What is race to the top

To ensure that this program makes the most effective use of funds, the Department held 10 public meetings to accept input from experts and other stakeholders.

At these meetings, held between November and January , 42 invited assessment experts joined representatives from 37 State education agencies and nearly 1, members of the public for over 50 hours of public and expert contribution on critical questions about assessment and assessment design.

Additionally, the Department solicited written input and received over comments. On April 9, , the Department published the final priorities, requirements, definitions, and selection criteria for the Race to the Top Assessment competition. To assist prospective applicants in preparing an application and to respond to questions, the Department hosted a Technical Assistance Meeting on April 22, , and hosted a number of conference calls in which prospective applicants could ask questions of the Department's program team.

As with the Race to the Top State competition, all applications—both successful and unsuccessful—as well as reviewers' comments and scores will be posted. Schools may also encourage struggling students to stay home on testing day to raise average scores, or use disciplinary tactics to remove them from school altogether, and agencies may lower cut scores to make it appear that more students are proficient Weiss At the extreme, the increasingly high stakes attached to raising student test scores has likely contributed to a growing number of district-wide cheating scandals Ariely ; FairTest As the and — New York State Teachers of the Year themselves warned their state Board of Regents, accountability systems that rely on student test scores make it less likely that the schools most in need of great teachers will be able to recruit or retain them Peneston et al.

Removing impediments to the expansion of charter schools is another priority for Race to the Top grantees. However, research findings on the effectiveness of charter schools in boosting achievement for low-income students and in narrowing achievement gaps are mixed at best.

The recent results are better, but, even there, gains in reading are tiny. Greater gains were seen among minority students living in poverty, who are the most disadvantaged, with black students living in poverty and Hispanic English-language learners posting the highest gains. If charter schools serve a substantial number of those student groups, these results suggest that good charter schools could narrow gaps to a small degree.

However, many charters have policies that make it hard for the most disadvantaged students to get in. Finally, state grantees must commit to identifying and turning around their lowest-performing schools. These promises are flawed on both theoretical and practical grounds. First, schools are targeted for turnaround based on student test scores, but the influence of factors outside the school is strong, and accurately determining how well a school is serving its students correspondingly difficult.

Second, the turnaround strategies mandated range from substantial substitution of staff—principal, teachers, or both—to more drastic measures like turning the school over to a charter or other outside operator, or, should all else fail, closing it altogether.

This makes sense; with so much else unstable and uncertain in their lives—housing, meals, parental attention—low-income students need their schools to provide stability. When implemented thoughtfully with substantial support for new staff and consideration for other factors, including curriculum and professional development, turnaround strategies can improve struggling schools.

Even efforts that succeed at the elementary school level, however, may flounder in high schools, where students enter already many years behind de la Torre et al. On the whole, changing school staff is unlikely to produce real, sustained improvement. One, Cardozo High School, is being reconstituted for the second time in five years. Data from 20 years of 36 partial and full reconstitutions in DCPS are no more promising. Of three high schools reconstituted in —, SAT scores did not change significantly at two and went down noticeably at the third.

Since , District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System [DC-CAS] scores at 21 reconstituted schools are largely the same, but more are down than up, and none has recorded notable proficiency gains. However, data from school closures over the past decade—as this has become a widespread reform strategy—show that few students make such moves, and the consequences of closures tend to be more negative than positive.

Numerous studies also document downsides, from decreased student and teacher morale and neighborhood stability to upticks in violence Weiss and Long Race to the Top also advances other strategies to improve teacher quality, some of which have more promise. Teacher collaboration and team planning have been found by researchers to be an important driver of instructional quality.

In a review of recent literature on improving teacher knowledge and practice, for example, Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleague Nikole Richardson note the effectiveness of professional learning communities, in which:. In ongoing opportunities for collegial work, teachers learn about, try out, and reflect on new practices in their specific context, sharing their individual knowledge and expertise. Darling-Hammond and Richardson , 3. This level of collaboration requires years of team-building and can be especially difficult in struggling schools, where turnover is high and expectations of students are often low.

