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.

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.

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.

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.

Photo courtesy of the Washington Post

This is an exciting time in the school reform movement — and not only because of teacher quality reforms happening in Tennessee and other states. Throughout the country, parents — especially those from poor and minority households — are starting to do battle with defenders of traditional public education and pushing to take their place at the head of the table of education decision-making.

In California, the parents who are members of Parent Revolution are battling school districts, affiliates of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, and even the state board of education in order to lead overhauls of the Golden State’s worst failure mills. The effort by the majority of parents at McKinley Elementary School to replace the Compton Unified School District as managers of the school — now tied up in litigation — is particularly pleasing because it is the first use of the state’s Parent Trigger law giving families the ability to actually shape how schools are overhauled.

Meanwhile in Connecticut, Gwen Samuel and the newly-formed Connecticut Parents Union is challenging the state to actions such as April’s arrest of homeless mother Tanya McDowell, who was charged with what can only laughingly be called stealing education, and demanding that the Nutmeg State offer parents school choice if it won’t hold districts accountable for student achievement. (Your Dropout Nation editor is an advisory board member for the organization.) The work the CTPU is doing — including imploring the state legislature to pass a law banning the use of reverse seniority, or Last In-First Out, rules in teacher layoffs (particularly in the worst-performing urban districts receiving federal School Improvement Grant dollars) — should inspire all of us to fight harder for every child, especially our own.

But as wonderful as this may be, there are still far too many states in which parents have not fully rallied to push for school reform. And one of those states is Virginia, which has long been perceived to have many of the best-performing districts in the nation. That perception, however, is not reality. And Virginia’s parents will have to fight as hard as — if not harder than — parents in other states just to push reform ahead.

Based on Dropout Nation‘s analysis of federal and state high school data, the Old Dominion’s five-year graduation rate (based on eighth-grade enrollment) has barely budged, from 84 percent for the Class of 2005 to 86 percent for the Class of 2009, trailing the progress made by more-aggressive school reform states in the region such as Tennessee (from 74 percent to 84 percent) and outside of it (New York State, for example, which went from 72 percent to 77 percent in that time). And this doesn’t consider the fact that Virginia’s kids are being given mediocre math instruction (rated C by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute) and the overall curricula is not even close to world class. Add in the fact that 5 percent of graduates are earning so-called “modified standard” and “special” diplomas (which allows their schools to avoid teaching them Algebra I and other state-mandated requirements), and that the pace of improvement in reading (as measured on the National Assessment of Educational Progress) has slowed compared to states such as Florida, and the Old Dominion is falling behind.

Once one digs deeper — and looks at results over the past five years — the reality gets more depressing. Just 61 percent of young black men in eighth grade attending Richmond’s public schools in the 2004-2005 school year were promoted to their senior year five years later, only slightly better than the rate for 8th-grade black men who were in the exiting graduating Class of 2005; the Promoting Power (or Balfanz) Rate for Latino males and Latino females declined, respectively, from 50 percent and 67 percent to 44 percent and 19 percent in that five-year period.  In Alexandria, the Balfanz Rate for black males in the Class of 2009 was 73 percent, not much better than for the Class of 2005; for Latino males, it had declined from 70 percent to 68 percent (rates for Latino and black females have improved, from, respectively, 71 percent to 92 percent and from 93 percent to 97 percent). While some districts in the state (notably the Henrico County district outside of Richmond and Augusta County in the Shenandoah Valley) have done better, and the state has had some improvements, it doesn’t mean all is well. Some of the relatively low levels of attrition, for example, can be easily attributed to the state’s otherwise strong population growth. But when one looks at other metrics of student performance, it is clear that children — especially those from poor and minority families — aren’t being well-served at all.

Yet the Old Dominion’s education traditionalists and many of its political leaders are unwilling to get off the snide. This was clear last year when the state board of education decided to not adopt Common Core State Standards in reading and math even though it is clear that much of what’s in place — particularly in math — falls below the rigor of what they have rejected. Even more of this shamefulness was on display earlier this year when black politicians in the Old Dominion’s state senate voted to kill a school choice plan that would have allowed poor and minority parents to keep their kids out of the worst American public education offers. Over the past couple of years, those politicians, along with the NAACP branch there, the state school board association and the NEA’s affiliate, have fought tooth-and-nail against expanding the number of charter schools in the state and other overhaul measures. While some parents have tangled with these education traditionalists — and in the case of long time state Sen. Henry Marsh, have even called out them out — there hasn’t been a mass movement for reform from parents.

In some ways, this isn’t surprising. When it comes to school reform, Virginia is the place where such efforts die. Even in a state that is home to some of the most-influential movers in the national school reform movement, neither the state’s newspapers (including the supposedly august Richmond Times-Dispatch) nor its business leaders — often the prime movers in pushing for reform — have taken up the cause in the way their colleagues in states such as Indiana have done. The lack of strong grassroots reform groups on the ground who can actually inform families about the low quality of teaching and curricula in traditional schools and also agitate for robust, thorough data systems, has also been a problem.

Meanwhile the leadership on the gubernatorial side of the statehouse has been absent. While Gov. Bob McDonnell did successfully push to abolish some restrictions on the growth of charters (and backed this year’s school choice plan), he has otherwise been AWOL on reform. Same for Gerard Robinson, the former president of Black Alliance for Educational Options, who now heads the state education secretariat. Although it can be argued that Robinson has little mandate to push for reform, it’s hard to tell if he’s even built it up in the first place. Given his school reform credentials, Robinson could easily use his bully pulpit to rally parents, business leaders and grassroots activists to push harder and faster on behalf of the children in the care of the schools he oversees.

