Earlier this week, Dropout Nation analyzed the failed tenure of Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent Eugene White and his attempt to find new gigs in Greenville, S.C. Since the piece ran, White’s luck in landing another job hasn’t gone so well. On Tuesday, days after deadlocking on whether to hire White, Greenville’s school board voted 7-5 to pick the district’s interim superintendent to fill the top slot. Then another district to which White was attempting to flee, this in Mobile, Ala., unanimously picked another internal candidate. With almost no options this time around, White announced that he would remain as top boss of the Titanic district. Declared White: “I’m going to do what needs to be done.” And upon hearing the news, one can imagine all the parents in Indianapolis served by the district who can afford to leave put their kids’ names up for charter school lotteries and called U-Haul. (The ones who can’t are stuck with abject failure that damages the futures of their kids.)

But White’s future remains cloudy, even if IPS’ clown college of a school board (which has indulged his incompetence for seven years) decides not to send him packing in the next few months. The threat of Circle City Mayor Greg Ballard taking control of the district looms large, especially after the mayor (who already authorizes charter schools) hired a former Teach For America executive to be his education czar. The state branch of Democrats for Education Reform stepped up the pressure to reform the district this week by holding a confab featuring Neerav Kingsland of New Schools for New Orleans, who discussed how Indianapolis had to embrace at least part of the Recovery School District model that has advanced reform in the Crescent City. And Indiana’s state government could weigh in further this summer by seizing more IPS schools from White’s management.

Certainly White isn’t the only failure among school district chieftains. He may not even be the worst of them. But we cannot continue to tolerate those in charge of providing education for our kids remaining in jobs they are ill-equipped to hold. If we are to hold laggard teachers accountable for their failures in the classroom, then we require all school leaders (including superintendents and those on school boards who abet them) to meet the same high standards.

No matter what happens, it is high time for White to take his leave of the district. As I said seven years ago about both White’s predecessor, Duncan “Pat” Pritchett and then-state superintendent Suellen Reed, White’s departure would do a host of good for the Circle City’s children.

The 1961 Freedom Rides have become among the most-memorable events in American history — and a major marker of the Civil Rights Movements successful fight to end of Jim Crow segregation. But the Greyhound Bus rides were also the key turning point that reshaped the direction and the tenor of the movement and its leadership. More importantly, it forced John F. Kennedy, an American president who had little interest in advancing civil rights, to finally begin the steps that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and other legislation that ended official (and de-facto) segregation for good. Now, more than ever, the lessons about unapologetic grassroots activism and speaking truth to power are ones that should be embraced by all school reformer in what is sadly turning out to be a post-No Child Left Behind Act era in which some have lost their focus on what they are supposed to do.

At the time the Freedom Rides began, the Civil Rights Movement was at a crossroads. Starting in the 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its legal mastermind, Thurgood Marshall, had successfully used the courts to challenge Jim Crow laws that condemned blacks to second-class status in American society. This included the case of Irene Morgan, a Baltimore woman who had just gotten over a miscarriage arrested by Hayes Store, Va., police in 1944 for refusing to hand her seat on a Greyhound bus to white riders.

The NAACP would take up her case, successfully appealing it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that states could not apply Jim Crow to any form of interstate commerce. The legal and public policy strategy reached its crescendo in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Yet governors and legislators in southern states refused to enforce the court rulings and did all they could to circumvent them. In response to the Morgan ruling, states continued to segregate bus stations and other facilities; other states, including Arkansas and Virginia would respond to Brown by refusing to integrate scho0ls and even shutting down entire school districts in a form of massive resistance. The fact that Marshall and his team were reluctant to actually take it to the streets in protests, unwilling to force states to actually abide by federal rulings, and fearful of being tarred as disloyal by Americans still spooked by fears of communism (and the presence of spies, real and otherwise, working on behalf of the Soviets) made the NAACP a toothless tiger.

