Race to the Top, Wasn't
by Frederick M. Hess • Jul 24, 2014 at 8:34 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
We've just marked the fifth anniversary of Race to the Top, the Obama administration's signature education initiative. When launched, the $4.35 billion competition drew bipartisan cheers and was lauded as an example of getting school reform right. Five years on, I see it more as a monument to paper promises, bureaucratic ineptitude, and federal overreach.
The U.S. Department of Education launched Race to the Top in 2009, with funds from that year's big stimulus bill. The legislation called for states to develop plans to improve data systems, adopt "career-and-college ready" standards and tests, hire great teachers and principals, and turn around low-performing schools.
At that point, the Obama administration could have told the states, "Put forward your best ideas, and we'll fund the most promising ones." An approach like that would have taken federalism seriously, funded states that were committed to their proposals, and followed the path the Reagan and Clinton administrations adopted so effectively when it came to welfare reform.
Instead, the administration dreamed up 19 "priorities" that states would be required to address. Most of the priorities were actually a pedantic list of familiar talking points, including professional development, standards, ensuring an "equitable distribution" of good teachers, and so on. Perhaps most tellingly, the administration let states know they'd ace three of the 19 priorities if they promised to adopt the brand-new Common Core and its federally-funded tests.
In practice, Race to the Top was driven by its bureaucratic application process. Applicants produced hundreds of jargon-laden pages in an attempt to convince the Department-selected reviewers that they would do what the administration asked. As one reviewer described it to me, "We knew the states were lying. The trick was figuring out who was lying the least."
Racing to meet the program deadlines and hungry for federal funds, states put forward slapped-together proposals stuffed with empty promises. States promised to adopt "scalable and sustained strategies for turning around clusters of low-performing schools" and "clear, content-rich, sequenced, spiraled, detailed curricular frameworks." Applications included bizarre appendices replete with missing pages, duplicateRace to the Top, Wasn't :: Frederick M. Hess:
