Cuomo Takes Aim at Teacher Quality: Last year, Dropout Nation highlighted New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s persistent work to force the state’s Board of Regents to allow for districts to expand the use of student test score data from the state’s battery of exams in teacher evaluations from 20 percent of the overall evaluation to 40 percent. While a lawsuit from the American Federation of Teachers’ influential Empire State affiliate — and a ruling from a state lower court judge — has put the effort into limbo, Cuomo deserved praise for using his considerable political capital to push for important reforms in teacher performance management.

But Cuomo isn’t stopping his effort. This week, as part of his proposed budget, the governor is tying a four percent increase in the $20 billion in subsidies given by the state to traditional school districts and charter schools to implementation of the new teacher evaluation system by next year. Under Cuomo’s plan, districts that fail to implement an evaluation system that bases nearly half of performance reviews on student performance based on state standardized tests will not receive either the Race to the Top dollars or $805 million in additional state dollars flowing from the budget.

The move comes on the heels of the embarrassing news that districts such as New York City could not reach agreements with their AFT locals on implementing new teacher evaluations in order for those districts — and the state itself — to use the $700 million in federal funds from the Race to the Top initiative. In New York City, in particular, the AFT is demanding a new appeals process for laggard teachers given poor ratings under the new system. Given the reality that the current appeals process all but protects failing teachers from losing their jobs (fewer than one percent of teachers sent to the infamous “rubber rooms” under the city’s current agreement with the AFT ever lost their jobs no matter how deserving), one can easily understand why Mayor Michael Bloomberg is rightfully opposing the union’s demand. While Cuomo hasn’t weighed into New York City’s fracas, the governor has already made clear that the AFT won’t get exactly what it wants — to keep the status quo quite ante in its favor.

At the same time, Cuomo stepped into the stalemate between the state education department and the AFT over settling the lawsuit filed by the union last year; Cuomo is threatening to impose his own solution through the state budget within the next 30 days unless the two sides reach a settlement. The AFT and the state education department have only agreed that classroom observations — which, even under the best of circumstances, are far less reliable in measuring student performance than either value-added analysis of student test score performance or even surveys of students — should be the “majority” element in the new evaluation system. But given that the state never pushed hard to reduce the role of observations in the first place, it is more than likely that Cuomo will weigh in.

Certainly Cuomo will face challenges in pushing his plans. The AFT has already made clear that they will fight Cuomo’s plan; they will likely enlist state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who collected $14,400 in donations from the state affiliate between 2004 and 2010. The fact that the union has also given $2.3 million to Republicans in the state senate — including $36,900 to Silver’s counterpart, Majority Leader Dean Skelos — all but assures that the union will get a, umm, equal time with the union. So Cuomo will have to rally school reformers, including Bloomberg and centrist and liberal Democrat reformers to mount a strong challenge against AFT opposition. The governor and school reformers may also have to go further and actually endorse primary challenges by reform-minded candidates against Silver’s colleagues just to keep the speaker honest.

Meanwhile Cuomo should also push for the long-term overhaul of state education governance. Although the governor does appoint the state Board of Regents, the fact that his appointees must be approved by both houses of the state legislature all but guarantee that Cuomo will have to present ostensibly compromise-orient players. While some regents, notably current Board of Regents Chairman Meryl Tisch (an appointee of Cuomo predecessor George Pataki), have turned out to be far more aggressive reformers than one would have expected, the reality is that education is one priority that should be directly under the governor’s purview. Given the economic development importance of overhauling the state’s education system, Cuomo should have the state education commissioner directly in his cabinet.

No matter what happens, Cuomo is showing, as outgoing colleague Mitch Daniels has done in Indiana, that governors without direct oversight of education can actually foster and sustain reform.

Bobby Jindal’s Push for Choice: While Dropout Nation has devoted plenty of space to reform efforts in other states, it hasn’t taken as much notice as it should about what is happening in Louisiana outside of the Recovery School District effort in New Orleans, which has been the epicenter of the expansion of charter schools and school choice. Yet one has to argue that the Bayou State is one of the few that has continuously done the right things in expanding school choice and improving teacher quality. The effort to analyze the performance of its university schools of education in recruiting and training teachers — using value-added analysis of student test score data — is one of the most-pathbreaking in the nation. It has exposed the results of the low quality of training among most of state’s ed schools. It  has also proven the effectiveness of programs such as those at the University of New Orleans as well as shown how low-performing nearly all of them are compared to the alternative teacher training operation run by TNTP, the national outfit which, along with Teach For America, is at the vanguard of the teacher quality reform movement.

The state’s governor, Bobby Jindal, is looking to further burnish the state’s efforts on the teacher quality front this week with his proposal to eliminate near-lifetime employment for laggard teachers with unsatisfactory ratings on the state’s new teacher evaluation system, while pushing further on expanding charters by allowing successful charter operators to expand without having to go through the current approval process, and allowing the state education department to authorize charters throughout the state (and thus, ending efforts by traditional districts to restrict school choice within their boundaries).

