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 Declaring that “outdated laws” are “preventing school administrators from… improving the quality of our public educational system by denying them the flexibility to make teacher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.

Your editor used to say that once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch discredits herself with every book, column, and tweet. This isn’t true anymore. Not only does she expose her intellectual disingenuousness through Twitter, her op-eds, and the Bridging Differences column in Education Week she shares with the equally retrograde Deborah Meier, Ravitch even has her own eponymous blog from which to cast straw men and ignore inconvenient facts about the nation’s education crisis.

On Monday, in her attempt to dismiss the concerns of those rightfully ringing alarm about the science results from the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (and the increasing evidence of the low quality of science instruction and curricula) , Ravitch attempted to argue that there is in fact slow and steady improvement in how we are educating our children. Certainly Ravitch ignores the growing evidence of the nation’s education crisis (including low graduation rates in urban districts), and she fails to acknowledge that American public education still isn’t providing kids with all of what they need to be successful once they graduate high school (as seen with the high levels of college freshmen in remediation classes). But she is right that there are fewer numbers of children struggling with illiteracy and innumeracy. While Ravitch makes the wrong step of using NAEP data from 1992 (which doesn’t include data from states that didn’t begin voluntarily participating in NAEP until 1998 and were fully required to do so in 2002, and thus incomplete), Dropout Nation notes that the percentage of all fourth-graders reading Below Basic proficiency declined from 39 percent in 2002 to 33 percent in 2011, making it likely that 217,432 fewer fourth-graders were functionally illiterate — and likely to drop out — in 2011 than nearly a decade earlier. Far too many kids are still condemned to poverty and prison. But we are making some progress in helping more of them stay in school and on the path to better lives.

But in the process of arguing that fewer students were doing poorly than two decades ago, Ravitch failed to acknowledge the critical reason why this has happened: The very reform efforts — including the standards and accountability initiatives embraced a decade ago in the No Child Left Behind Act — that former school reform dilletante now opposes so fiercely. This isn’t shocking; after all, Ravitch has a penchant for ignoring the facts (and even rewriting history) when it suits her. And in this case, any fellow traditionalist can understand why.

After all, Ravitch would have to acknowledge that the modern school reform movement, which began with southern governors and chambers of commerce at the end of the 1970s and began to gain traction in 1983 with the Reagan Administration’s publication of A Nation at Risk, has actually done plenty of good in advancing college-preparatory standards, pushing for the end of near-lifetime employment for even the worst-performing teachers, instigating the expansion of school choice and the development of charter schools, and articulating that traditionalist thinking Ravitch now defends is morally, intellectually, socially, and economically unacceptable.  More importantly, Ravitch would have to also admit that No Child spurred a round of reforms — including the efforts of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the chancellors who served under him since the mayor took control of the Big Apple’s school district — are making progress. And in the process, Ravitch would have to admit that a new wave of reforms, building upon those spurred in the previous three decades, will further render moot the practices, policies, and soft bigotry of low expectations from which she now profits.

So, of course, Ravitch would dance around the role of systemic reform efforts in helping more young men and women stay on the path to economic and social success. She’d have to admit to her intellectual and moral charlatanism — and stop debasing her legacy.

As you know by now, Dropout Nation has largely praised President Barack Obama’s school reform efforts. Certainly his administration’s No Child waiver gambit has been an abject disappointment and a stain on the record on the president and that of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. But this is balanced off against the administration’s Race to the Top initiative, which has given reform-minded governors another tool in their efforts against education traditionalists in their respective states, and its unofficial push for Common Core standards in reading and math (another step in helping all kids get strong, comprehensive college-preparatory curricula).

So we can appreciate why Democrats for Education Reform, the activist group cofounded by Teach For America backer Whitney Tilson, issued a report this week explaining why their peers should rally behind Obama’s re-election. For the most part, the polemic makes some good points on the president’s behalf, especially in making clear his steadfast willingness to buck the will of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, which still wield considerable clout within Democratic Party circles. Yet DFER overstates the impact of Obama’s efforts on gubernatorial activity, fails to acknowledge that much of the success of Obama’a efforts so far has to do with predecessor George W. Bush”s steadfast use of policy and the bully pulpit, and in the process, reject the bipartisanship along party lines that has proven to be important in advancing reform.

Certainly Race to the Top has helped governors even in the most traditionalist-entrenched states such as California advance such reforms as Parent Trigger laws and requiring the use of student test score data in teacher evaluations; so has the administration’s tacit and controversial support of implementing Common Core, which, contrary to what opponents of the standards declare, are far superior to those that had been in place in all but Massachusetts and Hawaii (when it comes to eighth-grade math). Yet the administration’s efforts haven’t been all that helpful in all cases. Early results from the School Improvement Grant program touted by Obama and Duncan, for example, proves out arguments made by yours truly and others against the program.  SIG’s overall focus of the program on individual school turnarounds ignores decades of evidence that such efforts rarely work. The fact that the turnarounds are overseen by the very districts that managed the schools into academic failure in the first place makes success anything but likely; the fact that SIG doesn’t address other underlying issues — including the array of state laws and collective bargaining agreements that have helped even the lowest-performing teachers keep their jobs — also makes SIG a less-than-useful tool for governors and school leaders.

Even the success of Race to the Top remains in many ways an open question. As governors such as Hawaii’s Neil Abercrombie have learned, federal policy doesn’t necessarily help out when you’re dealing with NEA and AFT affiliates, and other education traditionalists who still wield tremendous clout through their political donations and other state laws that still render districts (in the case of the Aloha State, an entire agency charged with running schools) servile to their demands. As the civil rights movement of the 1960s learned all too well, governors and reformers still have to do the tough work of rallying grassroots and legislative support (as well as develop needed governmental infrastructure and talent) to successfully implement their proposals. One way this can happen is by allowing reform-minded districts to participate in Race to the Top competitions, something that Dropout Nation suggested that the Obama administration should have done after its first round three years ago; only now has Obama and Duncan embraced this idea.

Meanwhile DFER’s claim that Obama’s reforms helped “Governors Get Their Groove Back” fails to acknowledge the reality that there was plenty of reform efforts happening at the state level before the president came into office. Under the leadership of governors Frank O’Bannon and Mitch Daniels, Indiana had moved throughout the early part of this century to allow the mayor of Indianapolis to become first city chief executive in the nation to authorize charter schools, moved to overhaul how it calculated graduation rates, launched one of the first dual college credit efforts, and provided what is still now one of the nation’s most-comprehensive and easy-to-use school data systems. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush built upon the efforts of predecessor Lawton Chiles to make the Sunshine State one of the most reform-oriented in the nation — and reduced the number of illiterate children on the path to academic and social failure. In California, Arnold Schwarzenegger spent years pushing for reforms such as increasing the number of years newly-minted teachers had to work before attaining near-lifetime employment, as well as oversaw the expansion of charter schools; it was Schwarzenegger’s state board of education appointees who helped Green Dot founder Steve Barr successfully push the Los Angeles Unified School District into handing over Locke High School for its so far successful overhaul. And in New York State, it was George Pataki who successfully supported putting New York City’s school district under mayoral control, and appointed the reform-minded Board of Regents that has now pushed for another wave of reforms; his successor, the otherwise-disgraced Eliot Spitzer  convinced legislators to enact a law requiring new teachers seeking tenure to prove that they successfully use standardized test scores and other forms of student performance data in shaping their classroom instruction.

One of the key factors driving those reforms — and has helped Obama support new efforts at the state level — was the current president’s predecessor, Bush, who ushered a great leap forward in systemic reform in 2001 with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. Thanks to Bush (and the cadre of Democrats and Republicans in Congress who supported it), No Child advanced federal policy by setting clear national goals for improving student achievement in reading and mathematics; it finally focused attention on using data in measuring teacher quality.  Through its Adequate Yearly Progress measures, the low quality of education across the nation’s public schools — including urban districts and in suburbia — was exposed while it gave researchers the impetus to look at the nation’s high school graduation rates (and present in clear, stark terms the high school dropout crisis). More importantly, No Child fully signaled the primary role of states in education governance. States may be required to improve graduation rates and test scores — including the aspirational goal that all students are proficient in reading, math and science by 2014 — but the federal government allows them to develop their own solutions in order to achieve them.

Simply put, without No Child, the conditions that allow Obama to implement Race to the Top and his other reform efforts would have never existed. If anything, the flexibility that Obama is pushing rightfully (through Race tot the Top) and wrongly (in the No Child waiver gambit) would have never existed. Nor would have the latest round of reforms have ever come into place. And this is something that DFER should have acknowledged.

