Race to the Top: Another major federal reform effort emerges
In the past, the federal government has always had a very limited role in public education, and states and local school districts have traditionally been the ones in charge. However, this changed drastically beginning with the arrival of President George W. Bush and the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. And now, who would have dreamed that our country’s fall into financial crisis would be the catalyst for a major push by the federal government to advance certain education reforms centering on teacher effectiveness and struggling schools?
Faced with this financial crisis, the incoming Obama administration made one of its first priorities the passage of a major federal stimulus funding package, otherwise known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Contained within that Act were the seeds of major education reforms in the form of numerous grant programs.
One of those is the highly visible $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) fund, which will likely be the template for the reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) - also known as the NCLB. The reauthorization of the ESEA/NCLB is long overdue, and while some experts predict that the Obama administration will release its proposal for the reauthorized ESEA this spring, many believe that Congress won’t finalize action on the bill until 2011.
Reauthorization likely to reflect lessons learned from NCLB
It’s no secret that the Bush administration borrowed heavily from the Texas state accountability system in designing the federal version – NCLB. It was then-Texas Gov. Bush who presided over the creation of our state accountability system, and not surprisingly he took the same ideas to Washington when he became president.
However, as can be true for initiatives born at the state level and then adapted at the federal level, things tend to “morph” once the folks in Washington D.C. get hold of them. The resulting NCLB accountability provisions were just different enough from our state system that they caused Texas some major headaches in making adjustments to comply. A chief example was the federal requirement regarding participation of special education students in the state assessment system.
Under the Act, states were capped at 2 percent of the number of special education students who could take the state assessment based on modified academic achievement standards, and 1 percent of the number who could take an alternative state assessment and be counted as proficient for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).
Although Texas and other states chafed significantly under these limits, which were considered by some to be arbitrary and ill-considered, Texas had no choice but to make some major changes in our state assessment system to accommodate these requirements. One of those was to eliminate the State-Developed Alternative Assessment (SDAA) and Locally Developed Alternative Assessment (LDAA) and to institute two new tests, the TAKS-M and TAKS-Alt. The good news is that according to some experts, the Obama administration is looking at eliminating the caps in favor of a more workable solution in the next version of ESEA.
The administration hinted at other changes it would seek in the reauthorized ESEA when it released its fiscal year 2011 budget to Congress. Among those were recognizing and rewarding schools for helping students make gains even if they aren’t yet on grade level, and changing from “highly qualified” designations for teachers to measuring teachers based on student improvement.
Also, according to a recent New York Times article, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan referred to the NCLB Act’s 2014 deadline for all students reaching proficiency as a “utopian goal,” and administration officials have told educators they want the deadline eliminated. But Duncan more recently said that he and his aides had not reached a final decision on eliminating the deadline.
Focus on teacher effectiveness and struggling schools
Regardless of how the ESEA reauthorization unfolds, the more immediate focus now is on the RTTT fund. The administration released proposed criteria on the RTTT fund and several other grant programs authorized by the ARRA in quick succession last summer. TCTA commented on all of them, and was the only statewide teacher association in the country to give input on the largest of these, the $12 billion second phase of the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund. Although each program had slightly different areas of focus, it soon became clear that these programs marked an unprecedented federal intrusion into areas of education that have always been a function of states and local school districts.
Several themes that caused TCTA great concern were common to all of the programs, including an increased emphasis on evaluating, paying and terminating teachers based on student test performance, as well as encouraging essentially unchecked charter school growth as a chief way to address struggling schools. As an example of the level of prescriptiveness of the RTTT criteria, one of the performance reporting requirements is to report “the number of teachers and principals...who were removed for being ineffective” based on qualifying evaluation systems. TCTA expressed strong concern, arguing that we don’t want the federal government dictating employment practices.
Another key feature of the RTTT fund was the requirement for states to participate in a consortium of states to develop and adopt common curriculum standards and common assessments. While 48 states had already joined a consortium to do so, called the Common Core initiative, Texas and Alaska did not. This proved to be a significant consideration in Texas’ decision about whether to participate in Phase 1 of the RTTT. Texas Gov. Rick Perry took exception to the common standards requirement, saying that this seemed to be coercing states to abandon their own locally established curriculum standards in favor of national standards and a national test, and that Texas was not interested in doing that.
Consequently, the governor made national headlines when he announced in a press conference days before the application deadline that Texas would not seek funding for Phase 1 of the RTTT fund. Due to TCTA’s own concerns about the RTTT, TCTA stood with the governor in support of his decision not to pursue these funds. Interestingly, closely on the heels of the governor’s announcement that Texas would not seek RTTT funds, Education Week released its nationwide Quality Counts report, giving Texas a grade of “A” on its standards, assessment and accountability, and ranking Texas sixth in the country in this area.
