Last Thursday, U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan released the final application for the Race to the Top fund, a revision of the proposal released by the Department of Education in July. Race to the Top is a federal grant that will award pieces of more than $4 billion to states who “have led the way in reform and will show the way for the rest of the country to follow,” says Duncan. Though, in theory, it is good to allow states to spread their figurative wings in creating their own reform, it is a bad idea to turn reform into a competition. Instead of calling this a “Race to the Top,” the Department of Education should reconsider and call it “Another Bad Attempt to Reform Education.”
This $4.35 billion dollars is an unprecedented amount of federal sponsored money for reform, especially education, which is too often put on the back burner. Since there is this huge amount of money to be spent on education, it is imperative that all states get at least a portion of the money. Instead of turning it into a contest, where the top performing states get the most money, it should be divided up amongst the states based on population. The larger states should get a bigger cut of the four billing dollars. However, the government wants states to use this money to implement change, and just handing them the money will in effect, keep them from doing just that.
It is important that at least some of the money is conditional to keep states from using it without actually making any changes to their systems. I would propose the same type of competition for at least a portion of the money, but there should be a base amount given to every state to give them a jump start in changing their education systems. With at least a small portion of money, states will be better able to do the necessary research and start up programs for reform. Then, once every state has had an equal opportunity to get programs going, the rest of the monies can be rewarded based on the quality and effectiveness of said reforms.
If the government insists upon making this a competition, it should at least begin with a level playing field. Not every state has the means to start up programs without initial financial help. The way I see things going right now, is that the larger, more financially stable states will be able to provide the best reform programs and will receive the most “Race to the Top” funding, while states who need the money more will be unable to really participate. It is a vicious cycle. The states without enough education funding will not receive any of this money, and things will not change, while the big states with more money are just going to get more money.
Though I am excited to see our government finally instituting education reforms (the last time anything major was done was in 2001 with the No Child Left Behind Act, and we all know how well that worked out), I just wish that they would make a few changes first. Let’s give every state a chance to make some change, and finally fix our evident problem with education. Now that this program has already been started, I am excited to see if it actually works. I am guessing that we are going to see rich education states just get richer, without actually seeing very noticeable change. But, there are always surprises.
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It's really strange to me that the government still doesn't understand how to improve our education. There's several countries we could model ourselves after that have superior education, but instead, we choose to do the same thing we've been doing, which obviously hasn't been working.
ReplyDeleteLike you said, the states that need this funding the most aren't going to be the best right now. They're the worst. Though it's nice that we support those states that are doing well, we also need to think about how we can make our country better as a whole. So what if everyone who comes out of California is a genius? That won't help fix our problems.
Plus, what are these rankings based off of? If it's test scores or some similar measure, that doesn't give a fair representation. Just because students know how to take specific tests well doesn't mean they're learning the way they should. I remember in my high school, because of No Child Left Behind, everything we learned was catered to our state test. We didn't learn anything of value because our school was just trying to get funding.
And like you said, the states that are really in trouble financially will never get this money. I'm from Michigan, and our state government is close to getting removed because of the current economy. Of course there's no extra money to spend on education. Because of this, Michigan will only get farther behind, and people from there will no longer be able to compete in the job market. It's the beginning of a horrible cycle.
I think this initiative, like you said, should be based on population. There should be no competitive component, or it should be a very small portion of the money.