The Obama administration’s $4.35 billion competitive grant program, Race to the Top (RTT), intended to encourage reform and improve student outcomes in K–12 education by awarding competitive grants to states that agreed to implement certain policies and practices, including creating state data systems and adopting common standards. A new report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) analyzes the implementation of RTT and evaluates its impact on student achievement. The study was conducted by Mathematica in partnership with American Institutes for Research (AIR) and Social Policy Research Associates (SPR).
The analysts collected information on state education policies and student achievement through phone interviews with state education agency representatives (conducted Spring 2013) and state-level test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress from 2003–15. They then compared these data amongst three types of states: Early RTT states which received Round 1 or Round 2 grants in 2010 (twelve states), later RTT states that received Round 3 grants in 2011 (seven states), and non-RTT states that did not receive grants (thirty-two states).
In Spring 2013, those states which received first or second round grants in 2010 reported using more RTT endorsed policies than non-RTT states in four areas encouraged by the program: turning around low achieving schools, adopting high-quality standards and assessments, promoting conditions that allow for more successful charter schools, and improving teacher and principal performance. Later RTT states reported adopting more polices than non-RTT states in just area: improving teacher and principal performance. These findings seem to indicate RTT had an impact on state policies early on, yet the authors of the report note that other factors could be responsible for these differences—and, indeed, when they looked for changes in state policies over time, they found no significant differences in the use of RTT promoted policies in RTT states versus non-RTT states.
When it came to RTT impact on student achievement the results were equally uncertain. As the report states, “Different reasonable interpretations of how student achievement was trending before RTT yield conflicting conclusions.” With various other happenings and reforms going on at the same time of the implementation of RTT, it becomes virtually impossible to determine whether changes in student achievement were a direct result of RTT.
This report highlights the challenges of evaluating the program’s impact, especially when other local factors are at play. In any event, as Education Week points out, more definite findings would have little hope of improving RTT or similar programs anyway; the Every Student Succeeds Act passed in December of last year ended the funding of the RTT program and prohibits the federal government from creating such programs in the future.
Lisa Dragoset et al., “Race to the Top: Implementation and Relationship to Student Outcomes,” Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education (October 2016).
