Race to the Top Mandates Impossible to Implement

[proud2BlibKansan]

In the Republican Party, presidential debates candidates like Mitt Romney and Herman Cain tout their business executive experience and claim expertise at job creation. Former Governors Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman promote their management experience as the CEO of state governments. Whatever you may think of their proposals for stimulating the economy and ending unemployment, there is no question that these candidates believe, and they believe their audience believes, that knowledge and experience are important leadership qualities.

However, when it comes to educational leadership, it seems that knowledge and experience do not count for very much, certainly not to the Obama-Duncan team, the Cuomo-King-Tisch team that establishes educational policy in New York State, or the Bloomberg-Walcott team that runs the schools in New York City.

Last year, Tennessee was awarded a federal Race to the Top grant worth over $500 million based on a proposal that required teachers be rated based on student test scores and extensive evaluations by school administrators. Arne Duncan, Barack Obama's education czar, highly praised Tennessee for its "courage" and "commitment to turn their ideas into practices that can improve outcomes for students." Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam called his state "the focal point of education reform in the nation" and declared Tennessee's new motto to be "First to the Top."

Now it turns out that Tennessee, which ranks near the bottom of the country on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, may not be getting to the top any time soon. One middle school principal, who was originally a big supporter of Tennessee's Race to the Top proposal, now describes it as a disaster. According to Will Shelton, principal of Blackman Middle School in Murfreesboro, the new rules require repeated observations of the school's best teachers and force principals to complete enormous volumes of paper work. The result is they never have time to work with either the students or the teachers who actually need the help.

more . . . http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/race-to-the-top-mandates-_b_1105092.html?ref=tw