What a surprise, the favorite project of corporate schooling advocate, and Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is an abject failure:

The Obama administration’s signature $4 billion Race to the Top initiative, designed to spur far-reaching education reforms across the country and raise student achievement, is largely a failure, an analysis released Thursday concludes.

Most winning states made what the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education labeled “unrealistic and impossible” promises to boost student achievement in exchange for prizes that were ultimately paltry in comparison with their pledges.

But three years in, Race to the Top hasn’t spurred states to address what really is behind students’ poor academic performance: poverty and the associated lack of opportunities that accompany it, said Elaine Weiss, national coordinator of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. Her group advocates for a more targeted focus on poverty over the current slate of education reforms involving testing and accountability.

The Department of Education rejected the report’s conclusions, saying it’s seeing promising signs of improvement in student achievement in Race to the Top states and warning that it’s too early to draw sweeping conclusions. Some state officials also said they are finding the competition useful.

Of course, this assumes that the real goal of the corporate driven education reform is actually to improve education, and not simply an excuse to allow Wall Street to asset strip yet another segment of our society.

I do not share the optimism of  Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.  I have concluded that it is about private profits, and not an honest desire to improve American education.