Studies show that teachers in heavily low-income and racially isolated schools may feel they have less ability or responsibility for improving student achievement, due to the multiple barriers they face.

Doing so requires that teachers understand community and student context well. It also requires the principal to lead by emphasizing and nurturing relationships with teachers, through regular classroom visits and feedback and support for tailored professional development; with parents, whose input should shape how family culture is woven into classroom learning and who must become partners with the school in promoting that learning; and with the community, whose assets need to be leveraged and aligned to provide supplemental supports for students and to counter the notion of a deficit-based context.

One question, then, is the degree to which states have prioritized this aspect of Race to the Top policy change relative to others. Another is whether the individualistic nature of value-added evaluations and test-based bonuses for high-scoring teachers create friction among teachers and across groups of them that weakens the benefits of more collaborative efforts. With respect to teacher qualifications, states are encouraged both to strengthen their teacher preparation programs and to improve access to and quality of professional development programs.

They also must pledge to identify alternative routes to certification in order to remove barriers to teaching for potentially strong teachers who might be impeded by existing systems or processes. While improving teacher preparation, providing better professional development, and finding new avenues for talented individuals to become teachers all seem like excellent ideas, in practice they have pitfalls as well as promise.

As described in the later section on state implementation of Race to the Top, some states are using value-added scores to judge not only teachers, but teacher preparation programs, based on the average value-added scores of their graduates, thus exacerbating the likely negative aspects of reliance on test scores. Moreover, many states have focused the bulk of their energy on developing and implementing assessments, with less attention to using student growth data to inform teacher support and development.

Some states have taken innovative approaches to recruiting talented professionals to teach in underserved schools and to increase the number of teachers in hard-to-staff subjects, with a particular focus on STEM fields science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. As detailed in the case studies in the appendices to this report, these programs vary in their success in terms of both number of individuals they are able to recruit and retention rates. It is not possible at this early stage to determine their ultimate success, but retraining professionals with a strong subject-matter knowledge base to be strong teachers could prove highly effective.

The result is likely an increase in novice and non-credentialed teachers in the most challenging schools and, in turn, higher rates of turnover. Many scholars have documented the advantages of experienced teachers over less well-paid novices, and of the importance of continuity and stability in improving student outcomes e.

Moreover, a recent study on the impact of teacher turnover concluded that, distinct from the relative quality of teachers who may be brought in to replace those who leave, teacher turnover itself harms a school. In order for increased teacher turnover to improve student outcomes, then, teachers who leave must be replaced by teachers who are substantially more effective.

Tom Payzant notes, too, the significant difference between the TFA teachers who were his students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, most of whom had taught for five years, and the average TFA recruit, who teachers for just two years. Where some studies have shown better outcomes for TFA teachers—generally in high school, in mathematics, and in comparison with less prepared teachers in the same high-need schools—others have found that students of new TFA teachers do less well than those of fully prepared beginners, especially in elementary grades, in fields such as reading, and with Latino students and English-language learners.

Darling-Hammond The teacher education residency program that Payzant started as Boston Public Schools superintendent was unique in its intensive, full-year training that combined classroom experience in schools led by exceptional principals and district-level teamwork.

It also intentionally focused on the key need to find and retain teachers of color and teachers in hard-to-fill fields, particularly math, science, and special education Payzant Local programs were not fulfilling this need, and the teachers that they recruited tended to leave after just two years. This strong preparation and lower turnover contrasts starkly with TFA and similar programs. Race to the Top fails to address one of the largest in-school contributors to opportunity gaps: differences in funding among districts and, within districts, among schools.

While a small, time-limited federal program cannot compensate for these stark inequities, it could certainly reward states that work to alleviate them.

The winning RTTT districts are in 12 states, all of which have serious deficiencies in the way they fund schools. Because they focus exclusively on test scores that capture only a slim portion of cognitive skills, efforts under Race to the Top to improve instruction also ignore a significant component in student learning.

While it was long believed that some of these skills were immutable, scientists and education scholars now better understand how many can be taught and learned, and that they need to be developed during the school day.

Beyond their contributions to academic achievement, soft skills are valuable in life more broadly. Indeed, employers cite such skills as critical factors in their hiring decisions, more so than virtually any of the cognitive abilities for which schools and teachers are accountable under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. To the extent that the Common Core State Standards put more emphasis on this largely neglected but critically important set of skills and their interaction with the development of cognitive skills, they may prove an important contribution to improving student achievement.

As the above review makes clear, those factors account for a substantial majority of the race- and income-based achievement gaps that Race to the Top aims to close. Yet the reforms Race to the Top demands barely touch on policies that have been shown to narrow opportunity gaps. Poverty is a huge factor in our district. When Dayton has kindergarteners three years behind, they deal with things very differently from suburbs.

We are very careful not to use SES [socioeconomic status] as an excuse, and we still provide great instruction and opportunities for every child to learn. Yet there is no way around the fact that concentrated poverty presents more challenges in implementing RTTT and other competitive grant programs.

Romick Within schools, some components of policies advanced by Race to the Top have promise. In particular, strengthening teacher credential programs using evidence-based strategies, as well as recruiting teachers in underserved subjects, could improve teacher quality in high-needs schools.

Supporting state efforts to promote collaboration among teachers and promote the proper use of student data to inform lesson plans and instruction can likewise boost student achievement.

As noted, Common Core State Standards may help address that challenge. Other within-school reforms advanced by Race to the Top may exacerbate opportunity gaps. Using student test scores to judge teacher effectiveness, for example, puts teachers who serve in low-income and minority classrooms and schools at a disadvantage and, as such, generates perverse disincentives for them to teach in those settings. Indeed, several school leaders interviewed suggested that this problem is already emerging.

It inevitably narrows the subjects taught and the breadth and depth of what is taught within tested subjects. Attaching high stakes to teacher, principal, and school evaluation has also been found to cause low-scoring students to be excluded from test-taking or even expelled, and to encourage other means of gaming the system to artificially inflate test scores, including, in extreme cases, large-scale cheating.

The research on charter schools is mixed with respect to benefits for students. It suggests disruption at the district level and provides no evidence that charter schools are the game-changer that will help states achieve their extremely ambitious goals for increased student achievement.

Similarly, while comprehensive, long-term strategies to turn around struggling schools can work, the types of drastic, short-term fixes advanced by Race to the Top are unlikely to help and might do harm. As the next section documents, this mismatch between what the evidence says is possible and what Race to the Top demands states produce has led to a host of problems.

In particular, we document the actions states have taken and their impacts on teachers, students, and parents, some of them positive, but many counterproductive. Case studies of the experiences of Ohio and Tennessee, presented in the appendices, illustrate these issues in depth.

The next section and the case studies also show the potential that exists in the right circumstance, given sufficient time, money, and other resources, for some aspects of Race to the Top to do good. Despite their good intentions, policy changes promoted by Race to the Top are falling short. They have largely failed to produce the substantial improvements that would narrow income- and race-based achievement gaps and, in several ways, have actually harmed students, teachers, and schools.

To the extent that some short-term gains have been achieved, it is unclear whether or how they might be sustained. The failure to achieve the goals should probably have been anticipated. This section reviews the experience so far by focusing on teacher evaluation and other efforts to improve teacher quality that were promoted within Race to the Top as key means to improve educational attainment, especially for low-income and minority students.

Teacher evaluation systems incorporate aspects of all four of the Race to the Top goals—better assessments, better data systems, better teachers, and better schools. It is the area in which policymakers have focused much of their attention and hope, and one that has been adopted by many non-RTTT grantee states. It is also the area in which grantee states seem to have encountered the greatest difficulties. Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia made changes to their teacher evaluation policies between and , according to an October report by the National Center on Teacher Quality Jacobs Nine more states have made changes since the report was issued, and 20 states now require student learning to factor into evaluations of teacher performance Bornfreund Because it rewards states for using measures of individual student growth based on state standardized test scores to evaluate teacher performance, Race to the Top has greatly spurred this activity.

