Race to the Top

About a year ago, the New York Times Magazine published an article that
explored President Obama’s “Race to the Top” program, a competition that
provides federal grants to states that come up with innovative ways to
improve education.

The really cool thing about this program is its focus on improving teacher
quality by linking salary increases and layoffs to teacher performance. Any
profession that ignores performance and only rewards seniority risks
alienating its most qualified potential members and allowing incompetence to
thrive. Although teachers’ unions serve some very valuable purposes (like
allowing for collective bargaining and providing some essential legal
protection), their insistence on divorcing pay from performance punishes
America’s most valuable teachers while allowing its most ineffectual
teachers to keep their jobs indefinitely.

You can click around the official “Race to the Top” website and see which
states won grants last year.

Some of the programs are really fantastic. They have built “common academic
standards,” created systems to reward teacher effectiveness, and made plans
to prioritize the lowest performing schools.

Another issue that the New York Times article addresses is charter
schools. Charter schools are an important alternative for students who have
no good public school options. They can also serve as an experimental model
for what a publicly funded school looks like without bureaucracy and unions.
However, students are admitted through a lottery system. For students in
these areas, receiving a quality education is based entirely on the luck of
the draw. So instead of relying on charter schools to fill the gaps in our
public school system, the successes of certain charter schools should be
used as models for improving public schools.

These are just a few of the issues addressed in the article, which you can
find here.