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.

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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.

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The shutdown last month of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the New York City school law nonprofit that successfully fought for New York State to provide more funding to New York City schools in the last decade, has marked the end of the traditional school funding suits. It makes sense. Despite the arguments (and the pretty charts) of such defenders as Rutgers’ Bruce Baker, there is no evidence that spending more on American public education will lead to better results for children. With so much money tied up by ineffective practices such as degree- and seniority-based compensation (including $8 billion a year dedicated to additional pay for teachers earning master’s degrees), it will take the systemic reform of K-12 in order to make school spending more effective in improving student achievement.

But what if equity lawsuits came back to form, this time with school choice activists and Parent Power advocates leading the way? This could possibly happen in states such as Connecticut, the site of three cases in which parents have been arrested for what can only laughingly be called tuition fraud. The idea of using equity and adequacy lawsuits to push for vouchers and other forms of school choice may not exactly be music to the ears of either conservatives generally opposed to judicial activism or to education traditionalists who are foes of all school choice. But if choice activists and civil libertarian groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union successfully take up such moves, it would lead to another round of school choice efforts that would provide more poor and minority children with opportunities to get the high-quality education they deserve.

Such a move wouldn’t be surprising. The ACLU proved its willingness to weigh into this arena two years ago when its Southern California branch successfully sued the Los Angeles Unified School District over the effects of reverse-seniority layoffs on three of the district’s middle school failure factories. The suit led to a settlement that abolishes the use of seniority in determining teacher layoffs at L.A. Unified’s worst failure mills. Other legal activists outside of education are also entering the arena, mostly against school choice. This includes the Legal Center for People with Disabilities and Older People in Colorado, which is attempting to halt the effort by the Douglas County school district to launch a voucher program on the grounds that the initiative would discriminate against students with disabilities. The ACLU’s Wisconsin branch is also involved in a similar suit over the recently-expanded Milwaukee voucher program.

What would motivate efforts to use legal means to expand school choice? Cases such as that of Tanya McDowell, the homeless Bridgeport, Conn., woman currently charged with stealing education after sending her child to a school in nearby Norwalk; 26 other students in that district have been kicked out of school since McDowell’s case came to light. Her case, and that of two other Nutmeg State parents and caregivers, have all come on the heels of Ohio mother Kelley Bollar-Williams’ conviction earlier this year for supposed tuition fraud.

These cases have made clear that it’s time to end zip code education, and have been the driving forces behind successful efforts in 13 states to enact school choice measures. But as seen in Pennsylvania, where efforts to pass a voucher plan and a tuition tax credit initiative fell to seed, a lot must be gotten right in order to successfully battle suburban districts, National Education Association and American Federation locals, and other foes of choice. So choice activists, including those centrist and liberal school reformers finally convinced of the need for vouchers, tax credits and inter-district public school transfers, may end up trying to persuade judges to see their side.

At the heart of such suits would be the education provisions within state constitutions. In 15 states, the constitutions require them to encourage and promote educational opportunities and the development of knowledge “adequate” educational opportunities for children. This could, in theory, be interpreted to allow for the existence of school vouchers  and voucher-like tax credit plans that allow private-sector firms to start their own voucher programs in exchange for tax breaks. In Illinois, for example, the state is required to finance “the  system of public education”, essentially allowing for the possibility of vouchers; same in Georgia, where the state is called to provide an “adequate” education system, which can include financing public schools and offering vouchers.

But in most states, the constitutions require their governments to only provide for “free public schools”. Blaine Amendments, originally crafted by Know-Nothings and other religious bigots during the 19th century to prevent Catholic schools from receiving state dollars, further restrict the ability to finance vouchers. But this isn’t necessarily a barrier to choice. Since the clauses do require the states to provide for public schools, it also can be interpreted to allow for children to attend any public school they want, be it traditional or charter, in any part of the state. Practices that have led to zip code education, including the concept of zoned schools, are essentially unconstitutional; and thus, inter-district choice of the kind encouraged by otherwise foes of choice such as Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation would be allowable. It would also put an end to caps on the expansion of public charter schools, the nation’s most-prominent form of school choice.

