Civil Rights’ Leaders Speak Out Against Race to the Top

I was reading through the declaration again today that several civil rights’ groups had developed and presented to the Obama administration.

I was impressed by the number of organizations that were  part of the crafting of this document. I was also impressed by how their concerns match the concerns that many of us have expressed in newspapers, in our blogs and in addressing the pitfalls of RTTT to our elected officials.

It’s unfortunate that President Obama did not reflect on what these leaders had to say as representatives of their communities. It’s also a shame that several individuals backed off of their statement after the president’s speech.

But it doesn’t matter. We have a document now that does reflect the thinking of many minority communities around this country.

So, Mr. Duncan, as my mom would say, “The cat’s out of the bag”… and there is no way to get him back in now.

Below is the first portion of the document but it is well worth reading in its’ entirety.

Dora

Framework for Providing All Students an Opportunity to Learn through
Re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law
National Action Network
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
National Council for Educating Black Children
National Urban League
Rainbow PUSH Coalition
Schott Foundation for Public Education

Today there is nothing short of a state of emergency in the delivery of education to our
nation’s communities of color. As our communities quickly grow on pace to become a
numerical majority, it is clear that confronting the issues we face is not just our challenge
alone but all of America’s challenge. As a nation, we are failing to provide the high quality
educational opportunities that are critical for all students to succeed, thereby
jeopardizing our nation’s ability to continue to be a world leader.

As a community of civil rights organizations, we believe that access to a high-quality
education is a fundamental civil right. The federal government’s role is to protect and
promote that civil right by creating and supporting a fair and substantive opportunity to
learn for all students, regardless of where and to whom they were born. This objective is
advanced by many components of the proposed FY 2011 education budget and the
Blueprint for Reform setting forth the Administration’s priorities for re-authorization of
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). For instance, we applaud the
Administration’s goal for the United States to become a global leader in post-secondary
education attainment by 2020 and its efforts to develop specific strategies for turning
around low-performing schools.

While there are numerous positive aspects of the Administration’s education agenda,
more comprehensive reforms are necessary to build a future where equitable educational
opportunity is the rule, not the exception. As civil rights organizations, it is our
responsibility to seek to close and ultimately eliminate the opportunity and achievement
gaps experienced by communities of color. To this end, we outline six major principles
that we will collectively advocate to strengthen the ESEA and ensure that the federal
government provides the support necessary to protect every child’s civil right to a high quality
education:
1. Equitable opportunities for all;
2. Utilization of systematically proven and effective educational methods;
3. Public and community engagement in education reforms;
4. Safe and educationally sound learning environments;
5. Diverse learning environments; and
6. Comprehensive and substantive accountability systems to maintain equitable
opportunities and high outcomes.

The comments that follow offer critiques of federal efforts that would: distribute
resources by competition in the midst of a severe recession; advance experimental
proposals dwarfed by the scope of the challenges in low-income communities; and
promote ineffective approaches for turning around low-performing schools and education
systems.

But, more importantly, we also offer specific recommendations to implement the
principles outlined above. We advance proposals to leverage federal resources available
to all states in order to create the preconditions to achieve equitable opportunities for all.

As a part of extending an opportunity to learn as a civil right, we call for: “universal”
early education for all students in all states; policies that will provide access to highly
effective teachers for all students, including incentives to recruit and retain well-prepared,
highly effective teachers in high–need, low-income, and rural areas; and community
schools that offer wraparound services and strong, engaging instruction with adequate
supports. We urge the federal government to institutionalize a federal resource
accountability system so that students, parents, and teachers will have the school and
community resources necessary for students to achieve high standards, regardless of
where they live.

In recent weeks, we have engaged officials within the Administration to advance these
ideas, and have begun to engage Congressional leaders, as well. In the coming months,
we will hold discussions in communities across the country to amplify and augment the
key prescriptions outlined here.

1. EQUITABLE OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL
As a result of our history and changing demographics, our nation is at a point where we
will remain globally competitive only through achieving educational equity. We are
therefore cautiously optimistic about the Administration’s call for the adoption of
common college and career-ready standards as well as the efforts of the National
Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers on this issue. Yet
we have withheld our full endorsement of these measures because the federal government
has not yet committed to delivering the resource platform to support all states and
communities to meet high outcome standards.

