Race to the Top: Impossible?

Education Reform is an area of great interest for me as a future teacher. When President Obama took office, I was so excited for what I thought he would bring to our country on many fronts, but especially in education. His initiative, Race to the Top, is essentially an incentive program to promote growth in our schools based on test scores and teacher performance, as well as a means to give easier access to helpful resources and effective practice research for both parents and teachers. After viewing the interview with Diane Ravitch, I traveled to her blog and stumbled upon a quick little tidbit on Race to the Top, which has recently been analyzed and deemed as impossible! This report  even shows that Race to the Top may actually be negatively impacting our schools! I was stunned by this news, but not too stunned... As we have already uncovered through discussion and readings, the intense degree to which we test our students is having a drastic impact, leaning mostly toward the debilitating effects. Here's the link to Diane's blog post: http://dianeravitch.net/2013/09/13/new-report-race-to-the-top-is-impossible-and-damaging/ which contains a link to the extended report (a lengthy 100 plus pages.)