
Then there was Larry Aceves. The retired superintendent of San Jose’s Franklin-McKinley, a school district obscure even in its own county, stumbled onto the ballot for California’s superintendent of public instruction after a low-budget campaign tour of the Rotary and PTA circuit. Topping 11 other candidates, Aceves won 18.8 percent of the statewide vote, the secretary of state’s office reported Wednesday, shocking two better financed and more experienced candidates.
“I pinched myself several times to make sure this wasn’t a dream,” the until now, little-known educator said Wednesday morning.
Assemblyman Tom Torlakson, D-Martinez, won 18 percent and the chance to face Aceves in a November runoff. Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, earned 17.2 percent of the vote, while nine others each got less than 10 percent in their quest to replace outgoing schools chief Jack O’Connell.
Race to Top Leaves Some School Reformers Weary
President Barack Obama’s signature education initiative has encouraged the overhaul of state laws governing charter schools, teacher evaluations and student-testing systems.
But ahead of the Tuesday deadline for states to apply for the second phase of Race to the Top, some education reformers were complaining the changes have not been as bold or widespread as expected.
“It’s the dog that didn’t bark,” said Andy Smarick, a former education department official under George W. Bush who supports the initiative. “I don’t want to underplay what has happened, but we have not seen revolutionary changes from coast to coast.”
Harvard study gives Race to Top winners bad grades on academic standards
One of the two states chosen by Education Secretary Arne Duncan as a winner in the first round of the $4 billion Race to the Top competition has academic standards that earned the grade of ‘F’ in a new study by Harvard University researchers, while the other state got a ‘C minus.’
The Education Next report by researchers Paul E. Peterson and Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadón also shows that standards in most states remain far below the proficiency standard set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP is known as the nation’s report card because it tests students across the country by the same measure and is considered the testing gold standard. States have their own individual student assessments designed to test students’ knowledge of state academic standards, which are all different.
This study, available on the Education Next website, comes on the heels of another analysis done by the Washington D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, which concluded that the two first-round winning states, Tennessee and Delaware, were chosen through “arbitrary criteria” rather than through a rigorous scientific process.
Unions, States Clash in Race to Top
Neil King, Jr. & Stephanie Banchero:
The Obama administration’s signature education initiative has incited tense showdowns in states across the country as unions and state officials feud over strategies to compete for $3.4 billion in federal funding.
The skirmishes come as states jockey for cash under the administration’s Race to the Top program, which seeks to reward states that are pushing to overhaul their education systems.
Applications for the second round are due by June 1, with winners to be chosen in September. Of the 40 states that submitted applications in the first round, only 16 were picked as finalists.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan ramped up pressure on the unions last month when he cited the advantage of union cooperation in picking just two states–Delaware and Tennessee–as winners in the competition’s first round. Those states will share $600 million.
States Skeptical About ‘Race to Top’ School Aid Contest
A dozen governors, led by Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado, sat with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a hotel ballroom in Washington a few weeks back, praising his vision and gushing with enthusiasm over a $4 billion grant competition they hoped could land their states a jackpot of hundreds of millions of dollars.
But for many of those governors, the contest lost some sizzle last week, when Mr. Duncan awarded money to only two states — Delaware and Tennessee.
Colorado, which had hoped to win $377 million, ended in 14th place. Now Mr. Ritter says the scoring by anonymous judges seemed inscrutable, some Coloradans view the contest as federal intrusion and the governor has not decided whether to reapply for the second round.
Wisconsin’s Race to Top bid deemed subpar
Wisconsin’s application for a share of $4.35 billion in federal education grants scored in the bottom half of 41 applicants, earning the equivalent of a C-minus grade by government reviewers.
The state’s score sheet and the accompanying reviewer comments were released Monday after U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan revealed that Tennessee and Delaware won funding from the first phase of the Race to the Top competition, qualifying them for $500 million and $100 million, respectively, over the next four years.
All of the reviewers noted that few local teachers union leaders in Wisconsin had supported the state’s application, and one noted that the statewide teachers union’s support seemed “tepid.” That was far short of expectations for competitive applications.
“Because teachers will play such a key role in the implementation of these efforts, their support is essential,” one of Wisconsin’s reviewers wrote in an evaluation of the state’s application.
Wisconsin risks stumbling in ‘Race to Top’
University of Wisconsin School of Education Dean Julie Underwood:
President Barack Obama spoke at Wright Middle School in Madison last month and urged our nation to make improving K-12 education a national priority.
The president underscored the critical link between improving education and our nation’s future economy. He called for our schools to push all students to achieve at higher levels.
The president also spoke about our need to raise the bar for student achievement and to close existing achievement gaps. He is offering the states $4.35 billion in competitive “Race to the Top” grants to try to spur improvement.
His call for reform comes at a critical time for our schools. Our graduates face an increasingly competitive world. The future of our state rests on our ability to prepare our students with the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed.
In recent years, however, the real struggle in Wisconsin has been in maintaining the quality public school system created by previous generations. Our public schools operate under a financial system that chokes reform and chips away at quality.
Underwood’s School of Education has a close relationship with the Madison School District via grants and other interactions. Former Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater now works for the School along with former Administrator Jack Jorgenson. Underwood attended the 2008 Madison Superintendent candidate public appearances.
Georgia strives to race to top in education
eorgia is in a race to the top and, in many respects, we’re leading the way.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced recently that $5 billion in grants are being made available to states that — in his words — adopt “college and career-ready internationally benchmarked standards” and “state of the art data collection systems, assessments and curricula to meet these higher standards.”
To me, it sounds like Secretary Duncan was reading straight from our Strategic Plan. For six years, Georgia has been focused on implementing a world-class curriculum, raising expectations and using quality data to make decisions. We have received high marks for the policies and standards we’ve put in place from groups across the nation.
But the journey to “the top” is not always smooth and raising standards is not easy. The truth is that the material that Georgia students are learning today is more rigorous than it has ever been and, consequently, the assessments they are taking are more difficult.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the pass rates on our state tests — like the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests and End of Course Tests — drop in the first year we’ve implemented our new curriculum and given the new state exams. This is to be expected: Whenever you raise the bar, there’s going to be a temporary drop in the number of people that can reach that bar. That’s true in any situation.
Madison Schools’ Using race to deny white student transfers to be topic for the School Board
As families’ application deadline looms, many are wondering whether the Madison School District will halt its practice of using race as the reason for denying some white students’ requests to transfer to other districts.
The answer could begin to emerge as early as Monday, the first day for Wisconsin families
to request open-enrollment transfers for the coming school year.
Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater and the district’s legal counsel will confer Monday night with the School Board. It’s possible that after the closed-door discussion, the board will take a vote in open session to stop blocking open-enrollment requests on the basis of race, School Board President Arlene Silveira said.
“This is a serious decision for our school district, ” Rainwater said.
“It is our responsibility to take a very careful look at legal issues facing our school district. ”
Last year, Madison was the only of the state’s 426 school districts to deny transfer requests because of race, rejecting 126 white students’ applications to enroll in other districts, including online schools. Many of the affected students live within the district but weren’t enrolled in public schools because they were being home-schooled or attended private schools.
Related articles:
- Wisconsin Attorney General Says Race Can’t Stop Student Transfers from Madison
- Wisconsin Open Enrollment Closed to White Madison Students
- Open Enrollment Denied
- Madison Parents Seek Court Order to Open Enroll into Monona Grove School District
- Wisconsin Open Enrollment: Part or Full Time
- Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau Informational Paper 28 School Integration (Chapter 220) Aid, January 2007
- Wisconsin Attorney General Opinion on constitutionality of Section 118.51(7)(a), requiring denial of transfer based on race
Wisconsin Attorney General Says Race Can’t Stop Student Transfers from Madison
The future of the state’s voluntary school integration program in Madison was thrown into doubt Thursday by a formal opinion from Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen declaring it unconstitutional to use race to block students’ attempts to transfer to other school districts.
