California and Race to the Top

Note: The Romero bill is to implement Race to the Top. SB X5-1.  See post below.

California Council on Teacher Education

CCTE’s disappointment ( with NCLB)  has now been further heightened as the initial educational policies

of the Obama Presidency, in the form of the Race to the Top (RTTT) initiative, are leaning

ever more in directions counter to effective and constructive educational policy. RTTT

increases reliance on high stakes testing, moves to unfairly and invalidly tie such test

results to evaluation of teachers and schools, builds even further a policy structure that

rewards those who are already doing well with no attention to those schools and students

in the greatest need, and offers yet further incentives to privatize educational activities.

The primary rhetoric of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, referring to RTTT as a

“competition,” clearly reinforces the focus on rewarding those states that can show already

strong programs while ignoring those in the greatest need.

More specifically, the concerns of CCTE about RTTT stem from the fact that student

achievement, currently measured in California through the California Standards Test and

the California Achievement Test, is on its own an insufficient measure of any teacher’s

abilities, skills, or knowledge because of multiple variables among students in California

classrooms. The RTTT requirement that at least 95% of students be tested would result

in a range of scores including English learners and children with disabilities, further

confounded by the widely varying school demographics across the state. Graduates from

any single university find employment in many different schools and school districts

representing communities with widely differing resources. A teacher employed in South

Los Angeles, whose students are primarily Latino, low-SES, and English learners, will

experience very different student test outcomes than a teacher employed in nearby Pacific

Palisades, where students are mostly White, middle to upper class, and native English

speakers. To quantify the success of these teachers using their students’ test scores is statistically unfounded, personally unfair, and educationally unwise. To then seek to link that data back to the institution where the teachers were prepared is a further illogical step.

Read the full report at : http://www.ccte.org/policy_resources/Statement_on_RTTT.pdf