But Jindal may end up making the greatest impact with his proposals to expand school choice. Besides the charter school expansion plans, Jindal proposes to expand the state’s school voucher program, which currently serves only 1,800 students in New Orleans, by allowing low-income families to escape any of the failing traditional schools throughout the state. Essentially families whose students attend 70 percent of the Bayou State’s traditional public schools — or as many as 398,453 children, depending on how the program ends up being structured — would be eligible for vouchers. If Jindal can get the proposal — along with a voucher-like tax rebate plan — passed by the legislature, he will have helped poor and minority families escape the worst American public education offers instead of remaining in dropout factories that endanger their futures.

Meanwhile another proposal would, if crafted properly, would also strike a blow for the wider Parent Power movement. Under the other Jindal proposal, parents of students attending failure mills throughout the state would be allowed to vote on whether it can become part of the Recovery School District after three years of persistent academic underachievement; the schools would essentially be converted into charters under state oversight. Currently, the Recovery district can take control of a failing school after four years without consulting families at all. This would essentially create a Parent Trigger law of a sort for the Bayou State, allowing families to take control of the schools within their communities and lead their overhaul instead of waiting on dysfunctional districts (which often perpetuate systemic failure) to improve themselves.

It also brings a new feature to the Recovery district model, allowing families to be real decision-makers in education and not simply imposing school overhauls (even if they are warranted). This, along with Jindal’s plan to allow universities, nonprofits, and community groups to authorize charters, could also make charter school operators work more-closely with communities, an issue that Dropout Nation discussed last year during the fracas in New York City over expanding charter schools.

Jindal will certainly find himself battling with both the National Education Association affiliate there and suburban districts, each of which have reasons to oppose both measures. The good news is that he will have some allies with which to work. The Black Alliance for Educational Options, for example, has long been a strong defender of the New Orleans voucher plan and has helped Jindal craft the proposed expansion. (The RiShawn Biddle Consultancy, a firm owned by Dropout Nation Editor and Publisher RiShawn Biddle, provides communications services to BAEO.) There is also the American Federation for Children’s Bayou State branch, which will also be helpful in massing support for his plans. But Jindal will definitely need additional reform support to keep pressure on legislators to support his plans. And he will have to work the grassroots, especially in New Orleans, to keep the push going.

Meanwhile Jindal should also work with the state education department to make the state’s school data systems easier for parents to use. While what is currently available works decently — and is more-simplified thanks to the state’s letter grading system — some work still needs to be done to move away from those clunky Excel spreadsheets that even researchers sometimes struggle to use.

As your editor made clear at the end of last year, Louisiana would be a state that reformers would follow intensely. And now, Jindal has given them even more reason to pay attention. And get involved.

The Problem of the School Inspector Concept: Give the Education Sector credit for offering a new approach to systemic reform with last week’s report on how states and the federal government could embrace the school inspection concept based on the model used in Great Britain. At the very least, the concept is an interesting approach to measuring the quality of schools — and could provide the kind of information families need to know what schools look like as well as how well they do in improving student achievement.

Is it workable? Well, one can argue that state education agencies don’t have the capacity for such an effort. But the capacity issue is one that states will have to deal with anyway, especially as we move to the Hollywood Model of Education in which the traditional district model is ditched altogether; this is because states will have to expand its capacity in order to better oversee the variety of schools that will fall under its oversight.

The real question is whether it should substitute for the accountability systems put in place thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act? That’s a different story. There are far too many flaws in the school inspector concept for it to work in that role.

The first problem starts with the flaws inherent in any system of observation that doesn’t involve the use of student performance data in evaluating school or teacher quality. As Dropout Nation noted last week in its report on teacher evaluations, even the most-rigorous classroom observation approaches are far less accurate in identifying teacher quality than either value-added analysis of test score data or even student surveys such as the Tripod system used by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of its Measures of Effective Teaching project. If classroom observations are generally inaccurate, why would we expect site inspections — even those structured by a rigorous rubric as the model developed in Britain by that nation’s Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), Children’s Services and Skills — to work any better. The subjectivity bias could particularly hurt charter schools, many of which operate in buildings that don’t necessarily resemble traditional public school sites.

This is a particularly important issue when it comes to the factor within schools that is the most important of all: The quality of teaching. Considering that observations of any kind can only measure the observable aspects of teaching and not the impact of teachers on student achievement (which is the most important matter and the one that cannot be observed at all), it is unlikely that a school inspector system can do any better than either traditional classroom observations or even the advanced systems being supported by the Gates Foundation in giving families a good sense of what is going on in classrooms or schools as a whole.

The fact that many of 27 areas measured through the British model relate little to student achievement or the student experience — a point made by ConnCAN’s Patrick Riccards — also makes the school inspector model not ready for prime time. Considering that we have evidence that students are far more familiar with school quality than most of the adults in schools (or any adult walking into them for only a few hours in a school year), embracing the inspector approach seems a rather wrongheaded idea.

