The U.S. Department of Education just released their final rules for the Race To The Top competition for districts (before now, it’s only been available to states).

Education Week has a good summary, and you can go to the source at various links:

The Department’s main page for the Race To The Top District program

Their Executive Summary of the rules

The rules themselves

I’ve previously posted about their plans to put lipstick on a pig in this program by including some decent wording about requiring schools to connect more with community groups, while retaining it laser-like focus on evaluating everything and everybody based on increased standardized test scores.

They continue in this vein by making “personalized learning” a big requirement for the program, and they included a lot of good phrases about it. However, despite all the “lipstick,” it all comes down to a pig, the standardized test results.

Justin Reich described the issue of personalized learning more eloquently than I could over at Education Week:

For some, personalization means using technology to individually diagnose student competencies on standardized tests and then apply algorithms to adaptively deliver appropriately challenging content to each student to help them perform better on those tests….

For some, personalization means that technology opens a world of information and expertise to every student, empowers students as explorers and creators, and lets them follow their interests and passions in diverse directions…

It’s pretty clear which road Race To The Top is taking….

I’m adding this post to The Best Resources On “Race To The Top.