A fourth grade class. | AP Photo/Nick Geranios
As Race To The Top ends, controversy continues
By JESSICA BAKEMAN
ALBANY—Five years and $700 million later, New York’s implementation of the education reforms that were required under the Obama administration’s Race To The Top grant program remain controversial, with resistance from educators and parents as strong as ever.
None of the changes associated with New York’s 2010 award under the competitive grant program is new anymore. State lawmakers adopted a statewide teacher evaluation system in 2010 (and have subsequently strengthened it), education officials adopted the Common Core standards the same year, and the state began testing students on the more difficult material and using the exam results to rate teachers in 2013.
But teachers’ unions and parent groups continue to fight implementation of the reforms, as was evident in the so-called “opt out” movement, this year’s unprecedented statewide boycott of standardized tests.
Some—teachers’ unions, in particular, as well as lawmakers who are closely aligned with labor groups—say the public’s anger over the reforms is an indictment of Race To The Top. It was a failure, they argue.
But education officials who have been and are still fierce advocates of the changes argue the current public tumult is the result not of broad failure but a specific strategic mistake they made: inadequate communication.
Because they didn’t impress upon teachers and parents how drastic the changes were and how acutely they’d be felt, political opponents like the unions had an opening to begin a war against the reforms that continues even as the final dollars from New York’s sizeable grant award are spent.
“This was one that I take responsibility for," said Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch, who led the powerful education policymaking panel throughout the application process and full implementation of Race To The Top. "We did not use any of the money to engage parents and let them know why we were moving to such a radical change. We did not use enough of the money to engage teachers early on to explain the rationale, and so this came at them fast and furious. … Therefore, other people were able to misinterpret the significance of what was going on, and it all came down to test scores.”
Ken Slentz, former deputy education commissioner, said the department realized too late its failure to communicate.
“When we came around to that, the proverbial well had already become so poisoned, we were already in a defensive position,” said Slentz, who left the department last year to lead a small Finger Lakes school district.
Michael Mulgrew, president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers, the largest local teachers’ union in the state, supported the state’s application for Race To The Top but blames the board and state education department for what he calls a “horrendous” implementation.
“That’s where it all went bad,” he said.
In 2009, under former governor David Paterson, who took office amid a national economic crisis, the board and department applied unsuccessfully for Race To The Top funds. Before a second attempt, education officials convinced Paterson and lawmakers to change certain education laws that were acting as roadblocks; the establishment of a teacher evaluation system was among those changes.
Leaders described the state’s interest in the program as a financial calculation.
“In 2008, the state was broke. It was a financial crisis, and there was no money coming into the school system—none, not a penny. The state was cutting back,” Tisch said. “We had an opportunity to apply for federal funding under Race To The Top, and simultaneously, we had an opportunity to move a system that had been stagnant for a very long time forward.”
Mulgrew said the federal government took advantage of states’ devastating fiscal circumstances, and so New York and others applied out of “desperation.”
Explaining what he called the “political context” of the application process, Mulgrew said: “David Paterson comes in, and the economy is completely in the crapper. The federal government is coming around and saying, we are going to save you from laying off thousands of teachers. … It wasn’t so much the education policies at the time. Everyone was freaking out over the budget.”
Successful on the second application, the state won $700 million in 2010, half of which went to school districts. The board and department moved forward with the implementation.
In 2011, Governor Andrew Cuomo took office and made strengthening the teacher evaluation system a top priority. The result was a system where educators’ ratings would be based 20 percent on students’ state exam scores and another 20 percent on their performance on local tests.
In 2013, when New York became the second state to begin testing students based on the Common Core standards, which are meant to boost college- and career-readiness, there was an intense public backlash.
In fall 2013, Tisch and then-education commissioner John King embarked on a statewide tour of public forums, some of which they canceled and subsequently rescheduled in a different format after the meetings devolved into chaos, with teachers and parents who attended slinging personal attacks at the leaders.
As the public unrest intensified going into 2014, an election year, Cuomo and lawmakers increased pressure on education officials, adopting what they argued were legislative fixes to the board and department’s poor implementation. For example, leaders banned the use of standardized tests in early grades, limited the amount of time teachers could spend giving tests or delivering test preparation and prohibited students’ Common Core-aligned test scores from being used in promotion decisions.
This year, Cuomo, who is warring with the unions, pushed lawmakers to intervene further, again overhauling the evaluation system so it relies more heavily on test scores. They later also required the department to increase transparency around the exams.
