Photo courtesy of rookie ’10

Thirty years ago, the Reagan Administration helped spur an array of systemic reforms when it released A Nation at Risk. By focusing on what was then the available data on the nation’s education crisis, the report helped lead efforts at developing state curricula standards. The report also spurred a series of new reforms that would help families start taking power in education. By 1991, Minnesota launched the first public charter schools, while Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist worked together with then-district superintendent Howard Fuller and state legislator Polly Williams to launch the nation’s first school voucher program.

Since then, the expansion of charters and vouchers have allowed millions of kids and their families to escape failure and mediocrity for brighter futures. Yet we still must do more to help our families take their rightful roles in being lead decision-makers in education. This includes passing Parent Trigger laws that allow families to expand the meaning of choice by taking control of failing schools in their own communities.

In this Best of Dropout Nation, adapted from a speech given at the Restoring Excellence in Education conference in St. Cloud, Minn., Editor RiShawn Biddle explains why families are looking to take power in education. Read, consider, and take action.

It is great to be here. And I have to especially thank the organizers, including AJ Kern, for bringing me here today. Like so many families, AJ and her husband, John, became part of the Parent Power movement the hard way: Through long and frustrating discussions and battles with those who are supposed to be school leaders who, instead, abandoned their responsibility as guardians of our children and stewards of our tax dollars.

Sadly, and also, fortunately, AJ and John – and you – are not alone. Each and every day, in Minnesota and throughout this nation, parents have woken up and realized that they must take their rightful roles as lead decision-makers in education. And what is happening as a result is absolutely amazing.

In Adelanto, Calif., parents of students attending the Desert Trails Elementary School are working to oust the traditional district that has continually mismanaged the school into systemic academic failure.

In Indiana, the families of 3,919 children are using the state’s new school choice program to escape the failure mills and dropout factories in cities such as Indianapolis, Gary, Fort Wayne, and Hammond. And in the coming school year, more will join them.

On the East Coast, the Connecticut Parents Union, are working the state capital this year to push for teacher quality reforms and other policies that will improve the quality of education for every child throughout the Nutmeg State.

And in Los Angeles, a group of parents have filed a lawsuit against the local district demanding that it finally follow state law and properly evaluate the performance of teachers, something that hasn’t been done – at the expense of the futures of thousands of L.A. kids – in four decades.

What we are seeing across this nation is amazing. Families, tired of waiting for politicians and school leaders to do right by their children, are pushing for reform. Parents are pushing to take their rightful place as the lead decision-makers in education. Moms and dads are demanding that they have the ability to choose schools that are fit for the futures of their children. And they are taking on adults who have perpetuated, aided, and abetted educational neglect and malpractice.

They realize that we must expand school choice. They realize that they must have the power to overhaul the very schools in their own neighborhoods. They realize that every parent needs information on what their kids should know. And they realize they need data on the quality of schools and teachers who have their kids in their care.

And they realize this: That we need a revolution, not an evolution, in American public education. And it cannot happen without families fighting fiercely for their children –and all of our children – no matter whom they are or where they live. Our children need Parent Power. And they need it right now.

If you truly want to understand why we need families to lead this revolution –and why Parent Power is critical to reforming our schools – I want to take you back to a time in history. To the middle of the Great Depression. And meet a young girl who would do everything she could for my mother and I to have a better life than her own. My grandmother.

Until she reached fourth grade, the quality of her education was subpar. As much as my great-grandparents loved her and did their best for her, they couldn’t help her because they could barely read themselves. But my grandma got lucky. In fourth grade, she had what we now call a high-quality teacher, who cared for her well-being, nurtured her genius and potential, and worked with her on reading and on her studies until she performed above grade level.

Thanks to this teacher, my grandma became the first person in our family to attend college. From her, came my mom and I, going places that she could only dream of.

This is not the way it should have been. But then, in my grandmother’s time, an education wasn’t important in earning a wage. For most of this last century, a mother and father could send their child to any school or to any teacher, and they would still do just fine. Regardless of the skill of the teacher or the quality of the school, you could drop out and still earn a middle-class wage.

This isn’t true anymore. Today, we know that in an increasingly global economy, education is critical to success and to survival. Whether you are an accountant or a welder, you need to be proficiently literate and have strong math and science knowledge in order to succeed.

But the bad news is that it is as haphazard for a child to get a high-quality education now as it was back when my grandmother was growing up in the Great Depression.  And this is as true in the North Star State as it is throughout the rest of the nation.

Thirty percent of Minnesota’s fourth-graders – that’s three out of every 10 fourth-grade students in this state – are functionally illiterate, according to the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s test of student achievement. That is 18,403 fourth-graders throughout this state. And when you can’t read, you will drop out.

