Last week, the President and Secretary of Education announced a plan to accelerate reform and innovation.
President Obama stated that “[t]his competition will not be based on politics or ideology or the preferences of a particular interest group. Instead, it will be based on a simple principle: whether a state is ready to do what works.”
Unfortunately, Mr. President, you are wrong. This competition is clearly founded on an ideology and agenda.
I often talk about the need to nurture, with incentives, the entrepreneurial spirit in education. Yet, the “Race to the Top” Fund does not support creative risk-taking; it prescribes a route and uses money to coerce states, districts, and schools.
The President and Secretary of Ed should have used a principle of equifinality, supporting diverse routes to achieve the same goal. In this case, I believe the goal is improved teaching and learning. Instead, a quick glance at the four fundamental reforms illustrates the push for clear agenda-based objectives. Arne Duncan is widely known for supporting charter schools, standardized tests, and rewards based on data for effective teachers. “Race to the Top” is the $4.35 billion carrot to mobilize such reforms.
Despite their emphasis on supporting “what works,” we really don’t know how to improve education. These reforms are not new. For 100 years education has been poaching from the business world, which explains why we say things like “benchmarks” and “data gap.” The results are lackluster.
I do not know what a “data gap” is. I do know, however, we tend to use words that de-humanize and de-politicize the educational process in an attempt to make it more clinical, methodical, and fixable. Numbers become proxies for students. ”Urban,” ”at-risk,” and “disadvantaged” become proxies for poor black and brown kids. I am not worried about the “data gap,” an inaccurate human construct. I am worried that, in our governments’ race to the top, too many students will be left and ignored on the bottom.
On Friday I will discuss the effect of “Race to the Top” on the purposes of education and education as a public good.
Randy Clemens
