Federal Judiciary

Moving the Summit -- By: Robert VerBruggen

?States#...#[that] cap the number of charter schools will be at a competitive disadvantage,? Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said on July 24, 2009. He was kicking off the Race to the Top program -- a plan to use $4.35 billion in federal funds to bribe states into enacting education reform. ?States that explicitly prohibit linking data on achievement or student growth to principal and teacher evaluations will be ineligible for reform dollars until they change their laws,? he added. The previous month, he had singled out New York, Wisconsin, and California as states that ?have laws that create a firewall between students and teacher data.?

Tony Bennett, superintendent for public instruction at the Indiana Department of Education, was in the audience for the kickoff speech. ?Prior to that, we?d picked up the same type of rhetoric while our legislature was in session,? he recalls. ?We were considering caps on charters, and we had a prohibition on linking student test data to teacher evaluations.?

Duncan?s threats worked. Numerous states, including Indiana, enacted or retained liberal charter-school laws and allowed students? test scores to be linked to teacher evaluations. But on March 4, when the 16 finalists for the first round of funding were announced, many observers found the results surprising. Indiana didn?t make the cut, while Kentucky, which has no charter-school law at all, did. So did New York, which, in addition to capping the number of charter schools, still has the law Duncan criticized -- evidently, the ?firewall? didn?t disqualify the state, either because it sunsets in July, or because it bans the use of data on students? test scores only in tenure decisions, and not in evaluations for other purposes.

What happened? Given the lack of transparency thus far, it?s not possible to say with certainty. Using a 500-point scale, five-judge panels whose members? names are not yet known arrived at scores that won?t be released until April. All we know is that the winning states all scored at least a B, or 400 points, and that, according to Duncan, their scores were bunched closely enough that any of them can win. Last week, the 16 states made presentations in the nation?s capital defending their applications, and the final decisions come down next month.

But here?s a big piece of the puzzle: In November, the program?s actual criteria -- a 500-point scoring checklist -- came out, and it turned out that charters and teacher-quality initiatives weren?t so important after all. By my count, a state can earn 260 points just by writing a convincing plan, whereas a state?s actual accomplishments -- passing laws, raising test scores -- can net it only 140 points. Its ability to convince local school, government, and union authorities to sign up for free federal money can bring in another 70; its participation in multi-state consortia, 30 more.

The distribution of the accomplishment-based points further insults states that followed Duncan?s advice. A state receives only 40 points for having a liberal charter-school law. There are no points for using test scores in consequential teacher evaluations, though there are points for having a ?high-quality plan? to do so.

Scott Jenkins, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels?s senior policy director for education, says many education reformers found the criteria and resulting decisions disappointing. ?People who wanted to turn around the schools had been pointing to the Obama administration, which was helpful because people who want to stop these measures tend to be Democrats,? he says. ?We?ll have to wait and see who the final winners are, but it could be much harder to do that in the future.?

For its part, the Obama Education Department stands behind the criteria. ?Obviously, different states have different strengths and weaknesses, and the combination of those strengths and weaknesses got some of them as far as the final round. But we think we have strong and rigorous criteria, and that the program truly speaks to its name: It?s a Race to the Top,? says Justin Hamilton, the department?s press secretary. ?It?s one thing to make the final round, and another to win. We think a much, much smaller number of states will win in this round.?

As for the 260 plan-based points, it will be impossible even to guess which states got how many until next month: As Frederick M. Hess has pointed out on NRO, states simply disregarded the federal government?s length requirements in their applications, submitting absurdly long, jargon-soaked summaries of how they planned to use the funds. Further, it is disturbing that (as Hess also noted) some states might have tried to use political muscle to affect the process.

The people behind Indiana?s plan, not surprisingly, defend it. Bennett points to its aggressive, performance-based teacher-certification initiatives, and to its emphasis on the Common Core curriculum.

Jenkins suspects that Indiana?s aversion to bureaucracy could have hurt its application. ?We were looking to do this in a contractual way -- to bring in national firms to seed change within the schools,? he says. ?If a grant reviewer is reading more detail in other states? plans as to who they?re going to hire, while Indiana says it doesn?t want to add bureaucracy, that can make a difference.?

Indiana is gearing up for round two -- states that lost out this time can change their applications and try again -- but officials there say they?ll do their best to enact reform with or without federal dollars. ?We said a long time ago that we need to change our attitude from ?How do we get more money for education?? to ?How do we get more education for our money??? Bennett says. ?If we reform without federal money, we will be the example the nation will look to.?

-- Robert VerBruggen, who edits Phi Beta Cons, is an associate editor of National Review.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on March 25, 2010 (boomark / email).