The 11-page opinion, issued in response to a Sept. 17 request by Deputy State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, isn’t legally binding. However, courts consider interpretations offered by attorneys general, and the opinions can carry weight among lawmakers, too.
Madison is the only one of the state’s 426 public school districts that invokes race to deny some students’ requests to transfer to other districts under the state’s open enrollment program, the Wisconsin State Journal reported on Sept. 9.
In response to Van Hollen’s opinion, Madison schools Superintendent Art Rainwater said he and the district’s legal staff will review the document and confer with DPI officials before commenting.
“As we always have, we have every intention of obeying the law,” Rainwater said.
Figures compiled by the State Journal showed the Madison School District cited concerns over increasing its “racial imbalance” in rejecting 140 transfer requests involving 126 students for this school year. There are more applications than students because some filed more than one request.
All of the students involved in those rejected transfer requests were white.
The number of race-based rejections represents a 71 percent increase over the previous year, according to data supplied by the district. The number of rejections has nearly tripled since the 2004-05 school year.
This is an interesting paradox, a District that takes great pride in some area rankings while at the same time being resistant to such movements. Transfers can go both ways, of course. Redistributed state tax dollar transfers and local property tax & spending authority dollars are tied to enrollment.
Todd Richmond has more along with Alan Borsuk:
According to DPI spokesman Patrick Gasper, Madison is the only district in the state that could be directly affected. The Madison district has refused to allow students, almost all of them white, to enroll in other districts because of racial balance issues. This year, about 125 students were kept from transferring, Madison Superintendent Art Rainwater said.
Milwaukee Public Schools followed a similar practice in the late 1990s but changed policies about eight years ago, allowing students to attend suburban schools under the state’s open enrollment law regardless of the impact on school integration in Milwaukee.
Notes on School Books and Censorship (Literacy?; Canada Dystopia)
Jacki Lyden, Barry Wightman and John Norcross:
Wisconsin Writers for Democratic Action (www) is keeping track of each book ban. We’re doing it because we know that these book banning efforts are about sowing distrust in the very idea of public education and all of our public institutions. These organized MAGA campaigns promote a white nationalism view of the country that sees the LGBTQ community as a scapegoat, and sees a misunderstood, seldom taught critical race theory as a bogus plot against America. Parents who do not want children to read specific books have always been able to control what their children read, in school, or at the library. As it should be. That’s not what this is about.
Justin Trudeau Creates Blueprint for Dystopia in Horrific Speech Bill
Life sentences for speech? Pre-crime detention? Ex post facto law? Anonymous accusers? It’s all in Justin Trudeau’s “Online Harms Bill,” a true “threat to democracy”Then people read the bill.
“If you look at the purpose of this law, it’s actually quite noble and most lawyers would agree with it,” says Canadian attorney Dan Freiheit. “Online safety, protecting children’s physical and mental health.” But the actual text?
“It’s wild,” Freheit says.Trudeau was lying when he said C-63 was “very, very specifically focused on correcting kids.” The purview of the Online Harms Act extends far beyond speech, reimagining society as a mandated social engineering project, creating transformational new procedures that would:
enlist Canada’s citizens in an ambitious social monitoring system, with rewards of up to $20,000 for anonymous “informants” of hateful behavior, with the guilty paying penalties up to $50,000, creating a self-funded national spying system;
introduce extraordinary criminal penalties, including life in prison not just for existing crimes like “advocating genocide,” but for any “offence motivated by hatred,” in theory any non-criminal offense, as tiny as littering, committed with hateful intent;
punish Minority Report pre-crime, where if an informant convinces a judge you “will commit” a hate offense, you can be jailed up to a year, put under house arrest, have firearms seized, or be forced into drug/alcohol testing, all for things you haven’t done;
penalize past statements. The law gets around prohibitions against “retroactive” punishment by calling the offense “continuous communication” of hate, i.e. the crime is your failure to take down bad speech;
force corporate Internet platforms to remove “harmful content” virtually on demand (within 24 hours in some cases), the hammer being fines of “up to 6% of… gross global revenue.”