We believe that the age of establishing outcome standards without making input
investments to achieve these outcomes must end. To this end, we offer the following
recommendations for federal action to provide equitable opportunities for all:
Recommendation 1A: Adopt Common Resource Opportunity Standards to
Complement the Emerging Common Student Outcome Standards.

We propose that the federal government adopt Common Resource Opportunity Standards, which would support the states’ common student outcome standards movement by ensuring sufficient resources to address extreme state budget cuts and interstate inequities. These standards would include national benchmarks for the following resources: (i) high-quality, early childhood education; (ii) highly effective teachers; (iii) a broad, college-bound curriculum that will prepare all students to participate effectively in our democracy; and (iv) equitable instructional resources.

1. As a condition for receiving federal funds under the ESEA, each state would be required to
submit a plan for closing opportunity gaps in these areas and ensuring that all students
have access to these core resources. As envisioned in the now pending Student Bill of
Rights Act, H.R. 2451, federal funding should be tied to each state’s demonstrated
progress toward equitable access to these education resources.

The federal government should also require that states make progress in achieving
resource equity for their schools. It should do so by enforcing existing requirements for
comparability in the funding provided to high and low-poverty schools and close the
loopholes in those comparability requirements by incorporating into the ESEA the
provisions of the now pending ESEA Fiscal Fairness Act, H.R. 5071.

In addition, comprehensive accountability systems are a necessity to gauge the effective
implementation of the common input and output standards and ensure all students are
able to achieve high outcomes. Independent audits of state and district education
expenditures should be required whenever students from historically disadvantaged
subgroups persistently fail to meet, or fail to make reasonable progress towards, college and
career-bound outcome standards.

In a recent speech at the NAACP’s annual convention, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan embraced this push towards resource accountability. As part of the ESEA
reauthorization, Secretary Duncan stated that the federal government “will require much
greater transparency and action steps to address inequities in funding systems, to ensure
low-income students and the schools they attend get their fair share of dollars.”2 In our
view, resource equity must go beyond just dollars to ensure, at a minimum, that all
students have access to early childhood education, highly effective teachers, college preparatory curricula, and equitable instructional resources.

Recommendation

1B: Shift the Focus from Competitive Grants for a Few
States to Incentives for All States to Embrace Systemic Reform.

Despite the critical need for Common Resource Opportunity Standards, theAdministration’s proposed FY 2011 budget directs the bulk of its increases in education spending to be distributed as competitive grants, while formula dollars, which have been historically underfunded, remain flat.3 Because only a few states will receive competitive grants, most children in most states will experience a real decrease in federal support when inflation and state and local budget cuts are taken into consideration. We are concerned that the Administration’s Blueprint suggests that ESEA reauthorization will continue this approach. Instead, we call for a shift of focus from competitive grant programs to conditional incentive grants that can be made available to all states, provided they adopt systemic, proven strategies for providing all students with an opportunity to learn.

If education is a civil right, children in “winning” states should not be the only ones who
have the opportunity to learn in high-quality environments. Such an approach reinstates
the antiquated and highly politicized frame for distributing federal support to states that
civil rights organizations fought to remove in 1965. With the creation of the ESEA as a
part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, the federal government took the
first steps toward requiring an equitable distribution of funding among states. Shifting the
emphasis from competitive grants to conditional incentives can preserve those gains.

Incentivizing behavior through limited competition, in and of itself, is not a bad strategy,
but we must go further to recognize that many states and districts in our union will not
compete, either because they do not have the capacity or because they lack the political
will. This increases the likelihood that better-resourced states and communities will win
out. For these reasons, a competitive framework does not go far enough to ensure equity.
The implementation of the Race to the Top Fund’s grant process highlights our concerns
about an approach to education funding that relies too heavily on competition: only
fifteen states and the District of Columbia were on the shortlist in the first round to be
“eligible” for possible funding.

4. These finalist states contain only 37% of the students in
the United States eligible for free and reduced lunch. Only 14% of the students in the
finalist states are Hispanic compared to 26% in the non-finalist states. Overall, 74% of
Hispanic students live outside finalist states. While 53% of Black students in the United
States are in the finalist states, losing 47% of the Black students places a huge economic
burden on the country. Overall, 42% or 12.5 million of the nation’s children would be left
behind.

