Race to Top czar: Competition works
The woman overseeing Race to the Top for the Obama administration said Monday that federal Department of Education officials have been “stunned” by the impact of the program.
Before even a dollar has been handed out, states competing to win a share of the $4.3 billion program have enacted reforms on a level not seen before, Joanne Weiss, director of Race to the Top, told a conference at Stanford on turning failing schools around.
To boost the chances of winning money, states have eliminated limits on charter schools, changed methods for evaluating teachers and principals and enacted aggressive rules on intervening in failing schools. By removing the ban on using standardized test data for teacher evaluations, California took care of a prerequisite to applying for the money. Only Nevada, of 40 states that indicated an intent to apply, has eligibility problems, Weiss said.
The department will use five-person teams of independent evaluators to rate each state’s application on a 500-point scale. Secretary Arne Duncan hasn’t decided how many states will be awarded money in the first of two rounds of funding. Applications are due Jan. 19 with a decision in April.
All of the states’ applications and evaluators’ comments will be made public after the first round of funding. Weiss said she doubts a failure to win would end a state’s commitment to school change. Race to the Top has “changed the conversation.” Many states now have a reform agenda, she said.
Weiss spoke at “Driving Dramatic School Improvement: Strategies for Turning Around our Nation’s Failing Schools,” which was hosted by the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The Obama adminstration announced plans to spend $5 billion to transform the nation’s 5,000 worst schools over the next five years – an ambitious – and some believe, unrealistic – commitment.
Turning around failing schools is a big part of Race to the Top, too. The approach is different from the No Child Left Behind law passed under the Bush administration, Weiss said. It overidentified failing schools, with sanctions for so many that the law has become useless.
In Race to the Top, states must commit to turn around the worst 5 percent of low-achieving schools, through one of four prescribed methods: closing down the school, bringing in a charter operator, replacing the principal and at least half of the staff and adopting a range of strategies, including replacing the principal in many instances.
“We have tight requirements, because we have been tinkering around the edges for a long time. It’s incumbent on us to give political cover” to state and local school officials who face the unpopular decisions of replacing staff and closing schools, she said.
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SVEF is the education foundation advocating for the needs of school districts across Silicon Valley. SVEF seeks to improve public education through establishing partnerships with the private sector and the education community ..
Just for the record, Joanne Weiss is not an educator, but an entrepreneur. Here’s her C.V. as provided by Oakland’s aggressively skeptical Perimeter Primate blog:
Joanne Weiss, Vice President of the Board, Partner and Chief Operating Officer at NewSchools Venture Fund, where she oversees the organization’s operations, as well as investment strategy and management assistance for many of NewSchools’ ventures nationally and on the West Coast. As part of this work, she serves on the boards. Prior to joining NewSchools Venture Fund, Joanne was CEO of Claria Corporation, an e-services recruiting firm that helped emerging-growth companies build their teams quickly and well.
… last May Arne Duncan appointed Joanne Weiss as Director of Race To The Top so she may be on a hiatus from her position at EFC.
http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/2009/12/education-for-change.html
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One of my concerns about their turnaround list is that it seems to assume that nothing good has been done in the targeted school before RTTT money is granted. What if the principal was hired new last year?
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Good point — and this was raised in the hearings and in comments submitted to Race to the Top. My understanding is that a district would not need to replace a principal hired within the previous two years.
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It is actually quite incredible that for just a chance at being competitive for a very small (relatively) amount of money could encourage state legislatures to implement long needed revisions in educational policy. It is too bad that just doing what is right for kids was an insufficient motivator. This is clearly already a successful policy intervention. Remains to be seen whether some of the promising but unproven strategies that are recommended so strongly in the competition will result in any real changes in educational outcomes. But at least now, we’ll have a way of knowing.
Of course, success might just be the biggest challenge of all, because such a competition strategy could be used just as easily for the ‘dark side of the force.’ Imagine a day when you can compete for public safety funds that will put more police on the streets but only if your state allows the death penalty.
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thx for this post
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