ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews education reform leading up to Race to the Top (RTTT) to demonstrate that the challenges that haunt RTTT are by no means new. Like other reforms, RTTT policy was not well informed by research. The chapter discusses the aspects of RTTT and how states won RTTT dollars. Teachers and principals, aside from their immediate duties, also have to negotiate the never-ending cycle of failed education reforms, while coping with the “unrelenting criticism of failing public schools”. Reform movements that have emerged since the 1980s have been described as standards-based, curriculum-based, test-based, and accountability-driven. In 2008, Cuban notes that, “policymakers turn religiously to school-based solutions for national problems. With principal and teacher effectiveness as one central component of RTTT, states were required to construct better ways to develop and identify effective teachers, primarily through teacher evaluation. Under Every Student Succeeds Act, states must collect, and make publicly available, the number of ineffective teachers across schools serving different populations of students.
