Race to the Top bid viewed as flawed |
On Board Online • January 25, 2010
By Brian M. Butry
Communications Coordinator
Despite the possibility of securing an estimated $700 million in federal funds, state officials failed to reach a consensus last week on thorny issues including raising the charter school cap and sunsetting a law that bars the use of student test data to make teacher tenure decisions.
Nevertheless, New York’s application for Race to the Top (RTTT) funds has been submitted to U.S. Department of Education. It included reform measures such as revamping teacher evaluations and adopting common core standards, both of which fall under the purview of the state Board of Regents.
Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said the state’s application for the competition was strong, but it will likely lose points regarding charter schools.
“With the cap in place, we have a good chance at starting this competition at minus 40 (points),” Tisch told On Board. She said the application will face “a steep uphill climb to be competitive.”
“I simply don’t see, from where I’m sitting, how we get there without the legislation,” she added.
The Regents in December approved a comprehensive reform plan aimed at not only securing additional money through RTTT, but also changing the state’s educational system. The Regents began the process of creating new consequences for low-performing schools, adopting common core standards, and developing a P-20 data system that would help link student achievement data to teacher effectiveness, among other changes.
The Regents asked the Legislature to make changes in laws affecting teacher discipline and charter schools.
Members of the state Assembly and Senate seemed unenthused about the charter school proposals forwarded by Gov. David Paterson and the Regents. Lawmakers negotiated behind the scenes right up to the Jan. 19 deadline for RTTT applications on whether to simply raise the charter cap or do so while also bringing more accountability to charter schools.
In the end, the Legislature refused to go along with Paterson’s request to raise the current cap from 200 to 454 – the figure that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the governor would garner the most points from federal evaluators.
Also elusive was consensus on a bill sponsored by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Democratic Conference Leader John Sampson that would have raised the cap to only 400 but also would have made charters subject to audits from the state comptroller. Under that bill, the Regents would have been granted sole power to approve charters and for-profit companies would have been prohibited from running the schools.
NYSSBA Executive Director Timothy G. Kremer said the charter school bill proposed by Silver and Sampson would have been a sound way to “ensure that lawmakers don’t simply force 200 new charter schools into communities that can’t afford the ones already in place.”
New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) was vocal in opposing lifting the cap. “It’s not just the quantity of schools, it’s the quality,” NYSUT President Richard Iannuzzi told the Albany Times-Union. “Chasing good dollars with bad legislation is foolhardy.”
Paterson said the Legislature, through its inaction, sent a negative message to the Obama administration, which recently asked Congress to approve a $1.35 billion extension of RTTT and create a new mechanism to allow school districts to apply directly for RTTT funds.
In a joint statement with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the governor said “we may now miss out on an opportunity to receive unprecedented federal funding for our schools and our children.”
In a conference call with reporters on the day of the application deadline, Duncan wouldn’t address specific applications and their chances at winning the competition, but he said state leaders needed to demonstrate that they were willing to make substantial changes.
“We want to invest in those places that are working together, that are collaborating and have a common vision of where they need to go and a collective willingness to challenge the status quo,” said Duncan. “No one factor is going to make or break an application, but as I’ve said repeatedly … this is going to be a very, very high bar and there may be a very small number of points that differentiates winners from losers.”
At SED’s request, more than 800 school districts and charter schools endorsed New York’s RTTT application through a binding memorandum of understanding.
Some local school officials, however, expressed concerns over various aspects of the application.
Members of the Buffalo school board said they were “troubled” by the emphasis on standardized testing and some vague aspects of the all-encompassing reform package. Eventually, the district did sign-on to the application, albeit without the support of its teachers’ union.
Approximately 20 states will win $4.3 billion in RTTT funding, with a possible range of 16 to 27 states that could win, according to an estimate by the Education Commission of the States. Forty states plus the District of Columbia applied.
The U.S. Department of Education has released an estimated range of what each state could expect to receive upon approval of its RTTT application but says it can adjust the actual amount awarded to each state up or down. New York could be awarded anywhere between $350 million and $700 million if its application is approved. The state is competing for “category 1” funds with only California and Florida.
In California, more than half (60 percent) of local districts did not sign off on the state’s RTTT application. And Texas would have been in the running for the same “category 1” funds, but Gov. Rick Perry said the entire initiative was an intrusion into states’ rights over education and the cost of implementing many of the reforms outweighed the financial benefit.
“We would be foolish and irresponsible to place our children’s future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special interest groups thousands of miles away in Washington,” Perry said. “If Washington were truly concerned about funding education with solutions that match local challenges, they would make the money available to states with no strings attached.”
Other states joining Texas in not applying were Alaska, Maryland, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Vermont and Washington.
Meanwhile, other states such as Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey, are competing for “category 2” funds. They could win $200 to $400 million.
The awards will be announced in April, but money would only be made available in October. Winning states will keep half of the funding at the state level with the other half heading to districts who signed on to the application.
Senior Writer Marc Humbert contributed to this story.