Pencils Ready! Race to the Test Shows Federal Overreach in State Assessments

Sarah Torre / April 16, 2010

As Race to the Top – the Obama administration’s $4.35 billion grant program designed to spur education reform – becomes a summer-long marathon for the remaining states that did not win grants in the first round of competition, the U.S. Department of Education has added an additional contest to the education grant Olympics. The Race to the Top Assessment (RTA) will provide $350 million to a consortium of states to develop an assessment system tracking student mastery of common college- and career-ready standards. While the prospect of additional funds might sound enticing to financially-strapped states, the federal strings attached to Race to the Top assessments could pull state and local education decisions out of communities and into the hands of Washington bureaucrats.

Incentivizing the adoption of certain standards, even if not directly written by a federal entity, allows the federal government unprecedented sway over how states and local governments should choose curriculum guidelines. Picking up the tab for an accompanying assessment system of federally-incentivized standards only further validates a federal hand in local education decisions. (more…)