I’m shocked, shocked to find that politics is going on in here.

I really love my friends in the eclectic education reform movement, even when they say really silly things. Take Joe Williams, who argues that the Duncan administration had to work really hard to keep ‘Race to the Top’ scoring “pure.” Pure? I’m sorry, but nothing is pure when people’s opinions are in play.

Let’s take a process I’m very familiar with - the role of reviewers in scoring applications for all manner of federal programs. First there is the selection process of reviewers, which in and of itself is skewed in favor of a certain ideology. DFER and kin are right to critique the scoring for Colorado and Louisiana. We’d add New Jersey into the mix of outrage over ridiculous omissions, but also Hawaii and Maryland for grade inflation.

We know people who would have been great reviewers and been able to read between the lines of BS that were carefully crafted in many a state application. But they were rejected. We know of people who became reviewers, who, shall we say, have a point of view that trusts bureaucracy just a little too much to make decisions concerning kids lives. I suspect, if ever released, identified scorecards would show it was they who scored some states high at the expense of others who ticked off the establishment on the way to the ‘Race’.

And what about the cut scores? In testing students, the cut scores can be artificially low or viewed as too high when it comes to passing kids on a test. The Duncan administration could have set the cut scores lower or higher. We believe they went lower, to be more inclusive of under deserving, but politically important states (like Maryland, where a Governor they love is fighting hard to keep his job).

Most people don’t realize that reviewers are told to check their actual knowledge of a state or issue at the door and focus only on what’s written in an application. So, if you knew that, for example, North Carolina talks a lot about data and testing but does little with it, you’d score that section lower than you would have if you’d only read how much they suggest they’d do with it all in a proposal. The same reality-vs-propaganda dilemma would be true for charters in NC.

And frankly, I don’t blame them. Every administration, including the one I worked in many moons ago, picks people it most agrees with to review programs. That’s their prerogative as soldiers of the commander in chief (who the people elect to govern). But let’s not be shocked by honest statements of fact that there’s politics going on in this gin joint. There is no “pure” reviewer or competitive grant program on the planet. Now that we have that behind us, can we have a real discussion about whether and how ‘Race to the Top’ can help kids when school districts and unions are in control of how the money gets spent? Didn’t think so.