Also, during the last two years, King left the department for a federal post, and lawmakers, who elect board members in a joint session, ousted three incumbent regents. They appointed several experienced educators who have been outspoken in their criticism of Common Core implementation.
The remaining funds from the grant program expire at the end of September.
Critics said Race To The Top was not what federal and state education officials promised it would be.
“The cake didn’t quite bake,” said Assembly education committee chair Cathy Nolan, a Queens Democrat. “We have not yet seen any real fruit, and it has not been implemented in the way that we thought it would be. I am a Democrat and support President Obama, but that’s been a great disappointment.”
New York State United Teachers spokesman Carl Korn called Race To The Top an “experiment that did little if anything to improve public education.
“When you look at the main components, students, parents and educators have spoken out loudly and clearly against the overreliance on standardized testing and the linkage between student test scores and teacher evaluations,” he said.
Further evidence of the grant program’s failure is legislation that has popped up in state legislatures throughout the country and on the federal level that seeks to undo some of what Race To The Top did, both Korn and Mulgrew argued.
State education officials, though, point to gains students have already made on the Common Core-aligned tests and national studies that found New York’s tests to reflect the highest proficiency standards in the country.
They also argued that the greatest successes of Race To The Top implementation are ones that went largely unnoticed by the public: a robust professional development program in which thousands of teachers participated and a incentive-based "career ladder" program that enabled educators in more than 200 districts to mentor their peers, improving retention for both the more experienced principals and teachers and the newer ones.
"So many people were focused on the evaluation system and the mechanical aspects," said assistant education commissioner Julia Rafal-Baer, who oversees the department's office of teacher and leader effectiveness and has been closely involved with Race To The Top implementation. The "career ladder" program "is really about using the evaluation system the way it was intended—making smart and strategic decisions within your district about what your educators need."
The board and department have asked the Legislature for funding to continue these programs, which will remain in only a limited capacity. So far, their request has not been granted.
“We learned about what can work and what is possible, but because the Legislature did not give us the money that we asked for, there is no way to expand that work across the state,” Rafal-Baer said.
Senate majority leader John Flanagan, former education committee chair, seems to be an advocate. He has argued recently that the department is underfunded and needs more state aid.
“I never viewed Race To The Top funding as a permanent stream, and I think a lot of the money was well spent,” he said during a recent interview. “There are things that aren’t always apparent. I went to a massive professional development workshop up here [in Albany] which was absolutely fantastic. … That was Race To The Top money. Is the public going to know about that per se? Not really.”
Officials and stakeholder groups said the expiration of funds to support these initiatives will be deeply felt.
Bob Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, was critical of some aspects of the grant program but said the state-sponsored professional development will be missed.
"Early on, in the beginning years, we heard terrible reviews, and they, over time, got better and better," Lowry said of the Albany training sessions, a program that was called the Network Training Institute. "Now people are thinking, what will we have to replace that? How might we replicate it on a regional level? ... The loss of funding for professional development—that hurts."
Education officials also boasted that the state’s development of a $28 million Common Core-aligned curriculum was a success of the grant implementation. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has positively reviewed the series of lesson plans, which are freely offered online and have been downloaded millions of times, including from many people in other states.
The curriculum had its critics, though, who complained that it was not yet finished before students started taking tests. Some argued that superintendents and principals were instructing teachers to use the curriculum like a script in hopes that strategy might help students achieve higher scores on the tests.
Slentz, the former deputy commissioner, echoed his colleagues’ arguments that the curriculum was meant to be an optional resource for districts. He doesn’t buy critics’ claims, he said.
“All of a sudden there was this implied intentionality that it had to be implemented script-like, all creativity gone,” he said. “That was a reactive comment; that was not an intellectual comment. … That was truly problematic for me, and in my role as chief liaison to the field to try to get that message out there, we really lost our ability to have a genuine conversation with people.”
Some critics said they’re heartened by the change of leadership in the department and the new members on the board. Commissioner MaryEllen Elia took office earlier this month, and the 17-member board has five new members, three of whom were superintendents.
“The fact that we have pushed to put people with more educational experience on the regents has made a difference, because they’re going to be the people that will help us get to better standards and higher standards without the kind of crippling backlash that we’ve seen from parents and teachers,” Nolan said.
Tisch, who has also expressed hopefulness that Elia’s arrival will foster unity rather than further fuel discord, said she isn’t surprised that the controversy hasn’t yet died down.
“The politics have become enraged between the governor and the teachers’ union, and that makes it more complicated still,” she said. “But even without a lot of the extra rhetoric, a large change in a large system is still very complicated.”