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Posts Tagged ‘Race to the Top’
October 6th, 2015 at 4:42 pm
Obama’s Real Education Legacy
Posted by Print

Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute has a enlightening critical essay on Barack Obama’s “real education legacy” in the latest issue of National Affairs. The essay couldn’t be more timely, coming on the heels of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s announcement last week that he plans to leave his post at the end of the year.

Hess writes:

Despite the soaring rhetoric and heady promises . . .  education reform during Obama’s tenure has disappointed in practice. Oddly enough, some of the president’s critics on the right have missed this and have maintained that, on education, his policy has been uniquely sound. New York Times columnist David Brooks declared that “Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency,” and suggested that Obama’s approach to education reform constituted a model for “health care, transportation, energy [and] environmental policy.”

In fact, Obama’s presidency has proven deeply divisive in nearly every area of policy, from health care to government spending to the environment. And those who have been disconcerted by the Obama administration’s faults in other areas — its abuse of executive discretion, its dramatic expansion of the federal government, and its exacerbation of identity politics and the culture wars — will find that education has not been spared. Despite all the promises of a “post-partisan” presidency, Obama has pursued a polarizing, bureaucratized, and Washington-centric education agenda while exploiting and then draining a substantial reservoir of bipartisan goodwill.

While it does little good to merely gripe about bad policies and squandered opportunities for reform, setting the record straight is crucial. Our understanding of the Obama era in education will color how we regard the promises of presidential candidates and inform our expectations for future Congressional and executive policymaking. Accounting for the lessons of the last seven years is especially vital given education’s substantive and symbolic import and its centrality for any national figure intent on promoting opportunity. Ultimately, the Obama years have illustrated that how presidents tackle education may matter as much as whether they do.

In particular, Hess looks at how the Education Department bungled Race to the Top and the ham-handed rollout of the Common Core standards. Do read the whole thing.

April 29th, 2011 at 1:50 pm
Community Organizing Targets Public Education

Conservatives are rightly convinced that private sector initiative is the key ingredient to almost every major improvement, be it economical, cultural, etc.  But before individuals can make big changes, they must be legally allowed to do so.

Thanks to Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top program, states like California opened up their public school districts to more parent involvement.  (These kinds of reforms are necessary to qualify for Race to the Top funding.)

According to Parent Revolution, a Los Angeles-based organization helping parents maximize their rights under the law,

The Parent Trigger is a historic new law that gives parents in California the right to force a transformation of their child’s current or future failing school. All parents need to do is organize – if 51% of them get together and sign an official Parent Trigger petition, they have the power to force their school district to transform the school.

If successful, parents have five options:

1) Charter conversion:

If there is a nearby charter school that is outperforming your child’s failing school, parents can bring in that charter school to transform the failing school. The school will then be run by that charter school, not the school district, but it will continue to serve all the same students that have always attended the school.

2) Turnaround:

If parents want huge changes but want to leave the school district in charge, this option may be for them. It forces the school district to hit the reset button by bringing in a new staff and giving the local school community more control over staffing and budget.

3) Transformation:

This is the least significant change. It force the school district to find a new principal, and make a few other small changes.

4) Closure:

This option would close the school altogether and send the students to other, higher-performing schools nearby.  Parent Revolution does NOT recommend this option to parents – we believe schools must be transformed, not closed.

5) Bargaining power:

If parents want smaller changes but the school district just won’t listen to them, they can organize, get to 51%, and use their signatures as bargaining power.

Parents get to pick which option they want for their children and their school. For a much more detailed overview of each one of these options, please click here.

All public policy needs to do is create space for private initiative to occur.  Once it does, the ingenuity of the American people will make the most of the opportunity.

For more on Parent Revolution, click here.

April 5th, 2010 at 1:48 pm
“Race to the Top” Competition Collecting New Opponents

It looks like Texas Governor Rick Perry isn’t the only state official who thinks the Obama Administration’s “Race to the Top” education funding competition is a game not worth the candle.  With 45 states participating, and 14 making the final round, only 2 states (Delaware and Tennessee) won.  The Department of Education also announced a cap on future awards – but not on federal requirements that follow the money – prompting several states to reconsider before reapplying.

But there is one benefit so far:

In Colorado, Van Schoales, executive director of Education Reform Now, a national advocacy group that supports Colorado’s participation in the competition, said the new award limit had strengthened the hand of teachers’ unions and rural school boards that, in opposing further participation, denounce federal intrusion.

“I’m surprised to see that there is a growing tide of people, an unholy alliance between unions and rural educators, who want us to say no to reapplying,” Mr. Schoales said.

If such an “unholy alliance” is what it takes to get states to kick their addiction to quick-fix federal dollars, so be it.