Eduwonk » Blog Archive » Racing To The Top:
"Race to the Top final regulations are on the way Thursday [You can read them here]. Ed Week writes them up. To some extent they do reinforce the view that the tragedy of
Race to the Top is that the Department of Ed has to spend this money at all – the anticipation may well have leveraged more state-level change than the actual program will.
The punchline is that the readers/reviewers for the state applications are now the entire ballgame. If they’re not strong and keenly attuned to change and reform then this initiative won’t suceed. I’m not as glum as some of the voices in the Ed Week story, but the regs have changed (and not in a reformist direction) so without a strong process to really evaluate state plans it is possible that some weak plans could slip through this scoring metric. In the Department’s defense, they are planning a creative qualitative process to vet the applications after the initial scoring is done. That’s crucial for quality."
Few things that are getting attention: It’s easy to see why the Department wanted to create a more comprehensive state capacity rubric, but it could also open the door to a lot of fuzziness. Again, the expertise of the readers matter a lot. I’m not freaked out (although some are) by the minimizing of common standards or new assessments, that’s a nod political and capacity realities. It would have been nice to see high-quality charters weighted more…and they could have been more aggressive on the human capital front. It’s still a lot of points but could have included more teeth to really delineate states.*
Bouncing ball to keep your eye on: New York. A strict reading of this means the state shouldn’t be eligible, but will be interesting to see how that plays out…the argument is being made that because the NY teacher data ban only applies to tenure it’s not really a ban on evaluation at all. Of course, a reasonable person might conclude that if a tenure decision isn’t an evaluation then exactly what is? Then again, a reasonable person would have no place in New York education policymaking. Update: More from Tom Carroll on that.
"Race to the Top final regulations are on the way Thursday [You can read them here]. Ed Week writes them up. To some extent they do reinforce the view that the tragedy of
Race to the Top is that the Department of Ed has to spend this money at all – the anticipation may well have leveraged more state-level change than the actual program will.
The punchline is that the readers/reviewers for the state applications are now the entire ballgame. If they’re not strong and keenly attuned to change and reform then this initiative won’t suceed. I’m not as glum as some of the voices in the Ed Week story, but the regs have changed (and not in a reformist direction) so without a strong process to really evaluate state plans it is possible that some weak plans could slip through this scoring metric. In the Department’s defense, they are planning a creative qualitative process to vet the applications after the initial scoring is done. That’s crucial for quality."
Few things that are getting attention: It’s easy to see why the Department wanted to create a more comprehensive state capacity rubric, but it could also open the door to a lot of fuzziness. Again, the expertise of the readers matter a lot. I’m not freaked out (although some are) by the minimizing of common standards or new assessments, that’s a nod political and capacity realities. It would have been nice to see high-quality charters weighted more…and they could have been more aggressive on the human capital front. It’s still a lot of points but could have included more teeth to really delineate states.*
Bouncing ball to keep your eye on: New York. A strict reading of this means the state shouldn’t be eligible, but will be interesting to see how that plays out…the argument is being made that because the NY teacher data ban only applies to tenure it’s not really a ban on evaluation at all. Of course, a reasonable person might conclude that if a tenure decision isn’t an evaluation then exactly what is? Then again, a reasonable person would have no place in New York education policymaking. Update: More from Tom Carroll on that.