Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
racetothetop
Obama Criticizes His Own Pro-Testing Agenda At Town Hall
010 months ago
On Monday President Obama criticized portions of his own policy platform when he told the crowd at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C., “Too often what we have been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools,” the AP reported.
The event was a town hall focusing on Latino education specially televised by Univision. From the AP:
“One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching the test because then you’re not learning about the world, you’re not learning about different cultures, you’re not learning about science, you’re not learning about math,” the president said. “All you’re learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that’s not going to make education interesting.”
“And young people do well in stuff that they’re interested in,” Obama said. “They’re not going to do as well if it’s boring.”
It’s a laudable if uncontroversial statement, notable because central portions of Obama’s education reform plan demand that standardized tests be used to measure student learning and track their progress, and keep tabs on teacher performance. For years education advocates have criticized the ways that standardized test score have led to the shrinking of education curriculum as schools face increasing pressure to raise test scores in reading and math. Under Race to the Top, the $4.3 billion competitive grants program that the Obama administration initiated in 2009, states have been rewarded with money for adopting laws that call for standardized test scores to be taken into consideration in teachers’ evaluations. Increasingly, teachers’ job security depends on their students’ test scores. Under Obama’s education policy proposals, an entire school’s teaching staff can be fired, schools can be shut down, and new charter schools brought in, if test scores don’t improve adequately. A number of recent scandals involving potential test tampering and impropriety suggest that the charter schools and traditional public schools alike are feeling immense pressure to show yearly gains in test scores.
Obama’s great at co-opting his critics’ arguments even if he doesn’t take to heart their policy suggestions. It’s an excellent strategy for cornering his critics and closing off the political space that critics of standardized tests have carved out for themselves in the often confounding education debate.
During the event Obama also said he was opposed to the idea of granting administrative relief to undocumented immigrant youth facing deportation. He also turned down the idea of offering young people who would have been eligible for the DREAM Act temporary protected status.
“With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case,” Obama told Karen Maldonado, an undocumented immigrant youth who held up her deportation order and asked him why students were still receiving them.
“There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.”
Obama supports the DREAM Act, however, which would have allowed students like Maldonado who clear a host of hurdles to become eligible for citizenship after a thirteen-year wait.
Obama Wants to Put His Stamp on No Child Left Behind This Year
011 months ago
President Obama wants Congress to take up school reform in earnest this year. The president, who has made education a key talking point since the State of the Union, hopes to revamp the Bush-era No Child Left Behind to align with his own reform platform, which the administration has thus far pushed out to states via stimulus money. Both the Bush and Obama approaches have been criticized as being overly focused on testing and punishing teachers.
In a speech at Kenmore Middle School this morning, President Obama called on Congress to pass an updated version of No Child Left Behind before the next school year starts.
“We need to make sure we’re graduating students who are ready for college and ready for careers,” Obama said this morning. “We need to put outstanding teachers in every classroom, and give those teachers the pay and the support that they deserve.”
“In the 21st century, it’s not enough to leave no child behind. We need to help every child get ahead.”
On a Sunday call with reporters, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that updating the law was necessary because four out of five schools don’t meet the law’s basic standards, CNN reported.
“Under the current law, it’s one-size-fits-all,” Duncan said. “We need to fix this law now so we can close the achievement gap.”
President Obama has said that No Child Left Behind doesn’t work because it both allows for watered down standards and leans too much on punishing schools. The administration’s proposals for fixing No Child Left Behind mirror the policy language of its Race to the Top initiative, a $4.3 billion competitive grants program for states. States that have won Race to the Top money did so by overhauling their laws to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores; lifting state caps charter schools; adopting data-tracking systems to evaluate students and agreeing to drastic measures when schools are considered failing. Under the program, failing schools must be submitted to one of four turnaround schemes, each of which involve either shutting down the school and firing all the staff or bringing in a charter school company.
Obama’s No Child Left Behind reform ideas focus on making competitive grants programs like Race to the Top a formal part of federal education law. Thus far, money for Race to the Top has come from the 2009 stimulus bill, which allowed Obama to start pushing his education agenda without having to fight in Congress. But with health care and financial regulation reforms behind him, the president is now moving education into the congressional hopper.
Education may be the one policy area where Obama can hope for bipartisan cooperation.