This complex framework requires much of states but gives them substantial latitude to accomplish the objectives. The result is a wide variation across states in both strategy and emphasis. At the same time, most grantees have emphasized the evaluation aspects of the requirements while relatively neglecting more important drivers of student and teacher success—those pertaining to feedback and the support needed to build on recommendations from that feedback.

Developing and implementing a valid, reliable, and effective statewide teacher evaluation system under the best of circumstances requires consideration and management of significant technical, administrative, political, and cultural issues. Getting enactment and implementation right requires time—time to develop, test and assure the quality and utility of instruments and measures; time to develop mentoring, professional development, and other tools that build on evaluation results; and time to train administrators and teachers on the proper use of evaluation tools and supports.

Time for communication and dialogue between principals and teachers is needed to create a professional culture of collaboration and trust within schools. As such, successful development and implementation requires the time necessary to build a statewide policy environment and public understanding of the purpose of teacher evaluation, potential bumps along the way, and realistic expectations of outcomes.

Finally, and most importantly, time is needed to engage, starting in the planning and development process, the support and participation of key groups, especially principals and teachers, and to secure the buy-in of local school districts.

Time is thus needed not only for initial testing of systems, but for revisions through an iterative process. In addition to promoting teacher evaluations and reward programs, Race to the Top encourages states to make it easier for those who want to teach to do so. While some RTTT states have used this component to develop innovative ways to bring credentialed and experienced professionals to hard-to-staff subjects and schools, the majority have not.

Instead, alternative teacher certification programs, such as Teach for America and the New Teacher Project, which offer only minimal training and preparation for new teachers, have become major suppliers of teachers for high-needs schools, in particular so-called turnaround schools. Yet there is little evidence either that the new teachers are well-equipped to deal with the added challenges of teaching in those schools, or that they contribute to a long-term, sustainable strategy for improving the quality of instruction in hard-to-serve schools.

This report explores the successes and bumps, so far, in implementation of teacher improvement efforts, with an eye both toward the degree to which time and resource needs are being met and toward the need to employ a broader set of strategies in federal education policy going forward.

Though time is a crucial element in the enactment and implementation of meaningful education reform, it has been severely lacking for RTTT grantees and for other states that are not grantees but are building new teacher evaluation systems. In the rush to implementation set by RTTT guidelines, many states and districts are feeling the pressures and strains from a lack of sufficient time, as well as the constraints of staff, resources, and declining principal and teacher support. Delays in implementation.

For example, the District of Columbia received approval from the U. Similarly, Florida was approved for a significant change in its plan in May , when the U. Department of Education allowed the state to shift funds to later grant years and to sharply reduce performance goals for having effective teachers in high-poverty, high-minority schools e. These changes suggest more than the expected challenges associated with statewide reforms, especially given the ambitious scope of state plans.

In May , the U. The delays may have federal consequences for other states as well. In January , U. Department of Education expressed similar concerns in January over significant delays in Florida, which the state defended as due to competitive bidding requirements that it said would ultimately lead to better implementation Armario The continuing impasse in New York between the state Board of Regents and Governor Andrew Cuomo on one side and the teachers union on the other on the issue of teacher evaluations led Cuomo to threaten to withhold state aid increases from districts that did not adopt the teacher evaluation system by January Cavanagh Cuomo had already shown his willingness to carry out this threat by suspending funding to 10 districts, including New York City, for failing to meet a December 31, , U.

Department of Education deadline. Although the impasse was resolved in June , and districts continued to negotiate and submit local plans, as of September , the state had approved just 75 plans and offered feedback on another out of a total of districts. The pace subsequently picked up to cover about half of all districts, but state education officials acknowledge that they are overwhelmed and had greatly underestimated the work involved in approving complex and detailed plans.

The rush in New York has also raised concerns regarding the quality and utility of programs being put in place. Superintendents were particularly affected by the impacts of rushing and cutting corners. Delays in creating teacher evaluation systems. The challenges have affected even those states the Department of Education has deemed most promising.

