Civil rights groups criticize Race to the Top competition for schools | California Watch

As California educators wait anxiously to hear whether the state will be awarded funds from the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition today, the nation’s leading civil rights organizations have attacked the race for funds as undermining the civil rights of the nation’s poor and disadvantaged children.

So far, California has lost out in two contests for education stimulus funds, as I have noted in previous blog posts.

In a highly critical broadside [PDF] issued last month against many aspects of the Obama administration’s education agenda, seven civil rights groups, including the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, singled out the Race to the Top competition for its fiercest criticism:

If education is a civil right, children in “winning” states should not be the only ones who have the opportunity to learn to learn in high quality environments. Such an approach reinstates the antiquated and highly politicized frame for distributing federal support to states that civil rights organizations fought to remove in 1965.

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