In today’s New York Times, David Brooks writes about one of the Obama administration’s quiet successes:
Over the past few days I’ve spoken to people ranging from Bill Gates to Jeb Bush and various education reformers. They are all impressed by how gritty and effective the Obama administration has been in holding the line and inciting real education reform.
The engine for reform has been the administration’s Race to the Top initiative, a $4.3 billion fund that the federal government has used to reward states that have pursued reform most aggressively. With Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at the helm, Race to the Top has proven to be a rigorously applied program that’s meeting its objectives — as good in practice as it is on paper.
The initiative reflects this administration’s predilection for using incentives to nudge behavior, rather than issuing top-down policies to effect change. As Brooks points out, the approach has yielded stellar results: states raising their caps on charter schools, a stronger emphasis on student performance, greater union openness to pay reform.
In recent weeks, the administration has come under fire for its seemingly thin list of accomplishments to date. The jury is still out on hot-button topics like health care and Afghanistan, but on education, the administration has been as bold and effective as reformers had hoped.
