(From The Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2010)
By BARBARA MARTINEZ
New York’s win of nearly $700 million in federal education funds came three months after bruising negotiations in Albany that culminated in an 11th-hour agreement. Now, a much tougher battle begins.
New York’s application to the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top competition was essentially a promise of what it would do if it won the money. Those pledges involve sweeping reform to the public education system of policies and problems that have remained intractable for decades.
“We know that the hard work is ahead of us,” said Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the Board of Regents.
The ambitious initiatives promised in the state’s application run from improving the way teachers are taught in education schools to how to make them accountable in the classrooms. The state has also vowed to use the money to create robust data systems to track student progress, to create a standard curriculum to be used in all schools and to turn around chronically failing schools.
Making execution all the more challenging is getting frequent squabblers to agree on major changes, including, for instance, a new teacher-evaluation system. New York state passed a law this spring that called for student test scores to influence teacher evaluations. But the details of such a system are subject to negotiations at each school district with its teachers’ unions.
Money will be doled out in part based on the poverty of districts’ students. New York City’s share of the win is anywhere from $240 million to $300 million. In particular, the new money means New York City and the United Federation of Teachers must agree on how to rate teachers based on how they move students forward.
“I don’t imagine it’s going to be smooth,” said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, an advocacy group that played a role in getting legislation passed that strengthened the state’s chances for the funding. Mayor Michael Bloomberg “does not have a strong record of negotiating with an eye toward reform. He’s negotiated with an eye toward politics,” Mr. Williams said. “He’s appeased the UFT with unprecedented pay raises and not gotten a lot of reform in exchange.”
New York City teachers’ salaries are up over 40% since the mayor took over. But teachers argue that salaries were so low a decade ago it was very difficult to attract or keep quality teachers in the city and that the raises have only caught up to their suburban counterparts.
At a news conference at City Hall on Tuesday, a parade of politicians and union officials patted each other on the back over the results of the contest, in which New York came in second place out of 10 states; New Jersey came just a few points shy of being in that group. “It’s fair to say this could not have happened without Michael Mulgrew,” Mr. Bloomberg said as he introduced the UFT president to the podium.
Afterward, Mr. Mulgrew acknowledged that creating the proposed data systems will lead to some “difficult conversations.” He worried about what he views as some officials’ efforts to use data as “a blunt instrument” rather than a tool that can be useful to teachers. In recent weeks, the city’s Department of Education announced that student data helped determine which teachers got tenure, an action that the UFT immediately rebuked.
Still, Mr. Mulgrew said he had a positive outlook that all the promises made in the application could be fulfilled and said the UFT and the city had already made progress in many areas. Indeed, Mr. Mulgrew was one of the five presenters to the Race to the Top judges in Washington this month, sitting at the same table as schools chancellor, Joel Klein.
Among the other hurdles that the state now faces with the money is coming up with a solution to turning around failing schools. “This country has never done that successfully,” said David Steiner, the state’s education commissioner, noting that some schools stubbornly stay on failing lists for years.
Mr. Steiner, who was formerly the head of an education school, said the Race to the Top funding also will help change how teachers are taught–arming them with real-world skills rather than just theory. “Teacher preparation fundamentally hasn’t changed in a century,” he said.
The money will help pay for many of these big changes, but not much more. “What we’ve been given is the opportunity, the tools,” Mr. Steiner said. “Everything has to be built.”