Racing to the top | Opposition to an innovative education plan shows lack of vision
On Tuesday, July 27, Maine learned that its application for the federal Race to the Top school reform grant program did not advance to the competition’s final round. As a result, Maine will miss out on what could have been as much as $70 million in school reform funding from Washington.
The state’s failure to secure a grant is unfortunate, and not simply because Maine won’t have access to millions of dollars to reform its schools. While not as bold as the reform plans put forward by many other states, what Maine proposed in its Race to the Top application would represent a significant step forward for Maine’s schools.
The state proposed, for instance, that Maine move to more of a “student-centered” model, in which each child follows an individualized learning plan rather than move through the system as a part of a grade-level group based on age. A student who is strong in one subject but struggles with another would get individualized instruction based on their specific needs, and would move on only after meeting learning goals.
Moving to a student-based approach requires a great deal of data collection and management. New, high-tech assessments would take the place of lengthy paper-and-pencil tests, providing teachers and administrators with a steady stream of real-time data with which to make curricular and instructional decisions. That information would be fed into newly developed data systems that track student achievement over time and connect that achievement, or the lack thereof, back to specific classrooms and instructional practices.
Maine’s teachers and administrators would become more accountable under the proposals in the state’s Race to the Top application, through an educator evaluation system based in part on student achievement data. No teacher in Maine could be rated “effective” without evidence of satisfactory growth in student learning. Teachers in need of additional support would get targeted training based on what testing data revealed about their strengths and weaknesses. Teachers who failed to show improvement could be removed from the classroom, something that rarely, if ever, happens today.
Such training would be one part of a broader effort to give teachers and school administrators the professional development opportunities they need. The state proposed, for instance, creating regional “leadership academies” to provide them with the tools and training required for the transition from a century-old industrial model of schooling to a modern, data-driven educational system designed to meet the needs of every student.
For schools and districts that continue to struggle, the state proposed an aggressive turnaround strategy in which underperforming schools, working with a team of support specialists, would develop detailed improvement plans to which they would be held accountable. Additionally, under recently passed “innovative schools” legislation, schools will be given more freedom to adopt instructional and management practices that more fully meet the needs of their students.
Misplaced priorities
As the state envisions it, Maine schools are to become more outcome-oriented, data-driven, focused on meeting the specific needs of individual students, free to innovate and, perhaps most importantly, more accountable.
Unfortunately, many in Maine’s broader education establishment — the school boards, the school and school district administrators and the teachers’ unions — oppose this new direction.
As part of its Race to the Top application, the state was required to catalog the support its plan received from local school district and teacher union leaders. Only 82 of the state’s 216 school units indicated their support for the state’s proposed reforms, leaving 134 that wanted no part of the state’s plan or the millions of dollars in school reform funding. Those 134 districts serve more than 50,000 Maine schoolchildren.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, only 24 local teachers’ unions signed on, less than 12% of the statewide total. This widespread lack of union support would make it almost impossible to implement reforms on the local level, which means that even if Maine had won a grant, it would have struggled to get its reform agenda off the ground.
As the Washington Post editorialized in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, we seem to have an education system today that is “more interested in the political interests of adults than the education rights of children.” This system, the paper continued, “keeps unsuccessful teachers in classrooms, fails to place the best educators where they are needed most and rewards longevity over effectiveness.”
Even though Maine’s Race to the Top application failed to win support in Washington, policymakers in Augusta and at the school and school district level should embrace it and take the bold steps necessary to move Maine into a new era of teaching and learning.
Stephen Bowen, a former schoolteacher and state legislator, directs the Center for Education Excellence at the Maine Heritage Policy Center. He can be reached at sbowen@mainepolicy.org. State Sen.Carol Weston is a ranking member on the Legislature’s Education and Cultural Affairs Committee. She can be reached at cweston@fairpoint.net. To read more Public Engagement, go here.
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