At the same time, another strategy pursued by the civil rights movement — the nonviolent resistance inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s successful push for India’s independence — was also struggling. Initially pushed by Bayard Rustin and the Congress of Racial Equality during the 1940s, it gained traction during the 1950s thanks to the arrest of Rosa Parks on a Montgomery, Ala. bus, and the emergence of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. as the leading voice of the civil rights movement. The efforts of King and the newly-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference gained national attention, especially as media coverage of lynchings, bombings and the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, finally alarmed Americans about the viciousness of state-sanctioned segregation.

But King and his fellow nonviolent activists found themselves in a quandary. The fact that black southerners were forced to live daily with segregation — and the violence that came to their doorstep any time they fought against segregation — made them less interested in nonviolent protests. Some, such as a NAACP leader in Monroe County, N.C., Robert Williams, called for “armed self-reliance” and lived up to his word in 1957 when he and other locals shot at Klansmen. (Northerners such as Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were equally as vocal in their support for violent resistance to racial bigotry.) The rest, well-aware of the murders of such civil rights activists as Sam O’Quinn in Centreville, Miss., made others rather docile. Keeping the peace was more important for daily survival than forcing America to realize its due. That King and his fellow pastors, many of whom were the establishment in their own communities (and thus, a tad on the conservative side philosophically) meant that they were not quick to take action and did little in the way of strong, public action. They also had to deal with the NAACP, which opposed King’s strategy (and were also competing with him and the SCLC for attention and resources).

Meanwhile the federal government wished to stay out of the civil rights conversation altogether. President Harry s. Truman desegregated the military in 1947, and Dwight David Eisenhower sent National Guard troopers to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School a decade later. But neither administration was willing to take any further steps towards making America’s promise of equal opportunity for all a reality. Both administrations were unwilling to challenge the traditional view of federalism, which essentially restricted the federal role in governing how states treated citizens under law. They were also more-preoccupied with the Cold War and containing Communism than with civil rights.

The incoming president in 1961, John F. Kennedy, shared this reluctance to delve into the civil rights battle. A fierce Cold Warrior, he was more than willing to ignore the concerns of the very African-American voters who helped him win a narrow victory over Richard Nixon the previous year. Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, also made sure to push the one true civil rights activist in the administration’s cabinet, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson (who actually worked to pass the nation’s first civil rights act during his term as U.S. Senate majority leader) to the wayside.

As both camps struggled with their own strategies and battled with one another, a new group of voices for freedom emerged. Starting in 1959, students attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities began conducting sit-ins at local restaurants and stores, demanding to sit and be served alongside whites. These protests began capturing national attention a year later when four students attending North Carolina A&T in Greensboro sat down at a lunch counter in a local Woolworth’s and ordered coffee; 20 more students would come a day later to take their place, launching one of the biggest sit-in protests of the era — and fostered sit-ins by HBCU students in cities such as Nashville and Atlanta.

These students, well-educated, talented, and energetic, were tired of being treated as second-class citizens by Jim Crow segregationists. They were also especially annoyed with the NAACP and Dr. King’s SCLC, which refused to fully support their protests and were unwilling to be the strong grassroots activists these young men and women expected them to be. And they would form their own group, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, to rally their cause. From this group would come a generation of black leaders both legendary and otherwise, including John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, mathematician Bob Moses and (unfortunately) Marion Barry. They were joined by older civil rights leaders such as Ella Baker and who were equally ready to take action and were just as frustrated with the reluctance of the NAACP and SCLC to join common cause.

But one established organization was more than willing to join these young protestors. And that was CORE. An offshoot of the international Fellowship of Reconciliation movement, the organization had attempted to rally support for nonviolent protests with such efforts as the Journey of Reconciliation, a bus ride that attempted to test southern compliance to the Morgan decision. But by the 1960s, CORE was in the doldrums. The ouster of its dynamic cofounder, Jim Farmer, along with the unfamiliarity with nonviolent protest and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigations of alleged communists, forced the group into the wilderness. Having been the pioneer of nonviolent struggle, the emergence of King had stole its thunder; nor was it welcomed by either King’s supporters or national NAACP leaders. But the new, campus-based civil rights activists were more than ready to get any support from any established group. And even before the Greensboro protest, CORE began staging its own sit-ins and nonviolent protests in cities such as Miami.

