By Tom
I found out yesterday that Washington State didn't just lose the Race to the Top, we got creamed. Smeared. Hammered. We came in 32nd out of 36. It was like watching another Mariners season. It was humiliating.
Of course, having the Seattle Times editorial page rubbing it in didn't help matters.
They were right, of course. We didn't get any of the grant money because our reform package wasn't bold enough and it didn't have sufficient buy-in from all the stakeholders. Specifically, the teachers and their union.
I have to admit, I was a little upset, finding out that we did so poorly. I actually liked the package that our legislature put together, especially the proposed changes to the teacher evaluation system, and the fact that we'll continue to support National Board certification instead of pouring money into a merit-pay program. And I'm not convinced in the least that adding charter schools is any kind of a sustainable solution to the problems in education.
Disappointed and frustrated, I took it out on a long bike ride. Which seemed to help, because by the time I got home, I figured out what's really going on here.
It was never about the money. Not really. What the Obama administration was trying to do was shake things up. They had a nice chunk of cash to throw at education. And they had a choice; they could dole it out in the usual way, based on need, and expect the usual results. Or they could do things differently. They could dole it out to states based on the degree of innovation in their proposed changes, and the degree to which the stakeholders in those states bought into those changes. Which is what they did.
And that actually makes a lot of sense, because now we all get to sit back and see what works and what doesn't. We may find out that merit pay is the best thing to happen to education since the Dry-Erase Revolution. Or we might find out that it's a complicated waste of money. We might find out that charter schools really do help their students learn and that they really do inform their surrounding public schools on best practices. Or not.
And if we find this stuff out, then we can use that information to improve education everywhere else. If we're smart, that is.
So taking the long view, this whole thing looks like one big educational experiment. Unfortunately, Washington, along with most of the other states, was unwillingly placed into the control group. We didn't get any of the much-needed money to pay for our innovations. But like this year's Mariners season, that's the way it goes.
Hopefully we'll all learn from this. And hopefully we'll use what we learn to improve education for all students.
Because that's what really matters.
I think the Race to the Top is just Arne Duncan using federal dollars to fund education by using the American Idol model. I agree it will shake things up.
But it’s not a good experiment, and there is no control group. We won’t know anything more when we’re done than that different things work in different places. It depends on teachers, and we are, at our best, an uncontrollable variable.
I’ve thought some about the pendulum metaphor, and I don’t like it. I think we’re traveling in a helical path, that looks like circles when viewed from the top. But the correct perspective would show that we are going up a spiral staircase, constantly improving. We have a lot of work to do, but things are far better than they were 20 years ago, and 20 years from now they will be even better.
David-
Agreed. Teachers have long been muttering that the ideas encouraged by RTTT aren’t particularly useful. This past weekend we heard from a group of aclaimed ed researchers that we were right all along, at least in regards to VAM.
My hope is that this news will make teachers more credible. I also hope that RTTT will give all of us a chance to see what works and what doesn’t on a large scale.
I’d be a little more at ease with the shake-it-up model if they didn’t have a rather narrow set of preferences about how to shake it up, and rather flimsy evidence holding up the hoops they want us all to jump through.
Funny; I was just talking to one of our “younger” teachers yesterday about the fact that the pendulum was as far to the accountability side as I’d ever seen it. And every time I think it’s about to swing back to the “Let the Teachers Do Their Jobs” side, it just seems to swing a ittle further away.
I don’t know… I’m okay with finishing out of the running. I think the money had some strings/motives with too narrow a focus. In 20 years, we’ll be looking back at this data-driven test-score-motivated movement in education and shaking our heads at the folly of it all. (And then 20 years after that, we’ll be doing it all again.)