The Obama Administration released its plan for the future of No Child Left Behind. In the absence of new legislation to fix the the original bill’s demands, the Department of Education will issue waivers to public schools that meet a particular set of guidelines.

The Education Department plans to grant waivers for the No Child Left Behind law to states and school districts that “embrace reform.” This bypasses Congressional reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind law, and allows states and districts to get out from under the onerous burdens of the law, which has a deadline for 100% proficiency in reading and math by 2013-14, and which would close down schools that did not comply.

According to the President in an interview this morning with Today Show’s Matt Lauer, money without reform won’t fix schools. Well, neither will reform without money. Because you can make the exact same statement that the President made, about how per-pupil spending has increased while results have decreased, about the reforms he seeks.

I cannot imagine any legitimate justification for Arne Duncan running a contest at this time at the expense of maybe 50,000 teacher jobs.

I hope we can be honest about what “Race to the Top” actually represents: blackmail. It forces states to change their education laws to fit particular notions about how to manage public education in America. And it does so at a time of crippling state budgets, when the Race to the Top funds mean the difference between thousands of teachers laid off or kept on the job, between class sizes expanding or shrinking. Basically, Arne Duncan and the White House are leveraging crisis to make preferred changes in education policy.