WSJ Story on RttT Outcomes
There was a story in the Wall Street Journal on May 3 about Race to the Top grants that casts them in a rather dim light. A number of grant winners did not actually move forward with the promised reforms and a number of the reforms did not actually provide any positive outcomes. Surprise, surprise, surprise. A lot of this might be just the usual government incompetence and the hit-or-miss range of results from innovation, a good deal more of it is the result of politics taking precedence over pedagogy. That works just fine in legislation and grant documents but not so well in classrooms. Here are a few noteworthy quotes from the article: "Rick Hess, director education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, worries that some policies, such as some of the new teacher evaluation systems, might unravel because they were 'half-baked' and passed simply to win cash. "The 'problem with bribing states to do thin...