Race to the Top

The U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top (RTTT) competition - and the $4.35 billion attached to it - has captivated the attention of officials in nearly every state and, in many cases, accelerated their work on the college- and career-ready agenda. As states are hard at work designing their applications for the RTTT first round deadline of January 19, 2010, Achieve recommends state leaders keep in mind several ways they can build on the work they have already begun and maximize the new opportunities presented through RTTT.

Common Standards and Assessments

Common, internationally-benchmarked college and career readiness expectations should be the foundation for all strategies undertaken with Race to the Top funding. The Common Core Standards Initiative - led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers in partnership with Achieve - continues its work with states to develop and validate common K-12 content standards that lead to college and career readiness by the time of high school completion. A complete draft of the K-12 standards will be released in early January, and the final standards are expected in early February 2010.

While the Race to the Top grants strongly encourage states to adopt common standards, the U.S. Department of Education will also sponsor a separate $350 million RTTT Assessment Competition to enable one or more consortia of states to develop and administer common assessments based on the common, college- and career-ready standards. USED has released preliminary information on the RTTT Assessment Competition but the final RFP is not due out until March 2010.

Because of our role in helping to shape the common standards and our experience leading the ADP multi-state assessment consortium, Achieve has been talking to a number of governors, chiefs and key national organizations about forming a consortium.

The common assessment competition is a tremendous opportunity for a significant number of states to band together and achieve two goals that have previously not been met by their individual state assessment systems: 1) creating high quality, forward looking, next generation assessments and 2) creating assessments that enable states to compare results against common, internationally benchmarked, college- and career-ready standards. Some think we need to choose between innovation and comparability. We believe we can and must find a way to do both.

For specific advice and promising practices for meeting the Race to the Top challenge on standards and assessments, see Achieve's Race to the Top: Accelerating College and Career Readiness - Standards and Assessments guide here. For more information on the RTTT Assessment Competition, go to the U.S. Department of Education's Web site.

Data Systems to Support Instruction

The RTTT competition gives states an unprecedented opportunity to build the tools to measure results; guide decision-making and investments; and provoke honest conversations about whether and how schools are on track for, meeting, and exceeding college and career readiness goals. The Data Quality Campaign recently released its annual progress report on state education data systems and found that every state is on track to have a longitudinal data system that follows student progress from preschool through college by 2011. However, the results also indicate that many states still lack key data system elements to inform critical policy decisions needed for RTTT reform plans, including key measures of college and career readiness and teacher effectiveness. Read the full report here.

States serious about winning RTTT must make fully implementing the essential elements of a P-20 longitudinal data system a top priority. But data alone are not enough: To foster meaningful dialogue and make continuous progress towards meeting college- and career-ready goals, states should leverage their investment in a robust data system to shine the light on college and career readiness school by school across the state, making it a central feature of their public reporting system. Most states already use school, district and state report cards to share basic data about schools' performance with the public. In most states, however, the data used to report on high school performance are not sufficient indicators of readiness for success in postsecondary education and careers. To shine a light on the progress schools and systems are making towards preparing all students for college and careers, states should generate report cards that include performance against key indicators - focusing the attention of educators and fostering greater public discourse on the importance of all students meeting college- and career-ready standards. To read more, see Achieve's Race to the Top: Accelerating College and Career Readiness - P-20 Longitudinal Data Systems guide here.

Great Teachers and Leaders

To make the dramatic improvements necessary to ensure all students are prepared for college and careers, as articulated in RTTT, states need thoughtful, intentional human capital strategies that get the right teachers in the right places in the right subjects. The need is especially acute in states that have or plan to adopt college- and career-ready academic standards and graduation requirements; they will need highly effective teachers - particularly in upper-level mathematics and science courses - capable of teaching rigorous content to all students. Three recent publications provide policymakers with instructive guidance, including strategies for rethinking teacher preparation to increase the number of educators prepared to teach college- and career-ready content to all students:

You can also learn more by reading Achieve's Race to the Top: Accelerating College and Career Readiness - Teacher Effectiveness guide.

Turning Around the Lowest-Achieving Schools

States seeking to prepare all high school graduates for college and careers need a strategy for responding to their lowest-performing high schools, which are responsible for a disproportionate number of students who drop out or graduate unprepared for what's ahead. Continuing to rely upon incremental change strategies will not lead to effective change in these schools. Instead, states need to build capacity to undertake dramatic improvement in these schools via turnarounds and fresh starts. At the same time, many individual students in better performing high schools do not graduate ready for college and careers. As a result, a complete state strategy must identify and segment schools by level of under-performance and mobilize different interventions to match each school's circumstances so that all students - no matter where they go to school - can graduate prepared for success in college and careers. To learn more, see Achieve's Race to the Top: Accelerating College and Career Readiness - Low-Performing Schools guide here and "Graduating America: Meeting the Challenge of Low Graduation-Rate High Schools," recently released by Jobs for the Future and Everyone Graduates Center.

Preparing for Sustainable Success

To win Race to the Top, states must articulate a comprehensive and aligned reform agenda designed to dramatically improve student achievement across the P-20 spectrum and ensure more students graduate from high school prepared to succeed in postsecondary education, training and careers. By calling for systemic education reform, RTTT is rightly encouraging states to think about what policies, programs and practices need to be developed or that they already have in place that can be built on, improved upon or transformed into something more effective and efficient for students and the system as a whole. This type of long-term planning is critical in building a sustainable reform; states should take the time to consider how the policies they are putting in place today will be sustained tomorrow. To that end, there are several criteria included within the RTTT application that call for states to describe how they plan to sustain their proposed reforms, which Achieve discusses in its new brief Sustaining the Race to the Top Reforms. The brief draws on Achieve's findings from Taking Root: Strategies for Sustaining the College- and Career-Ready Agenda, a set of recently-developed materials that seek to help states identify and implement strategies for sustaining their ambitious education reforms.

The Role of Postsecondary Leaders and Institutions

Among the range of stakeholders whose input and support is important for states to develop innovative and sustainable RTTT plans, higher education leaders and institutions are critical partners in ensuring that the reforms implemented will help more students successfully prepare for college. Achieve has prepared a policy brief for higher education leaders that identifies specific strategies for collaboration on RTTT reforms that promote P-20 alignment, leverage states' intellectual resources, and facilitate cross-sector capacity-building and stakeholder engagement. Read the brief here.