(B)race for the Top

Public School Matters

1.19.10

(B)race for the Top

Do you like numbers? Well, this is the blog post for you then. Tonight I’d like to talk about numbers. Specifically, I’d like to talk about the “Race to the Top” numbers. Race to the Top, of course, being the name for the educational stimulus money being held out by the nation’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, for the application for grants by the states. Mr. Duncan is calling it a race. I guess that makes it sound fun.

Well ok then, let's have some fun with numbers. (-: Numbers have to mean something right? Otherwise they are just numerals, just funny- shaped, chicken scratches on paper. So let’s try to attach some meaning to these numbers. The first number you need to know is $4 billion. That’s how much money in grants that the federal government is saying they have to award to the states.

How much is $4 billion? That’s 4 with 9 zeros after it. And if we were to divide the money equally by 50 states, each state would get $80 million dollars. Of course that would not be completely fair, because not each state has the exact same number of school children. Also, we need to keep in mind that the federal school secretary has other ideas of how it ought to be distributed. Remember it’s a race- a contest. There will be losers; there will be winners.

However, for now, let’s pretend that Indiana would get 80 million smackeroos. What would that mean? Well, using the figures for public school enrollment (from the IDOE website) there were 1,046,263 children enrolled in Indiana Public Schools last school (08-09) year. (That’s as current a number as I can find.) And let’s pretend, for the sake of discussion, we’d use this money to give each child enrolled in the public schools (We are not even going to discuss private schools in this blog, that will be coming.) in the state of Indiana a bonus on their allowance with the RttT money. This would mean that each public school student in the state of Indiana would get about 76 dollars and about 46 cents- about enough to buy a pretty nice game for his or her Wii system. That's fun, right?

Of course, I’m being quite facetious here. That is NOT how the $4 billion is going to be distributed. The way it will be distributed will be based on a competition between states to get the most points they can by demonstrating their compliance on points on a rating scale of 500 points. I don’t know ALL of what you have to do to get the total of 500 points. I do know this is available on the IDOE website for your review. But I do know how some of it can be “earned.” I know 70 of those points will be for states who have adopted common academic standards, such as Indiana has. I know states get points for showing that they allow charter schools. Again, Indiana would meet this requirement.

The points that seem to be causing the most controversy right now, however, are the 45 points that are connected to whether or not “states secure agreement from local school leaders to implement what in many cases will be an ambitions and difficult array of changes designed to improve public education. States must demonstrate those agreements in signed memorandums of understanding (with the amusing acronym of MOUs) from local school officials.” (I’m sorry- all I can think of is “a mou mou here, and a mou mou there, here a mou, there a mou….) “A MOU requires the signature of the district superintendent, president of the local school board, and the leader of the local teachers’ union if there is one.” (from an article “District Stances on Race to the Top Plans Vary” by Lesli A. Maxwell in Education Week with the parentheses being my own)

The Education Week article also cites the U.S Department of Education to say that some of the measures of a “model” MOU are under the category “Great Teachers and Leaders” and that includes measuring student growth, designing and implementing evaluation systems, conducting annual evaluations, using evaluations to inform professional development, using evaluations to inform compensation, promotion, and retention, using evaluations to inform tenure and/or full certification, using evaluations to inform removal, ensuring equitable distribution of effective teachers and principals to high-poverty and/or high-minority schools and hard-to-staff subjects and specialty areas, and providing effective support to teachers and principals."

These MOUs are going to be difficult to come by in a lot of places for various reasons, but one of the stumbling blocks that I can see is that no self-respecting teachers' union would sign such a thing without first making sure that none of the measures were going to hurt the people that they exist to support. (My pro- opinions on teachers’ unions will be an upcoming blog topic!)

Another point of hesitation on applying seems to be opposition to federal intrusion. Some school districts really do not want to have more federal stipulations shoved down their throats.

So there are some districts and some states that are just plain saying “Wow, is what we are going to get worth all of this work even if we are “lucky” enough to win?” The Education Week Article cited above quotes David Britten, the superintendent of the 1700 student Godfrey-Lee school system, a high poverty district adjacent to Grand Rapids, Michigan. “We just don’t agree that there is a one-size-fits-all approach to improving our schools, and frankly, for $50,000 a year for four years,…. We’d have to do an awful lot of funny things for just a little bit of money.”

The Education Week article lists many school districts across the country who are just plain opting out of their state’s “race entry.” They are turning their little yellow busses around at the starting line and racing on home. In addition to that, there are many districts that are trying to sign on to “the race” without the backing of their teachers unions. The article also states that Texas has just decided to say (in my words) “Hell No!” to the whole shebang. (God Bless Texas!)

The Indiana State Teacher’s Association has done some projections about the money that Indiana school districts could receive from the grants. The numbers are based on Title I numbers. (Title I is federal funding academically disadvantaged students.) ISTA is projecting that our state stands to get (if awarded) a total of about $125 million, which of course is better than the $80 million that we’d get if it was all handed out evenly to each state.

So would it make sense to go for it in Indiana? Well that depends on who you are, I think. Read on, please.

The ISTA projects the following amounts (again according to Title 1 figures) to be awarded to the six districts that my Special Education Cooperative serves. And one thing you have to note is that the districts themselves would only be getting roughly half of the amounts (below) directly. The other halves would be “siphoned” off by the IDOE, is my understanding. So you can kind of see why Tony Bennett and Mitch Daniels are all for this – it seems that it might help fund Tony’s salary and his very nice suits, and his manicures, and his spiffy haircuts. And Mitch can use his state revenues elsewhere possibly- maybe buy his tollroad back or something. But I digress, here are the projected numbers:

South Adams $497,064.44
Adams Central $331,741.69
North Adams $134,371.40
Northern Wells $154,587.66
Bluffton Harrison MSD $95,827.29
Southern Wells $25,696.81

Obviously, the Southern Wells District especially doesn’t seem to stand to gain much from signing on for the grant. They’d really only be bringing home about 13,000 dollars. That’s not much bacon- about enough to pay for 1 teacher’s assistant. And that may seem worth it to you, however, I think it would be so much less fuss and muss to just have a big old rousing Southern Wells bake sale or two. Or even (God forbid) require athletes and supporters of athletics to self-fund their programs.

What do you think?

(I do ask you to please forgive some of the weak sarcasm in this post. I had vowed I'd try really hard to stay away from that in this blog. I'll try to do better in the future.)