As you check out Editor RiShawn Biddle’s latest American Spectator column on the likelihood of Mitt Romney embracing former president George W. Bush’s school reform agenda, listen to the Best of The Dropout Nation Podcast from October 2010 on why school reformers haven’t been able to translate their success in gaining attention to the problems of American public education to this year’s midterm elections. The lessons from then — that it will take more than documentaries to make sure that education is the primary issue in this year’s presidential, congressional, and state elections — remains as important now as ever.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player, smartphone, Nook Color or Kindle Fire. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software, Google Reader, BeyondPod, DoggCatcher and other mobile software.

A special Dropout Nation Podcast will be broadcast tomorrow.

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For all the talk among education traditionalists about supposed “corporate ed reform” and the evils of business leaders (along with other outsiders) in transforming American public education,  they forget their influence over the very institutions at the heart of public schools — and the vast sums they collect as a result. So when they complain that they no longer have unquestioned clout over schools, they should remember that it has been lost because they embrace a failed vision that those who understand the consequences of their thinking and action will no longer accept.

In this Best of Dropout NationEditor RiShawn Biddle makes this point in this reprint of an essay from last May. Read, consider, and give your own thoughts.

Yesterday, New York Times’ Sam Dillon decided to tread the same ground your editor covered two years ago (and others have done since). And as one would expect, Diane Ravitch and other defenders of the very obsolete practices and low expectations thinking that have contributed to the nation’s education crisis, offered the report as an example of the nefariousness of the school reform movement. After all, according to their simple-minded, class envy-driven, anti-intellectual view, a wealthy entrepreneur can’t both have a healthy interest in improving the world in which he lives and an equally sensible self-interest in leaving his mark on it. You know, what all adults seek to do in life.

Yet Ravitch and her gang fail to consider the organizations that are subsidizing their own defense of the status quo (a point that Dillon manages to ignore in his piece). Start with the National Education Association, which devoted $248 million of union dues this past decade on political campaigns, making it the biggest player in American politics. The union has also spent millions on building and sustaining alliances that aid and abet its aims; this includes $1.9 million to the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (which certifies ed schools) between the 2005-2006 and 2009-2010 fiscal years, and $1.6 million to the Economic Policy Institute (which always seems to produce reports that neatly dovetail with NEA positions) within the past six years. There are also organizations allied with status quo thinking such as the Ford Foundation and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which command both dollars and vast memberships.

Then there’s the American Federation of Teachers, whose president, Randi Weingarten (the subject of my profile this month in The American Spectator) is one of the foremost advocates on behalf of the status quo. From here appearances on shows such as The Colbert Report to profiles in Newsweek, Weingarten is the nation’s best-known union leader and most-prominent education traditionalist, almost as high-profile as Gates himself. And thanks to that profile and her position as head of the nation’s second-largest teachers union (including a foundation that is devoting millions to funding their own initiatives), she is just as influential as Gates (if not more so).

Essentially, both sides of the debate are basking in resources, financial and otherwise. and using them accordingly. One can say that status quo defenders control even more dollars; after all, they are in control of school districts and university schools of education, the institutions through which most of the $500 billion in taxpayer funds devoted to education flow. The NEA and the AFT, in particular, have long-influenced those dollars thanks to state laws and collective bargaining agreements that structure how dollars (in the form of teachers and their compensation packages) are directed to classrooms. Through their defense of seniority- and degree-based pay scales, they have created a teacher compensation system in which teachers are paid for simply lasting years instead of for improving student achievement, under which high-quality teachers aren’t rewarded for doing good-to-great work, that provide near-lifetime employment to the worst teachers, and perpetuate seniority-based assignment rules that, along with the lack of rigorous evaluations based on objective student achievement data, all but ensures that poor and minority children are taught by laggard teachers. They have been unwilling to embrace any real reform of teacher recruiting, training and compensation, allowing for the profession to become mired in mediocrity and failure at the expense of both good-to-great teachers who manage to emerge from the muck, and children who don’t get to choose who teaches them.

