New Jersey's "Race to the Top" Flops

New Jersey's Race to the Top application fiasco boiled over yesterday, when Governor Christie fired his education commissioner, Bret Schundler (in the white shirt and in presumably happier times). The episode quickly offered unseemly finger pointing, political posturing that badly backfired, and a sense of bureaucratic ineptness that transcended ideological zealotry.

Much has been made of the Schundler team's gaffe in providing incorrect information on its application. That error cost five points in the Race to the Top's evaluation scheme. Those points greatly mattered, as New Jersey's application was out of the money by three points.

Originally, the Christie Administration called the mistake a "clerical error" that anyone with common sense would have simply adjusted. While one can understand the point, the spin conveniently ignores the reality of documentation requirements in the worlds of grant funding, RFPs, and other legally generated requests for funds. Any grant writer, any attorney (including Christie, a former federal prosecutor who touts his adherence to the letter of the law), any firm preparing business pitches knows that following submission directions is the first rule of proposal writing. It's akin to a golf pro signing her or his scorecard at the conclusion of a round. In short, the Christie administration's thin excuse for an incorrectly managed proposal does not pass the smell test.

Further, the governor's obsession with his ideological struggle with the New Jersey teacher's unions led him to hastily rework Schundler's initial, well-crafted proposal. Christie's revisions, frantically conceived and hammered together at the last minute, and over a Memorial Day weekend, did not include the teacher's unions sign-on to the proposal. This stipulation was part of the Race to the Top conditions. The New Jersey governor's calculated maneuver, according to a story in today's New York Times, cost the Garden State's application more points than providing information from the wrong fiscal years did.

Christie has blamed everyone except himself for his state's equivalent of coming in fourth in a race that only paid for win, place, and show. However, I'm not convinced Christie really wanted to win. Conservatives such as Christie have been uneasy over Race to the Top. His administration was lukewarm to the funding chase from the get-go. The governor publicly screwed Schundler over a sensible deal the then-education commissioner made with the teacher's unions to get them on board with Race's first application. Politically speaking, Christie benefits from continued unrest in the state's school systems. Volatility keeps an unpopular statewide group such as the teacher's unions readily available as a convenient collective scapegoat to castigate for the state's many issues. Does this strategy sound familiar?

Yet, education financing is a volatile issue in New Jersey, as well as other states. Christie's suburban and rural constituencies will feel a continuing pinch in education services, as a combination of diminished property tax revenues and, ironically, decreased federal funding will mean larger class sizes, fewer after-school activities, and declining physical plant maintenance. One "solution" may be a de facto deflationary strategy, in which "expensive" teachers find retirement the better choice of valor. Younger, cheaper teachers will be the fresh meat for the public education grinder. In that way, costs are "managed," and a "new dawn" will rise for New Jersey education.

The "solution" is likely to run aground on standardized testing and "data-driven" teaching. Education funding, and other payment schemes such as merit pay, are chained to test results. Yet, the notion that statistical analysis equals understanding psychological truth goes against the grain of human experience. That has not deterred conservatives and "concerned" liberals from having an almost religiously-held belief in this profoundly flawed premise. Their imposition of their unquestioned, unshakable faith in quantitative analysis as education's salvation has largely gone unchallenged. "The data shall set you free?" That sounds more akin to arrogant hubris than thoughtful spiritual awakening.

Bret Schundler tried to navigate this difficult passage. His spectacular failure to make the "three-point play" for federal funding sealed his bureaucratic doom. However, the larger failure is at the top. That's a race with plenty of horses in it, running hard, running strong, running wrong. In that "race to the top," who would you put your money on?