Would these folks that a school must keep Mein Kampf, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or The Turner Diaries in K-12 libraries? Can a school curate its collection? Is removing – or restricting access to – a book from a library for children “banning” it?
“Over the last decade, just 10 of 24 races for Madison School Board have been contested”
WiSJ:
But the odd way Madison elects its School Board is a significant factor that needs fixing. State law requires candidates in cities with populations between 150,000 and 500,000 — meaning only Madison — to run citywide in seven numbered seats for three-year terms.
So every spring, candidates must choose which of two or three seats they will seek. For competitive reasons, new candidates tend to run for seats that incumbents don’t already hold. That lets incumbents avoid scrutiny.
It also can deny voters choices. For example, an incumbent ran unopposed for Seat 7 last spring, while two new candidates ran for Seat 6. But what if a voter preferred the two newbies over the incumbent? Voters can’t select those two on their ballots.
In theory, a candidate with fewer votes could even win election.
A better system would pit all candidates for Madison School Board in the same pool, with the top vote-getters earning however many seats are available. That’s how most school boards across Wisconsin conduct their elections. Or they assign seats to geographic areas.
——
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Competitive school board races in Monona (Madison are uniparty – uncontested of course)
The Monona Grove School Board candidate forum will be from 1 to 2:30 p.m. Four candidates are running for three three-year terms. They are incumbents Eric Hartz and Philip Haven, and challengers Katie Moureau and Janice Stone.
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Diversity Efforts at Top High School
The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down a case seeking to block selective public schools from using race-neutral admissions policies that conservative activists argue are illegally designed to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment.
The case, involving Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., was seen as a follow-on to the court’s decision in June ending affirmative action in university admissions. It more directly involved a 2007 ruling that barred school boards from promoting integration by using race as a factor in pupil assignments but that suggested officials could consider the racial impact of broader policies such as where to build new campuses.
Tuesday’s order, which, as is typical, was unsigned and provided no explanation, leaves school authorities free to pursue measures that may promote integration without classifying individual students by race. Two conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, dissented from the decision not to hear the case.
World’s Top School Systems Try to Ease Pressure on Students
The world’s most competitive school systems, known for their hard-driving approach and top-notch academic results, are easing up.
Students in Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan score at the top of global tables in mathematics and science, far higher than their American counterparts. But their schools are also often stress factories where children are pushed hard to ace high-stakes national exams, sometimes achieved through long hours of homework and pricey private tutoring.
Governments are trying to rein in the education arms race.
Singapore has scrapped all exams for first- and second-year primary school students, and midyear exams all the way through secondary school—part of a roster of changes intended to make learning joyful, or at least less test-heavy. South Korea is cutting some of the toughest questions on national tests for graduating high-schoolers. Taiwan has begun requiring university applicants to list extracurricular achievements in an effort to reduce the emphasis on exam scores.
China has slashed homework for younger students and banned for-profit tutoring centers. It has forbidden written exams for first- and second-graders, ordered teachers to stop publicizing exam scores in chat groups with parents, and abolished what it calls “strange questions” on tests—a reference to extra-hard queries that go beyond the curriculum, often fueling demand for after-school tutoring.
Race based teacher union fees
The Oregon teachers union is contemplating a “progressive dues structure” that will charge white teachers higher fees than their “BIPoC” counterparts.
This is racism in the guise of anti-racism. pic.twitter.com/c0x0WuAuHx
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 6, 2023
“an overwhelming 74 percent thought that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions”
Democrats are very shaky indeed on the idea of merit today but that wobbliness goes back quite a way to the origins of affirmative action as a tool for allocating jobs and school admissions. As it evolved in practice, affirmative action became bound up with preferences based on race (later also on gender) that were used to override allocations based on conventional measures of merit. While these practices have been with us for a long time, they have never been popular. Voters have been stubbornly resistant to the idea that it’s fair to allocate sought-over slots on the basis of race rather than merit.
