When Race to the Top collides with states’ rights, debate follows
Teachers unions, school district officials, and lawmakers have all weighed in on New York State’s Race to the Top application with varying degrees of skepticism and enthusiasm, but few have given any thought to the legal issues behind the experiment.
Last night, students at Columbia Law School held a panel discussion on Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s competitive grant program that, in its first round, will award several states hundreds of thousands of dollars to adopt the Obama administration’s education policies. The question put before the panel is one any federal initiative like Race to the Top is apt to bring up: Is this experiment stepping too heavily on states’ policy toes?
The panelists included Marcus Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Deborah Meier, a columnist for Education Week, James Liebman, a law school professor and the NYC Department of Education’s former accountability chief, Richard Iannuzzi, president of the state teachers union, and Dan Weisberg, a vice president at The New Teacher Project. (more…)
