Sam Chaltain has an excellent post dissecting Tom Friedman’s clueless column praising Race to the Top.

Sam points out that Friedman’s book The World Is Flat made the case for collaboration, not compulsion.

Sam gently explains to Friedman that Race to the Top contradicts what Friedman recommended in his best-selling book.

He concludes that Race to the Top is fundamentally flawed because it lacks both technical expertise and emotional commitment.

“…its formulas for technical expertise, such as new teacher evaluation systems (good idea) based significantly on student test scores (bad idea), move the goalposts but ignore the skill levels of the players. As international change expert Michael Fullan points out, RTTT ‘pays little or no attention to developing the capacity of leaders to improve together or as a system: it is based on a failed theory that teacher quality can be increased by a system of competitive rewards, and it rests on a badly flawed model of management where everyone manages their own unit, is accountable for results, and competes with their peers – creating fiefdoms, silos, and lack of capacity or incentives for professionals to help each other’ – in short, the sorts of habits Friedman defines as the key to becoming successful in the flat world of the twenty-first century.

….programs like RTTT reflect a technocratic insensitivity to the actual rhythms of human beings, and a complete disregard for the necessity of building a shared emotional commitment for the changes we seek (Chicago, anyone?). So whereas attaching a dollar sign to the “recommended” reforms of RTTT was an effective strategy, as was tying each state’s conditional funding under ARRA to its agreement to adopt the common core learning standards, it’s equally true that there are short games and there are long games. And what I loved about The World is Flat was its recognition that to win the long game of the current century, compulsion was fool’s gold; commitment was the gold standard.”