Who’s in, who’s out of the race?
In seemingly direct response to Perry’s pronouncement that Texas would not apply for RTTT funds, the Obama administration declared that it would seek another $1.35 billion in RTTT funding as part of its fiscal year 2011 budget to allow school districts to apply directly for the funds (regardless of whether the state applies). Several large school districts in Texas had expressed dismay that Texas would not be seeking the funds, so it will be interesting to see whether these districts take advantage of applying directly for RTTT funds should the expansion effort be implemented.
By the Jan. 19, 2010, application deadline for Phase 1 of RTTT, only two states, including Texas, had announced they were not seeking the funds and eight others signaled that they would wait for Phase 2. That left 40 states and the District of Columbia submitting first-round applications. Of that number, 16 were recently named finalists, with announcement of the final winners expected in April. It is not clear yet whether Texas will consider applying for Phase 2 of the RTTT grant; applications for Phase 2 are due by June 1, 2010.
States scramble to meet criteria
What was particularly striking about the way the RTTT fund application process unfolded was the contortions that many states went through in order to submit a competitive application. States rushed through major changes in state law at the last minute in an effort to better position them to win, such as expanding their charter school caps or linking student test scores to teacher evaluations. Various media reports chronicled the antics that accompanied some cash-starved states’ last-minute rush to change laws in a desperate effort to grab onto this new federal funding stream.
According to a Jan. 19, 2010, Associated Press report, the New York Legislature proposed last-minute changes to charter school law that New York Gov. David Paterson and Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in its RTTT application. With the legislature proposing to raise the cap of 200 available charters to 400, Paterson warned that the U.S. Education Secretary had said that the state must eliminate its cap or raise it to no fewer than 454 to qualify for up to $700 million from the federal RTTT fund. Accordingly, the governor ordered a special session to negotiate changes for 8 p.m. on the Martin Luther King holiday, with the application due in Washington the following afternoon.
Education Week chronicled the changes made in California when the legislature overturned a long-standing state law prohibiting teacher evaluations from being linked to student performance, which would have apparently doomed the state’s chances for up to $700 million in RTTT money. California also passed legislation allowing local school governing boards to close failing schools, convert them to charter schools, or fire a failing school’s principal and half the staff as part of its quest for RTTT funding.
In Tennessee, the legislature approved changes Gov. Phil Bredesen said were needed to boost Tennessee’s chances in the RTTT competition, including requiring half of teacher evaluations to be based on student achievement data. In Colorado, Gov. Bill Ritter signed fast-track legislation to help the state’s chances of winning RTTT money which included calling for the state to better monitor the performance of public school teachers and principals.
Even though some major local school districts signed off on their state Rto have time to read the fine print of the grant’s requirements, and then decide whether to continue pursuing the grant. For example, an Illinois superintendent said that his district would continue with the program only if it was comfortable with whatever strings were attached to the money and what resources would be involved. “If we believe the pain is not worth the gain,” he said, “we may not follow through.”
Others chose not to sign off in the first place - of Illinois’s 870 school districts, only about 350 signed on to join in the application. Another Illinois superintendent said the district decided not to apply for RTTT money, in part because of concerns about basing teacher and administrator evaluations on student test scores.
Backlash/funding cliff may be ahead
Now that the application deadline for Phase 1 of RTTT has passed, another potentially major problem looms. From the beginning, it’s been commonly understood that only a handful of states would end up receiving grant funds under the current scope of the program. What’s more, many states asked for enormous sums in their grant applications.
For example, according to some reports, the reforms in Florida’s RTTT application would cost $1.14 billion, which is far higher than the USDE’s award range for a state of Florida’s size (estimated to be anywhere from $350 to $700 million). The District of Columbia asked for $112 million, while the available range of funds for the District is $20 to $75 million. Accordingly, experts have predicted a significant potential backlash when states that made significant, long-term changes to state laws find out they weren’t awarded adequate funds (or any at all).
There’s also the issue of what RTTT funds can be used for – the rules are clear that the funds cannot be used to plug holes in school district budgets, but must be spent on the particular reforms required by the grant. Then there’s the issue of the potential “funding cliff” associated with RTTT funds – while these funds will initially support the significant reforms that states and districts must put in place, once the grant funds run out, it will fall on the individual school districts and taxpayers to foot the bill to sustain the reforms.
Whether all of these factors will converge to create a “perfect storm” that sidelines many of the RTTT education initiatives that the administration holds dear, remains to be seen. Regardless, it’s clear that the appropriate role of the federal government in public education will continue to be a key topic of discussion when Congress finally takes up the major task of reauthorizing the
