States on the VAMwagon Most Likely to Receive Race to the Top Funds
Since 2009, the US Department of Education via its Race to the Top initiative has given literally billions in federal, taxpayer funds to incentivize states to adopt its various educational policies, as based on many non-research-based or research-informed reforms. As pertinent here, the main “reform” being VAMs, with funding going to states that have them, are willing to adopt them, and are willing to use them for low- and preferably high-stakes decisions about teachers, schools, and districts.
Diane Ravitch recently posted a piece about the Education Law Center finding that there was an interesting pattern to the distribution of Race to the Top grants. The Education Law Center, in an Education Justice article, found that the states and districts with the least fair and equitable state school finance systems were the states that won a large share of RTTT grants.
Interesting, indeed, but not surprising. There is an underlying reason for this, as based on standard correlations anybody can run or calculate using state-level demographics and some basic descriptive statistics.
In this case, correlational analyses reveal that state-level policies that rely at least in part on VAMs are indeed more common in states that allocate less money than the national average for schooling as compared to the nation. More specifically, they are more likely found in states in which yearly per pupil expenditures are lower than the national average (as demonstrated in the aforementioned post). They are more likely found in states that have more centralized governments, rather than those with more powerful counties and districts as per local control. They are more likely to be found in more highly populated States on the VAMwagon Most Likely to Receive Race to the Top Funds |:
