As in Illinois, lawmakers in California adopted several significant education reforms in an effort to solidify their chances of winning an award. While the state never did receive any funding, California did not revoke any of the policies it had enacted during its failed bids. What about the four states that never applied for Race to the Top funding? By jump-starting education policy reform in some states, the competition may have influenced policy deliberations in others.
Alaska provides a case in point. Still, in the years that followed, Alaska adopted a batch of policies that either perfectly or nearly perfectly aligned with Race to the Top priorities.
I would like Alaska to lead in this, not bring up the rear with 20 percent of an evaluation focused on student improvement. Policymaker Perspectives. To further assess the influence of Race to the Top on state policymaking, I consulted state legislators.
Embedded in a nationally representative survey of state legislators conducted in the spring of was a question about the importance of Race to the Top for the education policy deliberations within their states. Winners were fully 36 percentage points more likely to say that Race to the Top had a massive or big impact than losers, who, in turn, were 12 percentage points more likely than legislators in states that never applied to say as much.
If these reports are to be believed, Race to the Top did not merely reward winning states for their independent policy achievements. Rather, the competitions meaningfully influenced education policymaking within their states. Even legislators from nonapplying states recognized the relevance of Race to the Top for their education policymaking deliberations. Indeed, a majority of legislators from states that never applied nonetheless reported that the competitions had some influence over policymaking within their states.
From Policy to Practice. None of the preceding analyses speak to the translation of policy enactments into real-world outcomes. For all sorts of reasons, the possibility that Race to the Top influenced the production of education policy around the country does not mean that it changed goings-on within schools and districts.
Still, preliminary evidence suggests that Race to the Top can count more than just policy enactments on its list of accomplishments. Moreover, they did so in ways that reflected their experiences in the competition itself. Figure 3a tracks over a year period the average rigor of standards in states that eventually won Race to the Top, states that applied but never won, and states that never applied. Throughout this period, eventual winners and losers looked better than nonapplicants.
Before the competition, though, winners and loser looked indistinguishable from one another. Between and , the rigor of their state standards declined at nearly identical rates and to identical levels. In the aftermath of Race to the Top, however, winning states rebounded dramatically, reaching unprecedented heights within just two years. While losing states showed some improvement, the reversal was not nearly as dramatic. Nonapplying states, meanwhile, maintained their relatively low standards.
The impact of Race to the Top on charter schools, which constituted a less significant portion of the competition, is not nearly so apparent. In winning states, higher percentages of public school students attend charter schools than in either losing or non-applying states.
But as Figure 3b shows, post-Race to the Top gains appear indistinguishable from the projections of previous trends. While Race to the Top may have helped sustain previous gains, it seems unlikely. Between and , the three groups of states showed nearly constant gains in charter school enrollments. With Race to the Top, the Obama administration sought to remake education policy around the nation. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that it met with a fair bit of success.
In the aftermath, states adopted at unprecedented rates policies that were explicitly rewarded under the competitions. States that participated in the competitions were especially likely to adopt Race to the Top policies, particularly those on which they made explicit policy commitments in their applications. These patterns of policy adoptions and endorsements, moreover, were confirmed by a nationally representative sample of state legislators who were asked to assess the impact of Race to the Top on education policymaking in their respective states.
In the aftermath of Race to the Top, all states experienced a marked surge in the adoption of education policies. And legislators from all states reported that Race to the Top affected policy deliberations within their states.
While it is possible that Race to the Top appeared on the scene at a time when states were already poised to enact widespread policy reforms, several facts suggest that the initiative is at least partially responsible for the rising rate of policy adoption from onward.
First, winning states distinguished themselves from losing and nonapplying states more by the enactment of Race to the Top policies than by other related education reforms. Second, at least in and , Race to the Top did not coincide with any other major policy initiative that could plausibly explain the patterns of policy activities documented in this paper. The surge of post policy activity constitutes a major accomplishment for the Obama administration.
With a relatively small amount of money, little formal constitutional authority in education, and without the power to unilaterally impose his will upon state governments, President Obama managed to jump-start policy processes that had languished for years in state governments around the country. When it comes to domestic policymaking, past presidents often accomplished a lot less with a lot more. Each state had the opportunity to submit a plan to the U.
Department of Education for education reform, keeping these four criteria in mind. Since the program was launched, 46 of 50 states have submitted plans and a number of those states have received funding from the program. The Washington Post also reported that a large number of the jurisdictions that have received Race to the Top funding are making significant, positive progress.
Of the 12 jurisdictions that received the first grants, nine are on par to reach their benchmarks in the third year of the four-year grants.
However, three areas are failing to make the grade, according to federal officials. Those three include the states of Maryland and Georgia , as well as the District of Columbia. The federal government is committed to helping all three jurisdictions bring their reform up to par, but U.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan also said that a large part of the responsibility lands on the jurisdictions themselves. The District of Columbia is currently experiencing issues with school turnaround, seeing reform efforts pay off in just one of the 13 low-performing schools the district had committed to turning around.
In addition, administrators in D. Alaska and Texas also did not adopt Common Core Standards. However, due to insufficient funds each grantee was to receive The Race to the Top-District Competition invited school districts to apply for funds by demonstrating how they can personalize education for all students in their schools.
For a list of winning school districts in and see the U. Hawaii is the only state that received Race to the Top competitive grants and has not requested additional time to implement the mandatory education system reforms. The following states took actions to make their applications more competitive after the first round:. Adoption of CCSS was accelerated by an August 1, deadline, after which states would not receive points toward round two applications.
States that adopted these standards stood the best chance of winning, although technically the actual Common Core standards were not explicitly part of any federal initiative, according to the corestandards. These incentive grants were very helpful in shoring up education budgets in cash-strapped states after the financial crisis of Despite 40 states applying for Race to the Top funds, criticism of the contest has been widespread across the political spectrum.
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