But CORE was ready to do more, especially after Farmer returned to CORE in 1961 to retake its reigns. A tireless protester, Farmer decided that it was time to dust off one of the organization’s earlier efforts, the Journey of Reconciliation, and do a new series of protest Greyhound rides into southern cities. Calling it the Freedom Ride, Farmer and his team recruited a rainbow coalition of 13 men and women, including SNCC cofounder Lewis, and Jim Peck, a longtime CORE player, to ride on Greyhound and Trailways buses into Mississippi and Alabama. The selection was deliberate. Farmer wanted to present a face of unity, that blacks and whites could live together in brotherhood. He also wanted to make sure that the Freedom Riders were ready for anything. This meant not only mixing northern whites with their black counterparts, but even brought in the young HBCU students who were experienced with — and tired of — segregation.

They took to the road on May 4 of that year — and rode into history. At first, the riders encountered little trouble as they road through Virginia and North Carolina; one of the riders, Joe Perkins, was arrested after sitting at a shoe-shine station designated for whites. But then, in Rock Hill, S.C., Lewis was assaulted after walking into a whites-only waiting room at a Greyhound bus station. By the time the riders arrived in Atlanta, their tour had begun to capture attention and was even a distant thought in the minds of Robert Kennedy, the newly-appointed U.S. Attorney General, and his staff. The ride had also gotten the attention of Alabama’s police officials and the United Klans of America — and they had already begun conspiring to maim CORE’s crew.

When the Greyhound bus carrying some of the Freedom Riders came into Anniston, Ala., the Klan was ready. Aided and abetted by police officers, and Alabama highway patrolmen riding alongside the Freedom Riders on their bus, the Klansmen and their crew attacked the bus, smashing windows and damaging its shell. Unable to get the Riders off the bus so they can beat them, the Klan then firebombed the bus, the pommeled the Riders as they fled out of the flaming wreck. Only the fast work of the legendary Fred Shuttlesworth kept the Riders from facing an even nastier fate.

Their colleagues on the Trailways bus suffered an even worse fate. While they road from Atlanta to Alabama, Klansmen on board the bus began beating up the Riders; Peck, was particularly beaten up, with blood spurting from his face. Once the Riders got into the state capital of Montgomery, the notorious sheriff Bull Connor allowed local Klansmen to suffer even more beatings. In front of CBS newsman Howard K. Smith and other reporters, Klansmen along with other bigots chased down Peck and his colleagues, beating them mercilessly. By the time the day was over, the Riders were either in local hospitals or in Shuttleworth’s home recovering and waiting.

Thanks to Smith’s coverage and that of his fellow reporters, the beatdown of the Riders caught national attention. For the Kennedy administration, the exposure of Jim Crow violence wasn’t what it wanted. More-interested in fighting the Cold War than in dealing with the civil rights struggle, JFK and his brother, Bobby wanted to do anything they can to keep the problem on the hush. Through the administration’s point man, newspaperman-turned-Justice Department official John Seigenthaler, the administration managed to get the Riders out of Montgomery (by plane) into New Orleans, where CORE celebrated the anniversary of the Brown ruling and facing criticism from media players, the administration, and traditional civil rights organizations, wondered what it would do next.

But even as the original Riders, battered and beaten, began recovering from their wounds, new protesters were coming. The leadership of SNCC, including feisty, dynamic Fisk University student Diane Nash, decided to pull together a contingent of students to embark on their own Freedom Ride; Lewis, who had left the original Ride before the Anniston and Montgomery showdowns (in order to win a fellowship) joined them. They didn’t bother waiting for help from King, the NAACP or even on CORE (which was reluctant to undertake another civil rights road trip), and they ignored entreaties from the Kennedy administration (which would rather have seen the civil rights movement disappear altogether). They sent 10 volunteers, including Lewis, to go to Montgomery. But when their bus arrived in Birmingham, police officers stopped the bus from going further; the Riders were then arrested and jailed along with Shuttlesworth (who was detained for helping the Riders make their way). When they finally got into Montgomery, they faced another round of violence from Klansmen, who didn’t discriminate in their beatings; they even mercilessly beat Kennedy administration point man Seigenthaler when he tried to intervene.