“Although we have our different approaches, everyone agrees the current law is broken and in need of repair,” said Republican Rep. John Kline and Democratic Rep. Duncan Hunter in a joint statement last week. “The status quo is failing both students and taxpayers.”
When, exactly, congress will take up No Child Left Behind is uncertain. The latest version of the law was passed in 2002.
To "Win the Future," Kids and Schools Must Survive the Present
01 year ago
Education reform is about to return to the headlines, if not the floor of Congress, if President Obama’s State of the Union is any indication. Obama built his feel-good speech Tuesday night around the uncontroversial theme of “winning the future” and nestled every major policy issue within this rhetorical frame. He put particular emphasis on education as the path to that victorious future. But the education agenda the president articulated contained no surprises. It’s the same one his administration’s been selling for the past two years–and it’s the same one many of his critics have been fretting about for just as long.
Education reform watchers offered Obama reserved praise for giving education such a prominent place in his speech. “One reaction I had was exactly that he spent a lot of time on education, which I think is a good thing,” said John Rogers, associate professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. But Rogers, like a handful of other educators I spoke with after the speech, added long caveats after this initial praise.
Obama touted his administration’s undeniable wins, including student aid reform, and championed the more questionable achievements of Race to the Top, which is a $4.35 billion competitive grants program for states that adopt the president’s reform agenda. Eleven states have won millions of dollars each as a reward for opening up their states to more charter schools and agreeing to make test scores a component of teacher evaluations and salaries.
Under Race to the Top, states were rewarded for forcing public schools that were designated as failing to undergo a total restructuring or a takeover from a charter school company. The program remains controversial, especially among teachers who oppose new evaluation systems that they feel unfairly punish individual educators for a systemic problem.
Obama also called for 100,000 more science and math teachers by the end of the decade and called on Congress to take up a No Child Left Behind reauthorization in the model of Race to the Top. He didn’t suggest how those teachers would get funded, and congressional watchers consider it unlikely that the new Congress will have the stomach for a major overhaul of any program, including No Child Left Behind.
Obama called Race to the Top “the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation.” If success is measured by impact, Obama’s correct. The program circumvented Congress entirely and got 39 states to rewrite their education laws. But if success is measured in students’ improved performance and teachers’ increased retention rates, the jury’s still out.
“I think the speech clearly shows the president understands the link between education and our country’s future,” said John Jackson, president of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, which works toward racial equity in public education. (Colorlines’ publisher, the Applied Research Center, has done contract research for the Schott Foundation.) But, Jackson stresses, the Race to the Top initiatives Obama is pushing aren’t proven to work. ”We haven’t seen one state that has reformed its education system by removing its charter school cap, or reformed its education system by linking teacher salaries to student performance.”
A September 2010 study by Vanderbilt University found that performance pay on its own had no measurable impact on teachers’ ability to raise their students’ test scores.
Global Competition
In his speech, Obama tapped into the pain that many Americans are feeling right now as they wade through seemingly endless economic crisis, and tried to redirect that frustration toward global competitiveness. He warned that while America’s middle class has been dismantled over the course of a generation, other countries have been ascending, creeping onto the medal stands that the U.S. occupied alone for decades.
“Nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world,” Obama said. “And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They’re investing in research and new technologies.”
But pitting the U.S. against other countries unsettled some educators.
“The line here is: ‘Yeah, they go to the sweatshops now and make stuff for us, but if they beat us they won’t be in the sweatshops making stuff anymore. They might dare to have a standard of living that’s better than us,’ ” said Rick Ayers, adjunct professor of education at the University of San Francisco and co-author of “Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom.” ”It’s all put out in a very polite, liberal veneer, but I would point out that it’s the dark, Asiatic other that is being called up.”
Ayers said that the true comparison between present-day America and Cold War America is “an extraordinary rise in income inequality that public policy could address separately, an extraordinary rise in incarceration rates that public policy could address. The presumption that education can act independently of economic inequality and incarceration is wrong.”
The United States is ninth globally in the percentage of undergraduate degree holders, Obama said. He wants the country to claw its way back to the top. As it is, more than a third of college students don’t graduate in six years, and that number is even higher for undergraduate students of color–something Obama pointed out in a speech he gave at UT Austin last year. The president seemingly knows that students of color are key to achieving his education goals.
