I live in a state (New York) that just assumes it is at the top of everything. But unless Education Secretary Arne Duncan includes some special criteria requiring sheer arrogance in the Race To The Top sweepstakes, it will be hard to see how we can show we are doing anything particularly special to respond to the president’s call to get our act together on education reform.
Compare our “We’re Freaking New York, So Fund Us” approach, to what we see in Colorado, where Gov. Bill Ritter actually appointed a Race To The Top Czar to make sure the state wins outright in the battle for the most reform-friendly state.
The drumbeat from Duncan and his team on this race has been hard to miss: Despite widespread criticism that they couldn’t possibly be serious about having merits trump Congressional district politics,they seem… serious!
And people are picking up on that fact. There’s suddenly a lot of exciting action out there around the country on this stuff:
— In Illinois, both the House and Senate over the weekend responded to Duncan’s criticism of the state’s charter school laws by passing a major charter reform law. SB 612 goes to the Governor’s office. The law doubles the charter cap, eliminates a geographic cap and sets up a 6 month process to design an independent authorizer for charters in Illinois.
— In Rhode Island, State Education officials on Friday approved the first of an exciting new kind of charter school which would be operated by suburban mayors. Cumberland Mayor Daniel J. McKee won support for the mayoral academy concept from the General Assembly in 2008, but had to wait for the state Department of Education to review his proposal in order to open the elementary school this fall in Cumberland. (Disclosure: I am on the board of the flagship school, which will be run by Democracy Builders, the CMO that runs Democracy Prep in Harlem.)
— In Tennessee, after Duncan suggested to reporters that a recent move to kill charter school legislation by a bloc of Democrats in the Legislature could cost the state $100 million in Race To The Top funds, some electeds are now having second thoughts. Remarked House Democratic Caucus Leader Mike Turner in the Tennessean: “No one has said a word to me about this… Obama ought to call us and tell us this stuff. If he would have called us and told us this, we might have had a different outlook.”
And I am hearing that at least one state is on the verge of proposing some sensible “smart cap” legislation.
The race is on.