What is innovation? And are the feds getting it right?

Even within the “reform” camp there are differences over what ought to top the federal government’s policy agenda.

That was the takeaway Friday morning from a panel about the Obama administration’s education policy priorities. The Race to the Top competition has built momentum behind the administration’s “innovation agenda,” said moderator Virginia Edwards of Education Week, but questions persist about whether the education department is pushing the right changes.

A major question is whether the federal government is trying to push change too quickly.

“The mechanism of something like Race to the Top may not be the best model for the federal government sponsoring innovation because it’s too big and it’s too fast,” said Ed Haertel, a testing expert who advised the Obama administration on the competition.

Race to the Top gives political cover to people who want to lift charter caps and tie teacher evaluations to student test scores, said Rick Hess, education policy director at the American Enterprise Institute. But much of what the competition rewards is whether states push “conventional best practices — or what our friends think is hot and current at the moment,” he said.

Instead of telling states exactly what to do, Hess said, the federal government should use its clout to create conditions where changes can be made.

That’s exactly what the Obama administration is doing, argued Charlie Barone, federal policy director for the lobbying group Democrats for Education Reform. The only thing absolutely required for a state to win Race to the Top funds is the elimination of a “firewall” preventing test scores from being used in teacher evaluations, he said. Everything else is left up to state officials, and Race to the Top is just there to help.

Education Department spokesman Peter Cunningham also challenged the idea that Race to the Top is telling states exactly what to do.

“The role of the federal government is to have money set aside to try things that otherwise wouldn’t be tried,” he said, and state and local officials get to decide what exactly those things are.

But with school districts across the country slashing their teaching forces, asked Maisie McAdoo, a spokeswoman for New York City’s teachers union, is the brand of “innovation” Race to the Top encourages the best way to spend money?

Cunningham defended the administration’s priorities, saying that preserving jobs without also trying to improve schools would be negligent.

Some innovations don’t fall neatly into the federal government’s policy agenda, Hess said. He encouraged reporters to look for stories in state budgets that are only going to get thinner over the next half-decade and in the technologies that could reshape how teaching and learning happen.

“Cost-effective models are going to be much more important,” he said, pointing as an example to schools that use the Rosetta Stone computer program instead of live teachers to run foreign language classes at low cost.

So how should reporters cover Race to the Top-sized innovations?

Writing about the potential impact of prospective reforms could help bring high-level policy conversations down to the ground, Cunningham said.

“The real story is not the policy debates that happen inside the beltway,” he said. “It’s what happens in the field and in the classroom.”