But Virginia’s  parents can’t despair about the unwillingness of state leaders or even national organizations such as the NAACP to pursue systemic reform. There are plenty of school reform outfits — many right across the Potomac in Washington, D.C. — who can play their part. There are also the growing number of Parent Power groups, including Parent Revolution and the Connecticut Parents Union, who can offer advice on how to leverage the voice of families for action. There is even the lessons that can be gleaned from the civil rights movement and efforts by earlier generations of parents in Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood that can guide efforts in the Old Dominion. And, of course, your editor is also willing to offer advice to any Virginia parent activist ready to take up the charge. Especially since this is my home state (and one of several states I always maintain a particular interest).

Virginia’s children deserve better than mediocrity and failure. And only an army of families can force the reforms that must happen now.

When it comes to developing a robust school data system, California hasn’t exactly been the pioneer. As I reported three years ago in A Byte At the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era, the Golden State has spent much of the past two decades blundering the effort. The unwillingness of state officials to fully fund the roll out of the first system, California School Information Services, meant that it was only rolled out to 263 out of the states 1,058 school districts. Its current effort, the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System, has been even more troubled: It took five years for CALPADS to make it from legislative intent to begin full development in 2008. It took another year for the system to become somewhat operational. Last year, it was shut down for a time because of computer glitches; the state’s education department later demanded that the firm handling the development of CALPADS get it ship shape or default on the contract. And all in all, it is barely operational.

CALPADS should be shut down because it isn’t the fully comprehensive data system that policymakers, parents and schools needed in order to improve the quality of education for their students. But that’s not the reason why the state’s once-and-future governor, Jerry Brown, is proposing to do exactly that. Instead, he is cutting additional funding for CALPADS as part of his longer-term embrace foes of school reform and standardized testing. And it gets worse: He also plans to cancel the development of CALTIDES, the teacher performance data system that has long been the bane of the state branches of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. This will mean that the move made by the state two years ago to begin tying teacher evaluations to student test data will also fall by the way side.

Brown’s declaration is pleasing to teachers unions, thoughtless defenders of traditional public education such as EdWeek‘s Anthony Cody (yes, we’re giving the guy more well-deserved ridicule), and national commentators who don’t deserve their perch such as Valerie Strauss. But Brown’s move will do little for taxpayers, policymakers, principals, teachers, children and families, all of whom deserve high-quality data that allows them to make smart fiscal and educational decisions.

For one, the state will likely still have to pay out $7 million to IBM, the contractor charged with developing CALPADS, even if the system isn’t completed. So whatever savings Brown thinks he will reap isn’t likely to be reality. The possibility of Big Blue filing suit to ensure repayment of its contract will also mean additional legal fees that strapped taxpayers don’t want to bear. Meanwhile, the fact that 99 percent of school districts have already begun migrating to CALPADS also means that any move off the system will lead to a second round of transition costs.

Shutting down CALPADS would be bearable if the goal is to move from CALPADS to a better, more-comprehensive data system that ties together K-12, postsecondary data from the state’s three university systems and workforce information; Florida has already done this with great success. But Brown has no discernible intention of doing this. So it just means more dollars down the drain. Eliminating CALPADS also doesn’t address the critical need for data that should be used in making critical decisions on school spending and how to proceed with overhauling traditional school districts. Given the structural deficits Brown is trying to address — and that dealing with those problems will involve revamping state education spending — it is shortsighted to propose eliminating CALPADS funding without a plan to develop a more-robust system.

As for everyone else? As imperfect as CALPADS may have been, it was a key first step in developing a more-comprehensive and useful data system. For one, it helped push districts towards improving the quality of their own data systems; this would have been a first step towards giving the state’s teachers and principals data they can (and, as this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast points out, should) be using for improving student achievement at the school level.  For families, CALPADS also allows for easier transfers of student records; the next step would have been to make the data system more-useful for parents — a problem that has more to do with the state’s emphasis on structuring data for compliance purposes instead of for usefulness in making school decisions.

What Brown could have done is simply begin the process of developing a better school data system. He could have asked the state legislature to craft and pass new legislation that would have reshaped CALPADS to meet the needs of those who will use it — including families, the most-important players of all. He could also have also worked with the state’s education department and finance agency on replacing IBM as the vendor; that move would have made sense given how poorly the company has bungled the system’s development. Brown could have even used the situation as an opportunity to begin pushing for structural reform of the state’s public education governance, an underlying reason why the development of CALPADS has been bungled in the first place. But he didn’t offer any such steps. Instead, Brown has decided that there is no need families and taxpayers to be lead players in education. And that the education crisis that plagues the children of California and the rest of the nation doesn’t need addressing.

But for Brown, this is par for the course. Earlier this year, Dropout Nation criticized the governor for not tackling the state’s byzantine educational governance structure and for not re-appointing school reformers to the state board of education. Though governor may may have overseen the launch of two charter schools during his tenure as Oakland’s mayor, he has proven over and over again that he is in the thrall of the state’s NEA and AFT affiliates, along with other status quo defenders. So he’s not going to address the structural problems of the state’s educational governance system, will all but avoid addressing the systemic problems of low-quality instruction and curricula contributing to low educational achievement — especially among its poorest and minority children, and will just be an obstacle to any reform.

In Brown, California has a governor who lacks the will and vision to overhaul public education for the benefit of the state’s children. The only solutions to counter that lack of will may lie in reform efforts such as those being undertaken by L.A. Unified — or in the decision of families to move out of the Golden State to states such as Indiana, which are fully embracing reform. Hopefully for California, Brown’s tenure will be mercifully short.