In regards to Race to the Top, I remember writing to the Republican Lieutenant Governor at the time. I warned him that performance based salaries(for teachers) which were connected to student TCAP scores were a fool’s errand, or something to that effect. He responded which I appreciated. However, he never understood the pitfalls of this practice. Thus, Race to the Top would be adopted with the Lieutenant Governor carrying the water for the then Democratic governor, Phil Bredeson. What ensued was a disaster for the profession and for creativity and exploration in the learning process. It was shortsighted, and allowed Arne Duncan, and Obama sycophant and Secretary of Education, to gain leverage by forcing states to write grants in order to get back their own tax dollars. Duncan was a huge proponent of standardize assessment – and lots of it! Bredeson and Ramsey caved, and over assessment became the norm. It exists to this day.
Teaching to the Test. That is what Race to the Top should have been named. Every, single public school in the state of Tennessee pivoted to getting ready for TCAP (Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program). Schools raced to send kids to school weeks before the traditional start which used to be roughly the third week in August. It was an arm’s race. Academic coaches were hired. Data experts were hired. Central Office’s of several office staff ballooned to enormous numbers. Worse. Nobody knew what they were doing. All anyone knew is that test scores better improve or funding would be lost.
The problem? While noble to have a common assessment like TCAP be the benchmark for Tennessee school improvement, the real questions nobody asked. What and how were students to be taught? The State of Tennessee adopted federal curriculum standards during 2010. Ramsey(R) and Bredeson(D) moved to sack our old standards. Obama’s Education Secretary wins again. I won’t even begin to express how dangerous it is to have the Federal government deciding what standards should be taught. However, power should revert to the states when there is a question of authority…I will leave it at that. How students were taught became bland, vanilla, and uncreative. They were simply putting lipstick on a pig, creativity tossed to the wind.
Teacher unions wrongly stood silent as Bredeson and Ramsey ran roughshod over policies designed to protect the learning process. Their intentions(to reform failing schools) were good, but the process was deeply flawed from the outset. Failing schools, failing administrators, and failing teachers still crowd our urban schools today. Getting rid of a bad administrator is still just as difficult today as it was then. I was a member of the NEA at the time. Barely a peep was whispered. And that was a mistake. Why? The “reform” movement would continue with Bill Haslam. Collective bargaining would be outlawed for teachers. This was a huge step back as teachers were the ones who were trying to prevent TCAP from having so much power over our students’ lives and the learning process. Teachers saw the train on the tracks. Ron Ramsey was involved with this as well.
Tenure would end. Bill Haslam and Ramsey would also end tenure for new teachers. I will have to admit. If there is one positive from the consequences of Race to the Top, it is this one. No longer are bad educators protected by tenure laws. However, I still observe that some really bad administrators and teachers still retained. They just aren’t protected by the NEA. They are actually now protected by local bureaucrats and elected officials.
The consequences? Teachers left the profession in droves. The new TEAM evaluation laws were miserable. Good people simply hated the TEAM system. TEAM was meant to remove bad teachers with increased evaluation intervals. The problem? Bad teachers don’t care. Good teachers despised the extra red tape. Good teachers left the workforce, and we are left with a teacher shortage today. Worse, student test scores were connected to teacher pay and retention. That couplet sounded good on paper. However, when working in areas with high poverty, student achievement is tough to recover by teachers in intermediate grades (3-5). In other words, how do we get students back on grade level in grades 3-5 when they are already four years behind? Nobody wanted to teach those grades as achievement test scores were connected to teacher pay and a teacher’s level of effectiveness (LOE). Worse, it was nearly impossible to recover four years of learning during just one school year! Thankfully, we also had TVAAS to measure student growth, but I don’t think any sane person really trusts that model or where cut scores are set in relation to that model. It was (and is) voodoo.
So, here we are today. Common Core is now repealed. Many systems are moving away from using test scores as part of teacher pay. Race to the Top is being repealed a piece at a time. However, the damage is done. The workforce is gutted. How students are taught has been dumbed down – impaired. The bipartisan grant allowed TCAP to become THE driver of classroom education. Remember, assessment drives instruction. TCAP does not hit the top levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Thus, creativity and analysis have been largely vanquished from many Tennessee school systems (grades 2-8), replaced by incessant benchmarking. Our best teachers don’t like teaching in “TCAP grades.” So, we are left with school systems which still exponentially over assess and the best teachers not wanting to teach intermediate grades. The lasting legacy of Race to the Top is that it was a failure in both practicality and priorities. Our kids became numbers, and our teaching process became an automaton.