Meanwhile DFER seems far too unwilling to acknowledge another reality: That it will take bipartisanship to drive systemic reform. This has already proven to be the case in Connecticut (where the Democrat-controlled legislature attempted to eviscerate the reform efforts of their fellow party member, Gov. Dan Malloy, before public pressure forced them to relent), in Mississippi (where Republicans, doing the bidding of the NEA affiliate and school districts there, refused to allow for the existence of charters), in Minnesota (where Democrat Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed a bill passed by the Republican-controlled legislature that would have ended reverse-seniority layoffs that hurt the poorest students and the young, talented teachers that serve them), and in Arizona (where Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed the expansion of a voucher-like tax credit plan). If anything, it is clear that there are elements in both parties who are far more willing to bow to the demands of teachers’ unions and suburban districts opposed to reform than do the right thing by children.

But you wouldn’t know this from DFER’s declaration that “the core of the GOP education agenda revolves around dismantling the Education Department and shifting power back to states”. This broad mishmash of a statement, which focuses solely on the talking points uttered during the Republican presidential campaign and from House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, fails to consider what is actually happening among GOP governors (who have embraced the support they have gotten for reform from the federal level). More importantly, like Andy Rotherham has done, DFER ignores the likelihood that the Republican presidential nominee presumptive, Mitt Romney, is as likely to support the kind of reform efforts Obama is currently pushing. (The fact that DFER fails to acknowledge the damage being wrecked by the president’s waiver gambit, which in many ways is no better than the efforts being pushed by Kline –and one that civil rights groups have articulated ad nauseam — is simply inexcusable.)

Sure, DFER is engaging in the usual political talking points game. But for reformers, such statements matter. Such words (and the unwillingness to acknowledge the importance of bipartisanship) make it more difficult for DFER’s fellow reformers to build broad coalitions for advancing reform, which is especially needed as the next wave of efforts begin tackling suburban districts in earnest. Alienating fellow reformers on the other side of the political aisle is not a strategy for success.

Let’s be clear: DFER plays an important role in advancing reform within Democratic Party circles, and in reminding people that Obama has done a generally good job as school reformer-in-chief.  For that, they deserve thanks — and reform-minded Republicans and conservatives supporting Romney should acknowledge this too. But the organization needs to keep in mind that it must balance its role of supporting reform-minded Democrats within the party with its more-important role of helping all kids succeed in school and in life. Overstating the case for Obama’s re-election doesn’t help its cause.

Pay Attention to History, or Why Andy Rotherham is Off-Target on What Mitt Romney’s education policies may be: When it comes to presidential candidates and policy, it can be easy to get caught up in the old-school biases of traditional politically partisan thinking. In the process, one can fail to realize how the policies of predecessors in the Oval Office (along with one’s to policy players) tend to all but assure that a candidate tends to stay the course. More often than not, the successful presidential candidate realizes once he wins office that the nature of federal policymaking makes it extremely difficult to step away from current courses of action. More importantly, the influence of policy players in ascendance, the iron triangle relationships formed during a predecessor’s tenure, and the president’s own recognition that his predecessor was probably correct in his course of action, often means that those wonderful campaign slogans are dropped rather quickly once a president gets into the day-to-day role of  running the national government’s executive branch.

This can be seen in foreign policy, with Barack Obama — who proclaimed himself an opponent of George W. Bush’s policies on Guantanamo and the invasion of Iraq — essentially adopting much of his predecessor’s positions once entering office; Bush, in turn, did the same thing, deriding Bill Clinton’s military interventions in Somalia and Bosnia, before engaging in the same sort of adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. And this axiom is even more applicable when it comes to federal education policy. This is what my friend, Andy Rotherham, would be able to see if he took off those dusty goggles of traditional political partisanship (which was evident in his off-the-mark criticism of my latest American Spectator column on Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s likely education policy agenda as president) and paid attention to history.

It is easy for those who haven’t paid attention to the history of the modern school reform movement to think that federal efforts to spur reform started with George W. Bush and the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act 11 years ago. This isn’t so. No Child was the first great leap in advancing reform after a series of small, fitful steps that began three decades earlier when the Reagan Administration released A Nation at Risk, the pathbreaking report that articulated the case for reform that was already being made by chambers of commerce in southern states and the governors at the helm there such as Lamar Alexander in Tennessee; by 1986, some 250 commissions had been launched focusing on crafting the first wave of curricula standards, and implementing the second wave of standardized tests (that began as a result of Dwight David Eisenhower’s signing of the National Defense Education Act in 1958). By 1989, Reagan’s successor (and Dubya’s predecessor), George H.W. Bush, would take an even more-explicit step towards a more active federal role in spurring reform by convening the nation’s governors to start turning lip service about reforming schools into reality.

