Obama's "Race to the Top" is a Race Towards Losing Control of Education

As politicians and news organizations celebrate new federal education grants delivered by President Obama's "Race to the Top" program, it is easy to overlook what these grants really mean.

By joining the Race to the Top program, the states are ceding their ability to establish the standards, curriculum, and evaluation methods used for its students to a nameless, faceless collection of "teachers, school administrators, and experts" polled by an anonymous organization called Common Core State Standards Initiative."

According to the Common Core website, the organization will "provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them."

Which means, the states are giving away the ability to continue to establish the high standards required of students, and the teachers and parents in Swampscott will lose the ability to set the curriculum and evaluation methods to meet that criteria.

This program ensures that states and communities cede their ability to establish the type of education they feel is appropriate for their students. Instead, local educators will be required to adhere to a "common understanding of what students are expected to learn... regardless of where they live." Note that many of these standards have yet to be established.

Instead of working to improve education, any state that signs onto Race to the Top has abdicated its responsibility towards its students and parents by preventing us from engaging in how the students are educated. As parents, we will no longer be able to control our children's education, instead leaving the job to a mysterious group of "national organizations representing, but not limited to, teachers, post-secondary educators (including community colleges), civil rights groups, English language learners, and students with disabilities."

Perhaps students could benefit from a set of "effective models from states across the country and countries around the world," by joining Race to the Top, our educators will not be allowed to determine which models are best for our children, forcing our kids to follow models created by people whose credentials -- and identity -- we do not know.

Robert Holland, a senior fellow for education policy with the "conservative think-tank" Heartland Institute, suggests:

the “readiness standards for English largely are a set of 'content-free generic skills.' The standards favor the reading of workplace manuals much more than classic works of literature. The math content may be 'even worse.'

The CCSSI standards, he challenges, 'require only a smattering of math beyond Algebra I. Students in schools adhering to these standards could find themselves ineligible for admission to any half-decent college or university.'

In the end, ask yourself this: If common, national standards would be so beneficial to students across the US, why have more than half of the states refused to sign up for the program? And why has Obama required states to join the compact in order to receive Title I funding?

In an editorial in the Washington Post, Daniel Willingham, a professor at the University of Virginia, described the problem behind the Race to the Top initiative:

The likely failure of the 'Race to the Top' initiative doesn’t depend on whether or not these ideas are any good. Here’s the problem. States are not really committed to the reforms the administration envisions. If they were, they would have implemented them, or at least they would have been making a game attempt to do so.

In other words, if the ideals behind Race to the Top are so sound, states would not need to be extorted to embrace them.

Even the left-leaning Atlantic Monthly sees the extortive nature of this program:

(D)angling money in front of fund-starved school districts is a great way to make them enact changes the federal government would like to see...

The Obama administration is working hard to centralize as many aspects of American life in the federal government. The education of our children should not be one of those things. The states, communities, and parents need to be in charge of what our children learn and how they learn it. Not some anonymous think tank.