The NEA, the AFT and its allies also perpetuate practices and ideologies — including the Poverty Myth in Education — that have essentially allowed far too many educators to write off poor and minority children as being unworthy of a good education. They have consistently opposed any form of real school choice that allows children, no matter their station in life or their condition of birth, to escape dropout factories and failure mills. They have defended a system in which a child’s zip code determines the quality of their education — and can wreck their futures (and even land parents unwilling to accept this in the criminal justice system). And their unwillingness to address issues such as the crisis of low educational achievement among young males of all races — a subject of this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast – shows exactly where they stand on school reform.

I’m not going to say that education traditionalists don’t care about children. They think they do and I believe them. But what they defend, all in all, is a failed, negative and enslaving vision of American public education under which 150 children an hour drop out into poverty and prison. Worse, they defend the system by tying up taxpayer dollars in a status quo that was built for a different age in which education didn’t equal better quality of life, not for a time in which what you know is more important than what you can do with your hands. One can understand supporting such a system back at the height of the industrial age. One can even understand their self-interest in protecting that which has given them comfortable livings and influence. But in 2011, at a time in which the economy demands a better-educated populace, continuing to support an outdated model of education is not only intellectually indefensible, but absolutely amoral and immoral, unjustifiable by any religion or worldview — and they do so in order to protect their privileges, their influence and their incomes. Weingarten and other status quo defenders cannot justify condemning the lives of millions of children.

And that is the difference between them and the school reformer that Gates is funding out of his own pocket. What school reformers have imperfectly, yet successfully, articulated is a vision of education that allows for every young man and woman to achieve their potential; that argues that schools and those who work within them are missionaries for social change that can help address and alleviate poverty; and offers a positive view of what can be done through providing a high-quality education to every child. It is a vision that offers solutions based on data and practice, and accepts that if a practice doesn’t work, it should be ditched for another. And it uses the evidence that teacher quality and family engagement are greater determinants of academic success than socioeconomic background to advocate for remaking a profession into one that deserves the same respect as doctors, and giving parents the power they need to make great choices for the futures of their children.

This vision is winning the day not because of money; as with so many movements, school reformers were working the trenches, often with little money, before it attracted funding Gates and other big-named donors. The vision is winning because it is both a positive vision and one that has been better-advocated through strategic and tactical savvy. The NEA, the AFT and other defenders can develop new campaigns and protests, and raise ever more dollars, but none of that will hide the reality that what they offer is failure for children, failure for families, failure for communities and failure for a nation — all at a time in which falling down and dropping out is no longer a sustainable option.

Instead of conspiracy theories and class envy, education traditionalists need to take a look within.

News this week that New Jersey father Stuart Chafetz surreptitiously taped a teacher and teacher’s aide abusing his 10-year-old autistic son offers one more reason for why we must put an end to our nation’s special education ghettos and provide all kids with cultures of genius they deserve. But Chafetz’s case is also another example of families frustrated with the failures of American public education taking action on behalf of their kids — and proving lie to the arguments of education traditionalists that the ills that lead to so many kids dropping out lie with supposedly unmotivated parents. In this Best of Dropout Nation from June, Editor RiShawn Biddle explains why a system that does all it can to frustrate Parent Power is the biggest problem.

Anyone who is paying attention to the nation’s burgeoning Parent Power movement — from the efforts of Gwen Samuel in Connecticut, to the battle between parents of students attending McKinley Elementary in Compton, Calif. and the district there, to the success of Virginia Walden Ford in D.C. — already know that one of the myths held dear by education traditionalists — that lackadaisical, unmotivated parents are the reasons behind the low student achievement that is a symptom of the nation’s education crisis — is exactly that.

Yet there are still education traditionalists such as USA Today columnist Patrick Welsh — a teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria — who continue to perpetuate this myth. Dismissing two decades of research — including work by Williams Sanders, the driving force behind the development of Value-Added Assessment — that low-performing students greatly improve their performance after being taught by three high-quality teachers (and even more research that shows the importance of school cultures and principals in fostering cultures of genius), Welsh sticks to his anecdotal mishmash (all gleaned from a recent graduation event) and declares that “statistics and common sense show that with few exceptions, things don’t work that way”.

But in embracing the myth of unmotivated parents, Welsh and others wrongly assume that all parents have either the knowledge or access to information needed to make smart educational decisions. This isn’t exactly so. For most of the past two centuries, American public education has implicitly perpetuated a series of what we now know to be wrongful assumptions: That a child can be sent to any teacher or to any school and they will get a high-quality education. We have slowly learned that the quality of instruction can vary not from school to school and, more importantly, even from classroom to classroom.