By 1994, Daddy Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton signed into law the Improving America’s Schools Act,  reauthorized version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that took some steps towards actually making states and districts  accountable for the federal dollars they spent, expanded the scope of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (and in the process, shown light on the low quality of teaching and instruction in the nation’s traditional district schools), and fully embraced the charter school movement by providing federal dollars to support start-up efforts. Although the law didn’t achieve all that it intended, the passage of Improving Schools — along with the reform efforts undertaken at the state level by governors such as George W. Bush in Texas — would lead to the great leap forward in expanding accountability and promoting reform that would come with No Child seven years later.

One could say that any of these aforementioned presidents could have took a different path on education policy. Reagan declared on the campaign trail that he would abolish the U.S. Department of Education, while some of his staffers were none too happy about publication of A Nation at Risk. The rest, save for Bush II and his successor, Barack Obama, didn’t explicitly deal with education save for a few mild bromides about wanting a better education for kids. And until George W. Bush came along, education policy was a secondary aspect of policymaking for most White House occupants. Yet once in office, each of them paved the path towards advancing a stronger federal role in pushing states to meet their constitutional and civil rights obligations toward overhauling American public education. The coalition who make up the school reform movement — from the centrist Democrats and idiosyncratic conservatives and left-leaners in think tanks, to the corporate executives and entrepreneurs and their chambers of commerce, to the young urbanites, school choice-oriented libertarians and families in the grassroots — have proven skillful at ensuring that whoever ends up in the White House will pay plenty of attention to school reform, whether they like it or not. The fact that presidential policies often outlast their tenures also plays a part; so does the fact that nearly all presidential aspirants since Reagan got their starts as governors and state legislators, giving them an uncomfortable intimacy with how teachers’ unions and other education traditionalists influence school policy. And given that the nation’s education crisis is also at the center of the economic and social challenges facing the nation, no president can afford to embrace anything other than a strong, activist form of federal education policy.

In short, Romney, as artfully dodgy as he has been on education (and on everything else) this presidential campaign, will more than likely end up taking the same path on school reform if he wins office as Obama and Bush II and their predecessors. This doesn’t mean that Romney can’t end up in a different direction; as I mentioned in my latest American Spectator column, Romney’s penchant for going wherever the political winds blow means that he could easily end up in a different direction altogether. But given the realities that come with being president (along with Romney’s choices in advisers, which don’t include some of the most-fervent movement conservatives opposed to any federal role), staying the course on reform is what is likely to happen.

Holding All Schools Accountable, or Why Reformers Must Push for the Shutdown of Faltering Charters: As you already know, this week’s Dropout Nation commentary dissecting the faulty thinking of Diane Ravitch and other education traditionalists certainly attracted the attention of the once-respectable historian’s allies. It also attracted an important question from Michael Goldstein, the inestimable founder of the MATCH charter schools in Boston, about what reformers should do when it comes holding charter schools to the same high standards we demand for traditional district counterparts. Citing the move of the Los Angeles Unified School District keeping open the Academia Semillas del Pueblo, a failure mill in the City of Angels community of El Sereno that has maintained its longstanding status as one of the worst-performing charters in the entire district, Goldstein asked whether “charter supporters should hold charters to that higher standard for now?” That question, in turn, has hit upon one of the more-complicated debates happening within the school reform movement today.

As successful as school reformers have been in beating back opposition to the existence and expansion of charters, the movement still hasn’t dealt well with the claims from education traditionalists that many charters don’t make the grade. Over the past few years, this crowd has touted out the report by Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Options, arguing that it proves that charters are no better than traditional public schools. The fact that the CREDO study is flawed because it matches individual charter schools to groups of traditional public school students (along with the reality that the study is really a series of reports that shows the wide differences in charter school oversight in 15 states and the District of Columbia) has not stopped charter school opponents from using it as one of their most-forceful weapons in their rhetorical campaign. And when it comes to education, one must always remember that bad studies last forever and do even more damage than the verifiable facts themselves.

But education traditionalists do have one good point: That few poor-performing charters are ever closed or even turned around. As the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation noted in its report on school turnarounds, 72 percent of charter failure mills studied remained open and in abysmal shape five years later; 80 percent of traditional district failure mills remained open and perpetuating educational neglect as well. Only 15 percent of all charters opened since 1992 have ever been shuttered. While most charter schools do better or as well as traditional district counterparts (especially with poor and minority kids tossed away by so many in traditional public education), the fact that so many faltering charters remain open betrays the argument made by supporters that charters, unlike traditional public schools, can be easily shut down.

Certainly one reason why so many failing charters remain around lies with the fact that as bad as many failure mill charters may be, they may be better than the even worse traditional district schools to which kids were previously condemned. There is also the tension that comes between the important goal of improving quality versus the need to expand school choice; some parents may be satisfied with what the charter is doing even if the school is doing a terrible job academically. The need to allow for diversity in models of charter schools is also a factor; the current effort by reformers such as the Gates Foundation to focus more on building up the scale of existing top-performing charters such as KIPP is concerning because it could both stifle the development of new approaches to providing high-quality education and also foster the kind of bureaucratic failure that typifies traditional districts.  And there is also the reality that some charter school authorizers, more-interested in collecting fees from open schools than on maintaining quality, will allow for charter failure mills to stay around.

But allowing these zombie charters to remain in operation has consequences for the entire school reform movement, especially when one considers that only 13 percent of Americans can accurately describe charters, the continued opposition to charters among old-school civil rights groups such as the NAACP, and the demonstrable evidence that players on the status quo side are more than willing to play fast-and-loose in their rhetorical and tactical gamesmanship.  A sector that currently finds favor among federal and most state education policymakers can suddenly find itself to be whipping boys for politicians and activists — especially when the reality remains that there are still plenty of threats to the very existence of charters. More importantly, the willingness to tolerate failing charters makes it difficult to force the shutdowns of traditional district schools (as well as the overhauls and shutdowns of the failing districts themselves); if school reformers aren’t willing to hold the line on quality when it comes to their favored school operations, then districts shouldn’t be subjected to such standards either.

Ultimately, it is about meeting the very goal of the school reform movement — to offer all children, especially those in poor and minority communities — a high-quality education fit for their futures that makes it critical to address charter school quality. We can no more allow charter failure mills to perpetuate educational malpractice than traditional district schools because our kids deserve better than proverbial muck. A charter school that fails to help students succeed is no better than a traditional district school. And both deserve to be shut down.

So school reformers should do as the Los Angeles Times did this week and demand that failure mills such as Academia be put out to education’s glue factory. We should also applaud efforts such as that of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, who is looking to shut down failing charters as part of his own reform of the massive dropout factory that is his city’s traditional district. Efforts to force authorizers to better-monitor charter school quality — including tighter scrutiny on those applying to launch charters in the first place — would also help. There are other tools that can be used to advance quality. One could come in the form of Parent Trigger laws, which could be used by families to take control of failure mill charters the same way those laws are geared for advancing overhauls of traditional district schools; California’s Parent Trigger law can already be used for this purpose and this could also be applied to charters in other states where Parent Trigger laws are in place. Certainly charter school operators won’t like that possibility; in fact, it is one reason why Parent Power activists have not gotten as much support from the charter school movement as they should. But allowing for such takeovers would certainly put added pressure on those running failing charters to get their houses in order.

The school reform movement must hold the line on quality. And that means closing down failing charters that do as much damage to children as the traditional district dropout factories and failure mills we seek to rid eliminate.

Let’s get the bad news about the school reform compromise finally approved yesterday by Connecticut’s state legislature. These are only modest steps that won’t do enough to help transform education in that state and ultimately, help all children get the high-quality teaching, strong, college-preparatory curricula, and nurturing school cultures they need and deserve.

The plan to pilot a new teacher evaluation system using objective student data in just eight-to-10 districts (along with the fact that nearly all the reforms are being launched in pilot form) is real small ball stuff; it is one clear example of how Nutmeg State legislative leaders, including Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams and Education Committee Co-Chair Andrew Fleischmann (the subject of a Conversation at Dropout Nation podcast featuring Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel), ignored the successful reforms happening in the rest of the nation and merely bowed to the will of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates opposed to any stronger form of teacher performance management. The decision to also ban for-profit charter school operators from working with the newly-created regime for turning around the state’s  worst failure mills and dropout factories merely proves the point I made yesterday about the anti-intellectualism endemic in education (especially among traditionalists opposed to any form of reform that they do not favor).