First-round Race to the Top winners Delaware and Tennessee have encountered problems due to overly ambitious plans. Delaware, which has had a statewide teacher evaluation system since the s, was forced to request a one-year extension in developing the new system required by the grant, which ties teacher advancement, including tenure, to evaluation results.

The Delaware Department of Education project to design and identify valid measures of student growth failed to be completed by spring , and was renewed in fall This has been revised, however, such that, for teachers of tested grades and subjects—third- through 10th-grade math and reading—value-added scores must be used.

One concern teachers in Delaware have expressed from the start is the inability of state tests to detect growth at the bottom and top of the learning spectrum, a shortcoming that produces two distinct problems related to formative assessment and lesson planning and to teacher evaluation. In other words, an advanced placement teacher might automatically receive a satisfactory rating simply for teaching that class, since all of her students begin the year at the highest level, PL4, and thus meet the growth requirements upon entry DDOE Special education teachers worry that they will be unfairly penalized by a system that cannot accurately capture the growth of their students and their effectiveness as educators Stevens Among Delaware teachers who do not teach tested grades and subjects, content-specific tests are used to generate scores.

While the tests were developed by teachers, the assessments have also proven problematic. Due to excessively tight timelines, pretests were not available in the first year of use until late October, potentially rendering them invalid as pretests.

For example, a goal for a high school advanced placement teacher might be a 5 percent increase in the number of 11th- and 12th-grade students taking the AP exam in the current year over the number who took it in the prior school year, or targeted increases in the number of students applying for college, or in the average SAT score for the entire 11th- and 12th-grade population over the prior year.

Among school nurses, the growth measure might be a percentage decrease in student absenteeism among a target population Stevens It is also, she says, hard to justify in terms of validity:. This is high stakes evaluation and has been difficult not only to implement, but monitor as well. So much paperwork and time! The greatest challenge is on our teachers [of tested subjects] in grades as it is one-half of their evaluation.

Creating [student achievement] goals [for other teachers] at the beginning of the year was elusive at best—but we did our utmost to follow the mandates of DPAS II. When all was said and done, it was very time consuming and not equitable. Some of our best teachers were effective and some of our more challenged teachers were highly effective.

Greaves The state had to use an unfinished teacher evaluation system, resulting in numerous problems that are alienating both principals and teachers. Grover J. Tennessee has since established growth standards for nontested subjects, though it is not clear that the standards will be easy to use. A parallel rubric is being developed for physical education; teachers could be evaluated, for example, on how much students improve their ball tossing and catching skills over the course of the school year Tennessee ED Teacher observations have come under fire as overly burdensome and prescriptive.

The New York Times described an implementation process marked by poor communication, excessive micromanagement by Tennessee administrators, and a bewildering array of assessment rules Winerip b. The rules initially required, for example, that the strongest teachers in a school be observed the same four times per year as the weakest.

These concerns are affirmed by the considerable variation across districts in midyear principal ratings of teachers; in one district almost half of all teachers received the top possible score, while in another only 1 percent did. In light of this experience, Tennessee stated that it intended to review and make changes as needed to its teacher evaluation system, including the rubric and the policy requiring evaluation of experienced teachers.

The state released two formal reports in the summer of that both recommended changes, but the essential timetable remains the same. Many of the findings were positive: Teachers were receiving more regular and specific feedback on their performance; and clear expectations and regular feedback were leading to more self-reflection and collaboration among teachers.

But it recommended providing more time and training for administrators and teachers in the use of the rubric, and linking feedback more explicitly to high-quality individualized learning opportunities that can improve instruction. It also emphasized the importance of training principals as instructional leaders capable of assessing and supporting effective teaching SCORE Before the competition, though, winners and loser looked indistinguishable from one another. Between and , the rigor of their state standards declined at nearly identical rates and to identical levels.

In the aftermath of Race to the Top, however, winning states rebounded dramatically, reaching unprecedented heights within just two years. While losing states showed some improvement, the reversal was not nearly as dramatic. Nonapplying states, meanwhile, maintained their relatively low standards.

