We interrupt this gnashing of teeth . . .
with a little reality check.
Since the 16 finalists for Race to the Top funding were announced last Thursday, there has been a general gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.
“A sad day for reformville,” Petrelli writes. Today’s WaPo says the list isn’t “exclusive” enough.
I think that Secretary Duncan did just what you’d expect a college ballplayer to do: he kept his eye on the ball. And the ball, in this case is encouraging politicians at the state and local level to make changes.
Politicians, like entrepreneurs, aren’t risk takers. For them to get involved with a reform effort–especially one that takes on entrenched interests–there has to be a pretty clear sign that there could be a prize in the bottom of the Cracker Jack box.
The Department’s math–about one-third of the applicants made it into the Sweet Sixteen–seems about right to someone who spent nearly two decades as a policymaker on the state and local level.
To use another basketball metaphor (hey, it’s March), the Department is using the clock. All 16 won’t get funded, of course. But now, while state legislatures are still meeting, is the time to push legislators to act.
RTT4HE
Getting ESEA reauthorized is going to be a tough slog in the best of times, and these times are definitely not those. So it seems increasingly likely that Race to the Top will remain the center of the Obama administration’s education agenda. And not just the RTT program but the larger theory behind it: instead of doling out federal money via automatic formula, leverage change by focusing resources only on states that enact meaningful reform.
So I think it’s only a matter of time before RTT gets franchised out to other policy areas. The first should be higher education, where the administration is on the verge of investing billions of new dollars but still lacks a sharp state-level policy agenda to ensure that those resources make a difference. For a complete rundown of what the Race to the Top for Higher Education (henceforth: RTT4HE) should look like, see my new column in