Legislators made no effort to address the state’s school residency law, which, along with other Zip Code Education policies, condemn kids to low-performing schools and districts; this means more mothers such as Tanya McDowell will be tossed into jails and prisons for doing what’s right to help their kids succeed in school and in life. Nor did the legislature consider creating an inter-district school choice program that would expand the number of high-quality school opportunities for poor and minority kids. And the last-minute move to pilot a reading remediation effort is — which plays on successful efforts in Florida to retain third-graders struggling with literacy — is rather meaningless without forcing Connecticut’s ed schools to overhaul their abysmal training of teachers.

All that said, the good news is that Gov. Dan Malloy got much of his ambitious school reform effort contained in what is now Senate Bill 27. More importantly, the passage of the reforms is an important step towards overhauling public education in a state with one of the widest achievement gaps.

By requiring annual evaluations of teachers and principals based on Value-Added analysis of student performance over time, Malloy and legislators are finally providing the first opportunities to support and reward high-quality teachers and strong school leaders (as well as weed out those instructors and school leaders who don’t belong in the classroom). The launch of the school turnaround network, which is based largely on the successful Recovery School District model pioneered in New Orleans, is also an important step towards helping revamping failure mills that have failed far too many kids in the state for far too long; the decision to allow for top-performing charter school operators . The move to increase per-pupil dollars for charter schools by 22 percent by the 2014-2015 school year will do plenty to spur the opening of new charters throughout the Nutmeg, expanding the opportunities for high-quality education.

One of the most-important reforms approved by the legislature is the pilot reading remediation program. As mentioned, the pilot program won’t fully work without addressing the low quality of reading instruction among Connecticut’s teachers. At the same time, the very fact that the state is even moving to address this aspect of the education crisis deserves recognition. With the percentage of Connecticut fourth-graders reading Below Basic proficiency having  increased from 26 percent to 27 percent between 2003 and 2011, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (even as more reform-minded states experienced declines in illiteracy), the state can no longer ignore this leading factor in the state’s yawning racial-, ethnic- and gender-based achievement gaps. The move to launch another early childhood education effort — which includes offering 1,000 new pre-kindergarten spots to low-income families — could also be an important step for improving literacy so long as any gains can be sustained once a kid enters K-12 schools; that, in turn, will only happen if the state takes additional steps towards systemic reform.

The fact that any of the reforms were passed at all is a testament to Malloy’s success — and that of school reform activists on the ground such as the Connecticut Parents Union and ConnCAN — in forcing legislators to stop kowtowing to NEA and AFT leaders who have spent more time buying ads to defend failed thinking than on actually offering substantive reforms of their own. It is also a credit to black and Latino legislators such as State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, who forced Williams and House Speaker Christopher Donovan to come up with a plan that would be more-palatable to Malloy and take steps towards advancing high-quality education.

But Malloy and reformers in the state cannot stop pressing hard on transforming education. As I made clear in March, Malloy needs to campaign for school reform-minded legislators, while reform advocates should force legislators such as Fleischmann into primaries against challengers more-willing to stand up to NEA and AFT leaders. Reformers also need to work more-closely with Parent Power activists — including groups such as the Hartford Parents Organization — to further support on the ground. As Malloy showed last month in the round of town hall meetings held in Connecticut’s urban locales, there are plenty of families tired of schools that aren’t fit for their children’s lives — and they are willing to hold politicians accountable for defending failed thinking.

What happened this week in Connecticut is proof of why strong gubernatorial leadership and strident advocacy is critical to advancing reform. Nutmeg State children need more of this — and so do all of our kids everywhere in America.

One of the most-amazing aspects of the battle over the reform of American public education is that the lack of thoughtfulness among education traditionalists in their defense of failed policies and practices that have done little more than condemn 1.2 million children a year to poverty and prison. This is especially true when it comes to how teaching and curricula should be provided to kids, and whether the families that love them should be able to choose and shape the conditions in which their kids should learn. From where they sit, public education can’t possibly include public charter schools, publicly-financed school voucher programs, or even online providers paid by states (and chosen by families) because these are operations that aren’t run by traditional districts with elected (or mayor-appointed) school boards and executives. This is why they constantly try to argue that charters  – which are run by nonprofit and corporate entities — aren’t “public schools”, even when they are clearly defined as such under state and federal law, and why they argue that the very existence of charters is an affront to “local control” by school districts. And it is why folks such as once-respectable (and now largely-discredited) educational historian Diane Ravitch constantly proclaim as she does today that moves such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s successful effort to expand the state’s voucher program to serve as many as 300,000 more students is “dismantling public education”.

