Mass. wonders if race to top is worth it

May 31, 2010 by Anonymous

Friday, May 28, 2010
The Providence Journal
By RICKI MORELL
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_massskool_05-28-10_...

BOSTON

By most measures of student achievement, Massachusetts ranks first in the nation. But in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition for $4.35 billion in federal education money, the state failed to make the grade.

Now, a debate is brewing in Massachusetts and a handful of other states over a vexing question: Is the Race to the Top a race worth winning?

Some education officials and academics worry that high-achieving states such as Massachusetts will have to dumb down their rigorous academic standards to comply with Race to the Top rules. Virginia just pulled out of the competition because it wouldn’t adopt national standards that it deemed inferior to its own. For the same reason, Texas never applied. Massachusetts lost out in the first round – in part because the state wouldn’t commit to adopting national standards — and has been vying for a second chance for a $250 million grant. Applications are due Tuesday and adoption of common standards count for 20 points out of a possible 500.

Massachusetts is proud of its detailed and rigorous state standards. The math standards require elementary school students to solve word problems involving fractions, decimals, and percents. By 7th grade, students solve simple algebraic equations and analyze linear change with two variables. In English Language Arts, third graders learn grammar by identifying basic parts of speech and fifth graders explore similes and hyperbole. Ninth and 10th graders are expected to “use knowledge of Greek, Latin, Norse mythology, the Bible and other works often alluded to in British and American literature to understand the meaning of new words.”

Still, state officials have since considered adopting new national standards to bolster their application, causing anguish among those who believe the state’s standards are the nation’s best and should not be compromised.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan conceived of Race to the Top as an education “stimulus” for change. The program rewards states that promise to raise achievement using the Obama administration’s preferred methods: adopting national standards, promoting charter schools, linking teacher pay to student performance and turning around low-achieving schools. The federal intervention into local school business is controversial because it imposes the same prescription for all states – even if they are already high-achievers.

“There’s a lot of disappointment and anger in Massachusetts that our outstanding track record in education reform was not recognized,” says Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville.

Tennessee, a historically low-achieving state, is receiving about $500 million after winning the first round with an application that garnered bipartisan and teachers’ union support for, among other things, basing 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation on student data. The other state to win the first round, Delaware, which also ties teacher evaluations to student test scores, is getting about $100 million. Massachusetts, which ranks first on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card, received no money in the first round, ranking 13th out of 16 finalists. It could receive $250 million in the second round.

“I found it amazing that those two states won the Race to the Top,” says Paul Peterson, director of the program on education policy and governance at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “I know there’s more to Race to the Top than setting high standards, but I found it totally bizarre that Massachusetts has the highest standards in the nation and didn’t win anything.”

Peterson oversaw a recent study (http://educationnext.org/state-standards-rising-in-reading-but-not-in-math/ that gives Tennessee “F,” and Delaware “C-” for dumbing down their state achievement tests. Massachusetts earned an “A” because its test, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), is so rigorous.

To be sure, Massachusetts has some built-in advantages: Its students generally come from families that are wealthier and better-educated than much of the rest of the United States. Massachusetts officials say they still face a difficult challenge. The achievement of the state’s black and Hispanic students lags behind that of Asians and whites, a longstanding problem that the state is trying to address in its Race to the Top application.

U.S. Department of Education spokesman Justin Hamilton declined to discuss the details of the competition. “We hope that every state applies,” he said.

But states are dropping out. Minnesota gave up after the first round when teachers unions blocked state legislation linking teacher pay to student performance. Vermont won’t apply because of the requirements to expand charter schools and link teacher pay to performance. Kansas also bowed out for similar reasons.

Still, many states scrambled to become more competitive in time for the June 1 deadline. On Friday, the New York Assembly voted to more than double the number of charter schools in the state, in the hopes of getting some $700 million. New Jersey’s largest teachers union reversed its opposition to merit pay for teachers and announced it would support the state’s application to improve its chances of bringing $400 million to the state’s cash-strapped schools. Connecticut passed a new education law that its two major teacher unions helped craft that requires teacher evaluations based partly on student performance, and will also require additional credits in math, science and foreign language for graduation. Rhode Island submitted its second-round application for $75 million in aid without an endorsement from the National Education Association.

