The RTTT initiative highlights four major priority areas: 1) Standards & Assessments; 2) Data Systems to Support Instruction; 3) Great Teachers & Leaders; and 4) Turning Around the Lowest Achieving Schools.  On the surface, these areas not necessarily problematic.  They are all things about which those concerned with public education should be deeply concerned.  In the RTTT application each of these areas was assigned point values and the application delineated subsections within which states needed to articulate their reform plans.  These point values indicate the relative importance of each priority area and also can provide some insight as to what state officials will be most concerned with when it comes to shoring up RTTT applications that fall short of a winning mark.  In rank order of point values here are the priority areas listed again:

1) Great teachers and leaders – 138 points

2) Standards and assessments – 70 points

3) Turning around the lowest achieving schools – 50 points

4) Data systems to support instruction – 47 points

Two other major areas of the application were assigned point values: “State success factors” (125 points) and “general” (55 points).

Given the RTTT priority areas, the recent education policy priorities set by Commissioner Gist upon the start of job in July 2009 come as no surprise.  Consider RIDE’s five priority areas: 1) Ensure educator excellence; 2) Establish world-class standards and assessments; 3) Accelerate all schools toward greatness; 4) Develop user-friendly data systems; and 5) Invest our resources wisely.  The first four areas listed here correspond directly with the RTTT priority areas, while investing resources wisely is definitely a good priority to have when asking the federal government to invest an extra $125 million in your state.  In fact, essentially every educational initiative pursued in RI within the past 8 months can be traced back to a particular priority promoted by the RTTT initiative.  And this is not necessarily to a fault, if any of us were in Commissioner Gist’s shoes we’d be hard pressed to do otherwise, as doing so would jeopardize RI’s chance at gaining a significant new chunk of federal monies.

At this point readers might be wondering what the problem is.  I admit again, the RTTT and RIDE priority areas themselves do not seem problematic on the surface.  Who would be against things like great teachers and leaders and turning around low-performing schools?  Certainly no one who is genuinely committed to providing a high quality education to all students regardless of where they live and what schools they attend.  And, shouldn’t we have high standards and use data to improve classroom instruction and educational decision-making?  Of course we should, especially to fight against the much too common bigotry of low expectations and unfounded educational practices that plague too many classrooms disproportionately populated by low-income students of color.

But, as the old adage goes, the devil is in the details.  Each RTTT priority area is actually broken down in great detail, outlining a variety of subsections within the larger categories.  Even more revealing than the overall RTTT categorical point values are the values assigned to these subsections.  These subsection point values signal which devil to focus on in the details.  Here are the 5 most valuable subsections within the application:

1) Articulating State’s education reform agenda and Local Education Agencies’ (LEAs’) participation in it – 65 points (45 of which are connected to support from superintendents, school boards, and teachers’ unions) – part of “State success factors.”

2) Improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance – 58 points – part of “Great teachers and leaders.”

3) Developing and adopting common standards – 40 points – part of “Standards and assessments.”

4) Turning around the lowest-achieving schools – 40 points (35 of which are connected to the state’s support for LEAs in implemented one of the four school intervention models: turnaround, restart, closure, or transformation) – part of “Turning around the lowest-achieving schools” (yes, the subsection has the same name as the major category).

5) Ensuring successful conditions for high-performing charter schools and other innovative schools – 40 points – part of “General.”

It is the manifestation of these and other subsections that lead me to seriously question the priorities of RTTT.  When one stops to consider the practical implications of these subsections, it becomes easier to predict the problematic outcomes likely to result from the education reforms that RTTT is forcing upon states throughout the country.  To draw out what I see as problematic in more detail, I will address each of the most highly valued subsections noted above over the course of my next few posts.  Stay tuned :)