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EEP Weighs in on Race to the Top Guidelines

We're happy to announce that today we joined with our partners - The Education Trust, Democrats for Education Reform, and the Center for American Progress -- in signing a letter to Secretary Duncan providing strong support for his Race to the Top guidelines. We urge the Administration to remain committed to closing the racial and ethnic achievement gap via their policies and funds. The letter is in the public register as part of the official comments on the Race to the Top guidelines and can be read below.

Joint Comments on the Proposed Regulations for the Federal State Fiscal Stabilization Fund and Race to the Top Fund

August 28, 2009

Education Trust - Excerpt 

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:

As you know, the undersigned organizations have longstanding commitments to improving the quality of public schools for all children. Our special focus, though, is on schools that are too often overlooked in general improvement efforts: those serving large numbers of low-income students, English-language learners, and students of color. We write together today because of our collective conviction that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) provides an unprecedented opportunity to reinvigorate and refocus the school improvement effort in America. Done right, ARRA-financed initiatives can build on recent momentum at the elementary level by removing ambiguity about the aims of high school education, shaking an often complacent system out of its comfort with mediocre results, and elevating the most ambitious and effective reforms aimed at placing the needs of children-especially the most vulnerable-ahead of the privileges and prerogatives of adults.

We have no doubt that both Congress and the Administration are committed to doing this right. The ARRA legislation itself and the draft regulations are unequivocal in their focus on aligning K-12 expectations with the demands of post-secondary and the workforce and ensuring that both educators and the public more generally have good, honest, useful information on progress toward those goals. We wholeheartedly applaud your absolute clarity on the need to put the closing of long-standing gaps in achievement at the center of this effort. Your clear understanding that the most important gap-closing strategy is to focus like a laser on dramatically improving the effectiveness of those teaching low-income students and students of color, and your insistence that, to do any of this well, state data systems must link students to the teachers who teach them are exactly on target.

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Categories: Education News