This is true today as the Supreme Court prepares to render a decision next month on affirmative action in higher education as practiced byHarvard and the University of North Carolina. The Harvard case turns particularly on whether Asians have been discriminated against in admissions to that college. Given the proclivities of the Court and the blindingly obvious pattern of such discrimination—denying it seems as plausible as professing one’s belief in the Easter Bunny—it is a safe bet that the Court will decide against the universities. In so doing, the Court will find itself on the good side of public opinion and Democrats, who will no doubt denounce the decision in histrionic terms, will find themselves very much on the wrong side.
In typical polling from Pew in 2022, just 7 percent of the public thought high school grades should not be a factor in college admissions and a mere 14 percent thought standardized test scores should not be a factor. But an overwhelming 74 percent thought that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions.
Legacy Media endorses “critical race theorist”
The Squire of Stately Blaska Manor did the Danny Thomas coffee spray Sunday morning. In that long-ago sitcom, originally called Make Room for Daddy, his missus would relate some catastrophe and the comedian, mid-sip at breakfast, would spray Maxwell House into the atmosphere.
The Wisconsin State Journal, the state capital’s newspaper of record, Sunday 04-02-23 endorsed Blair Mosner Feltham for Madison school board. Over Badri Lankella for the seat being vacated by Christina Gomez Schmidt.
Blair Mosner Feltham. The same one who says:
“Our schools are products of white supremacy.”
That is pure, unadulterated critical race theory. Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D’Angelo (responsible for “the second-worst book ever written,” according to the author of Woke Racism), reparations advocate Ta-Nehisi Coates, and UW-Madison’s Gloria Ladson-Billings — none could have said it better!
“[Schools] reinforce white supremacy and if we want to talk about how we make sure all students are thriving on our schools, we need to fundamentally change both the structure of our schools and the purposes of them.”— Blair Mosner Feltham, WSJ endorsee for Madison school board
The first major national conference dedicated wholly to Critical Race Theory was held in Madison, Wisconsin, on July 7-12, 1989. — "CRT: a brief history"
Virginia AG orders Fairfax school to stop racial discrimination against Asian, white students in college prep
The woke district’s letter didn’t cite Asian or white students as being qualified for the program.
“It has come to the attention of this Office that Cooper Middle School is engaging in conduct in contravention of the Virginia Human Rights Act … and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution,” Johnson wrote.
“It appears that Cooper Middle School is soliciting and selecting applicants to the College Partnership Program based on race, color, and national origin,” she continued.
Race Neutrality in academic hiring
Today CNN did a segment on Texas Tech’s decision to stop using diversity statements in faculty hiring, citing my report. https://t.co/h9d5kuqiAa
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) February 16, 2023
Race Neutrality in academic hiring
Today CNN did a segment on Texas Tech’s decision to stop using diversity statements in faculty hiring, citing my report. https://t.co/h9d5kuqiAa
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) February 16, 2023
Notes on the “stop woke act”
The Economist:
Despite being weakened, the Stop woke Act has had an effect on campuses. Twenty-eight presidents of public colleges signed a letter on January 18th promising to defend “Florida values”. “Our institutions will not fund or support any institutional practice, policy, or academic requirement that compels belief in critical-race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality, or the idea that systems of oppression should be the primary lens through which teaching and learning are analysed and/or improved upon,” the letter says.
Usually when people want to prevent an idea they dislike, they limit who can speak on campus, says Adam Steinbaugh, a lawyer at fire. (Liberals have been accused of using this practice against their conservative enemies recently.) But the Stop Woke Act is different. “Florida is skipping the pretext,” Mr Steinbaugh says. “They’re skipping the middleman and just limiting ideas themselves.”