Then there are the relevations — courtesy of the Times Educational Supplement in a series of reports on school inspections since last May — that Britain’s schools have figured out rather novel ways to improve their profiles for scheduled inspections. As it turned out, schools were paying off truant students to avoid school on days of inspection, as well as schools passing around laminated artwork in order to improve the aesthetics. While Ofsted is now planning unannounced inspections in order to get around this gamesmanship, one wonders if Her Majesty’s government would be better off simply relying on value-added analysis of student data. After all, even in the British system, student achievement trumps site inspections as the most-important measure of school success.

The school inspection concept is a nice idea. But it is no substitute for comprehensive accountability based on objective evidence of how schools and the adults working within them help children succeed in school and life. What we should do instead is expand upon the accountability measures set in place a decade ago under No Child — and provide families with the data they need (including, contrary to the assertions of our friend, Andy Rotherham, value-added data on teacher performance) so they can make smart choices and spur systemic reform.

Etcetera: For the past two years, Dropout Nation has argued that President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan should structure future Race to the Top grant competitions to include reform-minded traditional districts, along with charter school operators, and even community groups. Such an approach would further systemic reform by essentially allowing them to become enterprise zones of sorts freed from state laws and collective bargaining agreements. So it’s good to see that Duncan may work on such an effort in the next go-round — if he can get Senate Democrats and (far more skeptical) Congressional Republicans to go along.

Connecticut, where Gov. Dan Malloy is putting together a school reform agenda, is one of five states where there will be great opportunities for reform -- and equally great obstacles to overcome.

Certainly discussions about the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act will be one of the big issues in the coming year — as will the Obama administration’s efforts to essentially gut the law’s accountability provisions through its less-than-thoughtful waiver gambit (which, as the Center for American Progress has shown in its recent report, hasn’t brought out much good from any of the states applying to escape the law). School reform will also be an issue in this year’s presidential election race.

But there will be plenty of action at the state level, especially when it comes to expanding school choice, overhauling teacher performance management, and forcing school districts to shut down or revamp dropout factories. School reformers and teachers’ unions will go after each other in state and congressional races; expect Democratic primaries for statewide and legislative offices to be venues in which centrist and liberal Democrat reformers clash with National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates, along with allies among progressive groups that have become beneficiaries of union largesse.

Certainly Michigan and Pennsylvania — the sites of action on the school choice front — will once again be in the headlines. So will New York State, where the education commissioner, John King, has proposed to cut off federal School Improvement Grant dollars to districts that have not enacted the Empire State’s teacher evaluation program. Expect Indiana to also be back in the news, especially with the proposed effort to put the state’s largest school district, Indianapolis Public Schools, into the hands of the city’s mayor. But there will be more. Here is Dropout Nation‘s small list of states where there will be plenty of action.

1) Connecticut: The Nutmeg State’s governor, Dan Malloy, has declared that the 2012 legislative session will focus largely on education reform — and has offered his own roadmap for the legislature to follow. Likely on the list is an effort to abolish the state’s reverse seniority law that essentially guarantees that veteran teachers keep their jobs during layoffs regardless of their performance at the expense of talented but-less senior colleagues; more money for early childhood education may also be on the table. Given the presence of the state’s new education commissioner, Stefan Pryor, a push for expanding the number of charter schools serving students in the state may also be on the table. All of this follows on a series of interesting, but vague proposals offered up in November by the state’s superintendent’s association, and the work of a school finance panel that Malloy put together earlier this year.

Whether or not any of his proposals come to fruition is a different story. For one, Malloy is squabbling with fellow Democrats who control the state’s legislature; some aren’t exactly too pleased with some of Malloy’s plans, including the consolidation of the state’s community colleges into one system akin to those in Indiana, and are even less pleased with Malloy’s success in gaining more authority to cut the state’s budget. Malloy is having particular trouble with Gary Holder-Winfield — a major player on education in the statehouse — and Roberta Willis (who sits on the state legislature’s higher education panel); this will make it difficult for Malloy to pass any school reform legislation.

Second, there will be other battles over which Malloy will have to weigh in. Parent Power activists such as the Connecticut Parents Union are already gearing up for a fight with the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association over expanding the reach of the state’s Parent Trigger law; the fight is particularly tinged by revelations earlier this year of the AFT’s presentation on how it unsuccessfully attempted to kibosh the passage of the Parent Power law and how it exacted revenge by ousting Jason Bartlett, the legislator who led the passage of the law and the neutralizing of his former colleague, Gary Holder-Winfield. (The revelations, by the way,so embarrassed the AFT that it forced national President Randi Weingarten to issue a series of non-apology apologies and meet with Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel and other activists.) Parent Power activists are particularly miffed that the AFT and NEA managed to exempt seven schools the unions control, called CommPACT schools, from the state’s Parent Trigger law by allowing them to not assemble school governance councils through which parents can exercise the Parent Trigger and push for the overhaul of failing schools.

