On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, RiShawn Biddle takes a look at the Darnell “Dynasty” Young bullying incident in Indianapolis and the Mark Berndt scandal enveloping L.A. Unified, and point out the consequences of failed school leadership. From superintendents such as Eugene White in Indianapolis blaming kids they call “crippled” and “crazy” for failure mills, to administrators looking away as criminal behavior happens in school buildings, the consequences of weak school leaders extend beyond academics.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player, smartphone, Nook Color or Kindle Fire. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software, Google Reader, BeyondPod, DoggCatcher and other mobile software.

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As the countdown begins for the first annual Summer of Transforming Education fundraising campaign for grassroots reform groups coming this Memorial Day, watch this month’s On the Road podcast featuring Connecticut Parents Union President (and Dropout Nation Contributing Editor) Gwen Samuel’s testimony before the U.S. House Education and the Workforce Committee. Learn how Parent Power and school choice are critical aspects of to help all children succeed in school and in life. (Connecticut Parents Union, which helped pass Nutmeg State Gov Dan Malloy’s array of reforms, is one of the organizations Dropout Nation will ask you to support, either as a Champion of Parent Power member or through a generous donation.)

Watch On the Road on the site or download. You can also subscribe to this series and to the overall Dropout Nation Podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software, Google Reader, BeyondPod, DoggCatcher and other mobile software.

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When Both Sides Are Right, Hess v. Emerson Division: Contrary to what the inestimable Robin Lake would declare, there are a few absolutes in life. Birth, death, taxes, and the existence of God are four of them (and yes, dear atheists, you will know He exists when you’re in one of life’s foxholes). But there are also times when two sides can have equally correct points. And this can be seen in one of the inside-the-tent battles for which reformers are renowned: The argument between Fordham Institute’s Adam Emerson and American Enterprise Institute education czar Rick Hess over the former’s scolding of the Zachary, La., school district, which reversed its decision to participate in the expansion of the Bayou State’s voucher program advanced by Gov. Bobby Jindal (and take in a mere 30 students into its classrooms, increasing the enrollment I’d 5235 kids by less than one percent).

Emerson took aim at Zachary and the families who successfully lobbied the district’s board to bail out of the plan for wanting to ” to keep their investment exclusive” at the expense of poor and minority kids who, until recently, had no choice but to attend. Emerson also noted that the district also seemed to forget its own past efforts to help kids in need of high-quality education — including 300 children displaced from their home districts within the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Ever playing the contrarian (yes, I wrote it again), Hess took Emerson to task for showing “gooey-minded, self-righteous disrespect” to Zachary’s families and school leaders, who, in Hess’ mind, are only rightfully looking out for their own self-interests. Hess also takes it up a notch (and insults Parent Power groups to boot) by saying that Emerson failed to offer the kind of “ideas and fresh thinking ” considerate for which Fordham is supposed to be known. (Update: Emerson has responded to Hess.)

As anyone who reads Dropout Nation knows by now, I’m no split-the-baby kind of guy. But in this case, both Emerson and Hess have it right.

Emerson is proper and right to scold the district’s leadership  and the parents for refusing to open the doors. (Emerson, by the way, also pointed out, as I have, that reformers must constantly advocate in communities in order to gain support on the ground, something Hess fails to note in his critique.) I know Hess likes to think he’s above all that. But moral scolding — and reminding people to live up to their obligations as members of civic society and children of God– is what school reformers (including Hess) are supposed do. Given that the state would have given Zachary the full per-pupil dollars (including the equivalent of the local dollars that would have otherwise been borne by the district)  — and that it had originally agreed to participate in the program in the first place — the excuses given by the district for turning their back on these kids is just inexcusable. More importantly, districts are merely recognized as arms of state governments as defined under those constitutions (as well as by the federal government through the No Child Left Behind Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hunter v. Pittsburgh ruling) and thus have no ability for independent action outside of what state governments decide. Zachary is essentially preventing Louisiana from fulfilling its constitutional mandate to provide all children with a high-quality education.