Even as the first SNCC riders were being arrested and jailed, SNCC kept sending more Riders. So did CORE, which teamed up with SNCC on the protests. Their efforts, along with the public fascination with the movement and the growing group of collegians and middle-aged civil rights activists ready to join the Riders, finally forced the NAACP and King to offer their support. Together with SNCC and CORE, they formed a coalition that recruited and trained aspiring Riders to be ready for the roughness of Jim Crow injustice.

They had plenty who wanted to join. Some 400 people would join the rides that year, according to historian Raymond Arsenault, the author of the 2006 book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. One-third were southern blacks who grew up with the horrors of state-sanctioned discrimination and wanted to rid the nation of it. They knew that in order to rally their brothers and sisters to change things for the better (and knowing that their elders were not willing to risk their own lives to do so) they had to step up, step out and do something. And they did pay the price. Alabama and Misssissippi officials, ready to defend Jim Crow at any cost, jailed every Freedom Rider who arrived into a bus station.

The Riders didn’t necessarily have public opinion on its side. Middle class whites, in partcular, were not all that interested in ending state-sanctioned racial bigotry. As Arsenault pointed out, 64 percent of Americans polled by Gallup who knew of the Rides disapproved of them. Most thought of the Freedom Riders as troublemakers disturbing a status quo that was tolerable (even if they also opposed racism). But the Riders were succeeding. Their example helped foster and energize civil rights activists even in Jim Crow hotbeds such as Neshoba, Miss.; by August, locals were also participating in Freedom Rides, challenging segregationist mythmaking that only outsiders were agitating for the end of the status quo. The Rides would to the first series of voter registration drives, bringing in natives such as Fanny Lou Hamer, whose demand for her Democratic Party affiliate to be seated at the party’s 1964 convention would be the beginning of the end of segregationist political power.

The action on the ground (and the accompanying violence and injustice perpetuated by Jim Crow regimes), along with King’s renewed advocacy, the agitation of SNCC and CORE, and support from presidential aspirants such as New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, also backed the Kennedy administration into a corner. The fact that the protests attracted international attention — and was threatening America’s global standing as the beacon of liberty against the threat of Soviet communism — also caused John and Bobby considerable anguish; that other administration officials, including Seigenthaler and future U.S. senator Harris Wofford, supported the Riders, also meant that the administration could no longer accomodate race-baiting politicians such as Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and his fellow-traveler in the U.S. Senate, James O. Eastland, who held sway in Democratic Party politics. By July, Bobby Kennedy had petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to pass a rule ending separate-but-equal in bus stations and Greyhound rides; by year-end, it became a reality. The federal government was shamed and prodded into expanding its role in ending racial discrimination, a step that would be expanded under the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Kennedy’s less-bigotry-tolerant successor, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

By year-end, the Freeom Rides were done. Struggling financially,CORE suspend the protests and handed off the legal representation of the Riders to the NAACP’s legal arm. But the impact of the Rides reached far beyond that year. It was the Freedom Rides that would help accelerate the plans for the March on Washington two years later, along with King’s I Have a Dream speech. It helped spur such antidiscrimination marches as those in Selma, Ala., and Montgomery. And even as SNCC disappeared into the ether, and CORE became a shell of its former glory, their strong advocacy would ultimately lead to America finally fulfilling its promise of equal legal and social opportunity for all under law; that Riders such as Lewis would go on to prominent political careers further proved the significance of the Rides in fostering servant leaders for social reform.

Five decades later, the Freedom Rides offer important lessons for school reformers, who now face an environment in which their push to overhaul American public education is attracting new voices, yet the think tankers, advocates and social entrepreneurs whose strategies have catalyzed this find themselves at a crossroads. The move by President Barack Obama last month to essentially gut No Child, along with efforts by congressional and Senate Republicans to push for the same now means that federal education policy is less-focused on pushing for systemic reform and holding states and districts accountable for improving teaching and curricula. Reversing this backslide is critical toward continuing school reform’ momentum. It is also critical to get Beltway reformers and social enterepreneurs such as charter school operators to work more-closely with grassroots advocates. And it is important to remind some Beltway reformers that focusing on poor and minority children will not only help all kids, but can even win suppoet from middle class blacks and Latinos, who will make up the majority of all Americans by mid-century.

This means that our new voices for reform, including the growing Parent Power movement must challenge education tradtionalists and political leaders through strong, vocal advocacy. This includes taking to the streets in a proverbial sense, using the Innternet to rally families, challenge failing and mediocre districts and even forcing state and federal leaders to expand choice and pass Parent Trigger laws. Using the courts as tools for reform alongside grassroots advocacy and policymaking is also key; as seen with films such as The Lottery, video and film can also serve well in furthering reform. And the new voices must call out longstanding reformers when they support positions or ideas that will weaken the ultimate goal of overhauling education for all children. This must be dome smartly, since new voices must also think through any flaws in their own efforts; but it should be done.

Fifty years after the first Freedom Riders changed America for the better, school reformers can follow their example. And help give our children schools fit for their futures.

This week’s This is Dropout Nation report on the continuing problems of America’s ed schools garnered some interesting responses. One of them came from Dimitri Sevastapoulo, a Harris Brown Stevens real estate broker who, before going into that arena, taught in New York City public schools, headed up the high school division of the famed Dalton School in New York City, and presided over the board of the Caedmon School, a private Montessori school that his child attends. He notes that a decade ago, when he tried to go back to New York University to complete his master’s degree in education, he was told that his “credits were stale” and had to begin the whole process of getting that degree again.

What he figured out? Writes Sevastapoulo: “A graduate degree in education is an expensive, worthless piece of paper.” More importantly, he notes that “competence in a serious field of study… accountability and dedication are the key ingredients for good teaching.” His points are on the mark.

Meanwhile Devon Skerritt, who manages the volunteer operations at Harvard’s ed school, takes issue with Dropout Nation‘s surmising that ed schools are probably no longer useful. For Skerritt, the idea of eliminating ed schools leads to the bigger question of “how do we create/support strong scholars’ research in ed?”Certainly, this is an important question. After all, ed schools are generally the centers of research in education. At the same time, however, one must remember that education research, like ed school training, isn’t close to being in tip-top shape. As my former Forbes editor, Seth Lubove, noted a decade in his report on the controversy surrounding the Success for All reading program, the education research field is often so incestuous that a supposed peer reviewer can also have a business relationship with the researcher presenting the data (and not recuse themselves in light of the conflict).  The interpretations by researchers can also be so agenda-driven that even if underlying data is solid, it becomes sullied by association. As a result, education research isn’t as exacting as it is in more-rigorous hard- and social science fields.

Education research is getting better. But ed schools haven’t been the ones driving this. The development of Value-Added Assessment, for example, was driven by William Sanders, first while running the University of Tennessee’s assessment center (which was run independent of the education school), and then, when he worked for privately-held software outfit SAS. The pioneering work of Paul Hill, Paul Peterson, Jonah Rockoff, Michael Podgursky and Marguerite Roza have also happened outside of ed school confines. And when one starts to look at the graduation rate and dropout crisis efforts of Robert Balfanz, Jay P. Greene, Christopher Swanson, and Michael Holzman, it slowly becomes clear that ed schools have lagged far behind in developing pioneering research addressing the underlying issues of the nation’s education crisis.

This isn’t to say that ed schools can’t exist in order to have strong research roles. It’s just that they haven’t actually taken up such work. Far too many ed school professors are either too busy maintaining the status quo within their institutions — or trying to make names for themselves as poor man’s Diane Ravitches — than improving the quality of education research conducted within their respective institutions.

