Washington Steps Up on Schools

New York Times Editorial, via a kind reader's email:

The federal government talks tough about requiring the states to improve schools in exchange for education aid. Then it caves in to political pressure and rewards mediocrity when it's time to enforce the bargain. As a result, the country has yet to achieve many of the desperately needed reforms laid out in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 and other laws dating back to the 1990's.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is ready to break with that tradition as he prepares to distribute the $4.3 billion discretionary pot of money known as the Race to the Top Fund. States that have dragged their feet or actively resisted school reform in the past are screaming about the rigorous but as yet preliminary criteria by which their grant applications will be judged.

President Obama gave fair notice of this shift in a speech earlier this year, when he talked about pressuring the states to do better by the country's 50 million schoolchildren. But Mr. Duncan will need cover from the White House to weather the storm.

The long and detailed list of criteria just released by the administration includes a fine-grained evaluation process under which states get points for reforms they have made and points for changes they promise to make -- and conditional funding that can be revoked if they don't make them. The process finally allows the federal government to reward states that have made progress and to bypass slackers.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 1, 2009 3:44 AM
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