Comparing Competitions: Race to the Top vs. RTT-ELC
When the U.S. Department of Education announced the original Race to the Top competition in 2009, critics charged that the administration was rewarding some reform options at the expense of others. States with policies aligned with the administration’s agenda received extra points in the peer review process, so if they wanted a real shot at the billions of federal dollars up for grabs, they had to take legislative action and remove limits on charter schools, reconsider the use of data to evaluate teachers and more.
The new Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) is likely to take a similar approach – rewarding states that fit the administration’s definition of making progress – if the guidelines announced last week are preserved in the final draft. And the broad strokes are similar too, with foci on effective programs, data, standards and assessment.
Differences emerge in the details, especially because of the major differences in design between birth-to-5 programs and how education is delivered in public schools. By comparing specific priorities within the two competitions, we can start to see that the administration views early education reform as an opportunity for building better infrastructure (creating data systems and multi-domain statewide standards, for example), but places less of a premium on dictating exactly how that infrastructure should be used.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison:
