Obama’s ‘Race to the Top’
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in the world—which actually sets many up to lose because of the sanctions that follow when failing to meet that unattain able standard. School reform is making the failures of vast numbers of America’s children inevitable.”
As Race to the Top’s mandate for rigor ous standards and assessments became translated into Common Core and highstakes testing, schools across the nation began to focus their energies into “teach ing for the test,” in order to acquire much needed funds in a time of seemingly per manent fiscal crises and to prevent puni tive measures if their children failed to meet the required benchmark.
In her book “Reign of Error” (2013) education historian Diane Ravitch stated, “So we are left with the short-term strat egies. [University of California professor Thomas B.] Timar says that the strategies of ‘bureaucratizing the process of school improvement and turning it into a chase for higher test scores’ have not worked. They have not made schools more stable, more coherent, and more professional. NCLB [No Child Left Behind] plus the Obama administration’s Race to the Top have made schools less stable, encour aged staff turnover, promoted policy churn, and undermined professionalism.”
A large part of what make these schools unstable is the practice of holding schools accountable when they find themselves at the bottom of the test rankings. For ac countability starts with increased pres sure to turn the school around quickly and proceeds to firings and school clos ings when they inevitably fail to improve. This does not address the prevalence of poverty and the ways in which poverty affects the communities that many of these schools are located within.
Ravitch underscored the fact that “pov erty matters. Poverty affects children’s health and well-being. It affects their emotional lives and their attention spans, their attendance and their academic per formance. Poverty affects their motiva tion and their ability to concentrate on anything other than day-to-day survival. In a society of abundance, poverty is de grading and humiliating.”
Furthermore, getting a “quality educa tion,” including a college degree, is not necessarily enough to ensure a quality job that would put the student in a po sition to, “outcompete workers around the world.” Those who are born at the bottom, the “losers,” will most likely at tend public institutions. Even if they suc ceed at getting through high school and graduating with a bachelors-degree, they are still competing against those who have gone through the most prestigious schools and universities.
“This stratification of college atten dance by social class matters,” stressed the late education theorist and activist Jean Anyon in her 2011 book “Marx and Education.” She pointed out that “selec tive institutions spend up to $92,000 per student, while colleges with low selec tivity spend about $12,000 per student. And per-pupil subsidies at selective uni versities are eight times greater than at non-selective institutions. Moreover, the prestige and networks one acquires at a selective school are invaluable in future job searches.”
Race to the Top might have benefitted a few schools that, with the help of federal funds, have managed to pull themselves away from the brink of being closed. For a great many schools, however, this pro gram has meant devastating interven tions that included firings and closings and the opening up of charter schools in their place. The charters are priva tized and unregulated institutions where young people can possibly get a qual ity education but are more likely to find themselves in ramshackle profit-making enterprises where education is the least of concerns.
Going forward, true educational reform would have to start, not from a position of increasing competition but from the idea that we are all of one worldwide community, facing a global climatic crisis, and that we need to address structural is sues that have resulted in high levels of poverty, including geographical issues that have arisen due to climate change, policing, and judicial racism. These items have given rise to the school-to-prison pipeline and gender inequalities that are manifested in a myriad of ways, including the persistent wage-gap between men and women. As these issues remain, so do differentiated educational outcomes that favor those who possess the most resources. n