Report: Race to the Top isn’t delivering big results
President Obama delivers remarks on Race to the Top with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in 2009. (Lawrence Jackson/White House)
The Obama administration’s signature education initiative, Race to the Top, can’t deliver much educational improvement in America’s public schools because there is a huge mismatch in its mandates and what is actually possible to accomplish with the provided funding and requirements, according to a new report released Thursday.
The title of the report precisely explains what it is about: “Mismatches in Race to the Top Limit Educational Improvement.” Written by Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education, a project of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, the report looks at how states that won in the early rounds of the Race to the Top competition implemented it in the first three years of their four-year grants.
Special attention is paid to the development and implementation of new teacher and principal evaluation systems, which were mandated by the Education Department to be based in part on student standardized test scores (despite the fact that many testing experts say this is not a reliable way to make such assessments). It says:
