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July 29, 2010

Our View: Race to the Top — Much effort, scant reward

The Salem News Thu Jul 29, 2010, 06:00 AM EDT

There's something unseemly, and even a little unsettling, about this "Race to the Top" the White House has been conducting.

Having been spurned once before, Massachusetts is again a "finalist" in the competition, which promises millions of dollars in additional aid for the commonwealth's schools.

State education officials will travel to Washington next month to advance their case, and the "winners" will be announced by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in September.

But in order for the commonwealth to get this far in the money chase, it was forced to make a rather hasty change in the way it measures student achievement by adopting the "Common Core" standards Duncan's agency would like to see implemented nationwide.

The switch, which was pushed through the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education at the urging of Gov. Deval Patrick, may end up substituting conformity for quality. Clearly it's the former that is the goal of the Obama administration as it borrows additional billions to pursue its top-down approach to educational policy.

This week's announcement that the state was among 19 finalists for the second round of funding was hailed by the business and political communities. North Shore Congressman John Tierney called it a great step forward in the effort "to promote state-initiated education reform efforts and provide federal funds to support our local schools, students and families during these challenging economic times."

But as his colleague, Sen. John Kerry, noted, Massachusetts already has among the highest educational standards in the country — and the test scores to prove it. The senator insists those high standards will be maintained, but his statement supporting the state's Race to the Top application fails to explain what exactly it is we've broken that needs fixing.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association, as might be expected, likes the idea of more money flowing into the state's school systems. And in a release supporting the state's application it pledged to back changes in the way educators are evaluated, including the use of "multiple measures of student achievement as one way to help determine teacher effectiveness." (The union's plea would be more credible if it was accompanied by a proposal to tie teacher evaluations to teacher pay.)

Patrick, Kerry and Tierney are all playing the role of good soldier in their commander-in-chief's effort to federalize the nation's education system. But given that this is the home of country's oldest public high school (Boston Latin, founded in 1635), whose students consistently rank ahead of their peers nationally, and even internationally, on tests of basic skills, one has reason to be skeptical about the loss of local control and potential waste of resources entailed by this so-called race to the top.

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