Massachusetts strengthened its application by passing legislation allowing more charter schools. In addition, the state school board is considering how to link teacher pay to student performance. The Massachusetts Teachers’ Association – the state’s largest union — signed on. The state’s other teachers’ union, the Massachusetts branch of the American Federation of Teachers, did not.

The biggest fight is about national standards. In March, governors and schools superintendents proposed specific grade-level requirements in reading, writing and math. But Massachusetts education officials in the administration of Governor Patrick had doubts about their rigor and declined to commit to adopting them in the first round. Now, they say they’ve pushed to improve the standards and will consider signing on to them.

The Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based think tank that favors charter schools and has long pushed for rigorous state standards, is incensed.

“It will be nothing short of educational folly if the Patrick administration discards this hard-won legacy for a bag of money,” Jamie Gass, the director of Institute’s Center for School Reform, wrote in an e-mail.

The Patrick administration has also said it is exploring the development of national assessment tests as part of Race to the Top. The Pioneer Institute voiced concern that officials would scrap the MCAS in favor of a national test. Education officials deny any plan to scrap the test, but this week the Massachusetts state senate approved an amendment affirming the current policy requiring students to pass the 10th grade MCAS to graduate.

Gass believes the state standards are at the heart of what many call the “Massachusetts Education Miracle.” Almost 20 years ago, a Democratic legislature passed, and Republican Governor William Weld signed, the Education Reform Act of 1993. The landmark legislation was the state’s response to a call for reform that had begun ten years earlier with the 1983 “A Nation at Risk” study, which warned of “a rising tide of mediocrity” in U.S. schools.

The 1993 Massachusetts bill poured hundreds of millions more dollars into schools, in return for the schools agreeing to raise their standards and enforce those standards through testing. The state rewrote its curriculum guidelines, detailing grade level content for local school districts. For example, currently, high school students must analyze the characters, structure and themes of classical Greek drama and epic poetry. The legislature also instituted rigorous testing for students and teachers.

Massachusetts student achievement soared. In 2007, the math scores of Massachusetts fourth graders rivaled those of traditionally top-scoring Taiwan and Japan on the world’s largest assessment of international achievement, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.

The Fordham Institute, a Washington-based conservative education think tank that generally supports the type of school reform prescribed in Race to the Top, periodically issues a study on state standards. In its latest study, ( http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=358) which looked at 2006 standards, Massachusetts got straight “A’s: in English, Math, Science, U.S. History and World History. By contrast, Tennessee got a “D” in English in Math, “B” in science, “C” in U.S. History and “D” in World History.

Under the Tennessee standards studied in the report, elementary school students aren’t even required to master basic computation without calculators, which students use beginning in first grade.

The Fordham Institute also judged the proposed national standards: It gave the math standards an “A-” and the English Language Arts standards a “B.”

This year, Tennessee education officials put into place new standards that closely match the proposed national guidelines. “I do not think that will be a difficult switch for us to make,” says Amanda Anderson, a spokesman for the Tennessee education department.

Linda Noonan, executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, which promoted the 1993 reform act, supports the Massachusetts Race to the Top application because she believes it could push the state to new heights of academic achievement.

“There are clearly people concerned that the sky is falling and that any change is a step backward,” she says. “We feel that we can’t ever stand still. We’re the best of a poor-performing bunch.”

Ricki Morell is a freelance writer based in Boston. This article was produced for the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, based at Teachers College, at Columbia University.

States NOT Taking Race To The Top Funds as of June 2010:
# Alaska
# Idaho
# Indiana
# Kansas
# Minnesota
# North Dakota
# Oregon
# South Dakota
# Texas
# Vermont
# Virginia
# West Virginia
# Wyoming