The extent of this crisis extends to every part of this state. One out of every five fourth-graders in Minnesota’s suburban communities from middle-class families are reading at levels of functional illiteracy. So are one out of every five middle-class Minnesotan fourth-graders who live in rural areas.

If you have a son, regardless of your socioeconomic background, he is likely struggling in school. One out of every five young white male fourth-graders from middle-class households is functionally illiterate compared to one out of every 10 of their female peers. Meanwhile two out of every five young Asian men in the state is reading Below Basic proficiency, greater than the three out of every ten of their female peers.

In Minnesota, it isn’t as if it has gotten better. Back in 2002, just 27 percent of the state’s fourth-graders – 16,641 children – were struggling with literacy. Today, we are now talking about 1,763 more fourth-graders who are functionally illiterate now than nine years ago. Meanwhile the rest of America – which has just begun to aggressively reform the rest of public education – has reduced the number of fourth graders who are functionally illiterate by 217,432 kids in that same period.

But as I said, Minnesota is not alone. We have an American public education system that is perpetuating this state – and national – failure.

The quality of teaching is the most-critical factor in student learning, accounting for at least half of the effects of student achievement directly traced to schools. But far too many of our teachers, often for reasons not of their own making, don’t have the subject knowledge, instructional talent, entrepreneurial self-starter drive, or empathy for children needed to be in the classroom.

Meanwhile we far too many principals, superintendents, and school board members who couldn’t cook fries at the nearest Burger King – yet have been trusted with the futures of your children. And failing them badly. In Indiana, for example, a superintendent named Eugene White tried to defend his record of running the worst school district outside of Detroit by blaming kids. He declared that unlike the city’s charter schools, his district had to take in kids that he calls “blind, crippled, crazy”.

It will take myriad solutions to solve this education crisis – and help your kids, and all kids, get the high-quality schools and teachers they deserve. But one of the most important starts with you – and with every mother, father, uncle, aunt, and grandparent in this room today.

We know this: When parents are informed about what education should be and what their kids should know, they will expect more of themselves. And they will demand better for their kids from the schools that are at the centers of their young lives.

How much is your power in education is worth? University of New Hampshire researchers Andrew Houtenville and Karen Smith Conway say that schools would have to come up with $1,000 in additional per-pupil funding to match the gains in student achievement that come from parents taking power in education.  In fact, the level of family engagement of power is twice as likely to predict a child’s academic achievement as their socioeconomic background.

We know that all parents, regardless of who they are or where they live, are concerned and discerning about the quality of education. Minorities and parents in high-poverty districts, for example, were more likely than middle-class parents to request a teacher for their child based on how teachers improved student achievement, according to a 2005 study by University of Michigan researcher Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren of Brigham Young University.

Yet the adults who run our schools essentially regard parents like you as afterthoughts, nuisances, and troublemakers. Sometimes all in one. And this regardless of whether you are rich or poor, black or white, man or woman.

Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg, professors 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.” While some of this may have to do with the negative experiences these parents have had with schools, it also has to do with the reality that there are many teachers who look down at parents — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds.

And that hostility gets even worse when families they want to escape the worst public education offers. Earlier this year, when the families of children attending New York City’s charter schools – families who are mostly black and Latino – protested against a lawsuit filed by the NAACP and the American Federation of Teachers, the reaction from both these organizations was absolute hostility. In fact, the head of the NAACP’s New York branch told one charter school supporter that she and her fellow parents were “doing the business of slave masters”.

But those of us from the middle class and suburbia encounter the same disdain. A few months ago, Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews, reported on an incident in Arlington, Va., where parents looking to send their child to a local magnet school wanted to visit the school and observe classroom activities. See, they wanted to not only know how good the school was, but whether that school would be the right environment for their child. Yet they were denied the ability to do so. Why? Because, as far as the district was concerned, letting parents do so would be a disruption.

These are just the most-visible examples of how American public education – whether in Saint Cloud or in Santa Cruz – makes it difficult for families to play the lead decision-making role in shaping how their kids learn.

The way schools deal with parents of all backgrounds (especially poor families) is particularly disdainful. Parent-teacher conferences are inconveniently scheduled. Parents struggle to contact teachers in order to know how well their kids are doing. Report cards are issued far too late in the school year for families to help their children succeed.

James Guthrie of the George W. Bush Institute has pointed out that the only real way that families can really be engaged in schools is if they actually have the ability to actually shape the education their kids receive. Yet only one in every five children and their families has access to such choice.

Essentially, American public education decides the quality of education your children can get by the zip code in which you live. And even if you live in what you think is the right zip code, your child may not be getting a high quality education. If you are poor, your kids are stuck in dropout factories. And if you are middle class, your kids go to warehouses of mediocrity whose shiny new buildings hide low-quality education. And even if you move from one zip code to another, you cannot guarantee that the school your child attends will be worth the cost of renting that U-Haul truck.