The law has created a culture of fear on campus, says a faculty member at the University of Florida, who wishes to remain anonymous. His university inbox is filled with emails about the act. Academics worry about accidentally breaking the law and being reported, he says. The University of South Florida, a different public university in Florida, has a website for students to report discrimination which specifically asks for “violations of House Bill 7.” The consequences could be steep for public universities, which stand to lose millions of dollars in state funding.
Stop subsidizing payoff-based college admissions
There aren’t many places where Republicans and Democrats can find common ground, but one has become clear as the Supreme Court takes up race-based admissions preference in lawsuits involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina. However the court ultimately rules, these cases have brilliantly illuminated the unsavory, publicly-subsidized admissions practices of selective colleges.
The most egregious may be those practices that allow the wealthy and connected to purchase special admissions treatment by making a large “charitable” contribution to deep-pocketed colleges — and to do it with big taxpayer subsidies. For progressive Democrats committed to promoting equity and ending tax breaks that favor the ultra-wealthy, such practices are obviously troubling. The same is true for populist Republicans frustrated with bloated college bureaucracies and self-dealing elites.
Why are administrators at a top-ranked public high school hiding National Merit awards from students and families?
For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom.
An intrepid Thomas Jefferson parent, Shawna Yashar, a lawyer, uncovered the withholding of National Merit awards. Since starting as a freshman at the school in September 2019, her son, who is part Arab American, studied statistical analysis, literature reviews, and college-level science late into the night. This workload was necessary to keep him up to speed with the advanced studies at TJ, which U.S. News & World Report ranks as America’s top school.
Last fall, along with about 1.5 million U.S. high school juniors, the Yashar teen took the PSAT, which determines whether a student qualifies as a prestigious National Merit scholar. When it came time to submit his college applications this fall, he didn’t have a National Merit honor to report—but it wasn’t because he hadn’t earned the award. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a nonprofit based in Evanston, Illinois, had recognized him as a Commended Student in the top 3 percent nationwide—one of about 50,000 students earning that distinction. Principals usually celebrate National Merit scholars with special breakfasts, award ceremonies, YouTube videos, press releases, and social media announcements.
Civics: extend, embrace -> extinguish
Extend, embrace, extinguish. Amazon’s AWS, which bought the end-to-end encrypted messaging service Wickr last year, says it’ll stop accepting new registrations for its consumer product Wickr Me at the end of this year, & discontinue it entirely after 2023. https://t.co/rM1TlNItG5
— briankrebs (@briankrebs) November 19, 2022
Can Harvard Discriminate by Race Forever?
he Supreme Court Justices exhibited supreme patience Monday in hearing nearly four hours of argument in a pair of major cases involving race and college admissions. But the argument was worth the time, because it exposed some unhappy truths about those who believe in the necessity of discriminating by race.
This means revisiting Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which said schools could use race as one factor in admissions in the name of achieving diversity. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor also famously wrote in Grutter that the use of race to achieve diversity probably wouldn’t be needed in 25 years.
That was 19 years ago, and on Monday several Justices pressed the question about when racial preferences would end. Seth Waxman, Harvard’s advocate, admitted that the school is trying hard to get to a race-neutral future but sees no end in sight for preferences.
Elizabeth Prelogar, the U.S. Solicitor General and an impressive advocate, said explicitly that “I just don’t think it’s tenable to read” Grutter to say the Court had suggested a timetable. She said using race the way the schools do could continue as long as their interest in diversity is “compelling.”
The clear implication is that the schools can discriminate by race for years to come. And anyone who knows anything about the men and women who run today’s universities, and how they believe racism is “systemic” in American life, knows that the schools will never stop using preferences.
NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks, Eric Adams put each other’s girlfriends in top posts
Schools Chancellor David Banks quietly promoted Mayor Adams’ girlfriend to a top job at the Department of Education, just months after Adams hired Banks’ girlfriend as a deputy mayor, The Post has learned.
Banks named Tracey Collins — Adams’ longtime partner and NYC’s unofficial First Lady — the DOE’s “senior advisor to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” Desmond Blackburn. She started the new job in July, and got a giant, 23% raise to $221,597 a year, records show.
