Today, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is giving a speech at a high school in Boston that has improved after receiving a federal School Improvement Grant (SIG). He’ll be unveiling his department’s latest report on the results of the SIG program and a new four-year report on Race to the Top, the Obama administration’s signature initiative in K-12 education.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visits Boston on November 12, 2015. Department of Education Flickr.
The report casts SIG in a favorable light, and claims that Race to the Top has helped plant the seeds for long term change. Color us here at AEI skeptical.
This summer I penned an essay in Education Next on the legacy of Race to the Top, an effort that:
could have designed a program that told the states, “Give us your best ideas, and we’ll fund the states that are pioneering the most promising approaches.” … Instead, the administration proposed 19 “priorities” that states seeking Race to the Top funds would be required to address. States could earn points in each category by promising to follow administration dictates, with the most successful states winning the cash. Few of the priorities entailed structural changes. Instead, they mostly emphasized things like professional development, ensuring an “equitable distribution” of good teachers and principals, “building strong statewide capacity,” “making education funding a priority,” and so on. ….
In the end, the effort suffered for its emphasis on promises rather than accomplishments, ambiguous scoring criteria, and murky process for selecting and training judges. Conservative analyst Chester E. Finn Jr. concluded that the review process didn’t reflect “what’s really going on in these states and the degree of sincerity of their reform convictions.” The reliance of winning states on outside consultants and grant writers also meant that the commitment of key legislators, civic leaders, or education officials to the promised reform agenda could be pretty thin. Every one of the dozen winning states has come up short on its promises.
But even though the program did not live up to its promise, there are valuable lessons it taught. Here are two:
Build Reliable Infrastructure. It was no fault of the Obama administration, but the infrastructure to do Race to the Top well simply didn’t exist. Criteria for who should judge and how they should do so were made up on the fly. The need to do this in a hurry, along with conflict-of-interest rules, made it hard to assemble a first-rate pool of reviewers. U.S. Department of Education officials also had to combat concerns about the review process appearing too “political.” In the future, clear norms regarding reviewers, criteria, use of evidence, and institutional autonomy should be established before such programs are created.
Beware of Opportunity Costs. The Obama administration dangled $4 billion in federal funds at the height of the Great Recession and linked them to states demonstrating that they’d “prioritize” education spending. At a time when states could have been using the crisis to focus on finally doing something about underfunded pensions or much-needed belt-tightening, they were preoccupied with dreaming up new spending proposals. Opportunity costs don’t just come in policies pursued and tabled, but also in the debates that policymakers should and don’t have.
For the whole thing, feel free to peruse the full article.
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