The impact of Race to the Top on charter schools, which constituted a less significant portion of the competition, is not nearly so apparent. In winning states, higher percentages of public school students attend charter schools than in either losing or non-applying states.

But as Figure 3b shows, post-Race to the Top gains appear indistinguishable from the projections of previous trends. While Race to the Top may have helped sustain previous gains, it seems unlikely. Between and , the three groups of states showed nearly constant gains in charter school enrollments.

With Race to the Top, the Obama administration sought to remake education policy around the nation. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that it met with a fair bit of success. In the aftermath, states adopted at unprecedented rates policies that were explicitly rewarded under the competitions.

States that participated in the competitions were especially likely to adopt Race to the Top policies, particularly those on which they made explicit policy commitments in their applications.

These patterns of policy adoptions and endorsements, moreover, were confirmed by a nationally representative sample of state legislators who were asked to assess the impact of Race to the Top on education policymaking in their respective states.

In the aftermath of Race to the Top, all states experienced a marked surge in the adoption of education policies. And legislators from all states reported that Race to the Top affected policy deliberations within their states. While it is possible that Race to the Top appeared on the scene at a time when states were already poised to enact widespread policy reforms, several facts suggest that the initiative is at least partially responsible for the rising rate of policy adoption from onward.

First, winning states distinguished themselves from losing and nonapplying states more by the enactment of Race to the Top policies than by other related education reforms. Second, at least in and , Race to the Top did not coincide with any other major policy initiative that could plausibly explain the patterns of policy activities documented in this paper. The surge of post policy activity constitutes a major accomplishment for the Obama administration.

With a relatively small amount of money, little formal constitutional authority in education, and without the power to unilaterally impose his will upon state governments, President Obama managed to jump-start policy processes that had languished for years in state governments around the country.

When it comes to domestic policymaking, past presidents often accomplished a lot less with a lot more. Sign in. Log into your account. Forgot your password? Privacy Policy. Password recovery. Recover your password. Get help. Education Next. Latest Issue. William G. In exchange for dramatic changes to their education systems, it awarded 11 states and the District of Columbia tens or hundreds of million dollars over four years, after two rounds of competition. States pledged to accelerate student performance, while adopting more rigorous academic standards, and to rate teachers and principals in part on students' performance.

To be competitive, states also had to do away with limits or bans on charter schools, open alternative routes to certification for teachers, and improve teacher preparation programmes.

A third, much smaller, competition awarded seven states smaller sums for projects of a more limited scope. Encourage and reward states that created the conditions for education innovation and reform. Building data systems to measure student progress and inform teachers and principals how teaching could be improved.

ARRA therefore supported investment in innovative strategies that were most likely to lead to improved results for students, long-term gains in school and school system capacity, and increased productivity and effectiveness. And legislators from all states reported that Race to the Top affected policy deliberations within their states. While it is possible that Race to the Top appeared on the scene at a time when states were already poised to enact widespread policy reforms, several facts suggest that the initiative is at least partially responsible for the rising rate of policy adoption from onward.

ED was the principal stakeholder, being solely responsible for designing and operating RTT. The other main stakeholders were President Obama, who was personally committed to ARRA and its aims to stimulate growth and attainment, and the states that received the RTT funding along with those of their employees who were engaged in education, such as principals and schoolteachers. After the enactment of ARRA, Congress did not make any conditions for the programme's design or administration.

The objectives of the act were clearly stated and defined see The initiative above and formed a cogent vision for education reform, taking in student attainment, closing the achievement gap, engaging principals and teachers, and seeking ultimately to prepare pupils for further education and their entry into the job market.

As a Center for American Progress article stated at the time: "Race to the Top, one of President Obama's signature education initiatives, seeks to move the needle on student achievement.

It's time to make education America's national mission. It was backed, therefore, by a major piece of statutory legislation. It was funded by the federal government - through ARRA - thus making it fiscally workable. There were effective measurement functions involved. In order to receive a federal grant, each competing state had to present its case to ED, which had a points system based on a number of parameters to evaluate each case.