Jackson said other countries’ educational success has been linked to the educational equity that the U.S. has not yet found. “All of the countries that are outcompeting us don’t deal with fringe structural issues,” he argued. “They provide all students access to early education. They hold teachers in high regard, and not in a punitive frame, and they have a much more equitable distribution of their resources.”
Jackson pointed out that there are over a million homeless children in the U.S., for instance.
“Yes, we want to ‘win the future,’ but for many the concern now is surviving the present,” Rogers echoed, adding that 22 percent of American children below the age of six are living below the poverty line. “How do young people who are growing up in families that are really facing difficult economic circumstances survive the present without a whole host of social supports that are being eroded or eliminated outright?”
There was a time not so long ago when Obama was willing to examine the structural factors that influence a kid’s education, Rogers said. “None of that was in the speech [Tuesday] night,” he complained. ”Instead, all we get is that parents need to shut off the TV.”
Obama’s lone reference to the role that parents and communities play in the nation’s education effort was to declare, ”Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done.”
That’s the narrow, individualized perspective that makes teachers and parents feel so besieged. Obama tried to soothe teachers–”Here in America, it’s time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect”–but critics say his policies don’t match that rhetoric. ”The truth is I didn’t feel the sincerity in that,” said Jim Anderson, who serves on the statewide board of the Alliance for Quality Education. “I haven’t seen the policies that shows that respect.”
Educators said that Obama’s rhetoric contradicted his policy in other parts of his education remarks as well. Obama praised America’s public school systems for providing students with more than memorization drills for standardized tests. “It’s why our students don’t just memorize equations,” Obama said, “but answer questions like ‘What do you think of that idea? What would you change about the world? What do you want to be when you grow up?’ “
Rogers considered it one of Obama’s strongest lines and said that it reflected the part of the president’s vision he most admires. “But that’s not the sort of question that emerges when you have the narrowed standardized tests we have now,” he warned.
“Obama’s good at co-opting the criticism,” said Ayers. “He said, ‘We’re not talking about rote memorization; we’re about learning deeply and asking questions.’ But that’s our argument,” Ayers said, referring to progressives who take issue with the Obama administration’s policies, “that the test prep stuff undermines the possibility of deep learning and learning for democracy.”
Of course, amidst everything the president was said, there were notable silences as well. Rogers said he wished Obama was more willing to address the vast racial disparities in kids’ educational opportunities. “I was struck by the fact that there was so little attention paid explicitly to the issue of race in education, or even outside of education,” Rogers said. “He didn’t highlight those equity issues.”
The upcoming year holds many uncertainties. It’s still unclear whether Republicans or Democrats have any interest in tackling No Child Left Behind, or even what another Race to the Top round would look like. In the meantime, the debate rages on over what winning the future even means, let alone how to do it.
Merit Pay for Teachers Doesn’t Raise Test Scores, Study Finds
01 year ago
Researchers have found, again, that offering teachers extra money to boost their students’ test scores doesn’t have any measurable impact on teacher performance.
The latest study, this one the first ever controlled study on the controversial issue, came from the National Center on Performance Initiatives at Vanderbilt University. Matthew Springer, NCPI’s executive director, said the results showed that pay-for-performance initiatives, alas, are not “the magic bullet that so often the policy world is looking for.”
NCPI got a set of 296 Nashville middle school math teachers to agree to take part in the study where half were randomly placed in a control group while the other set was promised $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 if their students’ scored well on a Tennessee standardized test. One third of the teachers got a bonus at least once in the course of the three-year study, while eighteen teachers received bonuses every single year. And yet, researchers found no measurable difference in students’ test scores. Students taught by teachers who were promised bonuses progressed no faster than their peers in the control group.
The study reinforces the argument that teachers don’t have a secret stash of tricks, tools, and skills that they secret away but bring out at the promise of more money. Critics of the pay scheme argue that merit pay alone doesn’t make teachers better. And no teacher would ever scoff at a higher salary, but very often pay-for-performance initiatives come at the cost of teacher tenure and other benefits.
