Talk of  Race to the Top will soon be superceded by all-encompassing anxiety over the state budget. But make no mistake: The two bills the Assembly passed Tuesday were historic; they will have long-lasting and far-reaching effects, whether or not California wins a dime of the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition.

Despite full-bore opposition of the heavies in Sacramento – the school boards’, teachers union’s and school administrators’ lobbies – by this afternoon, the Legislature will have finally adopted measures thought implausible months ago. As a result, the state will be poised to:

• Take decisive action to fix the worst performing schools – an action it has resisted, flying in the face of federal law, for years.
• Revise its fundamentally sound but far from perfect math and English language curriculum standards. They had been viewed as sacrosanct until now.

• Create new nontraditional programs for people interested in teaching science and math, opening up the field to second career candidates with a lot to offer  schools.

• Require participating districts to revise how they evaluate teachers and principals, incorporating test scores as one factor. Teachers unions that had dismissed any suggestion of “merit pay” will now collaborate in the process.

• Give parents stuck in terrible schools a new right to send their children to better schools in other districts. Even in its compromised form, which will give receiving districts ways  to avoid their obligations, the parental choice provision marks a shift in governance and establishes a new principle: A child has a basic right to attend a good school anywhere.

Critics of the Race to the Top bills, SBX5-1 and SBX5-4 implied advocates were prostituting their values for one-time federal money that won’t even fill in 10 percent of gap in the K-12 budget for next year. And it’s probably true that, were they not desperate for dollars, California and other states wouldn’t be clawing to win the competition. Credit  President Obama administration for figuring out how to move states to enact measures they would never have otherwise adopted.

But Race to the Top was never proposed as a solution to states’ fiscal problems. It’s misleading to judge it on that basis. The program will provide money for systemic reforms that states – especially those with  teachers and parents demanding to roll back cuts  — would never spend on their own.

The payoffs could be big, if. as state officials are implying, they will use the money to create new metrics to replace STAR tests as the sole of measure student progress. Or write  online courses for career academies in high school. Or work with CSU education schools to improve their teacher preparation programs. Or establish programs to help principals assigned to struggling schools.

These are some of the possibilities of Race to the Top. They’re worth pursuing.

By John Fensterwald on January 6th, 2010