First created as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, in efforts to stimulate the economy, Race to the Top Fund is a grant program designed to bolster educational competition among states. The U.S. Department of Education piloted the grant in three phases with a point based selection criteria. Unlike its predecessor, No Child Left Behind, implemented under the Bush administration, Race to the Top is a meticulously detailed federal plan that gives significant attention to outlining the specific expectations, requirements, and action steps proposed, with a glossary of terms and definitions included as well. The length and specificity of the executive summary would appear to speak to the quality and effectiveness of the program. However, as we have discussed in class, Race to the Top is another reform that, sadly, does not benefit students, teachers, and families but rather advances plutocratic interests. Though there does not exist substantial literature reviewing the Trump administration’s stance on Race to the Top, specifically, there are numerous indicators that point to an emboldened neoliberal ideology that will drive the U.S. in the coming years towards privatized, market-based education.
Though I argue that Race to the Top was simply another band aid reform, William Howell of the University of Chicago conducted research that pointed to some level of success from the grant. To start he found that nearly every year between 2001 and 2008, new educational policy adoption rates across states low and essentially indistinguishable from one another. He concluded in the aftermath of Race to the Top’s announcement, however, adoption rates for all three groups increased dramatically. By 2014, winning states had adopted, on average, 88 percent of the policies, compared to 68 percent among losing states, and 56 percent among states that never applied. However, it is noteworthy to include that in winning states, higher percentages of public school students attend charter schools than in either losing or non-applying states
What is interesting is that Donald Trump, according to the Washington Post, opposes a strong federal involvement in public education. Which makes sense following his laissez faire approach to policy making. However, Race to the Top, though a federal initiative, is arguably driven towards providing more decision-making power to states. Why, then, has he vowed to end Common Core? And, where is Race to the Top in all of this discussion? Within his first 100 days in office, President Trump and Congress overturned accountability rules for the Every Student Succeeds Act. As of May 2017 the Trump administration planned to cut $10.6 billion from federal education initiatives, according to budget documents obtained by The Washington Post. President Trump and his choice for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, are strong proponents for the privatization of schools with public commitments to expanding school voucher systems. Though she is not nationally recognized, DeVos, and her husband, has been vigilantly working towards realizing their goal of an expanded voucher system. According to Chalkbeat, in 2000, she helped get a ballot measure before Michigan voters that would have enshrined a right to vouchers in the state’s Constitution. After the measure failed, she and her husband formed a political action committee to support pro-voucher candidates nationally. DeVos and her husband played a role in getting Michigan’s charter school law passed in 1993. Roughly 80 percent of charters in Michigan are run by private companies, far more than in any other state. Neoliberalism has ensured that schools are dependent on private donations and support, which keeps power concentrated in the hands of the elite and moreover, ensures that capitalists are defining the purpose of schooling, further solidifying social and economic arrangements. Looking at Michigan as a microcosm of the greater DeVos agenda we can see the exceedingly corporate influence on education and the intersecting relationships between “public” and “private” good.
Though vouchers are typically seen as a tool for white, upper-class families to evade less desirable schools I appreciate Thomas Pedroni (2007) offering a critical counter to the narrow ideas of who participates in these compensatory educational programs, affording agency and voice to those marginalized within these movements; Pedroni speaks to the nuance of these political movements and the ways in which they are certainly not “uncontradictory” or “unitary I feel at some level Pedroni’s work speaks to the construction of choice, who has choice, how individuals view their own ability to choose versus what is really available, and so on. Moreover, Market Movements and work on voucher programs highlight how deeply engrained the idea of efficiency, driven by neoliberal ideology, is within our current sociopolitical landscape and how language around “crisis conditions” further pushes parents, families, and leaders to hastily act through “band-aid” reforms that don’t necessarily get at the root problems. This principle ideology, though in reference to vouchers, can be a window to understanding where Race to the Top fits into the picture. That is to say, given this context, we can ask: how will our new political leadership affect the previous initiatives of the Obama administration?
President Trump came under fire in 2016 for stating that schools are “like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers, for the teachers and the administrators and not the students”. This metaphor is messy because it raises the question of who are the clerks? And what about the store owners? Why wouldn’t you want a store to benefit it’s employees (re: the clerks). Aside from being one of the many eye brow raising moments in a Trump speech, the idea of schools as a business speaks to a larger ideology. “One of the markers of this increased sway over educational policy is the standard assumption that humans exist as forms of capital to which value can be added through education and therefore contribute positively to the U.S. position in the global economy” (Au 2009: 60). the theory is an interesting point at which to unpack neoliberal ideology; this is to say that prevailing idea of students as investments –investments that businesses, government, state, etc. expect a return on. In this moment, more than ever, students are not viewed holistically but rather as nameless, faceless, entities that can be molded into and ascribed to certain social positions, positions that often maintain the social order. We must consider the ways in which school is both aligned and in conflict with economic life in the U.S. and also what specific tools are used to ensure both the transmission and acquisition of ruling ideology into students’ consciousness.
Ultimately, the Trump administration has not thoroughly fleshed out its plans for education. What is has done is apply the same business tactics from Wall Street onto a public good. The president and his secretary are unpredictable at this point since their language, actions, history and ideology are at some level inconsistent and ever changing given the push and pull influence of corporate backing. It is important to conceptualize Race to the Top fundamentally as a competition. Though framed as a grant, Race to the Top was a way to pit states against each other for a limited amount of funds – that is to say, there were bound to be losers – it was designed as a win/lose outcome. It is interesting to me then that Donald Trump would look to cut out these funds since competition seems to harmoniously align with his politic. What we can conclude then is that Race to the Top, and other educational reforms under Obama administration, are threatened because they seek to empower
, though through controversial means, a public-school system which Trump is looking to destroy.