Race to the Top (of What)?

With regard to the allocation of Race to the Top (RttT) competition, a colleague of mine,  Deb, writes: "Since when should a child's education be dependent on adults 'winning' a race?"

Well Deb, it does seem to be all about winners and losers and according to a Huffington Post article, the words that were used in the grant application:

The words "charter," "evaluation," "rigor" or "standards," "assessment," "accountability," and "online" or "e-learning" were mentioned more often in winning applications. On average, winners included the phrases "professional development" and "data-driven" almost twice as often as losers.

A distinct advantage reported in the NYT also was afforded to those states who employed full time professional grant writers, as opposed to South Dakota whose grant in the first round was written by a working teacher and a community volunteer.   Seems hardly like a fair process.

Another concern with RttT is the blatant privileging of charter schools.  If a state wanted to earn 40 points out of the 500, it needed to demonstrate how it was going to increase the number of charter schools.  Given the scores for those who won, the exclusion of this "priority" would have likely rendered an application a "failure".   So given the advantage and importance then of including in the grant a plan to increase charter schools, one might assume then that there is a plethora of research that clearly indicates superior student achievement outcomes in charter schools.   

In the RAND report, Rhetoric versus Reality, Brian Gill writes "None of the studies suggest that charter-school achievement outcomes are dramatically better or worse on average than those of conventional public schools" (2001, p. xiv).  In another RAND study (Charter School Operations and Performance), Ron Zimmer writes that "charter schools generally have comparable or slightly lower test scores than do conventional public schools...Charter school students tended to do slightly worse than comparable students in math in both elementary and secondary conventional public schools" (2003, xxii-xxiii). 

The research published by Economic Policy Institute and Teachers College Press that was conducted by Carnoy, Jacobsen, Mishel and Rothstein (2005) state that "based on 19 studies, conducted in 11 states and the District of Columbia, there is no evidence that, on average, charter schools out-perform regular public schools. In fact, there is evidence that the average impact of charter schools is negative" (p. 2).

Hmm. 

Okay, so no improvement in student achievement.  Why then the privileging? Why would the USDOE allocate $4.35 billion and ensure states pushed for the development of charters when the research does not show academic gains?

Consider what the DOE claims: 

Awards in Race to the Top will go to States that are leading the way with ambitious yet achievable plans for implementing coherent, compelling, and comprehensive education reform. Race to the Top winners will help trail-blaze effective reforms and provide examples for States and local school districts throughout the country to follow as they too are hard at work on reforms that can transform our schools for decades to come.

Why would our government want us to follow that which research says does not clearly improve student achievement? Where exactly does this trail, blazing or not, actually lead?  It makes me wonder if RttT is nothing more than a dressed up and more expensive version of Reading First.  Remember that when Reading First was authorized, schools districts that won grants were forced to purchase "proven" reading materials.  By 2007, none of the proven materials were included on the USDOE's website "What Works Clearinghouse" as these products did not have the requisite research to merit their inclusion. Tons of dollars were channeled to a few companies who certainly got wealthier.  Is this the same prospect with RttT?  Are we throwing dollars at some trumped up promise with the hope that something catches and "works"?  And we might well ask, works for whom? In what conditions? 

"Improvement," Richard Elmore (2000) suggests, "is more a function of learning to do the right thing in the setting where you work than it is what you know when you start to do the work" (p.25).  Developing the capacity to be responsive to emerging conditions appears to be a critical factor in occasioning improved outcomes for learners.  Yet, privileging the development of local sensibilities and capacities to be responsive to such changes is absent from the RttT. By its very name, we can assume there is a bottom, some "other" that serves as the base one must move from as the winning states race off to find some top. 

I wonder how long it will take for us to stop racing about and learn to dwell where we reside—to be present in the actual moment so that we can take measure of local circumstances?   All these large scale initiatives, like RttT frankly have me worried.  I wish for once, our government might consider Wendell Berry's advice.  He aptly observed that we would be wise to "learn to prefer small-scale elegance" (1989, p. 22).

The Slow Fuse of Possibility: Why Race to the Top Is a Maimed Thing

Occasioning learning is not to be confused with causality. Whereas simple matters can often be attended to through linear methods, complex learning resists such methodology.  This in itself was not a new "discovery".  What was an "ah-ha" moment  (thanks to my colleague, Kelly Harte)  was the hypothesis about why some of us continuously teach "basics" and resist/refuse to "teach" more complex content and how this same constraint of thought informs educational policies at the federal and state (at least in NJ) level.

During my 25+ years as an educator,  I have heard some colleagues explain that they cannot move on to more sophisticated concepts and processes as the students have not mastered the simple understandings that are seen as prerequisites to more complex understandings. Teaching students how to solve a simple algorithm, requires something pedagogically different from creating a set of conditions or engagements whereby students are able to compose more complex expressions, that may well (and often do) include simple algorithms. Occasioning requires a very different set of thinking protocols on behalf of the teacher as there is no single outcome. Occasioning produces possibilities, not certainties.

Teaching the "basics" and situating the basics as simple, not complex learning-- dulls possibility. That is the true educational crime; the long term horror. Emily Dickinson wrote, "Imagination lights the slow fuse of possibility."  If we were serious about an educational revolution we would privilege the imagination and dwelling. Our metaphors to describe our intentions might well include these words, rather than words like, "race" or "top."

In these new times, when we are posing questions (I hope) and composing answers to educational challenges I would recommend we listen to poets more so than education tsars, like Arne Duncan, who are replicating input-output systems such as Race to the Top.  Duncan's rhetoric posits educational issues and couched dilemmas within the confine of causality. Problem x can be solved by "scientifically based research" solution y.  The predetermined constraints, such as accountability systems based on value added analysis, determine the parameters of the field well ahead of any reality. In many ways this rhetoric rests on the same logic that informs teachers who only teach "the simple basics".

Input.

Output.

These methods work well for simple situations.

The costs of teachers only teaching the basics are well discussed, especially in popular press. Just see last week's LA Times for an example.  Less discussed is the immeasurable costs associated with Race to the Top.  I would suggest that both situations (teaching only the basics and Race to the Top) are simply too much to bear.

Rather than listen to the educational pundits, like Duncan, I would offer we turn an ear to the poets and philosophers. Consider William Carlos Williams who admonished the poets in "Deep Religious Faith." He closed the poem, writing: "Shame on our poets:/they have caught the prevalent fever/impressed by the "laboratory"/they have forgotten/ the flower!/which goes beyond all/laboratories./They have quit the job of invention./The imagination has fallen asleep/in a poppy cup."

These are wise words--words we could hold close, and ones that might inform our decisions. Imagine educational policy that privileged the imagination?  How different schools might be.  Or perhaps, John Dewey's wisdom might be dusted off and offered for our consideration. In response to the question about What is the matter in education? John Dewey answered:

It lies, I think, with our lack of imagination in generating leading ideas. Because we are afraid of speculative ideas, we do, and do over and over again, an immense amount of dead, specialized work in the region of "facts." We forget that such facts are only data; that is, are only fragmentary, uncompleted meanings, and unless they are rounded out into complete ideas-- a work which can only be done by hypotheses, by a free imagination of intellectual possibilities--they are as helpless as are all maimed things and as repellent as are needlessly thwarted ones" (Dewey, 1937, Philosophical Review, 36, 1-9, from an address to the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, Harvard University, 15 Sept. 1926).

If we were serious about redesigning education we would understand that the role of the federal government and state government is to occasion local brilliance, not constrain it.

Shame on our politicians. Impressed by the laboratory, they have forgotten the imagination.

Your Mirror Lies. August, 2010.