Everyone’s a winner
Arne Duncan got an earful from reporters today. They asked about scoring and why some states emerged as finalists when they did little to improve various parts of their reform portfolio. Take New York for example, which failed to lift the cap that stands in the way of its considerably successful charter environment from growing.
“We said from day one,” said Duncan, “that there were many, many factors” that would go into the scoring. Many different things would be considered, he said. “Charters were never going to be the determining factor from the very beginning.”
And there you go. Despite early and strong support for the idea that charter schools could turn around failing schools and promises that R2TT would help incentivize more states to lift caps and grow, charter laws were relatively inconsequential to the decisions of reviewers to pre-qualify 15 states plus the District of Columbia for new federal funds.
Why else would only three of the sixteen have charter laws among the top ten in the country? Indeed, Kentucky has none and seven others have laws that are barely passing.
So maybe the applicants were scored based on how rigorous their evaluations of teachers will be. Right? Wrong. Rhode Island’s application starts factoring in the impact a teacher has on student growth three years from now, and whose to say how they are going to measure that impact? Tennessee starts in 2011, but its law only requires 35% of a teacher’s evaluation to factor in student growth.
What’s going on here? California lifted its ban on the use of test data to evaluate teachers but the Golden State didn’t make it. DC and Florida, along with Colorado and Louisiana, might just be the only reformist states that made the final list. And now that it’s clear that a strong charter law or performance pay system doesn’t seem to matter for the competition, state policymakers can breath a sigh of relief that they don’t have to do any heavy lifting to get or stay in the game, just hire a smart team of consultants to create convincing charts and use flowery language. Read a little of Illinois’ application. It seems to be written entirely in the future tense.
So, do you fans of increased federal involvement in education still think it can make a difference to improving education for our children?
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“Buried within a 263-page application for $409 million in federal grant money, Ohio education officials detail how they want to spend $600,000 for two cultural anthropologists, $400,000 for a video, $320,000 for a communications plan and another $160,000 for ‘creative messaging,’ according to
Oh gosh.
Today’s
All I want for Christmas is the OSP, the OSP for all like me.