Parent Power groups are also going to push the legislature to eliminate the state’s Zip Code Education policies, which essentially limit the ability of poor and minority families to provide their kids the high-quality education they deserve. Particularly motivated by efforts in Norwalk to convict homeless mother Tanya McDowell of what can only be laughingly called “stealing education” and a lawsuit filed by a Connecticut grandmother, Marie Menard, against the Stratford school district after it indicted her and her daughter for sending her grandchildren to that district’s schools. Parent Power activists will also likely have a few choice words for Malloy, who left those groups and other reformers off his school finance reform panel.

Then there are the efforts of ConnCAN, the state’s leading reform outfit, to revive a proposed overhaul of the state’s teacher evaluation system; the law had failed to gain passage last year. Also, ConnCAN will likely battle against the NEA’s effort to move teacher certification and accountability out of the purview of the state’s education department to a panel over which the NEA and AFT would likely have significant influence.

2) New Jersey: There is plenty of unfinished business for the state’s tough-talking governor, Chris Christie, and the reform-minded Democrats which control leadership in the statehouse. The first lies with Christie’s efforts to pass a law allowing for companies to get tax credits for offering school vouchers to poor and minority students. One of several bills that have been held up in the legislature since June, the NEA’s Garden State affiliate, along with suburban school districts, have strongly opposed its passage — and has been so controversial that it was a driving force behind an unsuccessful attempt by 13 lower house legislators to oust Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver. The speaker, who is backed by state senate powerhouse and school reformer George Norcross, has all but said that the legislation will be considered whether or not she gets the full backing of the Democratic caucus; this, in turn, would require Oliver (and Christie) to win backing from the assembly Republican minority.

There is also a proposed teacher merit pay bill that has been the subject of negotiations between Christie and State Senate President Steve Sweeney. Sweeney announced earlier this month that he and Christie were close to reaching a compromise on that plan. There is also an effort to overhaul the state’s special education ghetto and a push to move school board elections from April to November; the state’s school board association backs both measures, especially the latter (since it allows districts taxing below the state’s property tax levy to put budgets before voters for approval).

Meanwhile the NEA, along with suburban districts, are pushing for the passage of Assembly Bill 3582, which would require the charter schools to be approved by voters in the neighborhoods that the schools would serve. If the bill is passed (and supporters of the bill can override the likely veto from Gov. Chris Christie), it won’t actually do much to stop the opening of charters in big cities such as Newark (where families have been voting for charters with their feet for some time). But it will likely keep charters from opening in New Jersey’s tony suburbs, whose districts have long opposed any kind of school reform.

With only one month — next month to pass all these bills, expect a flurry of activity from state legislators. Of course, Christie can also call a special session and force the legislature to work throughout the summer on passing the reforms he wants. Either way, what happens in New Jersey may set the agenda for what happens in other states where there is divided control of state government.

3) Virginia: Over the past two years, Gov. Bob McDonnell has been an absolute disappointment on the school reform front. Last year,  he didn’t put enough pressure on the Democratic majority that controlled the state senate to pass a proposed school choice bill; this led to the bill’s defeat. His teacher pay differential plan, which will provide additional dollars to districts in order to lu  while all he succeeded in doing is passing a watered down charter school expansion bill. Meanwhile McDonnell gave his now-former Secretary of Education, Gerard Robinson, little in the way of political backing or cover to push for any significant reforms; instead of seeking out a strong reformer with national credentials (which he could have actually found living in the state’s northern region near Washington, D.C.), McDonnell chose as Robinson’s successor, Laura Fornash, who has more experience with higher education than with K-12.

But now, with Republicans in control of both houses of the state legislature, McDonnell can actually pass some meaningful reforms. One critical move would be to pass the voucher-like tax credit bill that was defeated in the state senate last year after passage by the lower house; pushing for the creation of a state commission to authorize and oversee charter schools (or requiring the state’s education department to take on that task) would also be sensible. Another move that McDonnell should undertake is to revamp the state’s teacher evaluation system. This means

The Dominion State also has other issues to tackle. Start with the state’s pension system, of which teachers make up 43 percent of both active members and retirees. It is underfunded to the tune of $14 billion (as of the 2009-2010 fiscal year). Given that employees make just one percent of the $1.9 billion in annual contributions into the pension (the rest, including contributions that are supposed to be made by teachers and civil servants, are handed by state and local governments), this state of affairs really cannot continue. But it appears that the state legislature may simply ignore the problem. And if the legislature follows the rather irresponsible advice of House Appropriations Committee Director Robert Vaughn, the state may shove its head further in the sand by ignoring stricter financial reporting standards being crafted by the Government Accounting Standards Board that will force states to fully acknowledge the high cost of their deals with teachers’ unions and other public-sector unions.

4) Alabama: Two years ago, the NEA succeeded in convincing the Yellowhammer state’s legislature to kibosh a plan to allow for the existence of charter schools, and managed to back one of the few anti-charter school Republicans in current Gov. Robert Bentley. But school reformers have been working actively on this issue. And now, they have an ally in Bentley’s education policy director, Emily Schultz, a protege of Michelle Rhee who recently served as a staffer at school reform outfit Mass Insight. This, along with the lack of a permanent chief executive at the helm of the state’s department of education, the retirement of the Alabama NEA’s longtime boss (and political powerhouse) Paul Hubbert, and the fact that Republicans control both houses of the legislature, could lead to charter schools becoming a reality in the state. But given the longtime resistance toward charters and Bentley’s own political considerations, expect this to be a fight to the finish.