The findings were important for other political reasons. For one, pay-for-performance initiatives are a a central part of the Obama administration’s education agenda. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave billions of dollars to states who won the Race to the Top competitive grants program. Many states that won were successful because they had adopted similar models that tied a teacher’s salary and job security to how well their students performed on test scores. Education advocates criticize Duncan’s schemes as being a continuation of George W. Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind bill that placed standardized test scores at the center of education. And Duncan’s critics say the education reform movement has modeled its reforms on a corporate business structure–indeed, many of the superintendents and policymakers calling the shots in the education world today are business people with no classroom experience. Benchmarks, quotas and bonuses may work for improving account managers’ performance, but they don’t necessarily translate so well when it comes to the work of educating kids in classrooms.
And the study, received like a bombshell in the education world, shows just how little information and data the education reform world has on the ideas that the Obama administration is encouraging school districts to adopt. In 2009 Vanderbilt University researchers found similar results with a pilot incentive pay program in Texas. But this week’s is just the first controlled study on the matter, and as always the researchers stress the need for more evaluation, but it’s an important, if damning report.
And yet the education reform train keeps barreling down the tracks; it’s a hard thing to stop.
Race to the Top’s Round 2 Winners, And Why They Matter
01 year ago
After a flurry of leaked announcements this morning, the confirmed numbers from the Department of Education on today’s winners of Phase 2 of Race to the Top are in. They are:
- District of Columbia: $75 million. Score: 450.0
- Florida: $700 million. Score: 452.4
- Georgia: $400 million. Score: 446.4
- Hawaii: $75 million. Score: 462.4
- Maryland: $250 million. Score: 450.0
- Massachusetts: $250 million. Score: 471.0
- New York: $700 million. Score: 464.8
- North Carolina: $400 million. Score: 441.6
- Ohio: $400 million. Score: 440.8
- Rhode Island: $75 million. Score: 451.2
The winners and ranked points might not mean much from afar, but we’ll dig into those in a second. For a little background, these ten winners were pulled from a list of 19 finalists. All in all, 48 entries have been submitted to the Department of Education for its $4.35 billion competitive grants Race to the Top initiative. After Delaware and Tennessee were the sole winners of Phase 1 earlier this year, the Department of Education had $3.4 billion left to disburse to 36 Phase 2 applicants.
Money is awarded to states that show a strong commitment to the Obama administration brand of education reform, which includes adopting common standards and assessments; building data systems to measure and track student performance; strict teacher evaluation methods and a commitment to doing away with under-performing schools.
“Every state that applied has done the hard work of implementing a comprehensive education reform agenda,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said on a press call with reporters. According to him, in this latest round of RTTT states saw an average of a 30-point jump from their Phase 1 scores, which Duncan took as a sign of improvement from the first round of competition.
Duncan praised all the entrants for their “tremendous courage and tremendous innovation” in the crafting of their applications. “We’ve unleashed the amazing creativity and innovation,” Duncan said. “I’ve always said, sometimes jokingly, the best ideas are never going to come from me and never going to come from anyone in Washington. They are always going to come from the local level.”
While his remarks may have been heartfelt, the reality of education reform right now is quite different. There is very little that is organic or even local about the current national movement to overhaul the public school system. The federal government has been able to aggressively drive education reform in a top-down fashion with the flagship Race to the Top program and in so doing, bypass interference from Congress.
In the education world, “innovation” and “creativity” are often code words for a state’s willingness to adopt the mainstream education reform agenda, which in the Obama adminstration’s expression calls for submission to specific policies about how teachers are evaluated and compensated.
Sean Cavanaugh at Education Week has a first-take at the results, and points out that there are some themes among the winners: Florida won $700 million, and was likely being awarded for passing a new set of teacher accountability provisions and for instituting stricter standards for how to restructure struggling schools. The Duncan model calls for failing schools to submit to one of four turnaround models which mandate some combination of mass firings of all teaching staff, restructuring, or a charter school takeover.
States are currently embroiled in debates over how teachers should be evaluated: many teachers, parents and activists feel that teacher evaluation mechanisms that tie a teacher’s job security to their students’ test scores only further cements the primacy of standardized test scores in the school systems. Unions disagree with provisions that allow districts to do away with tenure and fire teachers with no recourse in two years if their students’ test scores do not improve.
After losing out in Round 1 of RTTT, New York passed laws that raised the state cap on charter schools and planned “partnership zones” for failing schools. Both D.C. and Rhode Island adopted teacher evaluation policies that allow for a teacher to be judged in part on the performance of his or her students’ test scores. The ideas may be self-initiated, but states that don’t adopt the Obama-Duncan plan don’t win money.