Skerritt also notes, rightfully, that there are some ed schools that are doing fantastic work in training teachers and principals. It may be time to follow the path of Abraham Flexner, whose Carnegie Corp.-funded review of medical schools led to improvements in how doctors are selected into med schools, shut down laggard institutions, and spurred innovation and better training throughout the medical field. Ed schools clearly need the same kind of housecleaning. If they don’t change, they should move aside for better institutions for training the teachers our children need for their success in school and in life.

We will talk more about this issue on Wednesday, when Dropout Nation hosts a special podcast on the future of ed schools featuring Arthur McKee of the National Council on Teacher Quality. He will argue for the existence of ed schools, but also for the full reform of their work in training teachers.

Five steps backwards to the bad old days of federal education policy. Tossing in the towel on the systemic reform of American public education at the time when kids and the economy need it most. What else can be said about the proposed revamp of the No Child Left Behind Act being pushed by Tennessee U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander and some of his fellow Republicans in the federal upper house?

The proposed elimination of the law’s Highly-Qualified Teacher provision isn’t exactly bad news. After all, all it has done is allowed states to simply grandfather in Baby Boomer teachers and others who may not necessarily be fit for classrooms instead of actually addressing teacher quality issues. But the Alexander plan — also known as Put Head in Sand and Ignore Reality — doesn’t take the same approach to pushing for teacher quality reforms — including requiring the use of student data in teacher evaluations — that has been embraced in the first two rounds of the Race to the Top initiative. At the very least, states should have to earn their federal subsidies.

As for the rest of the package? It’s hardly the “rare combination of thoughtfulness and humility” that Fordham’s Mike Petrilli dares to proclaim it to be. As with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s No Child waiver effort, the Alexander plans proposes to simply do away with the Adequate Yearly Progress provisions that have exposed the low quality of education across the nation’s public schools — including urban districts and in suburbia. Essentially, Alexander is proposing a set of mealy-mouth college- and career-ready standards that simply avoid holding states accountable for the quality of education provided in all but a few of its traditional public schools. Poor and minority children in suburbia — and even white kids in those schools — will simply have to struggle in cultures of mediocrity that, as Dr. Steve Perry noted in this month’s Conversation podcast, are often just marginally better than urban dropout factories.

Meanwhile the Alexander plan fails to deal with the reality that accountability needs to be expanded, not scaled back. The need to force the overhaul of ed schools, who train most of the nation’s new teachers, is still critical to the reform of American public education. Yet the Alexander plan is silent on that issue. Nor do Alexander’s proposals address the crisis of low educational achievement among young men of all backgrounds, one of the leading symptoms of the education crisis. As Richard Whitmire and I proposed in June, simply requiring gender to be measured as part of subgroup accountability would do plenty to force states and districts into dealing seriously with this problem. And setting a plain, simple measure of chronic truancy — an early warning indicator of academic failure — would give teachers and principals honest data that they can then use in keeping kids in school. Right now, only two states — California and Indiana — offer some sort of breakdown of chronic truancy data, and that’s not good enough. And school choice and Parent Power? Save for supporting the expansion of charter schools, not a thing.

What is particularly amazing is that the Alexander plan simply returns things back to the days when the federal government ladled out dollars with almost no accountability in return. It doesn’t embrace the best elements of Race to the Top — including its emphasis on forcing states to compete for federal money and show results. This is especially shameful because maintaining the program-based funding nature of Title I will do little to spur reform. If anything, it will eventually lead to a renewed form of compliance-based approach to how the feds oversee those funds that everyone — including Republicans and conservative reformers — decry. This is because under the Alexander plan, many states will simply go back to spending federal money without any consideration of results, which will lead to an eventual backlash.

There are those who will argue that the efforts by reform-minded states will continue without strong federal education policy. But they fail to remember that No Child is one of the main reasons why these reforms have accelerated in the first place. For reform-minded governors on both sides of the political aisle, No Child has proven to be the tool they need to beat back opposition from suburban districts and affiliates of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which have long dominated education at the state level. The law, along with Race to the Top, is the leading reason why 13 states this year expanded school choice, either in allowing for the expansion of charter schools and starting various forms of school voucher plans.

