Do you have an opinion on California's recent failure to get
stage 1 Race to the Top Federal funds?
At I-MAG STS we are never short of opinions. Some of us occasionally have more than one on the
same topic. The current Race to the Top funding, which California failed to qualify for, is $4.35
billion. There will be a second round in June. How much California might have eventually received
in the first round is not clear. Presumably, with nearly six million students and a fairly dismal
overall showing by most measures, hence plenty of room to race toward the top, California should
have received some funding. We appreciate that it is tempting to blame State Department of
Education officials and the Governor for failing to market Race to the Top to school districts and
parents. We'd be disinclined to say the effort put into the sales pitch was adequate or acceptable.
However, in our mathematical models when we project the stated Race to the Top goals, we consider
the entire effort largely toxic. Granted, school districts had a variety of reasons for not signing up,
but the overall response of "no thanks" was correct. Take a hypothetical target school which has
miserable API scores and low graduation rates. Race to the Top stipulates some courses of action:
close the school; fire a portion of the teachers; make the school a charter and so on. Same textbooks,
same building, same students, same parents and some new teachers from a vast pool of excellent
teachers never tapped by other districts. If the cards drop well, in about 20% of these schools scores
will go up slightly for one year (no fair not testing EVERYONE). In less than 5% scores will go up a
second year. This is failing to solve the problem. We'll see how Race to the Top actually does, but the
real challenge is if the strategy is wrong then those students NEVER get that time back. API scores
aren't our favorite measure for a lot of reasons. There's no actual value to a high school diploma.
A lot of money has been spent on public education and the results are not impressive. We'll have a
lot more to say about what what we are convinced should be done. Stay tuned, Legionaires.