But families are just beginning to fully understand this. They are also just beginning to grasp the importance of college preparatory education in giving their children a chance to get employment in high-paying white- and blue-collar professions. And poor and minority families (including the immigrant households Welsh takes time to laud in his piece), are finally realizing that they can no longer just simply attend field trips and help with homework. They must be well-informed decision-makers with real power in shaping education for their children.

While the school reform movement has made some progress on this front, parents are still stumbling around in education. Even now, school data remains a black box of sorts, driven by compliance rather than by the need to give parents information they need to make smart choices.  Organizations such as GreatSchools.org and the Education Consumers Foundation are helping to make school data more transparent and easy to use; the efforts of the Data Quality Campaign are working to improve the quality of state and district data systems. But much remains to be done on overhauling how data is collected and provided. And even when the data is available, state laws and the opposition of teachers unions to releasing such data means that parents are still left out in the cold. It took the Los Angeles Times and its series on teacher quality in L.A. Unified’s elementary schools to finally give Southern California parents information something approaching useful data.

The myth of unmotivated parents assumes that parenting alone can address all learning issues. This isn’t so. For example, 40 percent of all students will come into kindergarten with some form of learning deficiency no matter how often their parents read to them. The likelihood that parents understand such math concepts as algebra and trigonometry ; this is especially true when one considers that poor, urban parents are often forced to send their kids to the same failure factories that they attended a decade or two earlier.

This myth ignores the reality that parents don’t simply choose to let their kids languish in failure. Considering that 38 percent of black students and 33 percent of Latino students are forced by zoned schooling practices (and systemic decay within districts) to attend dropout factories, this isn’t exactly the case. It is even clearer when one looks at the cases of Kelley Williams-Bolar and Tanya McDowell, who now face legal sanction for illegally sending their kids to better-quality schools outside of their home districts. And when one looks at the dearth of intra- and inter-district public school choice, it is clear that poor parents are stuck with almost no choice at all.

Even in cities where there are more than one school district (and even a plethora of charter schools and low-cost Catholic school options), high quality school options remain elusive. The experience of the charter school movement — and before that, of the Catholic diocesan schools that were the main alternatives to traditional public education in the last century — has proven that choice is an amazing motivator; parents will run away from failure factories to the possibility of high quality alternatives when given the opportunity.

Meanwhile the myth of unmotivated parents lets those who work in American public education off the hook for systemic academic failure. It allows laggard instructors to remain in the classroom long after the poor performance of students in their care has shown that the teachers should be shown the door. It gives school superintendents, school boards and central office bureaucracies cover for avoiding the tough reform efforts they must undertake within their districts. It allows ed schools to remain complacent and continue their woeful recruitment and training of aspiring teachers. And it allows education traditionalists to avoid responsibility for perpetuating cultures of condescension, in which parents — especially those of poor and minority backgrounds — are treated with utter disdain and treated like pests when they actually stand up and attempt to hold schools accountable.

If anything, the myth is denigrating to the very good-to-great teachers that Welsh and other education traditionalists purport to defend. One can actually take that argument and argue that in essence, teachers and principals don’t matter at all. Not only does such Of course, Welsh and his fellow-travelers want to have it both ways: They want to both declare that parents are the problem and demand greater levels of respect for teachers (in the form of continuing a failing and ineffective traditional system of teacher compensation); they also want to ignore the data showing the importance of high-quality teaching and still proclaim that teachers are essential in education. But you can’t essentially argue that teachers are helpless in improving student achievement and therefore, unnecessary players in education, then demand that they should be better compensated. Either way, the views of Welsh and his fellow-travelers are condescending to parents, good-to-great teachers, and students alike.

Certainly parents are critical to student achievement. As Herbert Walberg, now a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, pointed out in his study of 29 family-school programs, the level of family engagement is twice as likely to predict a child’s academic achievement as their socioeconomic background. It is important that we provide families, especially those from poor rural and urban communities, simple, understandable data — and assistance in understanding what that data means for their children — that they can use to make good decisions. We must also put families into their rightful place as lead decision-makers and consumers in education. This includes expanding school choice, enacting Parent Trigger laws that give parents front-and-center roles in school overhauls, and requiring that every child gets the same kind of Individualized Education Plan (and parents get the potentially powerful role in shaping curricula and instruction) that we require, albeit imperfectly, for special ed students.

At the same time, we also can’t let parents off the hook.  There are parents who don’t deserve the title, who are failures in getting their kids ready for school and in providing for them safe, nurturing home environments. They don’ t deserve to be called parents at all. The concept of Parent Power also implies responsibility: Families just can’t stand on the sidelines waiting for rescue efforts. As I point out in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, all parents — especially fathers — should start their own math and reading tutoring classes, and team up together politically to demand reform. School reformers, especially those in the Beltway, have to go beyond proposing laws and undertaking systemic reforms, to work with the grassroots on fostering strong information infrastructures that help parents help their children.

But laying the failures of American public education at the feet of parents alone ignores the systemic problems of low-quality instruction, abysmal curricula, shoddy leadership and pervasive cultures of mediocrity that are truly the main causes of the nation’s education crisis. Traditionalists such as Welsh need to look inward, both at themselves and their colleagues, and begin thinking about how they will be partners with parents and school reformers in helping every child write their own story.

As you read today’s New York Daily News piece by Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle and Why Boys Fail author Richard Whitmire on why the rhetoric over the supposed “war on women” obscures the real crisis among young men, listen to this Dropout Nation Podcast from last May on the impact of the nation’s education crisis on our sons and nephews. We need to continue overhauling American public education and provide strong role models in order for keep our boys on the path to graduation and economic success.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player, smartphone, Nook Color or Kindle.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software, Google Reader, BeyondPod, DoggCatcher and other mobile software.

A new Dropout Nation Podcast will be broadcast this Wednesday.

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Certainly nostalgia for their vision of American public education that doesn’t work (and likely, never was) is a reason why education traditionalists such as Education Week blogger and teacher Anthony Cody and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten oppose school reform. But much of their opposition stems from the consequences systemic reform will wreak upon their economic and social fortunes. In this Best of Dropout Nation commentary from July 2011, Editor RiShawn Biddle, looking at last year’s Save Our Schools rally, takes a look at the driving forces behind the opposition of education traditionalists to changes that will best help our children.

Earlier this week, I had commented that today’s Save Our Schools rally would essentially represent three clear, but rarely-discussed factors in the divide between the education traditionalists who have teamed up with the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers to put on what is turning out to be a tiny rally far smaller protest rally than the organizers want it to be, and the motley crew of centrist Democrats and conservative think tankers, libertarian school and idiosyncratic left-leaning school choice activists, frustrated urban parents, suburban homeschoolers and others who make up the school reform movement. As I listen to and read the arguments of those who have organized the rally, these three divides are even more-present than I ever thought. And it’s not just about the loss of influence over the direction of education.

The first divide is generational. As Alexander Russo commented earlier this week, the Save Our Schools organizers had to worry about this rally turning out to be little more than a group of middle-aged teachers, education professors and teachers union bosses marching on the Ellipse against a new generation of educators and thinkers. But there was nothing they could ever do about it, largely because it is, for the most part, exactly that. The Baby Boomers who organized this rally have long-benefited from the six decades of efforts by the NEA and AFT to make teaching the most-lucrative public sector profession and the career most-insulated from performance management. Thanks to the work of the two unions, the average 25-year veteran with a baccalaureate degree can count on an average salary of at least $54,400 a year (or more than the median household income), near-lifetime employment (often within three years of entering the classroom), defined-benefit pensions that can pay out as much as $2 million over a lifetime, and nearly-free healthcare both during working careers and into retirement. With three out of every five teachers bearing master’s and doctoral degrees, they have benefited greatly from degree- and seniority-based pay scales that have increased incomes without actually improving student achievement or the quality of their instruction.

Given that they have had such a comfortable deal for so long — and considering that a good number of them, like their counterparts outside of education, still have heavy debt loads that have gotten more-burdensome since the onset of the current economic malaise — they aren’t exactly willing to let this status quo go. And this is what the efforts of the school reform movement threatens to do. Efforts by reformers along with reform-minded (and, in many cases, budget-conscious) governors to make it harder to attain tenure or abolish near-lifetime employment altogether means that their performance would no longer fly under the radar.  Same with moves to subject teachers to performance-based teacher evaluations based on student test score data. Add in efforts to eliminate seniority-based privileges (including reverse-seniority layoff rules ) and suddenly, reform becomes a threat to their economic calculations.

But it means more than that. Teacher quality reforms would ultimately mean the end of experience and seniority as the determining factors for esteem in teaching and the profession one more-concerned with merit and performance. This means a shift to young, talented and less-senior instructors who may have great ideas about improving student achievement, but until now, have been given short-shrift by their more-senior counterparts. It also means that good-to-great teachers, who have often went unrecognized or have been looked down upon in cultures of mediocrity will now emerge as the leaders in the profession. Meanwhile the move toward using data in shaping instruction and curriculum means learning new skills, something that many longtime instructors aren’t interested in doing both because of their unwillingness to grow professionally and their view that those practices and techniques are an affront to their philosophies on teaching.  For many Baby Boomer instructors, all these shifts are untenable, even though it is already happening.

Then there is the racial divide.  The school reform movement’s emphasis on improving education for poor black, white, Latino and Asian children — and the exposing of the low quality of instruction in the nation’s classrooms — has cast a harsh light on one of the biggest concerns for poor and minority families, especially those with young sons:  That there are teachers damning kids who don’t look like them with low expectations. Most of the problems have far less to do with race than with a system of teacher training that has brought too many low quality and poorly-trained teachers into classrooms. But, as Martin Haberman and others who have specialized in training teachers to work in majority-minority classrooms have pointed out, far too many ed schools have not trained teachers to deal with minorities, especially young black and Latino men.

This reality is a particular concern for black, Asian and Latino families, especially those entering the middle class for the first time. They are finding out that suburban schools can be just as abysmal as the urban dropout factories they fled, and that the racial divides can be just as deep.  As University of Michigan Associate Professor Karyn Lacey noted in Blue-Chip Black, her sociological study of middle-class black families in the area surrounding the nation’s capital, black families living in Fairfax County found themselves battling teachers and guidance counselors who wanted to relegate children to academic tracks that keep them from getting high-paying white- and blue-collar jobs.  And as Tom Luce, the former president of the National Math and Science Initiative has made clear, there are far too many minority high school students who are never informed that they can — and should — take the Advanced Placement courses they need to succeed in college and life.

This isn’t to say race is the biggest issue. One of the more-amazing themes of the nation’s school reform movement is that white men and women, many of whom are from the middle class, have actually joined together with black, Latino and Asian men and women to challenge practices that have endangered the economic and social destinies of children whose skin colors and backgrounds don’t match their own. And there are plenty of education traditionalists of all races and ethnicities who want the best for all children. But in defending the traditional system of American public education, they are supporting practices and widely-held mythologies that are economically enslaving far too many black and Latino children.

Then there is the class divide. As Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg of at the Sage Colleges have noted in their research on school engagement, urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.” Certainly some of this has to do with the negative experiences these parents have had with schools — especially those failure mills that they once attended and to which their children now go. But it is also about the fact that there are many teachers who look at parents — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — with condescension and disdain.

These teachers, many of whom would not be considered good or great in the profession, prefer to relegate parents to field trips and homework; look down on those parents who may not be capable of helping their kids because of their own learning issues; and are hostile to those families who want to take an active role in shaping the education their kids receive in school. And it’s not just these teachers: As revealed in survey of Houston principals conducted by the New Teacher Project, administrators who felt they didn’t have time to handle teacher evaluations and serve as instructional leaders wanted to spend less time working with parents.

This class divide, exacerbated by a compensation system that rewards teachers for degree-attainment and seat time instead of their effectiveness in working with families to improve student achievement — crosses all races. It is why Baby Boomer black and Latino teachers, principals and superintendents working in school districts that have been massive dropout factories for generations are as hostile to school reform as their white counterparts. It is why a Pedro Noguera is as much opposed to school reform as Diane Ravitch. It is why the teachers who  make up a large portion of the NAACP membership have swayed the organization against reform — and why Hazel Dukes dared to accuse charter school parents of “doing the work of slave masters”.

Ultimately, it is this class divide that explains why you won’t see the Gwen Samuels or the parents of kids at Compton’s McKinley elementary school participating in the Save Our Schools march — and why they will likely be accused of being the tools of “corporatist” school reformers by education traditionalists far too caught up in their anti-intellectualism to see what their defense of the worst American public education offers has wrought. The very idea of poor parents opposing those who have influenced the conditions of the schools that robbed two generations of children isn’t exactly a comforting thought.

And these divides are among the reasons why a failed vision of American public education is losing support, no matter how many of its defenders march on the White House.

Last week’s move by Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson to overhaul the city’s traditional district once again brought light to the matter of mayoral control and mayor-led reform. And it has fostered some fascinating discussion about related matters such as the need for more-talented teachers and school leaders (which will be the topic of Monday’s Dropout Nation feature).

But the bigger question remains: Should mayors even bother trying to undertake systemic reform? This is one that is brought up any time a big-city pol such as Adrian Fenty in D.C. loses re-election. In this Best of Dropout Nation from September 2010, Editor RiShawn Biddle points out that city governments can’t stand on the sidelines and allow traditional districts to remain clusters of dropout factories and failure mills.

Judging by Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty’s troubled re-election campaign alone, one would dare say that mayor-led school reform — including mayoral control of traditional school systems and other mayor-led reforms — is just a bad idea. Same would also be true if one looks at the fall of another municipal paragon of school reform, Bart Peterson, whose acclaim as the first mayor to authorize charter schools didn’t insulate him from losing his job as Indianapolis mayor three years ago.

Such thinking would be understandable. After all, mayors face more than enough threats to their long-term futures in politics — reforming city governments alone (much less just running them) leads to gaining entrenched enemies — without wading into the even-more treacherous landscape of public education. Once a mayor attempts to either take over a failing district, he or she is naturally rallying school board members, locals of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, superintendents and others; they may generally loathe one another, but they have greater enmity toward supposed interlopers invading their coteries. If the mayor succeeds in taking control, he now has a powerful rival in the form of NEA and AFT locals, who have the resources and ground games to whip up a frenzy among their supporters. All this before the mayor actually gets to the job of reforming schools.

Meanwhile, the average citizen — often still stuck in the old paradigm that education isn’t a city government concern — is still unsure of whether mayors should be in the education business. Even of the mayor does a great job on reforming schools, he must also get the other aspects of city government right: For many, keeping streets clean, cutting down crime, cutting taxes and improving quality of life are far greater concerns than education.

But one really judge the worthiness of mayoral control just on Fenty’s problems or Peterson’s fate. The former is in trouble because of his lack of appealing demeanor, stumbles in managing other aspects of city government, and missteps in handling Chocolate City’s race-based politics. Fenty is paying more for blunders such as canceling a meeting with the late Dorothy Height (a paragon of the civil rights movement) over one of his controversial moves as he is for challenging D.C.’S educational Ancien Regime.

Peterson’s strong efforts on school reform were not matched with equal effort on tackling the Circle City’s rising crime, improving quality of life in less-tony areas, and, as seen with his support of the now-completed Lucas Oil Stadium for the Indianapolis Colts, being fiscally prudent with taxpayer money. Citizens saw him as a complacent failure and showed him the door.

Mayors must still be as successful in improving the rest of city government as they are in school reform. That’s just the way it is. Residents aren’t just going to praise the mayor for fixing schools — especially if they are failing in other areas. This means mayors must be at skilled at managing goverment and keeping their supporters behind them; whether or not they launch school reforms, their jobs would still be the most-complicated in American politics.

The successes of New York City’s Michael Bloomberg, Richard Daley’s tenure in Chicago and John Norquist’s school voucher efforts in Milwaukee are better examples of how mayors can lead school reforms; their remaining challenges are also better examples of why the reform of American public education can’t just start or end at the central offices of school districts or one-off programs — and why the traditional school district model is no longer worth sustaining.

More importantly, as seen in efforts by the mayors of Rochester and Milwaukee to take control of the local district, the continuing saga in L.A. over Antonio Villaraigosa’s effort to nudge L.A. Unified toward reform (an effort first undertaken by predecssor Richard Riordan), and the problems of low educational achievement in  Hammond, Ind., Alexandria, Va., and elsewhere, mayors can no longer ignore the critical links between the long-term efforts of keeping middle-class residents and commercial activity in their cities and improving education. They must embrace school reform because so many of the issues with which they must wrangle are connected to it. Mayor-led reform is critical, not only in sustaining school reform, but in keeping cities thriving. No mayor wants to preside over Detroit-like despair.