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Why “Race to the Top” is a Sham

Tuesday 14 September 2010 - Filed under Dumbassery + Education + Stimulus

Though the Obama administration has shown that they are somewhat serious about encouraging some favorable changes in the educational system, the idea of Race to the Top should be seen as artificial cover for maintaining the same ol’ system which is in dire disrepair and in need of drastic overhauling. The program is asking that state educational systems try something different (and generally positive), but it’s a drop in the bucket against the deeply entrenched education establishment machine. Reason:

However, [Race to the Top awards] are dwarfed by the no-strings-attached, status-quo-preserving pallets [of] federal dollars that the feds have gotten into the habit of periodically airlifting to the states. Just to cite the most recent example, last month Congress passed a bill that includes $10 billion to preserve teachers’ jobs.

For every carefully considered dollar distributed to encourage reform, the feds undermined that message in a single stroke last month with two bucks that signal to states that they should hang in there, keep doing what they’re doing, and whatever happens don’t take the occasion of a budget crunch to rethink the way money is spent on education in this country. And that’s just the latest in a serious of ed money infusions, including a massive chunk of the stimulus cash, which have recently gone to teacher job preservation and other measures to prop up state education budgets. (Of course, last month’s $10 billion was an additional appropriation, thrown out on top of the usual tens of billions in federal K-12 education spending which remains largely untethered to reforms of any kind.)