Hizzoner named Banks’ girlfriend, Sheena Wright, and four other women deputy mayors last Dec. 21. Deputy mayors made $251,982 in FY 21.
Both women’s advancement underscores the tight inner circle of the Adams administration.
Wright, 52, previously CEO of United Way of NYC, helped lead Adams’ transition team. Banks and Wright live together in Harlem. Banks and Adams took office on Jan. 1.
A Queens teacher was stunned to learn of the quid pro beau.
“Critical Race Theory Is Bad Medicine”
My membership in the American College of Surgeons goes back almost 30 years. The 84,000-member professional society’s sole focus should be improving the standard of surgical care, but in recent years the college has made a priority of promoting critical race theory and so-called antiracism. Like many radicalized organizations, the college has taken to punishing members who raise concerns over its new agenda.
The college’s elevation of ideology—and demotion of surgery—was swift. I saw the first signs in 2019, when the college invited Joan Y. Reede to deliver its prestigious annual lecture. Dr. Reede is dean for diversity and community partnership at Harvard Medical School. The topic of her speech was “a path toward diversity, inclusion, and excellence.”
As the son of a Brazilian mother and American father, I welcomed her praise of diversity, but Dr. Reede’s speech made no meaningful mention of “excellence.” Surgery is a discipline that demands excellence in all its stages, from training to practice. Should diversity supplant quality in surgeon performance, patient care would suffer. Remarkably, Dr. Reede’s vision was met with rapturous acceptance by the college’s leadership, and the unqualified push for diversity became a lodestar for the group.
University of Wisconsin campuses openly embrace a Marxist program called ‘critical pedagogy.’
I studied for a master’s degree in education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. My program was batty. We made Black Lives Matter friendship bracelets. We passed around a popsicle stick to designate whose turn it was to talk while professors compelled us to discuss our life’s traumas. We read poems through the “lenses” of Marxism and critical race theory in preparation for our students doing the same. Our final projects were acrostic poems or ironic rap videos.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has reviewed the required coursework for 14 programs for teachers-to-be in the Badger State. These programs produce about 80% of all teaching graduates in the state each year. What they found was shocking. Worldview building and ideological manipulation take precedence over teacher preparation.
On the syllabi, noticeably lacking are academic literature or manuals of classroom instruction. Instead, Hollywood movies like “Freedom Writers,” popular books like Jonathan Kozol’s “Letters to a Young Teacher,” and propaganda like “Anti-Racist Baby” abound. In place of academic essays, graduate students write personal poems or collect photographs. These kitschy activities infantilize what ought to be a rigorous pursuit of professional competency.
An Interview with Christopher Rufo
Whether one agrees or disagrees with his work, there is no denying that the writer, documentarian, and activist Chris Rufo has had an extremely significant impact on our political discourse, debates and even our laws. Even large liberal outlets which seek to demonize him — such as the New Yorker and New York Times — acknowledge the immensely consequential nature of his work, especially on debates about what is taught in schools about race and LGBT issues. With this significance in mind, I spoke to Rufo about his core worldview and the goals of his political work. It was a spirited and in-depth discussions that focused on some of our differences and the questions many have about his aspirations.
Civics: My wife and I were shut out of the RISE small-business program solely due to my race and sex.
When I started a commercial cleaning business with my wife in 2011, I didn’t imagine that I would be a plaintiff in a race-discrimination lawsuit against a massive corporation.
Competitive School Board Races (!) San Francisco & Mount Horeb Incumbents Ousted. Madison?
Jill Tucker & Anni Vainshtein:
San Francisco voters overwhelmingly supported the ouster of three school board members Tuesday in the city’s first recall election in nearly 40 years.
The landslide decision means board President Gabriela López and members Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga will officially be removed from office and replaced by mayoral appointments 10 days after the election is officially accepted by the Board of Supervisors.
The new board members are likely to take office in mid-March. The three were the only school board members who had served long enough to be eligible for a recall.
