Comment on RTTT

From Ben Austin of Parent Revolution, one of the key people behind CA's Parent Trigger, following up on my last email in which I defended Race to the Top (RTTT):

 

A quick thought on your RTTT analysis -- one thing that gets lost in the analysis of the scoring, winners/losers, etc. is the positive impact RTTT had on states that lost. In California, without RTTT there

is no Parent Trigger (even with RTTT and an unprecedented grassroots mobilization, we only won by one vote in both chambers). We ultimately lost both rounds, but RTTT left a legacy of a paradigm shifting new law that has sparked a movement like we haven't seen before in education reform. In California, we technically lost, but for thousands -- soon to be tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of parents and children -- we won.