Kentucky Loses Out on RTTT Early Learning Grants
Education Week just reported that Kentucky has lost out (again) on a Race to the Top federal education funding competition. This time it was for the Early Learning Grants.
The RTTT Early Learning Grants, which will average around $55.6 million to each of the nine states that won the competition, will help develop improved early learning opportunities for preschool children.
This is going to be a disturbing blow in cash-strapped Frankfort.
This situation also raises a host of issues.
• Washington, DC is sending us a message – our education reform proposals consistently have not appealed to them. This latest rejection marks a third strike for us in the RTTT ball game. The state is clearly expensively out of sync with what DC finds appealing in education reform proposals.
• It is significant that six of the nine states are REPEAT RTTT winners! Only one winner is not a charter school state. We know DC really likes charter schools, and it is becoming apparent that DC is concentrating its education dollars in certain states where it likes education reform proposals.
We also know that the DC crowd is increasingly upset with teachers’ union interference in meaningful education reform.
Thus, Kentucky’s foot dragging on implementing charter school legislation – driven in no small measure by resistance from the Kentucky Education Association, the dominant teachers’ union here – may be hurting the Bluegrass State in the federal money races. This may be sending messages to the feds that the teachers’ union in Kentucky is too influential and is likely to stifle other meaningful education reform measures, too.
• Another thing that may have hurt: the application wanted information about student data systems.
Kentucky is very far behind in this area. Seriously lagging most other states, our Infinite Campus student monitoring and tracking program for K to 12 students only recently came on line. We will be the last state in the country to get high quality graduation rates – a high interest item in DC – from our state’s student data system.
Washington knows our data system track record, and that history certainly can’t build confidence in our future potential to excel. Kentucky should have concentrated more attention on getting this right much sooner. Now, we are playing catch-up, and left out.
Did we use the wrong facts in our application? Our application said:
• Kentucky currently ranks 48th in median household income.
• Kentucky currently ranks 47th for those over 25 who have completed high school.
After two decades of KERA, these don’t seem to be very encouraging statistics about our state’s potential to improve. Of course, most adults in Kentucky graduated before KERA was enacted, but still, after 21 years of reform, we should be seeing some improvements. The lack of progress highlighted in our application might not have impressed federal education officials looking for states that can lead the way in successful educational reform.
Why didn’t Kentucky’s grant writers use more encouraging statistics – perhaps like our supposed improvement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress? The answer may be that Washington knows all about how our nation-leading exclusion of students with learning disabilities makes our NAEP reading scores dubious.
Perhaps those putting Kentucky’s latest RTTT application together thought it best to not open that old wound and again highlight the fact that Kentucky has been reading its reading assessments to its learning disabled students since the beginning of KERA.
Fortunately, the state board just acted to end that bad reading policy. Sadly, repeating our history of tardiness with Infinite Campus, this vote came too late to influence the RTTT application.
The Bottom Line: When it comes to actually spending money, the current administration in Washington is consistently not buying Kentucky’s claims about education leadership and the state’s potential to lead educational reforms in the future. I want to stress again that there is no guarantee that DC is right with its attempts to horn in on the states’ rights area of education, but we also can’t totally ignore the message that there certainly are those out there looking at Kentucky and not being impressed enough to put their money on us. Right now, DC’s bets are going elsewhere as they put our nation’s tax dollars on other horses in the Race to the Top.