While reading the new Economic Policy Institute (EPI)/Broader, Bolder Approach (BBA) report on Race to the Top (RttT) released this morning I was, strangely enough, reminded of Woody Allen’s classic film “Annie Hall.”
From the movie “Annie Hall”:
Alvy Singer: “There’s an old joke. Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.'”
Of which the EPI/BBA report sounded eerily reminiscent, a la:
“These Race to the Top policies really suck,” EPI says. To which BBA reponds, “We totally agree; and states are taking far too long to implement them.”
I should say at the outset, as a disclaimer, that we at DFER were some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the transformative power of RttT from a policy-making perspective. On the flip side, our support for RttT is by no means unqualified. We agree with EPI and BBA generally that in most states there are a lot of implementation issues that need to be resolved and in many cases states are moving far too slowly toward the policies they promised. But no matter what one’s overall view is of RttT per se, it’s fairly easy to pick out the flaws in the EPI/BBA “study.”
The EPI/BBA report throws together a hodgepodge of unsubstantiated claims and cherry-picked data. None of the assertions made are accompanied by comprehensive evidence that supports them. Claims made in one part of the report clash with other claims that appear elsewhere. There’s an undeniable bias toward painting RttT in the worst light possible.
For example, perhaps one of the most glaring flaws of the report is that it seeks to assess state success on Race to the Top over a very short time period. A key EPI/BBA criticism of RttT is that most states are behind, in units of years not months, on their implementation schedules. If that’s true, how can one evaluate plans that were not approved by the U.S. Department of Education until 2010 and that, as EPI/BBA rightly points out, still have not been fully implemented?
One of the whopper fabrications in the report is that:
“States and districts that laid strong foundations for change, including making teachers real partners, and making union-management collaboration fundamental to the success of reform, have seen the most progress, have encountered the fewest bumps, and seem more likely to sustain gains.”
Nowhere does EPI/BBA define what “making teachers real partners” or “making union-management collaboration fundamental to the success of reform” mean but here are the facts: The U.S. Department of Education made union support a factor in scoring Race to the Top applications. Round 1 awardees Delaware and Tennessee,which were two of the three states EPI/BBA chose to beat up on the most, had 100% and 93% union support respectively.
Nowhere does the report define how EPA/BBA arrived at the assumptions that states with more teacher and union collaboration “have seen the most progress, have encountered the fewest bumps, and seem more likely to sustain gains.” But by its own metric, those states would be Delaware and Tennessee, as noted above, plus Hawaii and Kentucky (each with 100% union support).
Over the past several years, most of the twelve Phase 1 and Phase 2 Race to the Top grantees have been in the top tier of student performance on NAEP, a measure that both EPI/BBA and DFER agree is among the most valid. Again, we stress that it makes little sense to look at 2011 state data as a measure of RttT. But if you wanted to, you could treat the numbers over the 2005-2011 time period as reflective of both good USDOE judgment in picking states with bona fides as innovators and change agents and maybe a smidgen of early RttT effects for good measure.
It just so happens that DFER Policy Analyst Mac LeBuhn put those numbers together a few days ago. Here’s what he found.
For black students:
Students in Race to the Top states Delaware and North Carolina have composite scores on 4th and 8th grade NAEP that rank them in the top ten students of all states, as do those in Colorado a state we, and many others, think got shoddy treatment on their RttT application from peer reviewers;
Race to the Top states Washington, DC, Florida, and Rhode Island are among the states making the greatest student gains; and,
Maryland and Massachusetts are two of the top three states on both performance and growth (the 3rd being “missed it by that much” 13th place finisher New Jersey).
For Hispanic students:
Race to the Top states Florida and North Carolina are among the top ten states in overall student performance;
Race to the Top states Massachusetts and Rhode Island are among the top ten states with the largest student gains; and,
Race to the Top states Delaware, Georgia, and Maryland are three of the four top ten states on both performance and gains.
For low-income students:
Race to the Top state Kentucky is among the top performers;
Race to the Top states Washington, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Maryland, and Rhode Island are amoing the top 10 states making the largest student gains; and,
Race to the Top state Massachusetts is the only state in the top ten on both performance and gains.
EPI/BBA is very critical of charter schools being a factor in scoring state RttT applications. Charter schools definitely vary in quality. But the two CREDO reports published from the beginning of Race to the Top until now (2009 and 2012) show that charter school quality has improved and that in some states charter schools are outperforming traditional public schools by incredibly large margins.
Nowhere is this truer than in EPI/BBA’s favorite whipping boy state Tennessee. Tennessee was one of the states that took action on Race to the Top issues before it won the competition. In June of 2009, then-Governor Bredesen shepherded a bill through the legislature that raised the cap limiting the number of charter schools statewide. Last month, four years later, the CREDO group at Stanford University found Tennessee charter schools, which serve a disproportionate share of poor and minority students, outperform traditional public schools by a mile — adding the equivalent of 86 additional days of student learning in reading and 72 days of student learning in math, compared to traditional schools, each year. State leaders would like to expand charters even further, but are facing political obstruction because these schools have been even more successful than supporters hoped and at least as successful as opponents feared.
Not every Race to the Top state is gaining in every category, and not everything EPI/BBA said is false. The report is right, for example, to criticize Ohio where little school reform seems to have happened since the state cashed its first RttT check. To be clear, there are also several states that did not win Race to the Top that are showing notable gains, not the least of which is Alabama (are you as surprised as I am?), which is among the top-ten gaining states for both black and low-income students.
By and large, though, EPI and BBA should be using the results for Race to the Top states that are reviewed above as a guide to the policies they choose to support, not using the policies they choose to support to guide how they distort and represent the results. The mostly fabricated findings in the report are particularly insidious given that both EPI and BBA claim to represent the interests of the same minority and low-income students for which Race to the Top states are showing such impressive success. Toward the goal of coming together across ideological and political lines to do what’s right for our kids, EPI and BBA have further made themselves a big part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Charles Barone has more than 25 years of experience in education service, research, policy, and advocacy. Prior to joining Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) full-time in January of 2009, Barone worked for five years as an independent consultant on education policy and advocacy. His clients, in addition to DFER, included the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, the Education Trust, The Education Sector, and the National Academy of Sciences. Read more here.