• Published: Nov 22, 2009 - Page: 6B

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In the Race to The Top, the Louisiana School Boards Association doesn’t even want to suit up for the game.

We hope that the association, and more so the board members and superintendents who advise it, reconsider this decision.

One of the best things that President Barack Obama has done in office is to provide for billions in the economic stimulus bill to fund education improvement. Obama’s head of the Department of Education, Arne Duncan, is a champion of reform who is winning plaudits across the political spectrum for the proposal.

Louisiana’s reform-minded superintendent of education, Paul Pastorek, sees the “Race to The Top” competition as a way to fund reforms — from special reading and math classes to extended school days to computers, a whole host of things — that are needed to bring Louisiana schools off the near-rock-bottom ratings of recent years.

This is a competition for funding.

Louisiana could win it.

Our state has already been given a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to prepare its Race to the Top application. Hard-won reforms of the past dozen years, under Republican and Democratic administrations, have positioned Louisiana to be a winner.

But the association representing school boards says its members don’t want to participate in Race to the Top funding. If they do, the association said, board members feel they would be stuck paying for reforms after the anticipated four years — four full years! — of additional federal funding went away.

School board members, judging from a pompously imperious statement issued by the association, aren’t convinced that extra tutors or better computers or extended days are good for schools. “Mortgaging the future of local public schools for an experimental program that is not based upon any significant body of research that pretends to insure success in improving student learning is fiscally irresponsible,” said Nolton Senegal, director of the LSBA.

How can one tell when a school official is making excuses for poor performance? When they cite a lack of definitive research.

The Race to the Top funds are intended to show what works so that school boards can do more of it, and put their existing resources to better use.

New ideas are the whole point, although we would note that there is a significant track record of improvement in the poorest schools if management and instruction is focused on improvement and not on keeping the wheels turning the way they always have.

A bedrock aversion to change should not endanger Louisiana’s efforts to improve. And one of the criteria for the Race to the Top is that there be significant support from all the participants in the application — not just the state but the school systems and the schools seeking the money.