Part I: Race to the Top – General Flaws
There are tons of problems with this policy. A good primer is Alfie Kohn’s interview on CounterSpin. His points seem obvious, but the mainstream media fails to address them. He explains why.
The interview starts at 14:00 minutes in. If you can’t listen, here are some of the highlight:
On current School Reform:
“it has been a brilliant, brilliant PR strategy for the right, including the right in the Democratic Party as well, to frame their top-down sort of macho, mindless, bash-the-unions, offer bribes and threats to teachers and kids in order to raise test scores, not improve learning, but raise scores on bad tests—and frame all of this as if it were reform, as if it took bold leadership and real courage to intensify the same kind of tactics that have been used for decades now, except with more force behind it and even more reliance on test scores.”
On the name:
“it only has a nice name if you confuse competitiveness with excellence. If you believe that we make progress in life, in schools, in everything by making sure that one group can succeed only by making another group fail, then it sounds good.”
On the policy:
“the Obama administration’s first pivot point is you have to try to defeat other kids and not all of them are going to get the money they need.”
“The second point is the federal government will use a big basket of money, very big from a school’s point of view, in order to command compliance with what is known as reform…. and it’s not being used to make sure that kids get a rich, engaging kind of instruction, where they become excited about learning and turn into critical thinkers.”
On the media:
“and it is astonishing to see that every single major newspaper in the country has editorialized, to the best of my knowledge, in favor of this agenda, without a peep—never questioning why it is that affluent kids can wrestle with ideas and learn to be critical thinkers, while the recipe for African American and Latino kids is to be compelled with bribed and threats to shut up, sit down, and work through worksheets to raise the scores for their schools”
On merit pay:
“One is, as you say, that this isn’t really even put into place across the board, as a paper for the Economic Policy Institute pointed out recently in terms of merit pay, which isn’t the norm even in the private sector.”
“Number two, it overlooks the respects in which educating children, all of whom have to be welcomed in a public school, and where the currency is not producing widgets for pay, but coming to understand and fall in love with ideas, is powerfully disanalogous with what it is the private sector is trying to do.”
“Third point is that things like merit pay, a kind of carrot-and-stick attempt to manipulate employees doesn’t make sense either. I wrote a book years ago called Punished by Rewards, in which I showed that no research has ever demonstrated that bonuses and incentives produce, over the long term, a higher quality of work, even in the workplace.”
On why everyone loves it:
“One of the reasons they’ve all fallen in line with this agenda is because their ultimate touchstone for thinking about these issues is not what children need, it’s what ratchets up the U.S. corporate economy relative to its counterparts in other countries. As soon as you frame this discussion, not in terms of how to help kids become happy, ethical, lifelong learners, but how can we prepare future employees for the 21st century global economy, the battle is lost.”
Asbury Schools 