The education news websites and blogs are crackling. Race to the Top! The winners! The losers! The behind-the-scenes intrigue! But outside the borders of education nation, few people know, and even fewer care, about Race to the Top. Hard to blame them. State bureaucrats and scads of hired consultants spent months producing truckloads of pages of vapidly worded vague promises in an attempt to win from the federal Department of Education billions of dollars that probably shouldn't have been up for grabs in the first place. This sort of thing is neither interesting nor inspiring to most people. I just dumped a cup of Darjeeling on my desk and here's what the leaves say: The ?ed reform? effects of Race to the Top will be indiscernible, and in a short while, everyone will have forgotten about the whole thing. Oh, and billions of dollars will have vanished.
?Liam Julian