'Race To the Top' Is Great — Unless You're a Charter School

Liberal pundits are racing to heap praise on the Obama Administration’s award of hundreds of millions of dollars in education grants to Delaware and Tennessee – the result of the first round of the Race to the Top competition among states.

The $4.35 billion grant program, enthusiastically acclaimed by David Brooks and others, invites states to submit blueprints for reforming their education system to the feds. The states whose proposals the Administration likes best get a pile of money with which to carry out the reforms.

The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein proclaims the process by which Delaware and Tennessee were selected “rigorous” and the competition “actually forcing states to run.” He mentions, approvingly and without delving into devilish details, that Tennessee hurried to pass a law lifting the cap on charter schools (public schools relatively free of the establishment’s ruinous shackles) and received endorsements from 93 percent pf the state’s unions.

The Wall Street Journal bothered to dig deeper, noting that the two winning states have some of the nation’s more anemic charter laws and that Education Secretary Arne Duncan didn’t even mention charters in his announcement of the awards.

Moreover, the Administration, which has often said it would reward charter-friendly states – and thus implicitly implying it would confront charter-unfriendly teachers unions – now seems to be handing the latter a juicy opportunity to extract more baksheesh for itself and to sabotage education reform. The Journal explains:

States that refuse to cross the teachers unions are unlikely to produce significant education reforms for the simple fact that collective bargaining contracts are the biggest barrier to change. It’s not surprising that unions and school boards opposed Race to the Top applications in places like Florida and Louisiana. The reforms being pushed in those states – teacher accountability, school choice – are transformative. By giving unions and school boards such a huge sway over grant money [i.e., rewarding states above all “for getting local unions and school boards to approve their applications”], the Administration is saying that union buy-in matters as much or more than the nature of the reforms.

This “Race” is looking more like a crawl, and the “Top” more like a bottomless pit of union tyranny over schools – not that the liberal media have noticed.