5) Washington State: Its status as one of the few states that don’t allow for the existence of charter schools must certainly be an embarrassment to its most-prominent residents, Bill and Melinda Gates, and the school reform-minded foundation that also makes its headquarters here. The fact that nearby Oregon and Idaho has become the leading school reform states in this part of the American West is also particularly embittering. So this may be the year that the state actually embarks on systemic reform.

The state’s governor, Christine Gregoire, made some noise last year with her bungled effort to consolidate the state’s education agencies into one operation. This time around, she is proposing to expand a year-old pilot teacher evaluation program throughout the entire state; under the plan, teachers rated “basic” for two consecutive years would join those rated “unsatisfactory” on probation. At the very least, it would finally move away from a two-level rating system that Gregoire argues doesn’t work.

The rest of her package — including a proposal to put six dropout factories under the control of state universities — is rather uninteresting. But Gregiore’s plans, tepid as they may be, could be the start of more action. The National PTA’s Evergreen State affiliate has already announced its push for allowing for the existence of charter schools, rubbing the state’s NEA affiliate the wrong way. The presence of Stand For Children in the state also makes it likely that charters will end up on the state legislative agenda whether the NEA likes it or not.

The bigger school reform play may come with the state’s gubernatorial elections. With Gregoire leaving office, it will likely be a race between Republican Rob McKenna, the state’s attorney general — who is a strong supporter of allowing for the existence of charters — and Congressman Jay Inslee, who has garnered the NEA’s endorsement. Given that McKenna currently leads Inslee in the gubernatorial race — and the overall fatigue with the Gregoire regime among the state’s voters, the election offers an opportunity for reformers to actually put the lessons they’ve learned from past political successes and losses into practice.

When it comes to school reform-minded governors, once and future Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber would not come to mind. During the eight years he served in Salem from 1995 to 2003, he was far-less aggressive on education than contemporaries such as Roy Barnes in Georgia, future President George W. Bush (then in Texas), and Dubya’s brother, Jeb. Nor did he offer much more when he successfully ran for a return to office last year. Even the move last year by the NEA’s Beaver State affiliate to endorse his rival in the Democratic primary had more to do with his proposal to fund schools based on performance — a novel concept that has been used unsuccessfully at the higher-ed level because it never involves disturbing existing funds — than with any pioneering efforts. Declared Oregonian columnist Steve Duin last year after reading one of Kitzhaber’s policy statements: “education reform isn’t part of his learning curve or his agenda.”

But this year, Kitzhaber may have actually set in motion what could be one of the most-important reform efforts that states should undertake: Reforming how states govern their K-12 schools and universities. Whether or not the effort is successful in the long run is a different story. But it does show reform-minded governors, including Chris Christie in New Jersey and even Mitch Daniels (now serving out his last years in Indiana), what they can and should do in order to sustain their reforms.

As Dropout Nation noted earlier this week, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative has definitely set in motion a series of reforms that have helped weaken the influence of teachers unions, push states (including those that never won federal money) to require the use of student performance data (including test score growth) in teacher evaluations, put more teachers under private sector-style performance management, and fostered the expansion of school choice. The effort, along with the school accountability measures enacted as part of the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, have also signaled the long-running shift of control of education from school districts (who were always mere tools of state governments) to the state level.

Yet states have not taken the opportunities given to them by Race to the Top and No Child to overhaul the byzantine structures of governance crafted a century ago by progressive reformers fearful of centralized power. Only 12 states allow for the governor to appoint chief state school officers, and only 33 governors have the power to appoint the majority or all of the members of state boards of education. In states such as California and Indiana, K-12 schools and universities are governed by an unwieldy array of boards, superintendents, university presidents, and bureaucracies, each competing to justify their existence. In many states, the teacher licensing agencies are separated from state departments of education, even though the functions should be under one roof; policymaking over matters such as setting cut scores on standardized tests end up being handled by different boards. And the shamble of results, especially when it comes to school reform, can be seen in muddied policies, turf-battles over policymaking, and stalled efforts on any sort of reform (including anything involving developing school data systems).

Reform-minded governors could use school reform as opportunities to reshape how schools are governed. But most have not. During his first campaign for Indiana governor, Daniels proposed to make the state education superintendent an appointed office, but never followed through on that plan; given the legacy of legendary predecessor Paul McNutt, who ramrodded a series to consolidations during the Great Depression (and Daniels’ own efforts on that front), it may not have even been possible. Earlier this year, Washington State Gov. Christine Gregoire offered up a ham-fisted plan to combine all state education agencies into one mega-operation; that plan didn’t go anywhere. Meanwhile governors such as Jerry Brown in California and Oklahoma’s Mary Fallin have simply abdicated their responsibilities on the education front.