All in all, the Alexander plan, like Duncan’s waivers and House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline’s own efforts, simply does the bidding of education traditionalists (who don’t want any form of accountability) and fails to serve children. And any reformer who can defend this mishmash should look in the mirror and ask where do they really stand when it comes to our poor and minority kids.

But the proposal isn’t exactly surprising. As with the current GOP aspirants for the White House, the Alexander plan is shaped by the rebellion against the excesses of George W. Bush’s presidency and his legacy, on education, as the Democrats’ favorite Republican. Movement conservatives may be generally supportive of expanding vouchers and charter schools, two of the most-prominent elements of Bush’s education policy. For Alexander, a former U.S. Secretary of Education who ushered in the development of Value-Added Assessment of standardized test score data during his tenure as Tennessee’s governor, he must also keep in mind that he is up for re-election in 2014. He doesn’t want movement conservatives to offer up any challenge that will upset his goal of continually holding some form of political office.

No matter how one looks at it, the Alexander proposals aren’t worth the paper they are printed upon. The only good news is that Republicans are in the minority — and thus the plan has almost no chance of seeing the light of day this year. Unfortunately, Duncan’s waiver effort is still under way and some centrist Democrat reformers (notably Democrats for Education Reform, which rightly trashed Alexander’s plan) are moving away from outright opposition to trying to make it more-palatable for children’s consumption. Like conservative reformers who back the Alexander plan, they too should just stop and get back to work on pushing for an expanded federal education policy that pushes states further on embracing systemic reform.

When it comes to America’s system of training teachers, two things are crystal clear. The first? That America’s university schools of education, which train nearly all of the 200,000 or so teachers who attempt to enter the profession every year, are doing a shoddy job of recruiting aspiring teachers and providing them with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in the classroom. The second: That there is no correlation between the credentials teachers are granted and their ability to improve student achievement over time.

This week, two studies once again confirm both realities. And it is past time to take real action to improve the teacher training pipeline so that our kids get the high-quality education they deserve.

The first bit of latest news comes courtesy of the American Enterprise Institute, which released a study earlier this week on the abysmally high levels of grade inflation among ed school majors. The average ed school student at Indiana University’s ed school on its main campus in Bloomington had a simple grade-point average of 3.66, higher than the g.p.a.’s of students in the university’s other majors; as the study’s author, Cory Koedel notes in another study he conducted this year, math, science and economics majors only average g.p.a.’s of 3.06 , while those taking social science and humanities courses barely average over a 3.0.

At the University of Missouri’s ed school, the average student garners a simple g.p.a. of 3.80, nearly a full point higher than a student majoring in math, science and economics. Only psychology ranks as the second-easiest major on its campus — and even an average student in that major is only rewarded a 3.43. In fact, every student received a 4.0 g.p.a. in one out of every five ed school classes they took, a far higher percentage than what students in other majors ever receive. Stated simply, an ed school student has a one-in-five chance of earning an easy “A” regardless of their work product.

Essentially, ed school professors — many of whom have sparse experience in the classroom — are doling out too many high grades far too often, providing students with unrealistic assessments of their ability to perform in the classroom. This isn’t surprising: As former Teachers College president Arthur Levine surmised six years ago, one out of every two teachers in America are trained at schools with low entrance requirements. The results that are seen in our classrooms are even less shocking. As longtime teaching guru Martin Haberman has noted, half of all aspiring teachers never make it into the classroom, while Richard Elmore has pointed out that half of those who did get employed left the profession within five years — and this in spite of the fact that in most states, teachers attain near-lifetime employment within three years.

As for those who remain? Given that one-third of America’s fourth-graders are functionally illiterate — and our best-performing students rank 32nd in the world on the PISA test of international student achievement — the quality of teaching in our schools among those who attain tenure is abysmal. But doesn’t our teacher credentialing system help weed out laggards? Not at all. As Manhattan Institute scholar Marcus Winters and his team point out in a study of Florida teachers also released this week, there is no correlation between credentials — including certification and attaining graduate degrees, the two things education traditionalists tend to tout in their arguments over school reform — and student achievement. This confirms studies that have shown that credentials and experience account for only three-to-five percent of the student performance.