“Education has to be non-political,” Duncan said. “All of us have to unite behind getting better results for children,” because the current state of American public education was “morally unacceptable and economically unsustainable.” “People have to be willing to challenge the status quo.”
And here again, a bit of parsing: any group found resisting Obama administration reforms is often accused of clinging to the undefined and much-maligned “status quo.” That the current education system is woefully broken is uncontroversial, but there is little consensus around the solutions. But those who opposes the mainstream education reform movement are often accused of stalling progress. This leaves little room in the debate for Race to the Top and Duncan education reform skeptics, of which there are many.
Race to the Top critics have said that forcing states to compete for money undermines the very basic civil right that all kids in America have to a quality education. The $3.4 billion disbursed in this second round of Race to the Top will only be shared by 13 million students around the country in nine states and Washington, D.C. The majority of the country will lose out on the much-needed funds. They also take issue with the policy demands states are forced to adopt.
“We ran out of money at ten,” Duncan said when asked about how the funding cut-off was decided. Duncan repeatedly worked some version of that refrain into his remarks in the course of the phone call. If he had more money at his disposal, he would have been glad to have given away more. It was his bid for Congress to fulfill his request for another $1.35 billion to renew Race to the Top for a third and fourth round. When pressed for details about how far down the list of other finalists he’d have gone, if he had as he wished, “five billion dollars by tomorrow,” Duncan chose not to elaborate.
Latinos Key to Obama’s College Grad Goal, Administration Says
01 year ago
President Obama went back to friendly territory to give an education speech touting his administration’s education victories so far, and underline his one major education goal: to get the U.S. back on the top of the world’s highest college graduation rates. The administration acknowledged separately that to achieve that goal, schools will have to make sure Latinos graduate at higher rates.
The president’s Monday afternoon speech at the University of Texas at Austin, where Obama visited as a presidential candidate for a rally of 20,000 back in 2007, was preceded by a press call led by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “We set a goal for America to lead the world in college completion,” Duncan told reporters. “A generation ago we did lead the world. Today we happen to be 12th.” He called this goal the “North Star” of his department’s reform efforts.
In order to get there, about 11 million more undergrads will have to earn their degrees in the next decade. On the press call, Duncan said that raising Latino graduation rates would be central to that goal: among kids of color, Latinos are on their way to becoming the biggest racial group enrolled in the public education system today.
“Over one third of America’s college students and over one half of our minority students don’t earn a degree, even after six years,” Obama said.
The Obama administration has successfully passed several initiatives to address some of the reasons students of color don’t get through college, especially the financial burdens that often force students to drop out. His administration passed student aid reform back in March, which was indeed a win for students of color. The bill replaced $60 billion in corporate subsidies that student loan companies received every year for disbursing federal student loans, and put that money toward Pell Grants for students from low-income families and historically black colleges and other institutions that serve students of color.
Obama also touted other big achievements from his administration: streamlining the federal student loan application process–according to Duncan, financial aid applications are up 20 percent; and instituting the Income Based Repayment program that will forgive the loans of students dedicated to public service after 10 years. The wins are certainly real and worth noting. For students and college grads dealing with mountains of student loan debt, they’re much needed.
“We want to make sure nobody is denied a college education, nobody is denied the chance to pursue their dreams, just because they can’t afford it,” Obama said to cheers. “We are a better country than that. And we need to act like we’re a better country than that.”
Obama also briefly touched on his controversial Race to the Top program in his speech. According to Duncan, the education reform program is about creating a “cradle-to-career” pipeline to get students on their way to college. It’s a clever turn of phrase from the familiar “school-to-prison” pipeline that many progressive education activists see students of color being funneled through. But cute language will only get the White House so far in selling the program, which civil rights groups have criticized as needlessly punitive and competitive.
Obama to Critics: I’m Not Bashing Teachers
01 year ago
President Obama showed up at the National Urban League’s annual conference yesterday to take on the civil rights groups that have become top critics of his education initiatives. He discussed Race to the Top, his administration’s controversial $4.35 billion competitive grants program that hands out money to states that adopt the Obama reform agenda, blaming resistance to Race to the Top on a “general resistance to change; a comfort with the status quo.”
Earlier this week, the National Urban League, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and the NAACP issued a 17-page report criticizing Race to the Top as exclusionary and short-sighted. They charged that the very idea of forcing states to compete for money runs counter to our nation’s promise that a quality education is still every child’s civil right:
“By emphasizing competitive incentives in this economic climate, the majority of low-income and minority students will be left behind and, as a result, the United States will be left behind as a global leader.”
The civil rights groups also take issue with many of the fundamentals of Obama’s education agenda that further solidify the centrality of standardized test scores for gauging success and initiatives that bolster charter schools while shutting down so-called “failing” public ones.
But Obama focused yesterday on the most controversial aspect of his reform agenda: his efforts to institute what he calls systems of “accountability” that tie a teacher’s salary and job security to students’ standardized test scores. He had sharp words for those who believe his tactics amount to teacher bashing. “So, for anyone who wants to use Race to the Top to blame or punish teachers – you’re missing the point,” Obama said. “Our goal isn’t to fire or admonish teachers. Our goal is accountability. It’s to provide teachers with the support they need to be as effective as they can be. It’s to create a better environment for teachers and students alike.”
Try asking those in Rhode Island. Obama applauded the state’s move back in February to fire every single teacher at a high school with a lower than 50 percent graduation rate. Obama’s critics have asked: what happens when a town runs out of teachers to fire? And if the teachers are the problem, the students are left in a lurch while Obama soldiers on to keep firing every other ineffective teacher.
Last Friday D.C. school chief Michelle Rhee announced she’d fired 241 teachers in her district and put another 737 on notice. They’ll have a year to raise their students’ test scores or risk termination, too. The New York Times reports Rhee fired 79 teachers in the 2007-08 academic year, and another 96 in the 2008-09 school year before hiring another 500 new teachers in 2009, and then firing 266 teachers in the fall of 2009 because of budget problems. Teacher unions have called it the “hire-fire-rehire” syndrome.
There’s little proof of how well this crusade against so-called ineffective teachers will pay off. But Obama insisted that he hasn’t got it in for teachers:
I want teachers to have higher salaries. I want them to have more support. I want them to be trained like the professionals they are – with rigorous residencies like the ones doctors go through. I want to give them career ladders so they have opportunities to advance, and earn real financial security. I want them to have a fulfilling and supportive workplace environment, and the resources – from basic supplies to reasonable class sizes – to help them succeed. Instead of a culture where we’re always idolizing sports stars or celebrities, I want us to build a culture where we idolize the people who shape our children’s future.
All I’m asking in return – as a president and as a parent – is a measure of accountability. Surely we can agree that even as we applaud teachers for their hard work, we need to make sure they’re delivering results in the classroom. If they’re not, let’s work with them to help them be more effective. And if that fails, let’s find the right teacher for that classroom.
All lofty and uncontroversial ideals, of course. But the National Urban League and its civil rights partners have said judging teachers’ merits on their students’ test scores as Obama demands is unsatisfactory. The groups’ report argued teacher evaluations must be based on a teacher’s experience and skills and individual contributions to the school environment. The groups called for an end to zero-tolerance policies that criminalize young boys and men of color and Obama’s drastic turnaround models that shut down the poorest schools without replacing them with better schools or offering long-lasting solutions to the communities they’re in.
The education reform discussion is long from over. But Race to the Top–along with the controversy that surrounds it–likely will not disappear soon either.
Nineteen Finalists Named in Obama’s Controversial Education Project
01 year ago
This afternoon Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the finalists for Round 2 of Race to the Top, the $4.35 billion federal competitive grants program that hands out money to states who adopt the Obama education reform agenda.
Eighteen states and D.C. made this second round of cuts, and there will likely be 15 winners when the results are announced later this summer. The finalists were: Arizona, California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.
All of these finalists scored above 400 out of a possible 500-point scale, and beat out 17 other states. There were another ten states that chose not to re-apply this time around; conforming to the Obama reform agenda led to many state fights with teacher unions.
The only big surprise among the finalists was Arizona, which finished 40th in Round 1. But education policy bloggers suspect that their application this time around was strengthened by involvement from the Gates foundation—Bill and his wife Melinda have become key players in the education reform world, guiding the agenda with their millions of foundation dollars.
Part of that reform agenda has involved putting teacher accountability front and center; both Delaware and Tennessee adopted pay-for-performance models that tie teacher salaries and their very job security to their students’ test scores. D.C. school chief Michelle Rhee whose already the model in place for two years announced on Friday that she fired 241 teachers. Their students’ test scores didn’t pass muster.
States who want this federal funding are encouraged—nay, forced—to ease requirements for charter schools to move in to their school districts. Critics argue that these models place too much expectation on charter schools as an alternative strategy for reform when charter schools themselves are untested and inconsistent in performance.
The Obama administration has also succeeded in alienating teachers around the country by blaming them for the country’s education woes and instituting a punitive accountability system tied to standardized tests. Yesterday, a group of seven civil rights groups led by the National Urban League demanded an end to Race to the Top and a re-evaluation of the entire Obama education reform agenda.
The two winners from the first round, Delaware and Tennessee, shared a pot of about $600 million, which left $3.6 billion for this round. Money is disbursed partially on the size of each state. Education Week notes that if New York, Florida and California all win the maximum amount possible, there will be just $1.5 billion left for the other winners.
Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson
Civil Rights Groups Slam Obama’s Education Reforms
01 year ago
Today, a group of seven education and civil rights groups released a six-point plan for equitable and sustainable national education reform in this country. And, big surprise, the report is basically a 17-page repudiation of the Obama administration’s education reform platform.
Groups including the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Urban League, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition and the Schott Foundation for Public Education called for an end to many of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s signature initiatives, and a commitment instead to policies that incentivize positive results and lay the groundwork for long-term change in the neediest school districts. On every major Duncan policy initiative–aggressive promotion of charter schools, turnaround models for failing schools, national education standards, punitive teacher accountability measures–the coalition had harsh criticisms. And this morning, the Education Department issued a pat response:
We’re listening. The administration is dedicated to equity in education and we’ve been working very closely with the civil rights community to develop the most effective policies to close the achievement gap, turn around low performing schools, and put a good teacher in every classroom.
On charter schools, the civil rights groups write that not only is charter school performance uneven at best, but many charter schools only serve a small selection of the neediest students. The civil rights groups criticized the blind acceptance of charter school-as-panacea, because charter schools often don’t accept as many students with disabilities, students who rely on free school lunches, and English language learners–many of the groups of students who could jeopardize their test scores.
“While some charter schools can and do work for some students,” the report says, “they are not a universal solution for systemic change for all students, especially those with the highest needs.” Regarding “turnaround” models, the reform approach that demands mass firings of teaching staff when schools are deemed “failing,” the report said that where they’ve been tried, they’ve rarely produced positive results.
The civil rights groups perhaps reserved their harshest criticisms for Race to the Top, the $4.35 billion competitive grants program that hands out money to states that commit to the Obama education reform agenda. They write:
The Race to the Top Fund and similar strategies for awarding federal education funding will ultimately leave states competing with states, parents competing with parents, and students competing with other students. Moreover, even states that do not choose to compete for federal incentive funds should have an obligation to provide a standard of education consistent with protecting their children’s civil rights. The civil right to a high-quality education is connected to individuals, not the states, and federal policy should be framed accordingly. Good federal policy should mitigate political inequities that serve as barriers to delivering the ultimate change that is so plainly desired and needed. By emphasizing competitive incentives in this economic climate, the majority of low-income and minority students will be left behind and, as a result, the United States will be left behind as a global leader.
The Duncan-led Obama education reform crusade is built on several programs: the competitive grants program called Race to the Top, which rewards states with cash if they can prove they’re committed to the Obama reform platform. Many states have successfully rammed through overhauls of their states’ education laws to lift state caps on charter schools; tie teacher salaries (and job security) to their students’ test scores; and adopt national education standards.
Duncan’s reform often looks like a slash-and-burn assault on educators. Case in point: one of the education reform movement’s darlings, Washington, D.C.’s chancellor of schools Michelle Rhee, announced on Friday the termination of 241 teachers, and threats for another 700 teachers who could be fired within the year if their students’ test scores don’t improve. The stated aim is teacher accountability, by any means necessary. But in actuality, it just blames teachers for the plainly under-resourced and overly bureaucratic systems they work in.
