So my current home state of New York won almost $700 million, out of $4 billion set aside in the Race to the Top federal grant competition, announced on August 24, 2010.

http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/index.html 

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/new-york-wins-race-to-the-top-grant/?scp=1&sq=race%20to%20the%20top%20new%20york&st=cse

Who could say "no thanks" to that kind of money? (Texas did and withdrew from the competition.) Like the clever naming of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top assumes that education is akin to a competition with clear winners and losers. In this case, 10 states and D.C. "won" grants, while 36 states did not.

While I’m generally in favor of more, rather than less, investment in education, I’m not sure that Race to the Top is going to deliver, mostly because I think “high stakes testing” is not very productive, and tracking test scores (or any other statistic) may not provide nuanced information about what people are really learning in school. I have high—perhaps unrealistically high—hopes for structured education to encourage people to 1) question, research, and learn throughout their lives, not only during their formal schooling and 2) to make connections to others from different backgrounds and times, in the pursuit of 3) improving upon the world we currently inhabit. (My disclaimer might explain my limited and optimistic perspective—I have been in schools as a student and now as a college professor for most of my life and so structured education has literally been my life.) I hasten to add that formal schooling cannot accomplish everything, and that everyone teaches by their example, so all members of a community are responsible for one another. Our daily encounters are opportunities to teach and to learn, as I’m sure many know. But for now, let me stick with the three hopes I have listed.

First, if we question what counts as knowledge, if we investigate what another society deems “common sense,” if we learn how various communities have determined “facts” across different time periods, we may then be forced to question our own beliefs. Understanding that people hold differing perspectives that are based on their experiences may allow us to find mutual points of interest, if not commonality. This is not merely about tolerance, but about understanding a perspective that conflicts or even contradicts with one’s own. Rather than viewing human history as linear progress, education ideally demonstrates that past inventors, artists, philosophers, parents and others may teach us solutions to our contemporary problems—that a perspective, approach or technology from decades or centuries ago may be more suitable than one invented last year. We might also discover how leaders, thinkers, and teachers in the past encouraged behaviors that led to famine, wars, enslavement of other peoples, and environmental degradation. Learning about and from people who have been silenced, oppressed or overlooked might give young people in a hierarchical school environment an opportunity to empathize and appreciate their own positions as agents of potential change. 

Unfortunately, while structured education might be able to encourage creative, oppositional, and/or radical thinking and questioning, the current US system instead requires students to learn from a set curriculum, to learn “facts,” and to demonstrate their skills on exams in a recognizable way. That standardized tests are assessed far too quickly and according to a few rules also means that there is little room to reward student responses that do not fit the models. The overemphasis on standardized tests leads to emphasis in the classroom on certain knowledge and skills, and also emphasizes inequalities, as seen with students who can afford tutors or test preparation courses. This happens throughout the testing system and across the ages—from elementary school children taking English Language Arts (ELA) tests to J.D. students taking the NY state bar exam.

(I was already familiar with SAT and GRE prep courses, and should not have been surprised when my friend reported that there are test prep businesses dedicated solely to the bar exam. This friend, who has a B.A. from University of California at Berkeley, a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and a J.D. from University at Buffalo and who had likely done well on the SAT, ACT, GRE and LSAT tests, initially failed the bar exam. I too am a “good” test taker—PSAT, SAT, AP exams, and GRE exams were part of my youth—and had the advantage of a prep class for the SAT, but not all families can afford the hundreds of dollars, not to mention the time and energy, that these private classes can cost.)

Placing more value on other forms of evaluation—instead of standardized testing—will have different problems, but might at least demonstrate that there are a variety of valid ways to view and assess what people know or how students learn. 

Second, because this is a country that is mostly segregated, the public schools of the US are also segregated primarily by class and ethnicity, which leads to the unfortunate result of concentration of poverty and lack of resources in some schools, and privilege and abundance in other, perhaps neighboring, locales. Here's a local (to me) example. In the city of Rochester, more than 75% of the children in public schools are eligible for free or reduced-price meals. As a parent of a 1^st grader in Rochester's public school, and, along with my relatively well-off neighbors, “urban by choice,” I have seen two of my son’s kindergarten friends move to the suburbs already as part of “white (or middle class) flight.” My own parents not so subtly laud Brighton (a suburb of Rochester)—where I lived from age 4 to 10—as an excellent town and school system. When they moved our family to Boston, they chose the suburb of Lexington in part for its public schools. More than once, my mother, who is a pretty straightforward (read tactless) person, has bluntly recommended that we move to a suburb, any suburb. To her credit, she also recognizes what the city of Rochester and our neighborhood has to offer, but she has some concerns about her only grandchild's educational future.

(my child's public  elementary school in the City of Rochester)

The public school classroom is one of the few spaces where individuals work and play together in an environment that is not as heavily predicated on the hierarchies of ethnicity or income present in most workplaces and cities. Allocating financial and human resources so that schools in more impoverished locales have a greater share might provide young people in those neighborhood schools with access to arts, sciences, and technology that their wealthier peers already use in their homes and parents’ workplaces, and/or study with in private lessons and camps. We might benefit from the wisdom of all, not the words of only a few, and a genuinely public classroom can encourage all to appreciate the styles, accomplishments, and cultures of individuals from different backgrounds. Given the pressures of work, limited time and energy, and institutionalized racism, if parents feel they cannot trust or change their child’s school, if they feel the system stymies their efforts, some who have the financial resources will find it easier to sell a home and buy another one—just thinking of the logistics, the packing, moving, and unpacking gives me a headache—or to send a child to private school, than to engage in urban public schools.

And third, how can we improve upon our world? Structured education is but a drop in the bucket (or ocean), but all the drops add up. At least in regards to formal public education, there are many responses and I can't pretend to even imagine the range. For now, let me just make two comments. There are some more easily solvable problems, and some more difficult challenges. 

On the simpler side, large class sizes make it difficult for teachers to provide enough attention and direction at the appropriate level and hence students are encouraged to conform to rules, even unspoken ones, admittedly some that are very admirable, that might stifle creativity. Due to limited resources, reducing class size can be a struggle but I have never heard anyone say that a classroom has too few students. 

On the more challenging side, citizens may perceive that schools in adjoining towns are none of their concern and perhaps less deserving of their own tax dollars. How can we counter the disengagement of some of the citizenry in the lives of the younger generation? How do we best demonstrate that investment in education carries benefits that cannot be measured in dollars? Perhaps when we remember that many of our most meaningful experiences are also ones that we do not apply a dollar amount to—such as celebrating with family, talking with friends, playing—and that people everywhere share these practices, might we engage in our local and larger communities and view formal education as an important piece towards making this world more equitable, joyful, and respectful of our human and natural resources.

That $700 million federal grant isn't nearly enough for New York, $4 billion isn't enough for the country's children, and of course, there were more losers than winners in this competition. Of course winners usually enjoy winning. Of course losers often learn something from the loss. But there are other ways to operate. No winners, no losers, no competition. I am not blind to the competitive aspects of many of our institutions and the struggle for scarce resources, but it seems to me that investing more time, energy, and yes, money, into the public education of younger people--not just teaching in the cause of high-stakes tests--will provide more than we can calculate in dollars.