Until July, the most-successful move in that direction was by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who convinced the legislature to expand the powers of the state’s emergency financial managers taking over school districts such as Detroit; but that move is still just whittling around the edges of massive, often-incompetent bureaucracies. Still, too few governors have proven willing to use their political capital to battle for the needed overhauls of how schools are governed. And these are the kind of battles that must come — especially in states that won Race to the Top dollars — in order to sustain reform.

Turning symbolism into reality: Kitzhaber education adviser Ben Cannon. Photo courtesy of the Oregonian.

But now comes Kitzhaber, who managed to work with a Democrat-controlled senate and a house equally split between the two major parties to successfully pass a law creating a new board of education that will control all of the elementary, secondary and postsecondary system. Kitzhaber and his successors would be able to appoint every member of that agency. The new law also ends the election of state school superintendents, merging that role into the governor’s job. As a result, by 2014, Kitzhaber (or whoever succeeds him in the governor’s office) will also directly run the state’s public school and education finance systems.

Making the governor the chief state schools officer is certainly symbolic; the real work will be done by whoever Kitzhaber or his successor appoints as his second-in-command in charge of education. This is where the proverbial devil is in the details of policymaking and executing.

Kitzhaber will have to do more than just appoint teacher-turned-state legislator Ben Cannon (who has been a player in pushing through the governor’s reform agenda) as his education adviser. He will need to follow the step taken by Bill Haslam in Tennessee and appoint a strong, thoughtful, nationally-known school reformer to be the chief agitator for reform. This reformer, along with Cannon, will have to play good cop-bad cop in order to get things done. Kitzhaber will have to also keep his Spitzer-like reputation in check; he can’t afford to be an Oregon version of Adrian Fenty, behaving arrogantly when he should play nice; he should also continue to stare down the NEA in order to succeed. And Kitzhaber must address the state’s teacher quality issues. Two of the Beaver State’s ed schools have already been criticized by the National Council on Teacher Quality for their lackluster efforts in training aspiring teachers; the fact that NCTQ has had to filed open records requests just to get other ed schools in the state to cooperate with its national evaluation effort also doesn’t look good. Kitzhaber should put public pressure on the ed schools to cooperate fully, and shape up their offerings.

But the move in Oregon is symbolism with substance. It signals what should always be the case in every state: That governors should be responsible for the direction of education in their states. Given that the increasingly knowledge-based economy makes high-quality critical even for blue-collar jobs and long-term economic growth, governors should be actively working to overhaul schools. Every governor should look at Kitzhaber’s effort and launch their own campaigns to overhaul how their states govern schools. Given the waning influence of NEA and AFT affiliates in many states — and the budget-cutting tools states have at their disposal to reduce opposition from suburban districts — the time is now.

All's quiet on the Massachusetts front -- tonight at least. Photo by PhilPie

One of the continuing themes of Dropout Nation is the intersection between reforms started by federal education policy and school reform initiatives on the state and local levels. Another is the declining influence of the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, suburban districts and other education traditionalists who push against these efforts. Few of us could have predicted that the changes that are now present today — including the abolition of collective bargaining rules in Wisconsin — would have come to pass in exactly the way it has, and even fewer would have been able to explain how the federal Race to the Top initiative (along with earlier reforms including the No Child Left Behind Act) would have led to all this. What will be interesting is what happens in the coming years, especially as the bungling of No Child by the Obama administration has now created chaos at the federal level.

In this Best of Dropout Nation from November 2009, Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle observed the first moves by states looking to get their hands on the federal cash that came as part of Race to the Top — and the battles with teachers unions that marked those steps. This week, we will look at the next possible directions that the battle over school reform may go in the coming two years.

Last month, I noted how states such as California and Tennessee have pushed to qualify for federal Race to the Top funding by passing measures lifting caps on the number of charter schools and allowing the use of student test data in measuring teacher performance. Now, New York and Massachusetts are trying to get into the act. And unfortunately for school reformers in those states, not even federal money is enough to gain traction.

Tonight, senators in the Bay State passed a reform measure by a vote of 28-11 after hours of debate and some 100 proposed amendments. The bill does lift the cap on the number of charters the state can authorize, but it also restricts the presence of charters to areas of the state where traditional public schools are in pervasive academic failure. Charter school advocates weren’t satisfied for several reasons, including the fact that the requirement that the first three schools authorized had to be located in the worst-performing districts; since only three charter schools are approved annually, the advocates fear that charter school expansion is just smoke.

Opponents of charter school expansion may figure out a way to kill the bill in Massachusetts’ lower house. One legislator, Liz Malia, has already told the StateHouse News Service that: “Charter advocates did a lot of things very quietly… and they got too much of the pie.” The bill may not even be passed this year.

