Let’s Pretend to Progress

SALLY TRAN
Staff Writer

Despite the hubbub over our nations’s first African-American president, Mr. Obama has made some dubious choices, his newest eyebrow-raising decision arriving as Race to the Top. Hoping to improve our lowest achieving schools and close the growing achievement gap, the new initiative is a lovely, picturesque goal about as realistic as Santa Claus dropping down the chimney to leave presents under the tree.
With the plan to make students’  records and information readily accessible, the psychological effects of the information may become an unaccounted result. Teachers may skew their students’ performance in order to make themselves appear exemplary, thus handing children the short-end of the stick as they’re pushed up from one grade level to the next.
Although they are intended to be used by teachers and principals to adjust instruction in accordance to the students, the data may also serve as a way to measure how much a student needs to improve in order for the teacher to gain a good reputation.
Race to the Top seeks to provide an incentive for schools to better education and reward those who have shown improvements. Yet, the competitive nature of the grant may be more trouble than it’s worth—schools will be constantly pressured to enact reform after reform in order to receive these grants.
One government official strongly advocating the legislation is none other than the United State’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Coincidentally, Duncan also served as the superintendent of the Chicago Public School (CPS) system.
If the reference doesn’t immediately cause you to doubt the legitimacy and projected success of Race to the Top, ponder this fact: Prior to Duncan’s appointment, rampant cheating was discovered throughout the CPS district as schools with low reading scores on standardized tests would be placed on probation or shut down.
However, students were not the perpetrators; faced with monetary incentives, teachers were the culprits of changing answers on tests.
Many agree that America’s education system needs reform, yet we can only hope that its fate diverges from the faulty footsteps left by the No Child Left Behind Act. What we don’t need is another system that fantastically fails to achieve its purpose: giving students a better education.