Yet we continue a system of teacher training and certification that all but ensures that low-quality teachers will continue their educational neglect and abuse on our children. As Winters notes, the pedagogical theories taught by ed schools have little positive impact on student achievement (and ultimately, teacher performance). Yet ed schools have not done anything to move from that emphasis to focusing on the things teachers need to have for success — subject-matter competency, entrepreneurial and leadership ability, instructional method, and the ability to analyze and use data in their work. Nor do they screen out ed school candidates for their subject-matter skills and care and empathy for children; the latter of which can be done simply by following Haberman’s suggested method of having an aspiring teacher show how he works with a child who looks different (and has a different socioeconomic background) than them.

Part of the problem lies with the fact that ed schools, like other institutions in traditional public education, are simply too stuck in their ways to change. The other problem is likely to be purely arbitrary. As Michigan Superintendent Mike Flanagan noted last month, far too many ed schools are focused on revenue instead of quality, and that is particularly clear in his state: Two-thirds of the Wolverine State’s 7,500 ed school grads leave the state, either to work in districts in other states, or perhaps to go into other fields. Savvy collegians may have figured out that getting a teaching degree is such easy work that they just go in, grab the degree, and then head into another field. For ed schools, which receive $7 billion annually for teacher training, tightening up standards (and improving teacher quality) could also mean sacrificing revenue.

But it’s not just the ed schools alone that are responsible. The fact that state teacher certification agencies, which oversee ed schools, are often separate from education departments means that ed schools are not well-scrutinized and regulated; the fact that the certification agencies themselves are also stuck in an old-school mindset (and, until recently, have been banned in nearly all states from even allowing for the use of value-added data in certification) is also a problem. The federal government has also neglected its role in this arena, failing to make ed school accountability an element of the No Child Left Behind Act when teaching (and how teachers get into classrooms) is a critical reason for the nation’s academic failure.

Then there are school districts and those who lead them. As Koedel notes in the AEI study, far too many principals are giving too many of their teachers high marks for performance — even when their ratings don’t correlate with actual classroom performance. The fact that many principals themselves aren’t exactly up to snuff in their performance is part of the problem; as Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Steve Peha has also pointed out in his series on school leadership (and I pointed out last week in my piece on the school data) these principals, often drawn from the teaching ranks, are often unsophisticated in areas such as data analysis and incapable of leading adults. As I noted in the 2008 report I co-wrote for the National Council on Teacher Quality, state laws (influenced by the lobbying of teachers’ union affiliates) have made it difficult and expensive for principals and superintendents to dismiss laggard teachers. But the laggard talent in the administrator ranks, along with the cultures they and incompetent teachers perpetuate, also make improving teacher quality a tough problem.

It will take plenty of work to solve the teacher training problem. And it may have to start with the end of ed schools. The fact that alternative teacher training programs such as Teach For America now account for four out of every ten teachers hired since 2005 means that ed schools are starting to lose their monopoly. But remember, many of those programs actually are started by ed schools themselves, which means that there are still plenty of laggard teachers coming into the field. We need more outfits of the likes of TFA, Urban Teacher Residency United, and Teach Plus, who stand outside of the ed school world, and can recruit and quickly train teachers at higher levels of quality and lower cost.

In fact, one can dare argue that there is almost no reason for ed schools to exist. After all, if an alternative teacher training outfit, a school district or even a teacher professional association in the guild mold, can recruit aspiring teachers, weed out the proverbial chaff from the wheat, and get those teacher up to speed during the first two years on the job, then ed schools can go out of business altogether. This is one idea the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation can fund and make a success in quick order. And definitely needs to do so: Our kids deserve better than what they are getting now.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I focus on President Obama’s latest stimulus plan and explain why he should stick to school reform in order to solve the long-term unemployment crisis that is a key reason for the current economic malaise. Pouring $60 billion into bailing out faltering American public education systems — and $450 billion of good taxpayers money overall after bad — will not put high school dropouts to work or keep 1.2 million at-risk high school students from joining them this year.

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.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software and Google Reader.

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