Greed is...

'Twas the week before Christmas, and Race to the Top
Was the vendors' obsession and focus nonstop.
The consultants were drafting proposals for states
With smug affirmations of positive fates,
While chiefs in their gray suits and governors, too,
Looked to Arne for dollars—please, more than a few.
-from "The Greedheads' Christmas"

There's a theme emerging in American education this first week of 2010, and it isn't a pretty one.

You can see it in New York State Senator John Sampson's remarks on federal education funding:

"My philosophy is you have to be in it to win it," Sampson told reporters yesterday. "So I think we need to put ourselves in a position to take advantage of ... moneys that can come from the federal government."

It's in Diane Ravitch's latest missive in her online correspondence with Deb Meier:

Now, the Obama administration, with its odious Race to the Top, is welcoming entrepreneurs into public education with the expectation that the profit motive will lift achievement. This is arrant nonsense, though it is likely to take a decade before we see how little we have gained by this venture.

You'll also find it in the essay from which the above:

Regrettably, the whole "Race to the Top" enterprise has become a red light district for lusty charlatans and randy peddlers. Big firms full of wealthy MBA types—people who earn in a quarter what teachers make in a year—have gobbled up the $250,000 per state that the Gates Foundation offered as part of its own generous "consultant stimulus act," along with additional dollars that states have tossed into the kitty. In return, they're readying cool PowerPoint presentations, nifty white papers, and jargon-littered plans, all geared to helping states persuade Education Secretary Arne Duncan that yes, they are ready and eager to do his bidding.

Education, this January, is not about what is best for educating kids. It's not about how to get them safe, non-leaking classrooms, with a reasonable number of classmates, a well-trained, appropriately compensated teacher, and adequate supplies.

It's about money.

Now, all of the above--the classroom, supplies, low class size--also are about money. None of them, however, are the result of competition. Those systems don't improve by spending money on consultants, by analyzing data streams, or by closing schools (quite the reverse, in the last case). They don't improve by pitting schools, districts, or states against one another.

They improve by recognizing that these things--having fewer kids in a classroom, giving teachers the support they need, providing up-to-date textbooks and technology--are the heart and core of what allows for good education for kids. That the unglamorous basics of education cost money, and that everyone needs an adequate amount to allow for a solid education.

That isn't about racing to the top; it's about getting everyone to the finish line.