An Admission of Federal Manipulation Through Race to the Top
Joanne Weiss was the director of the Race to the Top program at the U.S. Department of Education and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s chief of staff. She wrote an essay atStanford Social Innovation Reviewthat is enlightening in that we finally have a USDED official admit the truth about the federal role in foisting Common Core on to the states.
I encourage you to read the whole piece, but I’ll pull a few excerpts of interest.
Weiss acknowledges that budgetary challenges along with offering larger awards induced states to apply.
The competition took place during a time of profound budgetary challenge for state governments, so the large pot of funding that we had to offer was a significant inducement for states to compete.
This process is typically different than how federal grant making has been done before as she explains:
…we decided that winners would have to clear a very high bar, that they would be few in number, and that they would receive large grants. (In most cases, the grants were for hundreds of millions of dollars.) In a more typical federal competition program, a large number of states would each win a share of the available funding. The government, in other words, would spread that money around in a politically astute way. But because our goal was to enable meaningful educational improvement, we adopted an approach that channeled substantial funding to the worthiest applicants.
When you see “worthiest applicants” read those states whose priorities matched ours.
They leveraged the governors.
…we placed governors at the center of the application process. In doing so, weAn Admission of Federal Manipulation Through Race to the Top | Truth in American Education:
