RTT

Thursday, I was able to speak with Jackie Gran, who is a leading policy advisor that works with Race to the Top. Here are a few of the ideas that came out of our intern luncheon:

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First of all, “access without excellence is an empty promise.” And to this point, that is essentially what we are guaranteeing: you can go to school somewhere, but the quality of that education may not be the best.

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The federal level needs to realize what its role is in education and in educating kids whose schools also have state and local regulations. ED would do better by being a warehouse of educational knowledge, providing states and local governments access to information from across the country that they would otherwise struggle to get or, even worse, not know of at all.

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NCLB was good in that it put a focus on the quality of education we are paying for and providing, and it did well to raise standards. Where it was weak, and is rightly criticized is in that it had no degree of accountability or extreme, but appropriate, course of action for schools that were seriously failing students. In an effort to address issues in a better way, RTT was designed to be “an outgrowth of state and local efforts, not a lay-it-over-the-top program.”

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Jackie said that an essential part of measuring whether or not RTT will be successful will be in assessing where the schools are/are not meeting their standards and providing them with the appropriate information and knowledge to be able to improve. It will not be successful if RTT reverts back to a system of merely measuring whether or not a school meets a standard. Consquently, this will also help to ensure that RTT is effective.