Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Changing The Rules Mid-stream To Avoid Being Embarrassed

From the LA Times:

California wanted to apply for the second round of federal education grants but had too few school districts willing to sign on. The Obama administration badly wanted California to apply, in order to avoid the embarrassment of having the biggest state with the most children rejecting its signature Race to the Top initiative. The solution: The U.S. Department of Education agreed to consider a California application made up of just a handful of districts in the state, including Los Angeles Unified. It's a match made in heaven, if that's what you can call Sacramento.
The Times goes on to support this new proposal, saying it's silly to require the entire state to be on board; after all, LA Unified alone has five times as many students as the state of Delaware, which won RttT funds in the first round.

NCLB had some problems, but everyone knew what the goal was--improved student achievement as measured by standardized tests, and penalties for schools that consistently didn't show student improvement towards even those minimal standards. What, exactly, is RttT's goal? What standards are being reached for?

3 comments:

maxutils said...

Just like NCLB, I'm sure the goal is to fix everything. And I'm sure it will work just as well.

mrelliott said...

As a teacher in a school who is not meeting the NCLB standard, and hasn't for the last 4 years, I can say with supreme assurance that money, is NOT a penalty for NOT meeting the standard.

Do you know how many grants, and other sources of money there is out there for schools whose status is "Improvement"????

I've never seen so much money pour into a school in all my life, both from state and federal resources.

maxutils said...

Since family income is a statistically significant determiner of student scores, perhaps you should try funneling the cash directly to the students . . .