In Kati's Blogs: Spurring Real Change for Needy Kids

Education Trust President Kati Haycock posted the following on the National Journal education blog:

Some—on this blog and elsewhere—have taken the position that competitive grants to fund education improvements are somehow bad for poor kids. The idea seems to be that only wealthy jurisdictions will have the skills to put together winning proposals, so poor kids would be more likely to benefit if the dollars were simply handed out like the vast majority of federal dollars are—through formula grants, whether or not their schools do anything good.

I think they’re dead wrong.

For starters, most of the programs they are talking about—including the Teacher Incentive Fund and the Invest in Innovation Fund—require grantees to make these students their priority. Indeed the teacher dollars can only be spent to develop and implement performance-based compensation systems in high-need schools.

Moreover, the states currently in the lead to win funds from the biggest competitive program, Race to the Top, belie the notion that wealthy states have an unfair advantage. Of the 19 new finalists announced last week, ten have poverty rates higher than the national average (including cash-strapped California, which made major changes from its first application to better its chances this time). And first-round grant winner Tennessee is hardly a rich state.

Even more important than who gets the money is what the winners have to do to keep it. I’ve been around for a long time, through years when federal dollars were plentiful and years when they were scarce. Never before, though, have I seen as much change in critical state policies as I have seen in the six months during which states have been competing for Race to the Top.

Of special importance to poor children, Race to the Top has prompted states to stop passing the buck on long-standing inequities in school quality. At least 15 changed laws to increase their authority to intervene in their lowest performing schools, where large numbers of low-income students and students of color languish. In Massachusetts, for example, the commissioner now has broad authority over the critical issues of staffing and budget in low-performing, stagnant schools and districts.

What’s more, at least 17 states have changed laws to improve their teacher evaluation systems—a key to increasing equitable access to effective teachers. Colorado, for example, passed legislation that requires teacher evaluations to include student-growth data starting in 2014-15. Instead of continuing the longstanding practice of passing not-so-good teachers along to teach in the poorest schools, Colorado teachers who get two years of ineffective ratings won’t be teaching at all.

We know that every state that changed various policies to compete for the dollars won’t necessarily win extra funds. But students in those states will be far better off as a result of those important policy changes.

Obviously, only time will tell how all this adds up on the ground. But I’m betting that the real winners in competitive grant programs will be the students.

Frankly, these competitive dollars are still pretty small compared to the many billions of federal dollars that continue to go to school districts by formula, no matter how horribly some of them serve the poor and minority students these dollars are intended to benefit. But it seems to me a wise use of limited taxpayer dollars to spur states and districts to innovate and make the tough changes that will help them reach our goal of a far fairer—and far better educated—America.