Meanwhile in the Empire State, the New York State United Teachers — an affiliate of both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association — is already bearing its teeth in opposition to a set of proposals from state Assemblyman Sam Hoyt to end the state’s ban on using test scores in evaluating the performance of probationary (pre-tenure) teachers and lift the cap on charter school expansion.  The state Education Department and Board of Regents also wants to bring back the use of test scores in evaluations. Given that United Teachers successfully brought the ban back to life last year after it was ended in 2007, the likelihood of tying student and teacher performance may be a dead horse not worth the time for legislators — thinking about their re-election efforts — to kick.

New York State officials also remain stubborn about addressing other changes needed to qualify for Race to the Top. Lame duck Gov. David Paterson (yes, he’s running for election, but he’s unlikely to win) hasn’t been willing to exercise any of the pluck he has shown in battling the legislature over the state’s fiscal morass. The new state education commissioner, David Steiner, also seems less interested in reform than even his predecessor, the much-lauded (and also, much-bemoaned and often spendthrifty) Richard Mills.

These battles do show the limits of federal government-led reform initiatives even when the dollars are attached to the effort. That the final Race to the Top rules hardly touch teacher quality reform — among the most-important issues in achieving true education reform — also makes the opposition among traditional education supporters at the state level seem rather, well, ridiculous. After all, allowing parents additional school options — and thus, making them true partners in education decision-making — should be embraced by every educator. And test score data is certainly far more objective than the standards used in private-sector performance reviews (which, by the way, use plenty of subjective multiple measures).

School reformers have clearly won the battle for the hearts and minds of leaders at the federal level; they have certainly won the day in states such as Indiana and Colorado, where legislators and governors have reached agreement some agreement on the need for overhauling public education. Even California, who may find itself replacing one reform advocate (Arnold Schwarzenegger) with another (former Gov. Jerry Brown) after 2010, may actually move towards meaningful reform.

But in states where systemic political dysfunction is the norm, teachers unions and other defenders of traditional public education can rally supporters on their behalf.  They can count on  some of their longtime critics on issues such as the expansion of charter schools. There is also the skepticism of school reform among suburban parents, who may realize public schools are in atrocious shape, but also have a relationship with schools and teachers that few school reformers (save for the Steve Barrs and Geoffrey Canadas) have dared to match.

The relationships between parents, traditional public school officials and teachers are, for the most part, superficial; the latter two are disinterested in any active parental involvement outside of the traditional jobs of supervising homework and attending field trips. They don’t want parents to be full partners in decision-making. But like any, dare one say, abusive relationship, the parents are more than willing to play along . And together, this trinity is formidable against school reform. In those states, school reformers must move themselves out of the Beltway and into the grassroots in order to win the day.

Given the influence of state legislation on local reforms and on national efforts, these battlegrounds will loom larger in school reform discussions.

Last week, Dropout Nation revealed the American Federation of Teachers’ true feelings about Parent Trigger laws and Parent Power efforts. Since then, media out such as the Wall Street Journal and the Daily News have editorialized on the cynical efforts while Parent Power activists such as former California State Sen. Gloria Romero — who authored the nation’s first Parent Trigger law and was mentioned in the presentation — demanding that AFT President Randi Weingarten “offer an immediate apology and a commitment to never let something like this happen again.”

But there are other ways education traditionalists can weaken Parent Power — and this is true in Connecticut (the subject of, and test case for, the AFT’s presentation) and in the rest of the country. See, last month, the state legislature passed something called Public Act 11-135, which took the terrible step of delaying the move to improve the state’s mediocre high school graduation standards. As part of the law, state legislators wrote in language that exempts seven schools, called CommPACT schools, from the state’s Parent Trigger law. Essentially, those schools aren’t required to assemble school governance councils, the vehicles by which parents can exercise the Parent Trigger and push for the overhaul of failing schools.

By the way: Six of the seven CommPACT schools — M.D. Fox in Hartford, Barnum School and Bassick High School in Bridgeport, Hill Central Music Academy in New Haven, and Washington Elementary and West Side Middle School in Waterbury — were among the first schools that had to put school governance councils in place by November of this year; Barnum, Bassick and Hill Central should have had them in place already.

Members on the state committee charged with overseeing the implementation of the state’s Parent Trigger law were kindly informed about this after the law was passed.

Now, why would the CommPACT schools be exempted from the state’s Parent Trigger law? In theory, the schools are run by parents, teachers and other community members. But given that the Nutmeg State’s AFT and NEA affiliates are intensely involved in the management of the CommPACT schools — with the executive director of the NEA affiliate and four other union leaders holding seats on the 13-member advisory board — the exemption isn’t surprising. While each of the CommPACT schools has a board that consists of principals, teachers union officials, community members and parents, there is no capacity for families to push through an overhaul if they think any of the schools need a fix.

This is a shame because while some of the CommPACT schools such as Longfellow School in Bridgeport are having some success in improving student achievement so far (with just 22 percent of 7th graders reading Below Basic on the state’s achievement test in 2009-2010 versus 46 percent of them as sixth-graders a year earlier), other schools aren’t making the grade. At M.D. Fox School in Hartford, for example, 66 percent of fifth graders read Below Basic in 2009-2010, versus 57 percent of them as fourth-graders the year before. At Hill Central Music Academy in New Haven, 73 percent of fifth-graders read Below Basic in 2009-2010, versus 46 percent of them as fourth-graders the previous year.

