How Much Have Districts Spent On Race To The Top Mandates?

A commenter at the Newsday article on Diane Ravitch writes the following:

The greatest scam was Andy Cuomo and Obama holding a gun to our head about the $700 million Federal funding and other state aid as well. Cuomo painted the teachers' union as the greedy obstructionists depriving children of their right to learn. These absurd programs cost more to implement than what most districts got in return. What hogwash, all for political gain.

The $700 million was to fool the public into thinking the money was going to go to children.

The reality is, the state has spent way more than $700 million on the reforms mandated by RttT - from the teacher evaluation systems to the data tracing systems to the new test development to the curricula development to the outside consultants hired to the technology bought to run the new systems and/or needed to be bought to run the new tests.

In the end, to win $700 million, the state will spend billions to make children and teachers miserable, teachers leave their jobs and/or be fired for "ineffective" ratings, and smear school districts, schools, teachers and students as "failures" via the rigged Common Core test scores.

The cynic in me says, that was the idea behind Race to the Top and Common Core the whole time.

Someday we'll get an accounting of how much was to spent to "win" Obama's RttT competition - but even before we get exact figures, the knowledge exists that we have spent way too much time, money and energy on this.