Who Would Have Guessed The Race Would Look Like This?

While I think the Obama administration could be doing more to push Congress to save the DC voucher program, I'm delighted with what Obama and Duncan are doing in other areas, most notably Race to the Top.  Here's a Democrats for Education Reform report on all of the change RTT is triggering all over the country:

 Who Would Have Guessed The Race Would Look Like This?

Stunning. We don't know how else to put it.

Not just the New York State Board of Regents' announcement today that it fully intends to be competitive in President Obama's "Race To The Top" contest with a comprehensive reform package. (As a New Yorker whose kids attend NYC public schools, I was perplexed for months as to why we seemed so willing to walk away from hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when school budgets are being slashed all over – especially since the reforms needed to win shouldn't be considered remotely controversial if you really think about them.)

What is stunning is the tremendous wave of edu-political reform which has been unleashed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the Obama administration in such a short time.

The president was swept into office by a strong demand for change. But who would have guessed that in less than one year we would be looking at such significant coast-to-coast policy changes at the state level. (And thanks to Charlie Barone, our federal policy guru/spiritual advisor/occasional disc jockey for keeping tabs on the RTTP landscape.)

And here's a DFER memo on RTT: www.dfer.org/rttp-faq+a/DFER RttT QA-Dec13.pdf