One of the most-critical forms of school choice is the ability to transform the schools in your own neighborhoods. Think about it: As taxpayers and as parents of kids who send your kids to schools that are at the center of their days and of their lives until age 18, you should be able to make that school better – even if it means taking that school out of the hands of a failing district. Yet only four states allow parents to do that now.

Meanwhile we don’t provide parents with the kind of comprehensive, yet simple school data systems that helps you understand how well a school is doing – and know what kind of teachers are working in classrooms. Two years ago, the Los Angeles Times showed in a series that the differences in teaching in classrooms can differ from classroom to classroom, even in schools that are rated high quality. Yet we continue to deny information to parents that they can use in making decisions.

And then, there are parents like you who don’t know what your children should know. How many can tell me what your kids should know by the time they leave kindergarten? Not many know. Every parent should be informed about what their kids should know – and what their kid is being taught in school.

What is needed in American public education is a new vision of parents – as lead decision-makers in shaping the quality of the education they receive.

It starts with expanding school choice. There is no reason why you should have to be zoned to a school that doesn’t serve your child’s needs – and doesn’t even provide an education that is worth the hard-earned dollars that you pay.

We then must pass Parent Trigger laws that allow you and a majority of fellow parents to turn around a failing school by ousting principals, teachers, even the district itself, and put the school under new management. Four states have Parent Trigger laws on the books. And some families are already using those laws to force change.

Then we must have comprehensive yet simple school data systems that tell you and your fellow parents what you really need to know about a school. This includes how well individual teachers are doing in helping kids succeed over time and how safe the school is.

And you should know what your kids should know by each grade, what kind of math curriculum is used in teaching, and even if the school offers interventions that can help your sons and nephews improve their reading and stay on the path to graduation and lifelong success.

Let me tell you something: School districts and teachers’ unions are afraid of parents. Especially when they push for their rightful roles as lead decision-makers in education.

The most-prominent example of this was revealed last year by my publication, Dropout Nation, when we got our hands on a PowerPoint from a lobbyist for the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union that was presented at its annual TEACH conference.

In this PowerPoint, the union detailed how it unsuccessfully attempted to “kill” an effort by parents and school reformers to pass a Parent Trigger law. The union also bragged that after it couldn’t stop the effort, it managed to water down the bill, and then, in a fit of “karma”, oust the state legislator who successfully got the law passed.

I can tell you that the AFT squirmed when it was revealed. It was so embarrassing that the president of the national union herself, Randi Weingarten, offered several of what I call non-apology apologies, and met with the president of the Connecticut Parents Union and the official who the AFT helped vote out of his job to offer an in-person apology.

Many of the adults in American public education – those who run schools and those who are their allies – are afraid of Parent Power. In one California district, a teachers’ union local ran a newsletter that essentially tried to claim that the parents are dupes for “heavy hitters” such as Bill Gates. In other districts, teachers’ unions and school districts seemingly work in concert to oppose any effort by families to get better for their kids.

Ideally, helping our kids succeed should be a partnership between every adult touching the lives of our kids, with parents in the lead decision-making role. But if there is going to be hostility, then those who run schools badly should be afraid. Families should no longer have to accept whatever they are given.

It is critical that parents take power. But you need to take the steps required to make this a reality. You have already taken the first step by attending this conference and meeting with parents and school reformers just like you. And I thank you for standing up and showing up.

The next step is to start your own parents union. Strength is always in numbers – and families need all the strength they can muster together. Through parents unions, you can help your children and help other parents help theirs too. You no longer have to stand alone against school district bureaucracies and teachers’ unions that have their own numbers. And believe this: No district is ready to take on well-organized parents.

Then push for expanding school choice. Here’s the thing: School districts have succeeded in opposing choice – and even increasing your property taxes – because they know that they can use your dollars to tell your state legislators that they will oppose charter schools, vouchers When you stand for school choice, you break a monopoly on education that shouldn’t ever exist.

Demand Parent Trigger Laws: Why should you have to abandon a school in your neighborhood – and, more importantly, why should a district that is not serving the needs of your children and other children continue to run the school as it sees fit.

Push for more data and transparency: It is hard to exercise choice when you don’t know what is going on. You spend $10 billion on education here in Minnesota – and $591 billion throughout this nation – and it all affects your child. You deserve to know what is going on and in an easily understandable way.

And finally, ask questions – and demand answers. You should know what your kids should know by third grade, by sixth grade, and by the time they are looking to attend college or technical school. And everyone who runs your district and your child’s school should be able to give you answers. Questions and answers equal power for your kids.

Take this energy today and use it to take power in education. And know this: You have armies of parents across this nation ready to help you.

