July 28, 2009

The Amazing Race-to-the-Top

Posted by Aaron Tang at 3:31PM

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The US Department of Education describes it as the "largest-ever federal investment in education reform": $4.35 billion in "Race to the Top" funds that the federal government will hand down to states who are succeeding in four crucial areas school improvement:

1.) Adopting rigorous standards and assessments;

2.) Recruiting and retaining effective teachers, especially in classrooms where they are needed most;

3.) Turning around low-performing schools; and

4.) Establishing data systems to track student achievement and teacher effectiveness.

Sec Ed Arne Duncan wrote about the plan in a Washington Post op-ed, and the president announced the plan and its conditions Friday.

Already, the plan has precipitated the exact kind of race that was hoped for as states respond to the fund's criterion. Seven states have already lifted caps on charter schools--Tennessee, Rhode Island, Indiana, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Colorado and Illinois--and other states are posturing and even revising other laws on the books so as to be eligible for the funds. California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger even commented, "We will seek any reforms or changes to the law deemed necessary, including changes to our data system laws, to ensure California is eligible to compete" for the funds.

So the funds are having the desired effect in that they're inspiring (or coercing, if you listen to some commentators) states to take action.

But are they good actions from a what's-best-for-kids perspective? Time will tell, but right now the answer looks like yes. All of the four criteria--improving data systems to track student performance and improvement at the classroom level; high state standards; improving teacher quality especially in high-needs areas; and school turnarounds--are controversial but aimed at closing the achievement gap and improving American competitiveness. A chorus of op-eds and articles has even started to emerge that support the federal plan and chastise states who are not in compliance and who therefore lose out on an opportunity to receive the funds.

What's really remarkable, though, is the administration's theory of action here. Typically when the federal government has an idea for how to fix a policy problem in the states, it sets a broad federal mandate and gives dollars to the states to carry out that mandate. That's generally how medicare, medicaid and welfare work, and it's the norm as well for federal education spending so far in the form of Title I. But here, the government isn't giving the dollars as an initial matter with strings attached, it's setting conditions as a pre-condition to eligibility for the dollars to begin with! By analogy, the federal government is doing the equivalent of a health care proposal that would say to states, "the federal government is making a chunk of money available to any state that requires all of its citizens to have health insurance; provides subsidies to low-income citizens; and demands employer participation."

Would such a proposal work in the health care arena? Who can say for certain--but probably not unless the states thought the promise of federal money at the end of the rainbow would be worth the pain. Evidently states who are changing their education policies to be eligible for race to the top funds think the money is worth it... or perhaps there's something else going on: law-makers know that the four fund conditions are the right ones as a matter of policy, but simply did not have the political capital to implement them (i.e. teachers unions and other interest groups opposed them). The carrot of doing it for extra dollars, in other words, may just be the political cover that state law-makers desperately need to execute controversial policy change.