{"id":1764,"date":"2009-11-12T19:41:08","date_gmt":"2009-11-12T23:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1764"},"modified":"2009-11-12T19:41:08","modified_gmt":"2009-11-12T23:41:08","slug":"race-to-the-top-review-revise-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1764","title":{"rendered":"Race to the Top: review, revise, redux"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am in California this weekend for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ssha.org\/\">Social Science History Association<\/a> annual meeting, where we get to talk about Maris Vinovskis&#8217;s book on the last quarter century of school reform, and since one of my copanelists Saturday morning is Jennifer Jennings, I finally get to meet the sociologist-formerly-known-as-Eduwonkette in person, face to face. Because several family members live in Costa Mesa, I also get to enjoy <a href=\"http:\/\/www.keancoffee.com\/\">Kean Coffee<\/a> about 20 miles south of the conference hotel\/cruise ship (when the heck did the SSHA officers decide to book the Queen Mary??!). <\/p>\n<p>While the focus of the book panel will be &#8230; well, Maris&#8217;s book, I&#8217;m sure we&#8217;ll be talking about Obama education policy at some point, including Race to the Top. I was rushing around last night not getting enough done, so I didn&#8217;t have a chance to do more than casually skim the stuff that&#8217;s now available on the revised final guidelines. A few initial thoughts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Bottom line? No idea. I traveled west and had coffee (see above), so I don&#8217;t have a bad case of jet lag, but I&#8217;ve been on planes for 7 hours today.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>I very much like the competitive priority on STEM fields. That uses a standard device for focusing grant-writers&#8217; minds in USDOE competitions (the bonus points for meeting a competitive priority). (Disclosure: it looks like <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.orlandosentinel.com\/news_education_edblog\/2009\/11\/race-to-the-top-more-of-floridas-ideas.html\">my state&#8217;s department of education is following the push<\/a> a bunch of us <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/mt\/archives\/002987.html\">have been making<\/a> about using Race to the Top funds for end of course exams, especially in science.)<\/li>\n<li>From the list of changes made, it looks like there have been a lot of political calculations made on what changes had to be made to keep stakeholders in the game and what had to stay the same to satisfy policy goals. <\/li>\n<li>Duncan is not anal retentive enough to make the points add up to a &#8220;nice round number.&#8221; I have a suspicion this is deliberate, and if so I think I know the reason why. <\/li>\n<li>People who focus on the total potential range of points for each section are missing an important feature of point distributions in scoring systems: it&#8217;s the actual range and not the potential range that matters on rankings. If the potential range is 58 points from top to bottom on one component but the scoring leaves a real-life range of 10 points, it doesn&#8217;t matter that the total number of points is 58. It could have been anything from 10 to 58. So what matters is how the reviewing panel looks at everything.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If we have time, I&#8217;ll try to persuade Jennings to put on her Eduwonkette cape and save the state where I grew up. But I think California&#8217;s problems are beyond what even a brilliant sociologist can solve. At least I get to see family members, which is worth the jet lag I&#8217;ll be fighting in the next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am in California this weekend for the Social Science History Association annual meeting, where we get to talk about Maris Vinovskis&#8217;s book on the last quarter century of school reform, and since one of my copanelists Saturday morning is Jennifer Jennings, I finally get to meet the sociologist-formerly-known-as-Eduwonkette in person, face to face. Because [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,11,4,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein","category-education-policy","category-research","category-the-academic-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-ss","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}