Reformers know this collective line of argument is one of the most-tiresome (and infantile) education traditionalists make, and one that is the most-circular. This is because traditionalists base their notions not on facts or data, but on mistaken interpretations of the very laws that govern public education in this country. Yet it is important to constantly point out this faulty anti-intellectual thinking. Why? Because challenging the illogic posed in traditionalist arguments is key to advancing reform.

Reformers must constantly point to education traditionalists that  public education is ultimately a state government function. All state constitutions charge state governments with the role of providing “free public education” in one form or another, from deciding how education should be financed to how it should be delivered to children and families. So states can shape public education in any way it wants so long as it is allowed in their respective constitutions; if vouchers are allowed to be used as a means for providing public education in a respective state, than the state can do it; same if the state wants to allow for (and finance) public charter schools, blended and virtual learning providers, even homeschooling and DIY education efforts by collections of families and communities.

It must also be pointed out that districts, like other municipal governments within states, 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). The U.S. Supreme Court said as much a century ago in the Hunter v. Pittsburgh ruling. This means that districts have no ability for independent action outside of what state governments decide. If a state decides that it wants to allow nonprofit and for-profit organizations to provide education alongside districts, this can be done and the district has no say in it. It also means that districts have no ability to decide whether the financing for education provided by local taxpayers and the state can remain with them even if the children and families no longer use the district schools that once served them.

Reformers need to remind traditionalists that their  opposition to the expansion of vouchers and other forms of school choice is merely a legacy of the 19th-century religious (and ethnic) bigotry of Know-Nothings and Unitarian Protestants toward Catholics, all but some Protestant denominations, and even American Indians. The Blaine laws that ban school vouchers and other public school dollars for educating kids in parochial settings, for example, were crafted specifically to force the children of Irish Catholic immigrants to become good Americans who followed the Unitarian-inspired civic religion pushed earlier in the century by Horace Mann and his allies. Before that, Protestants, fearful of the influx of Irish Catholics entering the nation (and that they may attempt to put the nation under the control of the Pope), did all they could to effectively squelch Catholicism; in fact, it was this bigotry that led to the mass formation of Catholic diocesan schools that still remain the nation’s second-largest collection of education providers. And let’s not forget the federal government’s effort to “kill the Indian, save the man” through Bureau of Indian Education-operated boarding schools that forced kids off reservations and subjected them to educational, physical, and emotional abuse.

Then there is the argument that private-sector involvement in education, be it through companies or nonprofits, is somehow evil. This is a traditionalist argument reformers must also shut down because it is based on a senseless belief that somehow free enterprise and the operations involved in it are somehow evil while government is naturally good and virtuous. Anyone who has lived through Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, and even the recent financial meltdown knows that there is nothing true about it. There’s nothing inherently virtuous about government-run district schools or anything evil in utero about corporations providing schools. The tax status of the organizations providing education don’t matter.

More importantly, in posing these arguments, traditionalists fail to remember that companies and nonprofits are already critical players in how districts provide public education, from publishing textbooks to providing accounting services. Whether or not those private operators always do a good job in those aspects (or, more importantly, if districts do a good enough job of managing their contractors) is a different discussion. But the reality is that public education is quite dependent on the private sector in order to provide some of the most-critical aspects of educating kids (and especially dependent on companies for the taxes that fund their operations in the first place). This fact should be pointed out ad nauseam.

And finally, reformers must point out to traditionalists that public education is not about the kind of organization that provides instruction and curricula, but how it is financed and regulated. Charter schools, private schools, online schools, DIY operations, and even teachers working together or on their own, are as capable to provide high-quality education (and even promote good citizenship) as a traditional district. Based on the track record of late for traditional districts these days, one can even say that the bureaucratic model is outdated and obsolete for this purpose. What matters more is not whether the school operators are government or private, but whether they provide our children with good-to-great teachers, strong, comprehensive college-preparatory curricula, and cultures of genius that nurture the genius inherent in all kids. Those school operators that don’t provide this (or behave illegally and unethically), be they traditional, charter, or private, should be shut down and not get public funding, while those that do the job deserve praise and support.

The warped, anti-intellectual thinking of education traditionalists deserves to be tossed into history’s paper shredder. And as reformers, it is our job to battle faulty thinking from whoever poses it.