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.

I have been accused of being too negative on the ‘Race to the Top’ competition by many, in and out of the education reform world. (I prefer the term cynical - even skeptical or experienced would do.) But recent soul-searching in the aftermath of Monday’s announcement that Delaware and Tennessee would be the inaugural winners in phase one has forced me to re-evaluate my thinking. When the news first broke Monday morning, I was a bit taken aback. But then, I figured “why not?”

Even if they’re not welcoming to charter schools, at least they have them, right? Moratoriums, caps and restricted enrollment must just be their way of maintaining quality standards.

And while Tennessee has only raised 8th grade proficiency on NAEP reading tests by 2 points in 11 years and Delaware 8th graders have remained stagnate since 2003, both have signed on for common standards. That should fix that issue lickety split.

And in re-reviewing both of their applications, I put myself in the place of a true DoED evaluator - alone, in a dark room, on my 4th application, deadline approaching - and I found that I truly appreciated the lack of detail in the teacher evaluation sections of each app. I was free to believe exactly what was written, and only what was written. I wasn’t hampered by knowledge of teachers union contracts, work rules, etc. And besides, with all those union locals signing on to the state proposals, I too was convinced that buy-in - not game changing reforms - would be the tipping point.

So there you have it. Just as Diane Ravitch has been accused of late, I am admitting to a 180-degree turn with respect to ‘Race to the Top’. As one can’t help but hit a few lawyers on a DC street if one throws a handful of pennies, one can’t help but buy a few decent reforms if one spends a couple hundred million dollars, can they?

Right?

(Happy April Fools.)

(Originally posted to the National Journal’s Education Experts blog)

‘Race to the Top’ meaningful? Serious education reform? To the contrary, the choice of Delaware and Tennessee to be the first demonstration of the Obama Administration’s commitment to breaking the status quo is not a choice at all, but an echo of the establishment’s stranglehold on our leadership in Washington today. That establishment goes far beyond the unions. It includes the chiefs, the principals groups, the administrators associations, school boards, the before school groups, the after schools, the publishers, et al — all groups who have praised the recent policy prescriptions led by Arne Duncan. Why? Why would the Blob back real reform? Maybe because it’s not real reform…

Read the entire post HERE.

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?

“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 this morning’s Dayton, Ohio news.  This set State Senator Jon Husted, a former education chair and current candidate for Secretary of State off the deep end. He called it an example of why people lose faith in government, and was “embarrassed” by some of the things the state is seeking to fund.

That’s not the worst of it. These abuses of money are obvious, but what about the policies that sound like they are addressing the Administration’s mandate to reform education but are actually carefully crafted to dodge the issue?

Take Tennessee, a state rumored to be a finalist today, whose Governor was lauded for signing into law a bill that requires at least 35% of teacher evaluations be pegged to student growth.  Their ‘Race to the Top’ application appears to imply that a greater amount of student growth counts towards teacher evaluation than is actually the case. The application says, “objective student achievement data will comprise 50% of the evaluation”, but does not make clear that student growth is still only 35% of that process, not 50%. The rest of how they will determine teacher performance is left up to multiple measures, classroom observation and other assessment tools to be decided. Cagey, no?

How about the competition’s push for charter schools? Delaware’s movement toward charter schools was halted by a series of self-imposed moratoriums (not mentioned in their application), they approved zero charters for this current school year and their approval of three new charter schools to open in 2010-2011 is hardly bold. And yet their application states “Delaware is among the most welcoming states for charter schools.”

Reviewers, however, are not permitted to use their knowledge of a state’s policies and environment to judge the applications.  It’s what’s on paper that requires their focus, not what they know (or can easily find out).

These are just a few of the examples that have many wondering how we can give credit to an otherwise well -intentioned program, one that may actually end up rewarding states for creative writing over good policy. Today we will know more when EdSec Duncan announces the finalists. Whether it will mean the race is won, or just starting again, remains to be seen.