5. As a result of the selection of Tennessee and Delaware as the two winners of the
first round, the Race to the Top Fund currently impacts only 2.5% of the students in the
United States eligible for free and reduced lunch, 3% of the nation’s Black students, and
less than 1% of Latino, Native American, and Hmong students.

6. The limited reach of the Race to the Top Fund and other market-based frames for federal education funding jeopardizes achievement of the commendable goal for the United States to become a global leader in post-secondary education attainment by 2020. By most estimates, the United States will need at least 16 million more graduates a year than our current rate to achieve this goal.

7. This requires a dramatic increase in the percentage of Brown, Black, and Native people – documented and undocumented – achieving post-secondary credentials. If states with large communities of color such as California, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas are left behind in any competitive grant process, significant numbers of Black and Brown children who are needed to meet that 2020 benchmark will also be left behind.

The Race to the Top Fund and similar strategies for awarding federal education funding
will ultimately leave states competing with states, parents competing with parents, and
students competing with other students. Moreover, even states that do not choose to
compete for federal incentive funds should have an obligation to provide a standard of
education consistent with protecting their children’s civil rights. The civil right to a highquality
education is connected to individuals, not the states, and federal policy should be
framed accordingly. Good federal policy should mitigate political inequities that serve as
barriers to delivering the ultimate change that is so plainly desired and needed. By
emphasizing competitive incentives in this economic climate, the majority of low-income
and minority students will be left behind and, as a result, the United States will be left
behind as a global leader.

We recognize that federal incentives are an important part of motivating states to action.
We therefore advocate the use of conditional incentives – incentives that are available to
all states that meet whatever equitable and fair conditions are established – rather than
competitive incentives, which only provide resources to the few. In addition, the
Common Resource Opportunity Standards, described above, should factor into the
evaluation of all federal educational funding applications and regulatory activities. To the
extent that competitive grants will be utilized, states should gain additional points for
progress toward resource equity and lose points for providing an inadequate approach to
closing opportunity gaps. The strength of states’ equity plans should be considered as the
U.S. Department of Education (DOE) determines how to allocate limited resources for
aid and technical assistance.

2. UTILIZATION OF SYSTEMATICALLY PROVEN AND EFFECTIVE
EDUCATIONAL METHODS
For far too long, communities of color have been testing grounds for unproven methods
of educational change while all levels of government have resisted the tough decisions
required to expand access to effective educational methods. The federal government
currently requires school districts to use evidence-based approaches to receive federal
funds in DOE’s Investing in Innovation grant process. So, too, in all reforms impacting
low-income and high-minority communities, federal and state governments should meet
the same evidence-based requirement as they prescribe specific approaches to school
reform and distribute billions of dollars to implement them.

Rather than addressing inequitable access to research-proven methodologies like high quality early childhood education and a stable supply of experienced, highly effective teachers, recent education reform proposals have favored “stop gap” quick fixes that may look new on the surface but offer no real long-term strategy for effective systemic change. The absence of these “stop gap” programs in affluent communities speaks to the marginal nature of this approach. We therefore urge an end to the federal push to encourage states to adopt federally prescribed methodologies that have little or no evidentiary support – for primary implementation only in low-income and high-minority communities. For this reason, we propose the following recommendations for federal action to ensure access to systematically proven and effective methods:

Recommendation 2A: Promote and Support Universal, High-Quality Early
Childhood Education.

Data on the benefits of high-quality early childhood education are overwhelming, and yet
millions of students across the country do not have this opportunity. The federal
government must ensure that all students have high-quality early childhood education
that ensures literacy by the third grade. When we miss this benchmark, Black and Brown
students, and boys in particular, begin the track from the schoolhouse to the penal system
– with very few opportunities for course correction. The highly successful reforms in
New Jersey prompted by the Abbott v. Burke litigation illustrate how high-quality
programs can be designed and implemented to produce extraordinary outcome changes in
a relatively short period of time. The federal government should create an early childhood
education quality index, like the one used in New Jersey, for monitoring program quality,
and provide incentives and funding for improving access to high-quality preschool based
on that index.