The Race to Top: Who Got Left Behind?

In 2001, George W. Bush proposed sweeping reforms designed to give kids great schools. Over the next year, a bipartisan committee of four Congressmen (two Senators and two Representatives) spearheaded the bill with the help of other elected officials and education professionals. The result was No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which was signed into law in 2002.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, one of his first priorities was to overhaul the country's educational system and address some of the shortcomings in NCLB. Obama's new plan, dubbed the “Race to the Top,” went into effect in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

No Child Left Behind

Every president and elected official claims to have the best interests of the nation's youth at heart. How many of them are or were actually educators? Too often sweeping reforms like NCLB (and even the Race to the Top) are plagued by an over-reliance on standardized tests and a blindness to other standards.

That's one of the main criticisms leveled at NCLB. The stated intent of NCLB was to help ensure that every American school provided the same high quality level of education to every student, but in effect, this translated to a lot of standardized testing and government control.

Ask almost any teacher who knows what's best for their students: the teacher, or the government. You'll be hard-pressed to find an educator who places more faith in their students' success in the government than in themselves.

Schools that failed to perform within the government's parameters were required to submit detailed plans to address their weaknesses, and continued failure could result in lost funding or lost students, through clauses that would allow them to leave the school for better-performing peers in the same district (if any were available).

The long-term success of NCLB is still up for debate. Upon his installment as president, Obama announced that NCLB would be replaced.

Race to the Top

Standardized tests will probably always be a part of the modern educational system in America. Race to the Top offered a more comprehensive answer to the challenges facing this nation's schools, though it was by no means perfect.

Race to the Top uses a multi-faceted scoring system to evaluate the effort of school's to improve their performance or maintain a high level of quality. Scoring areas included:

  • Great Teachers and Leaders (138 total points)

  • State Success Factors (125 total points)

  • Standards and Assessments (70 total points)

  • General Selection Criteria (55 total points)

  • Turning Around the Lowest-Achieving Schools (50 total points)

  • Data Systems to Support Instruction (47 total points)

The involvement of the National Governor's Association was an attempt to provide far-reaching “state success factors” to make sure that schools throughout the country would all have a similar set of goals to work from. The decision to place emphasis on “turning around” low-performing schools, as opposed to the somewhat authoritarian position that NCLB took, made Race to the Top appear somewhat warmer and friendlier than its predecessor.

Much like NCLB, or any top-down form of educational reform, whether or not Race to the Top was successful is hotly debated in educational circles. One thing that most educators and concerned citizens can agree on is that involvement by active parents can have a profound effect on local schools at the district level. This is where advocacy and action can have yield the greatest results and positively impact the lives of students.