Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

MA a winner in “Race to the Top” funding [updated]

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AP reports:

The U.S. Education Department said Tuesday that nine states and the District of Columbia will get money to reform schools in the second round of the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” grant competition. Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., will receive grants, department spokesman Justin Hamilton said. The amounts for each state were expected to be announced later…. The applicants named winners Tuesday will share a remaining $3.4 billion.

More to come, including the amount MA will receive.  For now, it’s good news, so kudos to those who put together MA’s application.

UPDATE: MA’s share is apparently expected to be about $250 million.  That should come in handy.

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  3. Compared with nearly $6.5 Billion we spend annually on education, $200 million in one time spending won’t amount to much.  We made changes to our education system whose negative consequences will harm our children for decades to come, in order to beg for scraps from Obama’s table.  The success of grant application does not vindicate the so called “reforms”, rather it shows how futile they were.

  4. I’m not overly excited.  At the very least it’s debatable whether or not the new standards are as high as Mass currently have in place.  It’s unclear how MCAS fits in.  I would think it would need to be modified if not scrapped bureaucrat in Washington making educational decisions instead of our own home grown bureaucrats

  5. As the research continues to mount* on the negative impact of programs that overemphasize testing and test results, states are forced to promise to adopt these destructive programs (e.g., tying teacher evaluations to test results) to get desperately needed cash.

    <

    p>And the states (and the families that live in them) without the wherewithal to fight for the cash are left to their own devices. Many of these have wasted precious time and resources trying to race to the trough. Now what? What does any of this have to do with equity and excellence and opportunity for all? Nothing.

    <

    p>*Just the latest is a British study linked above that finds pupils do better at school if teachers are not fixated on test results (to save their jobs and pay, for example).

    <

    p>(I posted something similar over at Boston.com.)

    <

    p>Lisa Guisbond
    Citizens for Public Schools
    http://www.citizensforpublicsc…

  6. It over-invests in the educational entrepreneur agenda and if it follows through with Arne Duncan’s plans, it will have states “competing” for basic funding for federal programs.

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    p>The standard “standards” complaint is a canard. Any claims for increased achievement are based on test scores, not standards. MCAS tests only a fraction of the standards, many of which are quite simply, not easily testable. It is the tests that drive instruction and achievement, not standards. Changing the standards will only have an effect inasmuch as we change the actual MCAS tests.

    <

    p>And with the 15% rule, and the fact that a shared assessment between states is at least years off, I don’t see anything to worry about.

  7. in which she completely debunks the theory behind these grants.  Arne Duncan did all kinds of destructive reorganizations in the Chicago city schools and the only reason the percent of students passing went up was because every year the passing score was lowered.  There was no actual gain in student achievement during his entire tenure.  How sad that this is now the basis of our national education policy.

    • http://www.commonwealthmagazin…

      <

      p>It’s by former Senate President Thomas Birmingham, featured in CommonWealth magazine. I especially liked his concluding thoughts:

      <

      p>

      There remains a principled reason to reject Ravitch’s rationale for opposing charters, and it goes back to the question that prompted her support of them in the first place. Why should poor kids be the only ones denied choice in education?

      Ravitch well describes the way privileged families “make sure to enroll their children in schools that have small class sizes, a broad curriculum in the liberal arts and sciences, well-educated teachers and well-maintained facilities.”

      It would be politically unthinkable to broach depriving upper class parents of this freedom of choice even if their children’s departure from the regular, neighborhood school would disadvantage the unmotivated poor kids remaining behind. How can we, then, justify holding only poor kids hostage in schools they would prefer to leave? Until Ravitch answers that question, the modicum of options charter schools provide kids whose parents can’t afford to buy school choice is for me reason enough to support their continuation.
       

      • what kind of choice is it?  Charter schools have never been shown to be better than public schools.  Most of them either do worse than comparable public schools or about the same.  The very few that produce good scores do it by cream skimming the most motivated students from the public schools and then counseling over half of them out of the school, so the remaining students get good scores.  This is not a viable choice policy, and by draining money from the public schools, will lead to a total destruction of public education. Are we really saying that we do not have the money and will to provide a decent education to every child?

      • The argument about “holding only poor kids hostage in schools they would prefer to leave” is pretty bogus because it makes it seem like a poor kid has but a single choice, to attend a single bad urban school. At least in Springfield (and I suspect many other locations), a poor kid has a few more options than that.

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        p>First off, a poor kid’s family has the same option as a wealthy kid’s family — moving. I will agree that it is harder to move if you are poor, but in Springfield, you can find low-cost housing in most sections of the city. You can also find low-cost housing in other communities. But it’s still an option, even if it is not perfectly easy to do this. In fact, one of the major problems with urban schools is that the kids are so transient — I think I read that the turnover rate of the students in one of our schools was something like 40% from the start of the year to the end of the year. So people are moving around already.

        <

        p>Next, Springfield offers multiple “magnet” schools — schools which can be opted into. So that completely debunks the idea that a poor kid in Springfield is locked into one school.

        <

        p>What Birmingham is more accurately describing is that he wants to give poor students the choice to opt out of a school system that has been deemed “failing”. When described that way, it makes some sense.

        <

        p>However, one has to realize that the school system is failing at least equally due to the students within it, not purely due to the system itself. And one has to realize that the students within it are failing due to their parents’ inability to focus on education.

        <

        p>One also has to realize that a parent who cannot focus on education will not make the effort to jump through the hoops required to get into a charter school, so the charter schools are self-selecting the better parents, and leaving worse parents behind. That just about guarantees the failure of the public school system.

        <

        p>I don’t doubt that opponents of public education haven’t figured this out. They’re pretty crafty.

  8. Keep in mind also that the money will be split 50/50 between states and the districts, so when it comes to “on the ground” spending, you’re looking at half that. Also, the spending is very tightly controlled; it has to go to RTTT plans, as submitted to the state.

    • is how much of the education reform money in general gets spent on reorganizations and data collecting.  Virtually none of it goes to smaller class sizes, hiring more staff so students can get more personal attention, more supplies – the things that are really needed in education.  

      • with a second rate mind.

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        p>I’ve tried reading her book, and I can’t help but get angry that it took her more than 20 years to change her mind. Her switching sides is heartening for those of us who see the flaws of the current policy regime, but she’s still not much of a thinker.

        <

        p>For example, she never discusses the fact that A Nation at Risk was based on a variety of falsehoods that have since been debunked. She never mentions the Sandia Report on Education which the Bush Administration–which she was serving at the time–quashed because it didn’t support the education in crisis meme.

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