Last month, the US Department of Education announced the recipients of the second and possibly final round of the federal Race to the Top grants.
The competitive grants were to be awarded based on assessments made by consultants hired by the department.
Illinois did not receive any of the grants, which went to nine states and the District of Columbia.
As Bernie Schoenberg reports in the State Journal-Register, IEA President Ken Swanson and Executive Director Audrey Soglin, sent a fiery letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to protest the decision and express their “profound disappointment.
“We are dismayed and disillusioned,” the letter states. “In our view, the process was unfair and fatally flawed.” They likened the denial of the state after a second round of applications to a student who carefully followed a teacher’s instructions for improvement, only to have a different teacher — who didn’t talk to the first one — assess the student as failing again. The fact that the first and second set of federal reviewers were not on the same page led to Illinois receiving lower scores in round two for some things highly rated in round one, which “defies common sense,” the letter said.
“As the secretary of education, you had an obligation to ensure the grants went to the right states,” the IEA officials tell Duncan. The union’s involvement was a large part of why Illinois should have been successful, they add.
“This was not reflected in our point score, and it makes us wonder whether the department truly values and understands how important unions are to successful deployment. …”
“We will remain true to our organization’s mission of effecting excellence and equity in public education, as we advocate for education employees. This was a wasted opportunity.”
Read the letter in its entirety
Want growth and jobs? We’ll need revenue
It’s the worst kind of election year pandering: “The worst time to raise taxes is in the middle of a recession.” Yet we continue to hear that claim from gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady and expect to hear it right up until election day.
Fortunately, there are other, informed, voices, such as that of Ralph Martire, Executive Director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability.
Using a formula developed by an adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign, Martire, points out that cutting $9 billion from the Illinois budget, as Brady has suggested, would cost the state 128,000 jobs!
That’s because those spending cuts would be achieved by firing teachers, health care workers, correctional officers and other public servants, who, having lost their wages, would stop buying stuff in local economies. News flash: Consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of all economic activity, so for every dollar state spending is cut, local economies lose $1.36 in consumer purchasing, which in turn causes the concomitant private-sector job losses.
As it is, the state’s long-term economic trends don’t bode well for a quick recovery. In fact, Illinois never fully recovered the 147,609 non-farm jobs it lost during the previous, much shorter and less severe recession of 2001. In the six-year recovery following that recession, from November 2001 to November 2007, Illinois regained just 67,200 non-farm jobs, or less than half the number it lost.
Factor in the 40,000 jobs Illinois must create annually just to keep pace with growth in the labor force, and it’s pretty clear the state’s private-sector economy hasn’t generated adequate job growth for a while. Heck, since 1990, Illinois’ economic performance has significantly lagged the country’s, ranking in the bottom 12 in real, state gross domestic product growth.
Martire acknowledges that while there never is a good or popular time for a tax increase, if the goal is recovery, sometimes you have to say yes to taxes.
Look, no one enjoys championing a tax increase. That said, Illinois, which has been one of the lowest tax and spending states for decades, can’t solve its budget problems or grow its private-sector economy without one.
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Illinois Education Association is an association of more than 130,000 members composed of Illinois elementary and secondary teachers, higher education faculty and staff, educational support professionals, retired educators and college students preparing to become teachers.
Merit Pay for teachers is a bad idea. Merit Pay for school districts (Race To The Top) is also a bad idea. That’s why the NEA-RA took a position of “NO CONFIDENCE” on Race to the Top. IEA should recognize this as just another way to justify inadequate funding for Education. There should be adequate funding for all states, not just those that choose to jump through a series of hoops to attain limited funding.
Ed is right. The letter from President Swanson and Executive Director Soglin is passionate, but misses the point. Race to the Top is a fundamentally flawed program. The problem isn’t that the winners weren’t picked fairly. The problem is that the program creates states, schools and students that are winners and losers. President Swanson criticizes the Education Secretary for not choosing the right states. When it comes to funding schools, the feds should not be picking right and wrong states. Nor should the Secretary be, as Ed suggests, pushing pay for performance schemes or lifting charter caps as a condition for funding.
Race to the Top: States race their hardest & don’t win. Teachers try their hardest and can’t win. Students have no say in any of this and just keep losing.
Race to the Top was not a merit pay program. State Affiliates who supported their state applications were not in any way indicating support for merit pay. The charter school issue is complex and varies from state to state. An expansion of a cap on PUBLIC charter schools subject to collective bargaining laws and accountable for what happens in them (such as in IL) is different than other charter school expansions that happened elsewhere. Nobody in IL or IEA who supported the RTT application was suggesting that selective funding should ever change our committment to providing adequate federal and state funding for all public schools in every state. The IEA RAs of recent years made school funding reform the number one priority of the organization. The RTT application did not abandon that goal in any way. Speaking of RAs, the NBI at the NEA RA regarding no confidence in RTT was thoroughly debated and passed narrowly. The IEA caucus debated the issue and took a position of no position on the question.
Holly. You are correct. Technically RttT is not a merit pay program. It is worse. It has made teacher evaluation linked to student performance a mandatory issue of bargaining for the first time in Illinois. And it is mandatory even though Illinois didn’t have its grant application approved. While the charter issue is complicated, many union members are not aware that charter schools must negotiate their own contract. A charter within a district cannot, by law, be covered by the existing agreement. Recent court decisions have made it more difficult to organize charters and the law which keeps them from working under the existing agreement puts charter teachers at a severe disadvantage when it comes to working out a collective agreement of their own. While I do not question the IEA leadership’s intent, the result of going along with RttT strengthens the hand of those who wish to extend its principles to ESEA reauthorization.
And it IS a merit pay program. Merit pay takes limited resources and rewards a limited number of teachers. RTTT takes a limited amount of resources and rewards a limited number of states. Our goal should be adequate funding for all states at the federal level, not just the ones who jump through the hoops the best!
In that sense, my brother Ed Rosenthal is exactly correct.