http://socialistaction.org/obamas-race-to-the-top/
Obama’s ‘Race to the Top’ falters
Published April 4, 2016.
March 2016 Edu cartoon
By KEVIN YESSIAN
In 2009, President Obama issued a fact sheet outlining his new education
reform plan. Race to the Top, as it is called, has four key areas:
rigorous standards and assessments, adoption of better data systems for
reporting, support for teachers and school leaders to become more
effective, and a plan for rigorous interventions when a school fails to
meet standards. In the seven years since this announcement, the results
range from somewhat satisfactory to outright disastrous.
Obama wrote a preamble to the fact sheet on July 24, 2009, which stated:
“America will not succeed in the 21st century unless we do a far better
job of educating our sons and daughters. … And the race starts today. I
am issuing a challenge to our nation’s governors and school boards,
principals and teachers, businesses and non-profits, parents and
students: if you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and
assessments; if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the
classroom; if you turn around failing schools—your state can win a Race
to the Top grant that will not only help students outcompete workers
around the world, but let them fulfill their God-given potential.” [i]
As stated, Obama’s goal for this program was to ensure that students
could outcompete workers worldwide. But as a goal for educators, it set
an ill-conceived precedent involving winners and losers.
Kevin K. Kumashiro, in his 2012 book “Bad Teacher,” outlined the
shortcomings of recent federal educational reform plans: “Politicians
and pundits today seem to be unable to talk about educational reform in
terms other than competitions, such as being the best in the world or
racing to the top, in which only some can win while all others must
lose. Even reforms that seem to say that everyone can win are
nonetheless creating winners and losers, such as [the federal act of
2001] No Child Left Behind’s mandate of 100% proficiency in reading and
mathematics by 2014—a rate that has never been reached by any nation in
the world—which actually sets many up to lose because of the sanctions
that follow when failing to meet that unattainable standard. School
reform is making the failures of vast numbers of America’s children
inevitable.”
As Race to the Top’s mandate for rigorous standards and assessments
became translated into Common Core and high-stakes testing, schools
across the nation began to focus their energies into “teaching for the
test,” in order to acquire much needed funds in a time of seemingly
permanent fiscal crises and to prevent punitive measures if their
children failed to meet the required benchmark.
In her book “Reign of Error” (2013) education historian Diane Ravitch
stated, “So we are left with the short-term strategies. [University of
California professor Thomas B.] Timar says that the strategies of
‘bureaucratizing the process of school improvement and turning it into a
chase for higher test scores’ have not worked. They have not made
schools more stable, more coherent, and more professional. NCLB [No
Child Left Behind] plus the Obama administration’s Race to the Top have
made schools less stable, encouraged staff turnover, promoted policy
churn, and undermined professionalism.”
A large part of what make these schools unstable is the practice of
holding schools accountable when they find themselves at the bottom of
the test rankings. For accountability starts with increased pressure to
turn the school around quickly and proceeds to firings and school
closings when they inevitably fail to improve. This does not address the
prevalence of poverty and the ways in which poverty affects the
communities that many of these schools are located within.
Ravitch underscored the fact that “poverty matters. Poverty affects
children’s health and well-being. It affects their emotional lives and
their attention spans, their attendance and their academic performance.
Poverty affects their motivation and their ability to concentrate on
anything other than day-to-day survival. In a society of abundance,
poverty is degrading and humiliating.”
Furthermore, getting a “quality education,” including a college degree,
is not necessarily enough to ensure a quality job that would put the
student in a position to, in Obama’s words, “outcompete workers around
the world.” In a competitive model, those who are born at the bottom,
the “losers,” will most likely attend public institutions. Even if they
succeed at getting through high school and graduating with a
bachelors-degree, they are still competing against those who have gone
through the most prestigious high schools and universities.
“This stratification of college attendance by social class matters,”
stressed the late education theorist and activist Jean Anyon in her 2011
book “Marx and Education.” She pointed out that “selective institutions
spend up to $92,000 per student, while colleges with low selectivity
spend about $12,000 per student. And per-pupil subsidies at selective
universities are eight times greater than at non-selective institutions.
Moreover, the prestige and networks one acquires at a selective school
are invaluable in future job searches.”
Race to the Top might have benefitted a few schools that, with the help
of federal funds, have managed to pull themselves away from the brink of
being closed. For a great many schools, however, this program has meant
devastating interventions that included firings and closings and the
opening up of charter schools in their place. The charters are
privatized and unregulated institutions where young people can possibly
get a quality education but are more likely to find themselves in
ramshackle profit-making enterprises where education is the least of
concerns.
Going forward, true educational reform would have to start, not from a
position of increasing competition but from the idea that we are all of
one worldwide community, facing a global climatic crisis, and that we
need to address structural issues that have resulted in high levels of
poverty, including geographical issues that have arisen due to climate
change, policing, and judicial racism. These items have given rise to
the school-to-prison pipeline and gender inequalities that are
manifested in a myriad of ways, including the persistent wage-gap
between men and women. As these issues remain, so do differentiated
educational outcomes that favor those who possess the most resources.
[i] Barack Obama, July 24, 2009
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/fact-sheet-race-top
Posted in Education & Schools.
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