A lawyer could argue that these clauses mean that a state has an “affirmative obligation” to provide a substantially equal educational opportunity to all schoolchildren in the public schools. This would include ensuring that every school is teaching according to a clear set of state standards and have adequate resources, all traditional equity and adequacy arguments. But it could extend further. A lawyer could challenge practices that lead to the lack of equity and access to high-quality education — and that would include rules that restrict families from getting those adequate resources by exercising school choice.

Districts would then be forced to accept students outside of their district boundaries. But this would also trigger another effect: The end of funding education through the use of property tax dollars collected by districts. Since states are required under their constitutions to provide for public schools, it can also be interpreted to say that state governments must also finance them too. Such judicial pressure, along with demands from districts who must now take on what they consider to be free riders on local taxpayer dollars, could finally force states to actually take steps that should have been done decades ago and move to a weighted student funding formula that would essentially act as vouchers with dollars following children to their respective school choices.

Certainly taking such court action wouldn’t be appreciated by conservative school reformers, who, like their movement allies in the political arena, are not fond of judicial activism. But it isn’t as if conservative reformers and school choice activists haven’t used courts in the past. A decade ago, conservatives such as Clint Bolick, along with groups such as the Center for Education Reform, backed the Zelman case, which led to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing for states to launch their own school voucher programs. One can easily imagine conservatives supporting similar efforts.

But more likely, it will be organizations such as Parent Revolution (which successfully pushed for the nation’s first Parent Trigger law) and other Parent Power groups now emerging on the school reform scene that will make the efforts. Why? Because they are better-positioned politically to reach out to traditionally left-of-center civil liberties groups such as the ACLU, which may be more-skittish of supporting school choice if it appears to be a conservative-led effort. Since Parent Power groups, along with other school reformers, are pushing to end traditional seniority-based pay scales and abolish Last In-First Out layoff rules, expect those efforts to be tied together with court-mandated torts for expanding choice.

All this said, there is plenty of what-ifs that come with this analysis, including judicial interpretation of what power state governments actually have to allow for inter-district choice. The Georgia Supreme Court’s ruling last May that the state didn’t have the constitutional standing to authorize charter schools — and that only districts could do so — is one example of this problem; judges can easily rule against such efforts based on that matter in legal interpretation called original intent. One must also remember that the earlier generation of equity and adequacy torts didn’t exactly achieve their long-term goals: The Abbott decision in New Jersey, for example, remains an shining example of why lawsuits aren’t exactly the cure for what ails American public education.

No matter what happens, these are interesting times for school choice. School reformers and Parent Power activists may end up embracing a tactic of education traditionalists in order to advance their goals.

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Photo courtesy of the Associated Press

Judging by the protests waged yesterday and all this month by the National Education Association’s New Jersey affiliate, one would have thought that the state legislature abolishing all of the defined-benefit pension and healthcare packages they hold so dear.

What the Garden State’s Democrat-controlled senate and assembly did last night was pass some modest adjustments. Teachers will now have to contribute 7.5 percent of their pre-tax pay to fund their pensions, admittedly a 50 percent increase over current contribution levels; but that is nothing compared to what private sector workers must pour into their defined-contribution plans in order to ensure a decent retirement. The fact that teachers are only allowed to retire at 65 – or the same age as private-sector counterparts – instead of 60 is no hardship at all. And the NEA, along with other public-sector unions, will hold seats on a new state agency charged with developing new, less-expensive healthcare plans for state workers, all but ensuring the union that it will influence those packages.

But for the NEA, the array of piecemeal reforms (which will save taxpayers a mere $122 billion over three decades, or less than the $201 billion in pension deficits and retiree healthcare liabilities outstanding) is symbolic of what has been happening throughout the nation for the past two decades: The days in which they could count on unquestioned support and cover from the Democratic Party is coming to an end.

This has been the case for the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers when it comes to the White House. Sure, President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have been more than willing to lavish stimulus dollars on behalf of the two unions and the traditional districts they hold servile (including the $10 billion Edujobs anti-layoff bailout). Money is all the NEA and AFT are getting. The unions are in a cold war with the administration thanks to its Race to the Top effort, which has helped push states into efforts to overhaul teacher quality and expand the number of charter schools serving the nation. And even before Obama took office, Democrats helped pass the No Child Left Behind Act, whose accountability provisions have helped shed light on the consequences of systemic educational failure perpetuated in part by the two unions.

