A Long Trek Before a Race to the Top

Team Obama is winning on education and losing on health. One difference between the health care food fight and the coherent education agenda is a mostly unified eight-year policy push by the new money foundations.

The debacle we're watching in health care is, in part, sponsored by competing foundations. Heritage is supplying talking points on the right, Kaiser Family Foundation is pushing the president's agenda.

Centerpiece of Team Obama's education strategy is the Race to the Top grant program. The RTT criteria -- particularly requirements for a school turnaround strategy, strong charter law, comprehensive data system, and links between student achievement and teacher evaluation -- are the new education reform agenda. They represent a consensus of centrist foundations that simply doesn't exist in health care.

The 'new' education agenda didn't get written last month: it's been a decade in the making. During the last reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (called No Child Left Behind), Education Trust was the voice for reform. Kati Haycock's gap-closing advocacy created an unusual degree of congressional consensus in favor of standards and accountability.

Since 2001, the charter school movement has become a powerful force backed by funding from Gates, Broad, Walton, Fisher, and Robertson foundations. Active charter advocates include The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, Center for Education Reform, and funding coalitions including New Schools and Charter School Growth Fund.

The 'human capital' agenda has also matured in the last eight years with the scaled success of foundation favorites Teach for America, New Leaders, and New Teacher Project.
Accelerated progress on national college ready standards began with a 2004 Gates Foundation orchestrated National High School Summit, a shotgun marriage of Achieve and NGA.

Embodying all four -- college ready standards, gap closing accountability, choice, and human capital -- are several new and powerful voices, including Democrats for Education Reform and Education Equality Project. These new voices scaffolded the Race to the Top criteria and, with EdTrust, will be active in shaping the next ESEA reauthorization.

An Oregon editorial is a recent example of using the new reform consensus embodied in the RTT criteria to judge the state of education affairs. The Web site of the Lt. Gov. of Colorado is an example of using RTT to goad local progress.

Duncan's announcement of Race the Top criteria didn't come out of the blue -- it's the result of the smart investment of several billion dollars by a coalition of foundations supporting the work of hundreds of education policy entrepreneurs.

If health care had benefited from a decade long push by a unified group of foundations, we would already have broader coverage and lower costs.

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Comments

[30yearsinak]

Government by foundation? No thank you. This "reform" movement has no real reform in it. It asks that public money be transferred to private entities (which the earlier comment aptly explains) and it proposes longer school days and more school days all with a focus of getting more kids to college. This will not improve graduation rates or provide more American jobs. Children without dental care, living in inadequate housing without access to books are, for the most part, unable to benefit from these "reforms".

Here's a better perspective:

http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.html?id=8591
(reprint of article from The Nation)

and another:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-ravitch/obama-gives-bush-a-3rd-te_b_215277.html

[CarolineSF]

The only trouble is, the Obama administration is making a big mistake in placing its faith in charter schools.

Charter schools don't outperform traditional public schools, as numerous studies confirm -- most recently a June 2008 study by Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes.

Meanwhile, charter schools harm traditional public schools -- and thus the students in those schools, and our entire educational system. The following excerpts are from the introduction to the March 2008 book "Keeping the Promise? The debate over charter schools," published by Rethinking Schools and the Center for Community Change. The authors are Leigh Dingerson, Barbara Miner, Bob Peterson and Stephanie Walters.

“… [T]here are those who view charters as a way to get rid of public schools altogether.

“… The elixir of an individualized bailout from a struggling system has serious side effects. … It can create a painful wedge in many communities, especially among African-Americans. It can weaken the political will for a collective solution to the problems in public education; and it can promote the deterioration of traditional schools. As highly motivated and engaged families pull their children from traditional public schools, urban districts have fewer resources – both financial and human – to address their many problems. The worse the schools get, the more appealing the escape to charters and private schools, all of which feeds into the conservative dream of replacing public education with a free-market system of everyone for themselves, the common good be damned."