Experts comment on Race to the Top

The NRC Critiques ‘Race to the Top’

If the National Research Council issues a report pointing out the obvious flaws with Arne’s ‘Race to the Top’ initiative and no major news outlet covers it, did it really happen?

The Race to the Top initiative — a $4.35 billion grant program included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to encourage state-level education reforms — should require rigorous evaluations of the reform efforts it funds, says a new report from the National Research Council. The initiative should support research based on data that links student test scores with their teachers, but should not prematurely promote the use of value-added approaches — which evaluate teachers based on gains in their students’ performance — to reward or punish teachers. Too little is known about the accuracy of these methods to base high-stakes decisions on them right now, the report says.

The U.S. Department of Education is developing regulations that explain how the $4.35 billion will be awarded. The National Research Council’s report offers recommendations to help the department revise these guidelines.

The report strongly supports rigorous evaluations of programs funded by the Race to the Top initiative. Only with careful evaluations — which allow effective reforms to be identified and perhaps used elsewhere — can the initiative have a lasting impact. Without them, any benefits of this one-time expenditure on innovation are likely to end when the funding ends, the report says.

Evaluations must be appropriate to the specific program being assessed and will be easier to design if grantees provide a “theory of action” for any proposed reform — a logical chain of reasoning explaining how the innovation will lead to improved student learning. Evaluations should be designed before programs begin so baseline data can be collected; they should also provide short-term feedback to aid midcourse adjustments and long-term data to judge the program’s impact. While standardized tests are helpful in measuring a reform’s effects, evaluations should rely on multiple indicators of what students know and can do, not just a single test score, the report adds.

You see… It’s called social science. It involves a process of reason, ethics and logic in which normative goals are established and then methods are formulated to both achieve those goals and to evaluate when/whether the goals have been met. This is what the NRC is advocating, but I am afraid that this report amounts to little more than a whistle in a hurricane.