The NEA and AFT thought they could at least count on Democrats holding court in America’s statehouses. For the most part, they have correctly assumed as much. From the effort two years ago by Indiana Democratic legislators in control of the Hoosier State’s lower house; to the move earlier this year by California Gov. Jerry Brown to remove two school reformers off the state’s board of education and replace them with NEA and AFT allies, statehouse Democrats have been more than mindful of their dependence on the coffers and rank-and-file members teachers unions bring to fore on their behalf.

But the lingering impact of the last recession, along with a sputtering economic recovery, means that many states will continue to collect less in revenues than they expect to spend. As a result, as many as 33 states will face at least $137 billion in budget shortfalls during their 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 fiscal years. Add in increases in Medicaid costs (states are expected to spend 19 percent more on those costs from their own coffers in 2011-2012), and at least $1.3 trillion in pension deficits and retiree healthcare costs, and suddenly, state governments must cut back on the generous deals they have struck over the past six decades with all public sector unions.

States controlled by Democrats — either with full control of statehouses or holding gubernatorial spots — face the greatest pressure of all; save for New York (which has technically covered its $147 billion pension deficit), Democrat-controlled states owe their public sector workers $1.1 trillion in pension benefits alone without enough funds to cover them. They can no longer simply tax their way out of these future expenses. Nor can they ignore one of the driving forces behind these expenses: Traditional teacher compensation, including degree- and seniority-based compensation and sick days (which can be used by teachers to buy service credit that can boost the final year income on which pension benefits are based). The high cost of the compensation, along with evidence that shows that they are ineffective in improving student achievement, and keeps laggard teachers in classrooms and fails to recognize and reward high-quality colleagues, has led politicians in those states to begin nibbling at the edges. Eventually, the increases in contributions will be followed-up by the more-radical efforts being undertaken in Wisconsin, Ohio and other Republican-controlled states.

For the NEA and AFT, the need for states to address these deficits comes just at an inopportune time. Despite the millions ponied up by the unions last year on behalf of Democrats, the party still lost control of the U.S. House of Representatives, majorities in state legislatures and gubernatorial spots. Democrats may still depend on teachers’ union largesse, but they no longer think that those dollars are worth all the kowtowing required to get them. The emergence of centrist and progressive Democrat school reformers as forces in statehouses also means that the prime foe at the federal level will become more fervent at the state level. With organizations such as Democrats for Education Reform and Stand for Children actively providing an alternative voice to the tired rhetoric of NEA and AFT affiliates — and with big-city mayors and young urban Democrats already galvanized for reform — the two teachers unions will continue to lose influence.

What happened last night in New Jersey — actually the latest in a series of moves by statehouse Democrats since Republican Gov. Chris Christie took office last year — is just one more example of the NEA and AFT ending up on the defensive. This can also be seen across the Hudson in New York State, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo successfully pushed the state Board of Regents to allow for student performance data on state tests to be used for as much as 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation; and in Illinois, where the AFT and NEA found themselves signing on to a series of modest (actually, hardly revolutionary) reform measures in order to stave off the possibility of even more-radical efforts. And despite last year’s lost by Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, more Democratic mayors will be looking to take over traditional school districts and authorize charter schools, further weakening the fraying ties between teachers unions and Democratic leaders.

This isn’t to say that Democrats and teachers unions will part ways. Democrats may be less-dependent on teachers’ union largesse, but they still dovetail ideologically on other issues. More importantly, the NEA and AFT really have nowhere else to turn. While they have been strong donors to Republicans in some states, the teachers unions can’t count on them to defend their interests either at the state or federal level. There will be more Scott Walkers, more John Kasichs and more Mitch Daniels ready to do battle. They need Democrats — including school reformers within the party’s ranks — and will have to adjust their rhetoric accordingly.

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And now, Bob McDonnell isn't the only one AWOL from Virginia's school reform scene.

