Oppose Race to the Top: Reasons Why Conservatives Should Oppose RTTT

Recently, Michigan Senate Majority leader Mike Bishop asked me for my opinion on the President's Race to the Top program. I told him that I didn't support it, and he looked at me in a way that said "I thought you were a conservative" and "I thought you wanted to help education." At the time, I struggled to explain why I didn't like the program- I didn't really know all the details to it, but suspected that I was indeed correct in opposing it from what little I knew. He thought I was just a tool of the teachers unions, who also oppose RTTT, but I knew that for some reason I didn't like this initiative by Obama, and it wasn't just paranoid anti-Obama sentiment.

Today, via theblogprof, via Right Wing News, I came across the an article called "Ten Rules for Anti-Government Republican Radicals in D.C. ." As an anti-government conservative radical, the kind that our founding fathers were, the kind of people that built our nation and made our country a great success, I find these rules to be useful in helping me begin to articulate why I oppose Race to the Top.

Rule number one for being an anti-government conservative radical is always try to decentralize power as much as possible. Race to the Top does not do this- it bribes the states into giving the central government in Washington DC more centralized decision making power over our education system.

Rule number two is that earmarks are corruption. RTTT is a $4.35 billion incentive program that awards prizes to districts for meeting a certain criteria. Like most Obama initiatives, it will be not be an open and transparent process the fairly distributes grants to the districts, but instead will be an opaque and closed process that awards grants to districts based on highly specific criteria designed to steer money to politically favored districts- ie, it is a program ripe for earmarking.

Rule #3 is that the louder they scream "emergency," the more suspicious you should be. The supposed reason why we should pass RTTT as quickly as possible is because we should never let a serious crisis go to waste, and our education system is in a crisis, and so now is the time when we should jam through massive bad legislation, but I don't buy this argument, and so I reject RTTT.

#5 is that the grassroots are your friend. What RTTT does is attack teachers, all teachers, and pretend that they are all incompetent and bad teachers, and that empowering the central government more to distribute gifts and prizes for things it like will somehow make the education system better. Teachers aren't bad people (or at least no more so than any other person)- I'm a proud member of the MEA. What is bad is the government structure that they operate in, the forced unionization, having them be employees of the state, etc. RTTT attacks the people, and you should never support legislation that attacks people.

#7) We will never control spending unless we change the system. This program steers money intended for 'economic stimulus' into prizes for school districts, prizes that they will become dependent on and become addicted to. It creates and enlarges a system of out-of-control spending and does nothing to help school districts become more efficient in delivering high-quality education to students.

9) We don't need new laws; we need reform. RTTT is yet another multiple-billion dollar new program that only supports and extends and strengthens the existing system, and does not really reform it. Oh, I know there is some good in it, but the main thrust of it is not to reform the system, but to put in place new laws, and thus a good conservative should oppose it.

10) It's better to kill a bad bill than improve it. Mike Bishop communicated to me that although there is a lot of bad stuff in RTTT, there is some good in it that we can work with, and that we need the money, and that education is in a crisis, blah blah blah. Mike, I support you, and think a lot of time you have good instincts, but sometimes it looks to me like the system is slowly corrupting you, as it does all good men. Kill Race to the Top- it is a bad bill, and although it could be improved, it is better to just kill it and start over with real reform that centralizes governments influence in education.