The new report coincides with the National Urban League’s 100th anniversary and annual conference, where both Duncan and President Obama are scheduled to speak this week.
Photo: Creative Commons/talkradionews
White House: Let Food Stamps Pay for Teacher Jobs
01 year ago
Rep. David Obey from Wisconsin, who’s been trying to create a $10 billion emergency fund to cover national education budget shortfalls and save more than 100,000 teachers’ jobs, opened up about the intraparty conflict his effort has sparked.
Obey spoke with the Fiscal Times last week, and shared the Obama administration’s suggestions for where to find money for teachers’ jobs:
Well, it ain’t easy to find offsets, and with all due respect to the administration their first suggestion for offsets was to cut food stamps. Now they were careful not to make an official budget request, because they didn’t want to take the political heat for it, but that was the first trial balloon they sent down here. … Their line of argument was, well, the cost of food relative to what we thought it would be has come down, so people on food stamps are getting a pretty good deal in comparison to what we thought they were going to get. Well isn’t that nice. Some poor bastard is going to get a break for a change.
The whole fuss began on July 1, when Obey–who’s supposed to be taking a victory lap before he retires later this year–won a resolution on a war-spending bill that moved a total of $800 million away from well-funded Race to the Top and other White House reform programs to help save an estimated 100,000 teachers’ jobs this fall. The Obama administration, in a move of striking pettiness, responded with a veto threat for any bill that dared take money away from Race to the Top.
Race to the Top is an ongoing competitive grants program that hands out money to states that can prove they’re sufficiently committed to the Obama administration education reform agenda. The White House won $4.35 billion for the program’s pilot year and after one round with only two winning states (Delaware and Tennessee), it still has $3.6 billion in unused funds. And so the Obama administration’s whining seems terribly unnecessary–besides the fact that without teachers inside classrooms, there won’t be anyone to carry out the reforms the Obama administration is so intent on implementing.
While President Obama’s got the support of a pack of other Dems led by Sen. Evan Bayh, he might be sensing a shifting tone in the debate. Last week, he dispatched Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his director of the Domestic Policy Council, Melody Barnes, to speak to reporters about the current intra-party fuss. Both Duncan and Barnes were heartily supportive of the teachers’ fund, to a point.
“We don’t have to make a choice between reform and making sure that teachers will stay in the classroom,” Barnes said on a phone conference with press, adding that if funding for teachers’ jobs came at the expense of funding for Race to the Top, the charter school fund and other education reform initiatives, she and Duncan would recommend a veto.
David Dayen from Firedoglake discusses why the Obama administration can’t have it both ways:
Incidentally, increased class size, which comes with the firing of teachers, LOWERS THE AMOUNT OF MONEY states can be eligible for under the RTTT program. So denying the education jobs fund by vetoing the bill over a $500 million cut to RTTT (less than a 20% decrease) actually lowers the amount states can receive. It’s a cut EITHER WAY, and arguably a larger one if the education jobs money doesn’t go through.
Barnes and Duncan could not explain why a $3.8 billion dollar Race to the Top program would somehow be less successful than a $4.3 billion dollar program.
Education Week reports that Rep. David Obey helped set aside $800 million for the reauthorization of Race to the Top in 2011, and that bill passed a House appropriations subcommittee on Thursday. It’s a tad short of the $1.35 billion Obama requested for Race to the Top’s 2011 budget–and we’re likely to hear some fussing from them on the topic–but it’s a very mature gesture from Obey, who’s taken plenty of heat from the Obama administration.
He had plenty of other choice words for the administration in his Fiscal Times interview:
The secretary of Education is whining about the fact he only got 85 percent of the money he wanted …. So, when we needed money, we committed the cardinal sin of treating him like any other mere mortal. We were giving them over $10 billion in money to help keep teachers on the job, plus another $5 billion for Pell, so he was getting $15 billion for the programs he says he cares about, and it was costing him $500 million [in reductions to the Race to the Top program]. Now that’s a pretty damn good deal.
…
It blows my mind that the White House would even notice the fight [over Race to the Top]. I would have expected the president to say to the secretary, “look, you’re getting a good deal, for God’s sake, what this really does is guarantee that the rest of the money isn’t going to be touched.”
Apparently, the president did no such thing.
Photo: Creative Commons/talkradionews