By exempting the CommPACT schools from the state’s Parent Trigger law, the state has essentially taken power away from parents that they deserve. Once again, poor and minority families get less than their due. But let’s be clear: This wasn’t the only failure with this bill. State legislators voted for Public Law 11-135 even though organizations such as ConnCAN  had steadfastly opposed its other provisions, which included delaying the implementation of the new high school graduation standards approved last year. That the state legislature passed everything contained in the legislation — including the weakening of Parent Power — and that Gov. Dan Malloy signed it speaks plenty about the Nutmeg State’s seriousness about reforming education so that all kids, including those from poor and minority households — can succeed in school and life.

Of course, Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel (who kindly provided the information to Dropout Nation) isn’t exactly pleased with this legislation; expect it to be challenged next year during the state’s special legislative session on education. Once again, as I note in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, the lessons for Parent Power activists and school reformers everywhere are simple: Play the political game smartly; rally the grassroots; ask smart questions; and hold politicians accountable.

The only kids at Manual High who may graduate. Photo courtesy of the Indianapolis Star.

Even among the nation’s 2,000 dropout factories, Emmerich Manual High School in Indianapolis stands out for its pervasive academic failure. Within the past three decades, the district that operates the school, Indianapolis Public Schools, has instituted numerous reform efforts, including the replacement of principals, to something called the Alpha Program (which monitored the classwork of Manual’s constantly bulging population of 16-year-old freshmen), and even a move funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to break up Manual into smaller high schools within the same building. And still, Manual remains a failure mill.

At some point, one has to realize that the problem is not just laggard teachers and administrators, but a district that perpetuates systemic failure. The same culture of incompetence at the school is usually mirrored by central office staffs — many of whom were once abysmal teachers and principals themselves. And IPS, one of the worst school districts in the Midwest outside of Detroit, has certainly proven to be incapable of serving children. The regime of Eugene White, who came to the district in 2005 to lead its overhaul, has proven to actually further the incompetence, with abysmal school leaders such as Jackie Greenwood — who ran Manual’s equally abysmal sister school, Arlington Community — failing upward, principals taking up successful overhauls (notably former John Marshall Middle School Principal Jeffery White) being forced out, and rampant nepotism (including the appointment of White’s own son to an IPS position) becoming the norm.

This persistent failure explains Friday’s move by Indiana Superintendent Tony Bennett to begin the takeover Manual, Arlington and four other IPS schools that have been abject disgraces for the past six years (and, in all honesty, much longer than that). The new question is whether the Hoosier State can succeed in turning around those schools when so many others have failed.

While the state has not yet chosen any of the five turnaround models available under the state’s own school accountability law, it has already selected three private-sector school operators to handle the effort. The problem with the choices? The quality of the operators may not stack up to the challenge. One of them, the EdPower division of local charter school Charles A. Tindley, may actually be capable of doing the work, especially since Tindley is one of the state’s best charters. But EdisonLearning, the famed school turnaround outfit started two decades ago by Chris Whittle, has not had a strong record of success. Its failures to improve student achievement in Baltimore and Philadelphia are enough to put it out of the running in any turnaround situation. (I’m still reporting on the third, Charter Schools USA.)  Bennett and his staff could have — and should have — selected a stronger group of outfits or even encouraged existing charter school operators in the state — including the Knowledge Is Power Program chain — to get into the turnaround game.

The second problem is that turnarounds in general don’t work. As former Thomas B. Fordham Institute scholar Andy Smarick (now a  New Jersey state official working on Chris Cerf’s efforts) pointed out in his own study of school turnarounds, just 11 percent of California schools placed into overhaul had made “exemplary progress” three years later; just nine percent of laggard schools in Ohio managed successful turnarounds. And as seen in New Jersey — where the state took over a series of districts, including Jersey City — and New York with its effort to turn around the Roosevelt school district, states just do an abysmal job of operating schools and districts. State education departments such as Indiana’s just lack the infrastructure to keep tabs on turnaround or even operate schools. That the state still has to take on the systemic problems throughout American public education — including the low quality of teacher training — that have helped foster these failure mills means that no turnaround will be simple work.

There are two moves Bennett should consider doing. The first comes courtesy of Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard, who offered earlier this year to take over oversight of the schools,converting the schools into charters, either allowing charter operators or even community groups (including parents) to run those schools. It would be similar to the move five years ago by Louisiana’s state government to launch the Recovery School District and would follow upon what Detroit is attempting to do; given that Ballard is already in charge of authorizing and overseeing charter schools, the mayor (and, if he loses office this year, opponent Melina Kennedy) has the capacity to make this a success.

The second: Take the steps made by reform-minded districts such as New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, to shut down the dropout factories and replace them with new charter schools. Given that Manual, Arlington and the other schools have been failing for decades, it makes no sense to continue educational malpractice. Either way, the kids deserve better than what these failure mills have offered for far too long.