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Whether this federal program will be any better than previous ones will depend on how well the Department of Education designs and monitors its grants and the extent to which it persuades state authorities to provide intellectually honest efforts to try out different systems and approaches and to carefully measure their effectiveness.

With $4 billion on the table, I’d recommend a decentralized approach where most of the funds are distributed by formula (e.g. school population) to the states.  For a state to get its full allotment, it would have to faithfully follow the federal rules. To foster true innovation, these rules might vary from the ordinary in the following respects:

1.       To ensure that the same old groups in each state don’t get all the money, require each state to designate a new multi-sector “School Innovation Group” (SIG) as the entity that would design the state’s “Race to the Top” programs in each of the law’s program categories (viz. standards and assessments; better data systems, teacher effectiveness and deployment, and transform low performing schools). SIG would allocate funds to bidders with the best proposals and provide technical assistance to groups that ask for help in designing their bids. The SIG would have representatives from several categories: e.g. K-12 schools, charter schools, colleges and universities, private business, research labs, community organizations, local and state agencies. The majority of members would come from outside of government and receive per diem for their services. The state’s governor and chief state school officer might nominate one-third of the members in each category, but the rest would chosen by lottery. SIG members would elect their own chairman and officers. The chairman would select a small staff to carry out SIG directives. Federal Education teams would be assigned to the state SIGs to provide oversight, technical assistance, and clear-eyed reporting of state activities and results from use of these funds.

2.       Federal rules would favor proposals that are set up as experiments, planned variations, and/or performance-based contracts. Organizing principles for such proposals would be better (higher student achievement), faster (in less time), cheaper (more achievement per unit of dollars spent), and more joy (better student attendance and satisfaction). The SIG would also bid out third party evaluation contracts to ensure fair and transparent comparison of innovative vs. traditional practices.

      Performance-based contracting might be the real sleeper here. Instead of writing complex proposals, performance contracts would force bidders to focus on attaining just a few measurable and desirable results. The contractor whether public or private, would only earn its full fee when it raises achievement by the amount proposed and approved (successful bidders would receive some funds up front to get started.)

Performance contracts give providers a good reason to get serious about designing programs that are likely to work. For example, performance contracts to improve English and math skills would likely result in shorter, more intensive, technologically assisted and possibly team taught programs. Why? There are both pedagogical and financial reasons. Pedagogically, for many fields intensive scheduling is results in higher rates of learning  (think foreign language learning) than conventional distributed scheduling (think traditional high schools with 6-7 50-minute classes per day in different subjects). Intensive scheduling also provides financial rewards. Contractors typically want to get paid sooner rather than later; they know they won’t get paid the full amount until they produce the prescribed results.