The Race to the Top is granting $4 billion American taxpayer dollars to the states for “reforming” public schools. The program’s webpage at Ed.gov gives this bottom line explanation:
Race to the Top winners will help trail-blaze effective reforms and provide examples for States and local school districts throughout the country to follow as they too are hard at work on reforms that can transform our schools for decades to come.
For 21st century education reforming education around public schools locks in a bell curve for schooling that makes diplomas of unequal value. One of the four specific areas in Race for the Top is: Turning around our lowest-achieving schools. The illustration above shows why doing so traps the students in these schools at the lower end of a bell curve of diploma value. The school on the low end of the bell curve is Columbus High School in the Bronx, New York. Columbus is now scheduled to be closed because it is failing. Realistically, turning it around would move the value of its diploma up the downside of the bell curve. The Race to the Top sort of thinking will see such movement as a victory, yet the Columbus students will remain in a far inferior school by comparison to schools like Jefferson, ranked number one US high school for 2010. The Jefferson diploma will remain far more valuable to a student who earns it than the Columbus diploma. That system is unfair.
There is a better way: replace the bell curve with the long tail
The internet is a power law network where the long tail can replace the bell curve. We should not allow public education to persist in bell curve school-ranking methods that perpetuate an underclass. Handschooling a power law tool; more on that point here soon.
As explained in a recent handschooling.com post, online testing open to all would give a Columbus student a way to complete with Jefferson students. What is now coming out of ed.gov is a race a bit of the way up the downside of the public school bell curve — at a price tag of $4 billion. Has Congress approved this expenditure?