Earlier this month, Dropout Nation criticized Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and the Old Dominion’s political leadership for failing to aggressively embrace school reform. The apparent unwillingness of the governor to actually use his political capital this year to push through a school choice measure (and push for a more-aggressive law allowing for greater expansion of charter schools in the last) was just one of numerous examples of non-existent political and civic leadership on overhauling the state’s public schools. The results of the woeful leadership — including falling behind Florida in improving education prospects for poor and minority children — led your editor to demand that parents do what their elected officials and school districts will not.

So today’s news that McDonnell’s Secretary of Education, Gerard Robinson, is heading to Florida to head up the Sunshine State’s own efforts is hardly shocking. The former Black Alliance for Educational Options chief executive hasn’t exactly been able to gain make much progress since becoming head of the state’s education secretariat last year — and McDonnell hasn’t been all that helpful on that end. In fact, Gov. McDonnell’s press staff could hardly muster a list of accomplishments under Robinson’s tenure for the press release announcing his departure.  This also says quite a bit about McDonnell’s own lack of success on the education front.

Certainly there is plenty that McDonnell could be doing when it comes to reform. And he can’t use the excuse that Virginia’s top executive office is weak in influence. All he has to do is look to Indiana — another weak governor state — where his fellow Republican, Mitch Daniels, has teamed up with state Superintendent Tony Bennett to push through the expansion of charter schools, creation of a new school voucher plan, and slowly overhauling how the state’s ed schools recruit and train aspiring teachers. Given what Scott Walker is doing in Wisconsin, the efforts of Chris Christie in New Jersey, and moves by Florida’s Rick Scott and Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, McDonnell’s lack of action becomes even more stupendous to behold.

McDonnell has a lot of work to do. It can be done. Simply pressing the state board of education to overhaul the Old Dominion’s lowly-ranked reading and math curriculum standards (or simply replacing it with Common Core) and ending the handing out of so-called “modified standard” and “special” diplomas (which allows their schools to avoid teaching them Algebra I and other state-mandated requirements), would be important steps in the right direction.

But right now, McDonnell will have to find a successor to Robinson with the stature, credibility and force of personality needed to confront the state’s educational ancien regime. More importantly, McDonnell needs to actually back the successor with his own clout. Otherwise, Virginia will remain as much a laggard on overhauling teacher quality, installing a college preparatory curricula, and expanding school choice as it ever was.

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Generally, your Dropout Nation editor pays no attention to either Daily Kos or RedState — and not just because they have nothing worth considering when it comes to the reform of American public education. Whether the issue is education or anything else, neither side represents the best thinking of their respective political ideologies. What they do instead is serve as the Marats and Robespierres for the ideological Left and Right: Overly dedicated to dogma; thoughtlessly adherent to orthodoxy; and inflexible in thought. They would sooner support intellectual and political lightweights unworthy to lead such as Howard Dean and Sarah Palin than anyone who veers slightly off their visions of the true and shining path. At least they don’t own real guillotines.

So it wasn’t surprising when RedState’s Erick Erickson — who has never missed a chance to slag a fellow conservative for being insufficiently adherent– accused Checker Finn and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute of being among heretics. Why? Because Finn took aim and fired straight at Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s opposition to enacting Common Core standards and improving the Lone Star State’s decent-but-not-great academic curriculum standards (which are highly-rated by Fordham in English, but are lackluster in math). Declaring that Fordham — especially Finn — are faux conservatives, Erickson then declares that “one-size-fits-all” standards would not work better than the state-centered school reform approach Perry has overseen during his tenure.

Now dear readers, you already know that Dropout Nation hasn’t exactly given Fordham’s leading lights a free pass for their sometimes curious approach to reform. It is particularly interesting that Fordham touts the Kissingeresque mishmash they call Reform Realism — which essentially calls for the gutting of accountability and less-expansive federal education policy — even as they tout the creation of a national set of curriculum standards through its embrace of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (which, given the Obama administration’s efforts on behalf of it, represents a soft form of expanding federal education policy). Fordham’s research czar, Mike Petrilli, again tried to pull off this rhetorical trick this past Wednesday during one of the institute’s latest pow-wows. And from where I sit, it’s still not convincing.

