The American education system is currently undergoing extensive reforms as a result of the Race to the Top program created by the Obama administration. This program encourages states to compete against one another for federal grant money in an effort to elevate education standards nationally. The $4.35 billion competition is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a federal stimulus bill intended to respond to the recessionary conditions of the economy. The program awards points to individual states for meeting specific educational criteria, including the adoption of policies such as merit-based performance reviews for teachers, standardized curricula, and the promotion of charter schools. 48 states have installed standards for grades K-12, some lifting restrictions on charter schools, and many states have increased performance reviews of their teachers and principals as a result of this program.
As is often the case with wide-sweeping federal reforms, there are many criticisms of Race to the Top. Perhaps the most criticized reform is the merit-based assessment of teachers and principals. The value of performance evaluation techniques promoted by the competition is highly subjective. Particularly for teachers working in schools in impoverished neighborhoods, perpetually low test scores present an enormous obstacle. In such areas, children often live in broken homes, perhaps with one or both of their parents in prison. Yet, teachers in these school systems are still expected to adhere to value-added assessment techniques. These requirements force teachers to exhibit similar ratios of success and improvement to teachers in wealthier school systems. Race to the top applies one-size-fits-all policies to an eternally complex problem such as teacher evaluation. Many teachers are not simply working in defective schools. They are teaching in defective neighborhoods. It is simply unfair to thrust the rigid responsibility of ever-increasing test scores upon the teachers of America’s poor.
Furthermore, the promotion of restrictive standards in curriculum and testing provide illusory measures of success for students. Standardized testing does little to prove that students are gaining the ability to think critically. Rather, such tests often incentivize students to temporarily memorize facts only to be forgotten by the following school year. Standardized test that are easily scanned and scored by computers or machines are simply incapable of compelling students to engage in creative thinking and the formation of new knowledge. Rather, it compels teachers to present test material reiteratively whether it is widely applicable to the students’ daily lives or not. Furthermore, standards in education are often designed in part by government bureaucrats with limited experience in education. Reliance on such requirements takes power away from teachers to explore topics that may encourage critical thinking and hypothesizing for fear of wasting time on material not deemed necessary for passing state examinations.
Children are far more capable of intellectualism than standards would have you believe. It is necessary for schools to return to promoting creative thinking. Many school systems are cutting courses in the arts in favor of courses geared toward state standards. Meanwhile, quality teachers are given less and less incentive to teach in poorer areas due to the unfair merit-based assessments imposed upon them. This results in high turnover in the schools and less stability for poor students. If you want to make education appealing to kids, teachers must be incentivized to engage in thought-provoking activities and empowered by their own educational expertise to account for the diversity of their students. Race to the top is a reactive program that encourages school systems to fight for money needed to prevent layoffs in an education system wounded by the recession. Schools should be concerned with producing inventive young minds capable of adapting to an ever-changing world, not mass-producing memorization machines capable of briefly storing data before inevitably discarding it.
A letter to President Obama from a fifth grade teacher
I definitely agree with your post Matthew. I believe that programs such as these are only preventing teachers who may be passionate about working with students in lower income areas from doing so because of financial responsibilities. The students are also suffering due to non creative forms of teaching such as standardized testing as you mentioned. Two of my daughters are teachers in elementary settings. They always wanted to be teachers, to make a difference and, to touch a life... but these programs make it much more difficulty to achieve those goals.
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