In the article State hopes dim for Race to the Top funds by Laurel Rosenhall in the Sacramento Bee today (p.1) , she claims that union opposition and poor student tracking system plagued the California application for RTTT.
While this is accurate, it avoids the important questions. Why was there union opposition? The writer notes that she contacted the relevant unions but did not receive a call back.
However, the opposition of the unions CTA and CFT was well documented in the hearings on the Romero legislation and in their own publications. The writer had a professional obligation to publish the arguments.
The unions opposed RTTT because it blamed teachers for problems in the society of poverty and the economic crisis. They opposed the RTTT legislation because it promoted the use of unreliable and invalid tests and then would use these test scores to evaluate teachers. And, they opposed RTTT process because the potential funds were not going into the classrooms where funds are desperately needed, but were to go to consultants to write more reports about what should be done. RTTT would fund the consultant class, not classrooms. Why should teachers participate in that?
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