But foolish consistency, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once declared, is the hobgoblin of small minds. And Finn, Petrilli and their gang are not small minds. The essential argument that they can make for what their seemingly contradictory positions — that federal accountability has not worked adequately enough to justify its continuation in current form (because of the regulatory burdens on states, along with their gamesmanship of the law itself), while the acceptance of Common Core by those states is voluntary and could result in more-substantial reform — actually can stand some scrutiny. A substantially flawed argument for sure; the argument that accountability is a failure falls on its face because it has actually worked in exposing the failures of American public education and provided the evidence needed to push for such reforms such as the expansion of charter schools. But it is an argument that a principled conservative — especially those advocating for school reform — can make and still, well, be sufficiently conservative.

Contrary to what Erickson may think, a conservative can argue for limited government overall and still make a strong case for a more-expansive federal role in education. Given the importance of education in sustaining the nation’s economic growth and social fabric, the depths of the nation’s education crisis, and the fact that the federal government spends $55 billion a year (as of 2009) on subsidizing public school systems, a more-comprehensive federal role that advances reform makes sense. (One can argue legitimately that the feds shouldn’t be funding education in the first place; but that discussion has been had and settled decades ago.)

If you think of education in the same manner as infrastructure and public works, it is not only sensible for the feds to push for more-rigorous curricula and better instruction, it is imperative. In fact, it was the great conservative himself, Ronald Reagan, who agreed with this thinking and helped advance the school reform movement three decades ago with the publication of A Nation at Risk; by 1986, some 250 state and local panels had been formed to spur overhaul of American public education. Finn, of course, could argue this better than I, especially since he was a Reagan appointee to the U.S. Department of Education.

Erickson’s other contention — that Perry and his fellow officials in Texas are actually capable of spurring reform on their own and can come up with more-rigorous curriculum standards than those proposed in Common Core standards — would stand up to scrutiny if not for the facts in evidence. If Erickson took a closer look at Perry’s record on education reform, he would have offered a more-thoughtful response than the claptrap he cranked out.

The success Texas has had in improving its education systems has less to do with Perry than with the work done in the previous two decades by his predecessors, Ann Richards and future president George W. Bush. They launched the series of school accountability measures on which federal education policy — most-notably the No Child Left Behind Act — is now based. Since Perry entered the governor’s office a decade ago, that progress has slowed significantly compared to its peer southern states.

While the percentage of fourth-graders overall reading Below Basic proficiency (as measured on the National Assessment of Educational Progress) has declined from 41 percent to 35 percent between 1998 and 2009, it doesn’t compare to the 20-point decline in functional illiteracy achieved by Florida, a more-aggressive school reform state, in that same period, or even the 12-point decline in Virginia (whose governors, like Perry in Texas, stood pat for most of that period).

Dig even deeper into the data and Perry’s school reform record (and anti-Common Core positioning) looks even less impressive. Seventy-three percent of Texas’ black male fourth-graders read Below Basic in 2009, a mere 7-point decline from 1998; it is a slower rate of improvement in literacy than Florida’s 28 percent decline (from 81 percent to 53 percent) for the same population of students, and the 19 percent decline in functional illiteracy in Virginia. The 15-percent decline in functional illiteracy among Texas’ Latino male fourth-graders is also lower than the 31-point decline for the same population in Florida.

Perry’s campaign-inspired protestations against federal intervention (and Erickson’s defense of that caterwauling) would make sense if Texas wasn’t taking federal education dollars. In fact, federal dollars account for 10 percent of the Lone Star State’s spending on education, slightly more than the 9 percent national average. When Perry declares publicly that he wants Texas to hand back those dollars, then I’ll buy what he’s selling. Otherwise, it just comes off as more mouthing off for spare votes.

Of course, some centrist Democrats — notably Andy Rotherham — are laughing about this latest round of ideological cleansing. But they should be careful: This week’s Netroots Nation conference is full of so-called progressive Democrats who are more concerned with preserving the privileges of teachers unions (and buy into the ranting of Diane Ravitch) than with improving the educational and economic destinies of America’s poorest children. To the Daily Kos crowd, centrist and liberal Democrat reformers — especially U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Barack Obama — are insufficiently left-of-center. Watch your backs.

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