The recall divided the city for the past year, with a grassroots effort of frustrated parents and community members pushing for the trustees’ removal over the slow reopening of schools during the pandemic and the board’s focus on controversial issues like renaming 44 school sites and ending the merit-based admission system at Lowell High School.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen said she wasn’t surprised by the results.
“We faced the hardest time of our entire lives as parents and as students in public schools and this Board of Education focused on issues that weren’t about dealing with the immediate crisis of the day, and they didn’t show the leadership that that was necessary and that parents needed to hear, and that kids needed to hear,” said Ronen.
At least a hundred recall backers had gathered in the back room of Manny’s Cafe in the Mission District on Tuesday night.
In an election season heated by controversy surrounding COVID mitigation policy and K-12 curriculum, Dane County’s largest school board race appeared split, with voters pushing through a raft of newcomers while ousting one longtime incumbent and advancing another during Tuesday’s primary election.
The SF school board recall should be a wake up call to elected officials — especially Democrats — across the nation: Parents are fed up with the status quo that puts adults ahead of kids and ideology ahead of results.
— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) February 16, 2022
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Wisconsin Governor Evers vetoes “critical race theory” bill
In vetoing the critical race theory bill, Evers said he is objecting to creating new censorship rules that would prohibit educators from teaching “honest, complete facts about important historical topics.”
“Our kids deserve to learn in an atmosphere conducive to learning without being subjected to state legislative encroachment that is neither needed nor warranted,” said Evers, a lifelong educator.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
2022 Wisconsin Governer’s Race and K-12 changes
Two Republicans running for governor said this week they would sign legislation that dissolves the state’s largest school district while the Democratic incumbent who spent a career in education said the idea would throw Milwaukee’s children into “chaos.”
Gov. Tony Evers, a former state superintendent and public school educator, signaled Tuesday he would not support a package of bills being proposed by Republican lawmakers that would break up Milwaukee Public Schools within two years and replace it with smaller school districts.
The future of Milwaukee’s school district suddenly depends on the outcome of this year’s governor’s race with the Republican field’s top two candidates endorsing an idea that has failed in the past but has new support sprung from scrutiny born during the coronavirus pandemic over how schools are run.
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Race and finance: the student loan trap
Taylor Nicole Rogers and Gary Silverman:
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https://www.ft.com/content/51ece9ca-750b-49ef-aacb-834b8e691eeaWhen US civil rights campaigners of the last century took to the streets, they dreamt of a day when black Americans would enjoy the same educational opportunities as everyone else in the country. Sabrina Cannon has lived that dream — and it has landed her deep in debt.
Cannon, 33, was the first member of her African-American family in Buffalo, New York, to go to college, using $100,000 in federal student loans to obtain a marketing degree in 2010 from Niagara University, a nearby private institution.
But she struggled to find work in her field during the tough times that followed the financial crisis, and only earned enough from other jobs to make minimum payments on her borrowings, leaving the principal untouched.
So, Cannon switched gears. She decided her future was in healthcare — specifically, mastering the alphanumeric code doctors use to keep track of patients — and she went back to school part-time to obtain a second degree in 2017 from State University of New York Polytechnic Institute. Resuming her studies allowed her to put payments on her first student loan on hold while she was in school, but it also required her to take on more debt to obtain new credentials.
Parents protesting ‘critical race theory’ identify another target: Mental health programs
Tyler Kingkade and Mike Hixenbaugh:
“Some of these kids, they’re just trying to get through the day, get through compacted math, get through algebra, go to cotillion on Sunday,” Eddins said. “They are not thinking about these issues.”
Two days after Eddins made the remarks, Southlake Families PAC — a group that has fought to stop a diversity plan at Carroll — sent an email to supporters calling on the school district to “Leave mental health and parenting to parents.”
Christina Edmiston, a Southlake resident and mother of two, was outraged when she saw the email. Earlier that month, Edmiston had pulled her 12-year-old son out of the Carroll district after he reported thoughts of suicide after having been bullied by classmates for his sexuality.
