By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

ELLICOTT CITY, Md. – The starting line for President Obama’s “Race to the Top” K-12 reform initiative was once crowded with school districts that were eager for a share of the $400 million jackpot.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

But pouty, uncooperative teacher unions are forcing a growing number of school districts to drop out of the Race to the Top, even before the next leg of the contest begins.

The latest contestant to be scratched from the competition is Maryland’s Howard County school district, which was hoping for $30 million in federal aid to acquire technology designed to help struggling students.

Those plans are effectively dead after the Howard County Education Association refused to sign off on the district’s grant proposal, which “requires signatures from the superintendent, the chair of the board of education and the president of the teacher’s union,” reports the Ellicott City Patch.

The HCEA would like the school district to have the Race to the Top money, but it’s refusing to allow student learning to be used in evaluating teachers’ classroom performance, one of the government’s criteria for determining Race to the Top winners.

School districts are still allowed to apply for Race to the Top grant money without union “buy in,” but their chances for success are greatly diminished.

HCEA President Paul Lemle seems to understand that Howard County families won’t take kindly to the union’s sabotage, which will negatively impact the area’s neediest students. That’s left him scrambling for someone else to pin the blame on, namely the board of education.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

Lemle claims the board froze the union out of the proposal writing process and that HCEA leaders didn’t get a chance to review the final draft “until Sunday morning of this hurricane weekend,” reports the Patch.

Howard County Superintendent Renee Foose refutes Lemle’s story, and notes that he was invited to join the process in mid-October.

“They were as involved as they chose to be,” Foose told the paper. “I personally invited him, if you want to come in and sit down with a pencil and start writing with these folks, then please do.”

We’re guessing that Howard County taxpayers are seeing through Lemle’s flimsy cover story.

What makes Howard County’s Race to the Top debacle newsworthy is that it once again illustrates the fundamental flaw in President Obama’s Race to the Top reform plan. To his credit, the president clearly wants to improve public education. But he’s chosen the worst possible way of going about it.

Instead of imposing meaningful changes on the public education system, Obama has designed a system that empowers his union friends to effectively veto any reforms that they don’t like.

Essentially, the president put school officials and union leaders in a row boat, and gave them all an oar. The school leaders are paddling in one direction, and the union is paddling in the other.

To onlookers standing on the shore, it appears that there’s a lot of work being done to move the boat forward. But in reality, the union is using its power to keep the boat from going anywhere.

Unless and until President Obama takes the oar from the unions’ hands (the longest of long shots), his education reform plans will have little meaningful effect on America’s public school system. And the nation’s school children will be in the same leaky boat they were in on the day he took office.