6 districts to steer Race to the Top
A half-dozen school districts , including Los Angeles Unified, will direct California’s second-round application to the federal Race to the Top competition. They must not only fight a tight deadline – June 1 for submission – but also the low odds of moving from 27th among states in the first round to the top 12 or 15 to get a piece of the remaining $3.4 billion.
On Friday, Gov. Schwarzenegger gave the go-ahead for Race to the Top, after weeks of vacillation and a personal pitch from Education Secretary Arne Duncan not to drop out. In moving ahead, administration officials also signaled a different approach. They recognized that writing a plan to appeal to as many risk-averse districts and local unions as possible is a losing strategy. Instead, they’ll hand the reins to a urban few districts that are comfortable with the reforms that Duncan is requiring.
These districts – Los Angeles, Long Beach, Fresno, San Francisco, Sanger and Clovis unified districts – will work with consultants funded by the Broad and other foundations. Other districts will have the opportunity to join – but only if they sign a memorandum of understanding that commits them to enact reforms. If only a handful of districts agree, the state will likely be eligible for less than the $700 million in one-time money that California had sought in the first round.
The reforms will be spelled out in coming weeks; they will have to address the key areas of weakness in the state’s first-round application: teacher effectiveness, use of data and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education.
The data piece will be tricky. California is lagging behind in launching a statewide student and teacher data system that can used to improve student achievement. So the state will make the case that the individual participating districts have already created their own sophisticated data systems that can benefit one another and guide state policy. That may be a stretch for Race to the Top judges.
The districts will likely agree to create new teacher evaluations and base compensation and tenure decisions on several measures, including test scores. They may commit to placing effective teachers in low-performing schools.
Schwarzenegger is pushing SB 955, which would give districts the option of eliminating tenure as a factor with regard to layoffs and transfers, enabling low-performing schools to protect young teachers they want to keep and to reduce the churn of teachers. But administration officials said Friday they weren’t counting on new legislation to strengthen the state application.
The big unanswered question is whether United Teachers Los Angeles will sign an MOU. The union didn’t participate in the first round of Race to the Top, and its president has expressed opposition to seniority and pay for performance proposals. But he hasn’t said no yet to the current effort.
Reapplying for Race to the Top will also add pressure on California to adopt the common-core standards in math and English language arts that Duncan and President Obama favor and that 48 other states are examining. In January, the Legislature committed the state to seriously consider replacing the state’s curriculum standards with common core by Aug. 2, the deadline that Duncan set for states to gain points on Race to the Top.
The state Race to the Top application is due June 1, and winners won’t be chosen until September. If the State Board of Education, which has the final authority, rejects common core in late July, the state would lose points on its Race to the Top application. Advocates of keeping or slightly amending current state standards will argue that politics of Race to the Top shouldn’t color such an important decision.
The plot thickens re CA’s involvement in RTTT, John. The decision to apply for RTTT Round 2 affects not only CA’s potential adoption of the Common Core content standards, but also CA’s involvement in the recently released RTTT Assessment competition. Joining consortia for both of these initiatives generatees points for RTTT Round 2. The deadline for joining a consortium for the RTTT Assessment piece is June 23, even sooner than the deadline for acting on the Common Core content standards piece. And the RTTT Assessment piece may well be problematic in that the feds seem to be favoring an approach that is likely to substantially weaken test data for accountability purposes. CA needs to conscientiously and thoroughly vet involvement in RTTT Assessment, just like they need to thoroughly vet the Common Core content standards, before heading in either one of those two directions. Doug McRae, Retired Test Publisher, Monterey, CA
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Thanks for covering education in depth. Look forward to future posts.
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It is interesting that the Economic Policy Institute analyzed the scoring on the first round of RTTT scoring and declared the results “arbitrary.” There was, via the scoring system, an overlay of objectivity and Duncan has asserted that all is non-political. Right. The fact that CA “redirected” recovery funds to back-fill other areas than what was intended (education) in the state budget and has no statewide “data” system to speak of would seem to suggest CA would be considered outside the parameters of the RTTT requirements. On the other hand the state has politicians on both sides of the aisle who appear to buy into the neo-liberal ideology of the basketball player as Sec of Ed. It’s certainly good PR for Duncan and the Governator (not to mention Romero) if CA can be brought into the fold, but it’s still lousy education policy.
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Gary: Having a half-dozen districts, with local unions’ buy-in, get a RTTT grant and acting as a lab for the rest of the state to watch would be great for California. Doing it within the current scoring rubric seems unlikely.
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“Having a half-dozen districts, with local unions’ buy-in, get a RTTT grant and acting as a lab for the rest of the state to watch would be great for California.”
Good point, John. Those “lab” ideas always work out so well. Like charter schools were supposed to be “labs” that would create new models to be “brought to scale.” That sure worked out well. Once you get beyond the “lab/reform” propaganda you realize that the fundamentals of RTTT are clap-trap. The above mentioned charters. The tying of teachers’ evaluations/compensation to student test scores condemned by the National Research Council. Other “turnaround” strategies that have no basis in much of anything or, when they do, show the strategies to be failures. But, then again, that’s reality. Who cares when basket-ball players, politicians , and pundits all line up in support. Keeps the public’s attention off the fact the US does a terrible job supporting poor children and CA, in particular, does a terrible job supporting schools.
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Actually, Gary, just look around you at LAUSD. Excellent charter organizations – Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, ICEF Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, and others – have grown and are coming to scale. They’re out-performing local schools and sending kids to college. Alliance will have 20 schools by next year and eventually will have 50. Charters will soon enroll about 9 percent of students in the district, I believe. More than just a lab, they are literally running circles around district schools and forcing United Teachers Los Angeles to compete for running new schools. (Whether the proposals that union teachers created are real or just window dressing will become clear in a few years.) So the lab idea is working and thriving in your backyard. Race to the Top competition already has led to significant changes, some good (removal of the barrier from using the statewide student data system to evaluate teachers) and some bad (simplistic merit pay system in Florida). It’s too soon to make a judgment on the program as a whole. But change doesn’t happen without experimentation.
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