By giving in to families that opposed allowing kids to transfer into the district, Zachary also allowed them to indulge their own bigotry toward poor and minority children who they likely fear will sully the classrooms of this precious district’s schools. Hess may want to think class (and to a lesser extent, race) don’t play a part in these discussions, but anyone who has spent time on sites such as DC Urban Moms know that there are plenty of middle class folks who express their low expectations view of other people’s children through the comfort that anonymity provides. Certainly school reformers can’t force everyone to think highly of their fellow men and women. But they can, and should, hold all adults accountable for their roles in denying kids opportunities to get the teaching and curricula they deserve.

At the same time, Hess is right in pointing out that reformers need to do more than play the role of moral scolds. This is especially true when one keeps in mind that local property tax dollars still account for, on average, 44 percent of all school funding (and 39 percent  in the case of the Bayou State), and often more in suburban districts. It would make sense for states to replace local property tax funding with state dollars, thus allowing for the expansion of all forms of choice by turning the dollars into vouchers that follow every child to whatever school, public, private or parochial, they so choose. This in turn would stop districts from arguing that reforms will cost them in terms of local tax dollars as their justification. But districts can justify opposition to charters and all choice — as well as perpetuate the myth of local control — because they   are still dependent on local property tax dollars.

Then there is also the reality that these families have, as far as they are concerned, exercised choice by buying a home in a district that is home to what they perceive to be high-quality schools (regardless of evidence to the contrary); from where they sit, poor people who want choice should go ahead and buy themselves homes too. This financial consideration, along with the emotional ties to the school buildings in the community, and the common desire among all for a school for their kids right in the neighborhood, and socioeconomic bigotry, explains why some families want to keep what they think is the good stuff all to themselves. Suburban district leaders have proven skillful at playing upon both the property tax dollars and the emotional concerns of the families that fund them in order to keep charter schools out of their boundaries and stop other school choice measures, even as they show contempt to these families (especially first-generation middle class households from minority backgrounds) in their own day-to-day dealings with them.

What reformers must do is both be the conscience of men and women who should know better (and, for the sake of their own enlightened self-interest, make sure that both other people’s children and their own can get a high-quality education) and offer solutions that lead more people to live up to their moral obligations (as well as expand opportunities for good-to-great teaching). Demanding better from middle-class families is important. But it is also important for reformers to also scold governors and state legislators for allowing situations such as Zachary to happen; this includes demanding full state funding of education (and effectively voucherizing those dollars so that they follow children to any school their families choose).

At the same time, reformers need to offer other ways of advancing reform that go beyond scolding. One way would be to team up with real estate developers to create “educational villages” in which families can send their children to school in the daytime, drop them off for babysitting at a child care center in the afternoon, and take them to the park on weekends. Such a concept would appeal both to households regardless of race or class alike. As I noted four years ago in an American Spectator column, such an idea would not only expand choice, it would also help advance systemic reform.

Integration Isn’t Worth Anything If Kids Can’t Read: Education Sector’s Sarah Rosenberg finds it “worrisome” that school choice — especially charter schools — lead to “increasing self-selection into segregated schools”. Why? From where she sits, this stratification (which is what it is since families make the choice instead of governments) denies kids the “firs opportunity to have significant contact with children from different backgrounds”, and “we risk starting with an achievement gap and ending with a divided nation”.

Forget for a moment all the studies and other evidence that choice – especially charters and private schools — may actually do as good or better job of helping kids become thoughtful citizens than traditional district counterparts — or the fact that reality that traditional district schools have historically been vehicles for forcing kids and families to adopt a Unitarian-tinged civic religion that disavows diversity. The fact of the matter is that Rosenberg sees this stratification and its underlying causes in the wrong way.

For one, Rosenberg fails to realize that there is little diversity or integration of any kind in most traditional districts; this of course, is a function of Zip Code Education policies such as zoned schooling, and the reality that districts only serve geographic areas (which, especially in big cities, tend to also be socioeconomically homogeneous). Nor does she consider the fact that state laws establishing charters (which often restrict the location of charters and even the kind of students they can serve), and the fact that suburban districts don’t charters in their boundaries (and do plenty to keep them out)  play a much larger role than self-selection in determining the homogeneousness of enrollments. Rosenberg also fails to realize that the problems with low-quality education have almost nothing to do with lack of diversity and far more to do with the low quality of the nation’s teaching corps and the practices (shaped by state laws and collective bargaining agreements) that subject poor and minority children to substandard schools; even in socioeconomically diverse schools, ability-tracking and policies that keep black and Latino kids out of college-preparatory courses ensure that education is separate and unequal.

What Rosenberg also doesn’t understand is that black and Latino families have already experienced integration in the form of forced busing and, like Harvard professor (and onetime integration advocate) Charles Ogletree, realize that it is little more than a “false promise,” that led to districts not providing high-quality teaching and curricula in the communities they live; and they have a right to make that point, since, after all, they are taxpayers whose dollars are siphoned off by districts in the form of taxes at the local, state, and federal levels. Like American Indians (which had their own experience with ‘integration’ in the form of boarding schools), black and Latino families feel that integration denied them chances to interact with successful role models who looked like them — and they want their kids to be able to experience this. The racial pride is why historically black colleges and universities remain prominent players in higher education and why charter schools named after civil rights leaders such as Cesar Chavez are common throughout the sector. For black and Latino children, in particular, who, unlike their white counterparts, are exposed to different races even before they go to school, what may matter more is to know that people who look like them can be just as successful and valuable in society as those of a lighter skin tone.

Ultimately, for these families, the opportunities to send their kids to an all-black or Latino charter school in which kids are getting the preparation they need for success in life is far more important to them that the diversity Rosenberg (and traditionalists of the integrationist mode such as Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg) seek out as some form of school reform. Or, as I declared to Gary Orfield two years ago, black and Latino families don’t care what Rosenberg thinks.

Committee of the Unthinking: Your editor hasn’t had much praise for House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, his fervent effort to eviscerate the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, his longstanding support for increasing federal special education subsidies that do little more than perpetuate education ghettos that condemn millions of young men and women to poverty and prison, or even his past failure (and that of Early Childhood subcommittee chairman, California Republican Duncan Hunter) to bring Parent Power activists to any of the committee’s hearings. But Kline (and Hunter) deserve thanks for this week’s Early Childhood subcommittee hearing featuring Parent Power activists such as Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel (a Dropout Nation contributing editor) and school choice activists such as former D.C. City Councilman and Black Alliance for Educational Options cofounder Kevin Chavous. Because the hearing once again revealed how both so many Democrat and Republican politicians (other than Kline and Hunter) still don’t get the importance of families being the lead decision-makers in schools and education as a whole.

You can easily surmise this from the questions and the grandiloquent statements made by education traditionalists fellow-travelers on the committee, all of which you can download or watch. There was the wrong and hostile declarations of New York Democrat Carolyn McCarthy, wagging a pencil as if it were a cigar, that charter schools “have the ability of not taking children with disabilities”, and similar words from her California counterpart, Lynn Woolsey; National Alliance for Public Charter Schools honcho Todd Zeibarth had to refute those statements and inform them that there are charters specially designed to work with kids with autism. Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott went on a five-minute round of speechifying, proclaiming that vouchers are terrible because they divert dollars from district schools that think those dollars belong solely to them (instead of remembering that they are payment for providing services to kids, and they shouldn’t get the dollar). Instead of asking why states don’t revamp their school funding systems so that the dollars are voucherized and thus, kids can use them at any school that fits them, Scott simply argued that “those who don’t get vouchers are worse off”.

Then there was Pennsylvania Republican Todd Russell Platts, who used his soapbox to declare that school choice and Parent Power makes things “worse off” because it allows families to “abandon” failure mills and takes families who can be advocates for public education out of traditional district schools (without ever considering that the public education is not about a district or a bureaucracy, but about providing high-quality opportunities for all kids). Platts went on to proclaim that “our duty is to every child, not to the very few” even as he defended traditionalist policies and practices that have denied high-quality education to poor and minority children.

Platt’s speechifying weren’t necessarily shocking nor were McCarthy’s; both are the darlings of the old-school “parent involvement” crowd who, as Temple University Professor William W. Cutler III illustrated in Parents and Schools: The 150-year struggle for control in American education, have long ago been co-opted by traditional district leaders and National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates; Platts, in particular, has long opposed school voucher programs (including the DC Opportunity Scholarship now facing another shutdown attempt by the Obama administration). Woolsey has long benefited from NEA and AFT donations, with $130,800 in campaign donations over her career, according to OpenSecrets.org. Scott has also benefited from teachers’ union largess, picking up $97,000 in donations from teachers unions over time; like fellow Virginian Henry Marsh (who was Scott’s colleague in the Dominion State’s legislature before winning his congressional seat 16 years ago), Scott is the kind of old-school black politician who has not realized the fact that education is the civil rights issue of this time.

But the fact that it isn’t surprising still doesn’t make it any less outrageous. What Platts, McCarthy, Scott, Woolsey and their fellow-travelers, both in Congress and in state legislatures, fail to realize is that families cannot “fix” or be engaged in education when they must tangle with bureaucracies and systems that treat them as afterthoughts and nuisances (when they aren’t being blamed by teachers’ union bosses and failed school leaders for their own performance problems). This is the reality in American public education today.

As Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg of the Sage Colleges have noted in their research on school engagement, urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.” Certainly some of this has to do with the negative experiences these parents have had with schools — especially those failure mills that they once attended and to which their children now go. But it is also about the fact that there are many teachers who look at parents — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — with condescension and disdain. The reality is that we have far too many teachers who look down on poor urban parents who may not be capable of helping their kids because of their own learning issues; who are hostile to those families who want to take an active role in shaping the education their kids receive in school; and would rather keep those families servile. And this disdain trickles down to how children, especially from the poorest households are treated. Contrary to what the GetSchooled Foundation and other groups attempted to declare yesterday in their report on chronic absenteeism, truancy is a natural consequence of kids realizing that they are illiterate, innumerate, and stuck with teachers and principals who treat their parents poorly and can’t help them as students make up ground.

This nauseating approach to families is just as strong in suburban districts such as the ones in Platts’ district– particularly for first-generation black and Latino middle-class households — as it is in big-city districts. As University of Michigan Associate Professor Karyn Lacey noted in Blue-Chip Black, her sociological study of middle-class black families in the area surrounding the nation’s capital, black families living in Fairfax County found themselves battling teachers and guidance counselors who wanted to relegate children to academic tracks that keep them from getting high-paying white- and blue-collar jobs, and finding themselves not informed about their options for preparing their kids for success in school and in life, including opportunities to take Advanced Placement courses or participate in the growing number of dual-credit programs. From inconveniently-schedule parent-teacher conferences to refusals by suburban schools to allow families to tour the classrooms their kids will have to attend, suburban districts are no epitomes of cultures of strong family empowerment and engagement.

The beauty of vouchers, charter schools and Parent Trigger laws is that these tools not only allows families to actually help their kids succeed in school and in life, they also spur parents to be fully engaged in education and learn more about how their kids can get a high-quality education. As James Guthrie of the George W. Bush Institute has pointed out, the only real way that families can really be engaged in schools is if they actually have the ability to actually shape the education their kids receive. They also become the kind of unabashed school reformers and impromptu leaders we need to overhaul American public education. More importantly, choice and power also allow for the very democratic action that education traditionalists tout as a defense for preserving the status quo; when families can choose how their kids are educated, they can be real players in the rest of American society.

Kline and Hunter should use this hearing as an opportunity to challenge their colleagues (especially Platts) and push for making choice and Parent Power key components of federal education policy; this includes encouraging states to embrace vouchers and Parent Trigger laws. On the  latter, they can already count on ranking Democrat (and former education committee chairman) George Miller, who once again proclaimed his support this past March for the passage of Parent Trigger laws.

As for school reformers? The challenge is to now remind congressional leaders such as Platts, McCarthy, Woolsey, and Scott that they need to embrace systemic reform and support the kinds of policies that allow for families to be real players in education. And when they still don’t get it, recruit challengers who will toss these politicians out of Congress for good.

Few traditional districts have been as reform-minded as New York City under the mayoral control of Michael Bloomberg. From shutting down more than 100 failure mills and dropout factories, to allowing principals to keep laggard teachers from working in their schools, the mayor and his array of chancellors (including the legendary Joel Klein) have succeeded in turning the district around from being a Superfund Site of American public education. Although the Big Apple still struggles in providing all children (especially young black men)  in every corner of the city with a high-quality education, the district has reduced the percentage of functionally-illiterate fourth graders (as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress)  from 53 percent in 2003 to 39 percent in 2011, and improved graduation rates and has shown a willingness to not be servile to the American Federation of Teachers local that had long held the city under its proverbial thumb.

So the announcement this morning by current schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott that he would institute a series of teacher performance management policies if the AFT affiliate doesn’t agree to allow the district to use New York State’s new teacher evaluation system was definitely not surprising. But it was once again heartening to see a school leader move to advance reform and be willing to take a union far too concerned with defending the interests of even the worst-performing of its members at the expense of children.

Certainly the intransigence of AFT’ New York City local President Michael Mulgrew, whose opposition to using the Empire State’s new evaluation system is as much driven by is desire to succeed predecessor Randi Weingarten as head of the national union as by the opposition of the Baby Boomers who are a dwindling minority of rank-and-file members, is driving Walcott’s latest move. Within the past month, the AFT launched its third lawsuit against the city to stop the shutdown of failure mills (this time, without the help of the union’s fellow-travelers at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s New York State branch), this time all but admitting that the goal is to keep rank-and-file members (including those who probably should have left city employ years ago) on the job. The union has also taken to the airwaves and newspapers, paying for ads proclaiming that Walcott’s boss, Bloomberg, still “doesn’t get” that it doesn’t appreciate his efforts (and also reminding state legislators in Albany and those aspiring to succeed Bloomberg as mayor that they better not think of following his example).

But in declaring that the district would remove teachers who failed to improve student achievement for two consecutive years (and offering to buy out their continuing contracts), Walcott is making clear that Mulgrew and the AFT are merely avoiding discussion about one of the biggest challenges facing the Big Apple as it embarks on a second wave of reforms: Overhauling how it hires, compensates, rewards, and manages the performance of its teachers. Although the first round of reforms have helped improve student achievement in the city, New York City will need to take more-aggressive steps in this second step. Providing all kids in the city with strong, comprehensive college-preparatory curricula (an area which Walcott and his predecessors have tended to ignore) would certainly help, as would expanding charters, shutting down more failure mills, and allowing families to take over those schools they want to save through Parent Trigger laws. But none of this — even rolling out Core Knowledge’s strong reading curriculum — would accomplish little until the city takes stronger steps to remove laggard teachers and replace them with those who make the grade.

This was made clear by the city last year when results from the teacher performance management pilot it undertook revealed that 18 percent of teachers evaluated were deemed ineffective in the classroom. Based on the efforts that Washington, D.C., has undertaken with its pathbreaking IMPACT program, one can expect New York City to dismiss five percent of its teaching corps. For the AFT, which is dependent on having as many rank-and-file members in classrooms (and paying dues) to sustain its $205 million-a-year operation, more-stringent teacher evaluations equals lost dollars. And it will fight to oppose more-robust evaluations (and the use of objective student test score data in them) even if it means battling with insurgents representing younger teachers such as Educators4Excellence (which is demanding more-objective evaluations of teachers and the school leaders who supervise them), and, perhaps, even opposing the (slightly) more-moderate line now being taken by Weingarten at the national level.

Walcott has essentially forced the AFT into a rhetorical (and tactical) corner. If the union continues to oppose using the new evaluation system, it puts itself in the awkward position of talking out of both sides of its mouth. It can’t continue declaring that it wants teaching to become more-professionalized and then oppose efforts by New York City and the Empire State to do just that. On the tactical end, if Walcott goes ahead and begins dismissing teachers and buying them out, the union will then have to play by his ground rules (or accept an even worse deal) once it relents and strikes a bargain (and it will).

But for New York City taxpayers, Walcott’s moves would not only help improve the schools for which they pay a pretty penny, it would also get rid of laggards who collect sweet perks in exchange for riding the proverbial pine (and keeping out of classrooms). Currently, the city pays $100 million annually to keep 800 laggards out of classrooms (some of whom were not teaching since the days of the infamous rubber rooms); buying those teachers out would be better from both a fiscal and teacher quality perspective. For the city’s high-quality teachers, Walcott is effectively stating that they should be able to teach in schools with professionals who are their equals and not deal with those who don’t deserve tenure. And for Big Apple kids, Walcott’s declaration (and that of his boss) that low quality teachers shouldn’t be allowed to continue educational malpractice is an important stand for ensuring that all kids get the good and great teachers they deserve. All in all, not a bad move at all.

Last July, your editor argued for school choice activists and other reformers to take a page out of the playbook of funding and equity activists and embrace legal action to advance overhauls at the state and district levels. Since then, Parent Power activists such as those in the Los Angeles Unified School District organized by Alice Callaghan (with backing from the school reform group EdVoice) , and the Connecticut Parents Union have launched their own tort actions to force districts and states to use objective student performance data in teacher evaluations and end Zip Code education policies that criminalize the actions of families such as that of Marie Menard who want to keep their kids out of failure mills.

But school reformers in other circles have largely shied away from this tactic. Until now. On Tuesday, a coalition of groups that include Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, Democrats for Education Reform, Parent Power group Parent Revolution, and families throughout the California, backed a suit filed in state superior court on behalf of eight teenagers against the Golden State and L.A. Unified, demanding an end to one of the most-pernicious policies defended by the National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers and other traditionalists: Reverse-seniority (also known as Last In-First Out or Last Hired-First Fired) layoff rules that force districts to sack young teachers — including those who are successful in improving student achievement among poor and minority kids — in order to keep  veteran instructors (especially laggards who don’t deserve to be in classrooms) on the job. Declaring that “outdated laws” are “preventing school administrators from… improving the quality of our public educational system by denying them the flexibility to make teacher employment decisions driven by the needs of their students”, the Students Matter coalition is demanding that Golden State officials ditch LIFO rules and allow districts to make layoff decisions based on how teachers perform in the classroom.

The lawsuit goes even further by demanding that the state end its traditional system of granting tenure under which newly-hired teachers can gain near-lifetime employment in just two years. Near-lifetime employment privileges is a terrible idea in any case, but even worse so in California because it takes four years to fully determine whether a newly-minted instructor has the chops to stay on the job; given that a teacher is unlikely to be better at improving student achievement after 25 years than after four, at least 640 children over a period of four decades (based on federal data on student-teacher ratios) may be subject to educational malpractice from a low-quality teacher. And given that it can take a district as long as seven years (and $2 million) to unsuccessfully attempt to fire a teacher through California’s 10-step process, it often means that few incompetent teachers — and few criminally abusive instructors such as recently-indicted L.A. Unified teacher Mark Berndt (who was paid $40,000 in exchange for dropping his effort to keep his job despite widespread evidence of alleged sexual abuse of children) — are ever tossed to the curb.

Meanwhile the lawsuit hits upon the impact of traditional teacher compensation and performance management within the Golden State (and throughout the nation as a whole) on the quality of education children — especially those from poor and minority households — receive. Given that the quality of teaching likely accounts for half (and likely, more than 50 percent) of the impact of schools on student achievement over time, near-lifetime employment rules, reverse-seniority laws, and desultory teacher dismissal policies conspire to put kids on the path to poverty and prison. This is especially so for poor and minority children, who then must deal with the consequences of Zip Code Education policies such as zoned schooling and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools and other forms of choice. And in turn, the Students Matter lawyers declare that these policies violate the California state constitution’s equal protection and public education clauses. Declares the brief: “Those statutes thus make the quality of education provided to school-age children in California a function of race and/or the wealth of a child’s parents and neighbors”.

The Students Matter suit comes on the heels of the Callaghan suit as well as the scandal enveloping L.A. Unified emerging from the arrest and indictment of Berndt, a laggard rated among the lowest-performing teachers at the school district’s Miramonte Elementary School, who now faces 23 charges of abuse of children; Berndt had fought an attempt by L.A. Unified to dismiss him after the district learned last year that he was being investigated for lewd conduct against children. The scandal led to an effort in March and April by reformers and L.A. Unified to pass a new law that would allow for those facing criminal charges that was successfully fought back by the NEA’s and AFT’s California affiliates. The lawsuit also exposes the deliberate efforts by the state’s governor, Jerry Brown, and State Supt. Tom Torlakson, to do the bidding of traditionalists that backed their election campaigns two years ago and role back the array of reforms successfully pushed by their predecessors, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jack O’Connell, with the help of former legislative powerhouse (and now DFER California honcho) Gloria Romero. Since taking office, Brown has all but abandoned reform efforts, including putting the kibosh on the development of CALTIDES, the longitudinal teacher data system, and effectively ended the effort to tie student performance data to teacher evaluations. Torlakson has basically become a hero of education traditionalists everywhere for defending the practices they back so wholeheartedly.

If the suit succeeds, one can expect California’s state legislature to end up taking up the very reforms already being enacted in states such as New York and Indiana. It would also force L.A. Unified and other districts to actually do their job and actually perform comprehensive evaluations using student performance data that, as the Callaghan suit argues, can be done and should have been done for the past four or so decades; L.A. Unified, in particular, has been called out by the National Council on Teacher Quality and Dropout Nation for evaluating just 40 percent of veteran teachers and 70 percent of new hires were evaluated by the district during the 2009-2010 school year — and this is one for which neither the district nor reformers can blame on teachers unions. More importantly, the suit may spur other reformers to finally give up their reluctance for using the courts in advancing reform. As Heartland Institute scholar Bruno Behrend pointed out last year on The Conversation, using constitutional clauses to help students succeed is something that all reformers should do.

Education traditionalists are already howling that the lawsuit is just an attempt to eviscerate workplace protections that supposedly help teachers from losing their jobs without cause. But they have little chance of making a strong case for this. For one, an earlier suit filed two years ago by the American Civil Liberties Union’s Southern California branch successfully forced L.A. Unified to abandon last hired-first fired in layoffs at failure mills serving poor and minority students; although the notoriously-bellicose AFT local there is appealing the decision, the underlying argument behind that case has plenty of legal merit. More importantly, there is more evidence that the very practices traditionalists defend do little more than foster cultures of low expectations in which laggards become cancers, making it difficult for high-quality counterparts to gain the recognition and rewards they deserve.  The fact that the laggards can teach for decades without being forced out also means that they bring down the performance of students by as much as a full year — and force counterparts to work harder in the next year just to get those students back up to speed.  The policies also demoralize younger teachers doing good and great work in helping students succeed because they must work alongside veterans who don’t make the grade — and can keep their jobs to boot in the event of reductions in force. In short, the defense of these policies NEA and AFT affiliates (along with their allies) do damage to the very teachers they say they are defending.

No matter what happens, the Students Matter suit is another important step in developing new strategies for advancing systemic reform. And our kids may be the better for it.