'Race to the Top' Not Yet Started

As 2009 moves toward a close, school districts in the Tri-Valley area are watching and waiting to learn whether they will qualify for some of the approximately $4.35 billion in federal funds promised by the Obama Administration under its Race to the Top program.

“We’re watching anxiously,” said Superintendent Brenda Miller of Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District. There is little else the district can do. The funds will be awarded competitively. The U.S. Department of Education has circulated a tentative set of guidelines for the competition. However, no firm criteria are expected until the end of the year.

Not every state will even qualify to apply, according to information made public to date. For example, states will be dis- qualified for having a “firewall” that prevents linking student performance data to evaluations of teachers and principals. California could have been disqualified on that basis alone. However, legislation signed last month by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated the firewall.

Putting an end to one of the conditions that would block the state’s application is not the same as meeting all the needed criteria. However, there are reasons to be hopeful, believes Joan Buchanan, 15th District Assemblywoman and a member of the Assembly Education Committee.

A former school trustee her- self, serving for nearly 20 years on the San Ramon Valley School Board before election to state office last year, Buchanan says she is “very satisfied” with the state’s move in recent years to develop and make use of objective data and performance standards as demanded by federal guidelines.

Although detailed criteria are not yet available, every state except Texas and Alaska has committed to working toward the guidelines that are known so far. The Race to the Top pro- gram is designed to build on the strengths of the No Child Left Behind effort, started by the Bush administration in 2002, while overcoming its weaknesses.

No Child Left Behind emphasized test scores, insisting that schools show improved performance overall and among specified groups. However, ac- cording to the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress, it left states so much leeway that some simply lowered academic standards to elevate test scores artificially. The National Assessment of Educational Progress has established rigorous academic standards for students nationally, but has no means of enforcing them. Instead, its studies high- light problems and needs. For example, it found that some states evaluated fourth- and eighth- grade students as “proficient” in math and reading when they did not even meet the National Assessment’s “basic” standard. It found that more states lowered standards than raised them from 2005 through 2007. Race to the Top is intended to maintain the emphasis on scores, milestones and data. It would create a higher and more consistent set of expectations for student performance and for state education programs.

“States are setting the bar too low,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. “We’re lying to our children when we tell them they’re proficient, (but) they’re not achieving at a level that will prepare them for success once they graduate.”

To Congressman George Mill- er, the Contra Costa Democrat who is chairman of the House Education Committee, the effort is more than academic. “If we are serious about rebuilding our economy and restoring our competitiveness,” he said, “then it’s time for states to adopt a common core of internationally benchmarked standards that can prepare all children in this coun- try to achieve and succeed in this global economy.”

Although Race to the Top funds would be a one-time boost rather than a continuing source of support, the money would be welcome in the extreme for California schools. To get the state as ready as possible for the release of specific criteria, Joan Buchanan and other members of the Assembly Education Committee are holding sessions with panels of experts to advise legislators on how California might improve its position in the competition.

So far as testing and monitor- ing are concerned, Buchanan believes that Livermore and Pleasanton schools, like her own San Ramon Valley schools, “have been implementing these practices for many years. Their performances are as high as or higher than state standards,” she says. Recognizing that federal com- petition guidelines will emphasize the process of improving education, state Sen. Gloria Romero (D- Los Angeles) introduced a bill with a number of features that could put the state in a far stronger position by conforming its education programs as closely as possible to the expected federal standards.

Among other things, the legislation calls for elimination of the limit on charter schools, requires the state superintendent of education to identify the lowest performing 5 percent of schools, and authorizes efforts to study how the wages of workers might relate to the performances of their former schools.

The bill received a big boost earlier this week when it was approved unanimously at the committee level. It has bipartisan support, according to the Sacramento educational consulting organization, School Systems of California. However, to become law it will have to gain approval in the Senate Appropriations Committee and the full Senate before approval by the Assembly. Whether it can overcome these hurdles is unclear, particularly since it is opposed by labor organizations such as the California Federation of Teachers and the California State Educators Association.

Nor is it clear whether California will be one of the states chosen for Race to the Top funds. All the local school districts can do is wait.

Excerpted from www.independentnews.com.