Photo courtesy of the Biddle Family.

One can’t help but pay attention to the battles over school closings in Chicago and other big cities goes on unabated; arguments over expanding school choice continue unceasingly; Common Core supporters argue with movement conservatives who call efforts to enact reading and math standards a foreign conspiracy (as well as with rabid traditionalists who call it a Big Business plot); and reformers spar with traditionalists over Poverty and Personal Responsibility mythmaking. But reformers must remember why they fight so hard for the transformation of American public education: The children and their families, especially from poor and minority backgrounds, who deserve better than the worst the super-clusters of failure provide them.In this Best of Dropout Nation from August 2011, Editor RiShawn Biddle explains why we must all make reform a personal matter. Read, consider, and take action.As your Dropout Nation editor, I often try to approach the debates over the reform of American public education with dispassionate analysis and furious, passionate writing. My insight comes from my reporting, often guided by data over anecdotes, a set of first principles, my Christianity and my sense of justice. But for me, this is no academic exercise, no bloodless public policy discussion. And I am constantly reminded that we must reform education because there are real lives, real men and women, who deserve better than fifth-rate.

One of those reminders is this picture right here. It is of a happy young girl, running in around in 1927 just two years before she was to go to school. Take away the black-and-white, and the period clothes, and she looks like any young girl walking around the streets in any neighborhood in America today.

The young girl in that photo is my dear departed grandma. The first years of her life involved joining my great-grandmother along the tracks of the Long Island Railroad, gathering coal that dropped from the trains, so that they could heat their shack in Roslyn, N.Y., and cook food. My grandmother the first nine years of her life mired in the kind of bitter poverty unimaginable even now. Even with that, she was as happy as any young girl could be. But she could barely read.

By the time my great-grandparents managed to get out of poverty into a relatively comfortable life (or as nice as maids and low-skilled workers could do for the time), moving from Roslyn to a nicer home in nearby Mineola, grandma had been to school. But the quality of her education was, to be kind, abysmal and subpar. By the tine she attended fourth grade, she was far behind her peers. And while my great-grandparents did their best to give her a loving home, their level of educational attainment was barely above signing Xs on documents.

My grandma could have remained mired in that state, on the way to dropping out. For the times she lived in, this would have been okay because education wasn’t necessarily critical to earning a living — and this would remain that way until the end of the 1970s. But my grandmother got lucky: She had what we would now call a high-quality teacher, who cared for her well-being, who worked with her on reading and her studies and got her to grade level and beyond. By the time grandma graduated from Mineola High School in 1942, she had been accepted to Wilberforce University, the first person in our family to attend college.

It was education that helped her get out of being poor and into a comfortable middle class life. It was education that helped my grandma provide the knowledge and loving household my mother and I needed to succeed in life. It was education that helped my mother, a single mother of three, get into good-paying jobs that she needed to keep a roof over our head. It is education that, in short, has helped my family, only a generation removed from slavery on my mother’s side, stay out of housing projects, out of Bed-Stuy and the South Bronx, and achieve things that my grandma could only dream about.

I tell this story for three reasons. The first: To remind everyone, including education traditionalists, that the argument that education cannot help move young men and women out of poverty — and that good-to-great teachers cannot transform the lives of children and keep them on the path to success in life — is absolutely ridiculous. Given the evidence from William Sanders and others than high-quality teaching is a more-critical determinant of student achievement than socioeconomic background — and the 1966 Coleman Report’s conclusion that if teaching is of high-quality, schooling will be a bigger factor than socioeconomic background — it is time for the Dana Goldsteins and Diane Ravitches to stop arguing the Poverty Myth of Education that deserves to be tossed into the trashbin.

The second reason? Because the reality remains that for far too many children, it is as haphazard to get a high-quality education now as it was during grandma’s youth in the worst days of the Great Depression. It is more than a tragedy and a travesty when one-third of our fourth-graders are functionally illiterate. It is absolutely immoral and intolerable. If you don’t find this state of affairs in American public education to be intolerable — and its underlying causes to be abhorrent — then I’d like to check your pulse. Because you can’t possibly be human.

And finally, I tell this story because it explains why I approach this education crisis so personally. I know, public policy types, including Beltway reformers, sometimes hate getting personal, dislike naming names, and prefer academic sparring to strong conversations that include calling people on the carpet for faulty thinking. But remember this: For every child, their future is intensely personal. We only have one shot, every day, with every child, to help them get the education they need so they can have futures worthy of their aspirations. The fierce urgency of right now isn’t just some X-axis on a chart.

For me, this isn’t just some bloodless public policy discussion. The young men and women being condemned to poverty and prison look just like I did when I was a child. They look just like my grandmother in her youth. They look like my nephew, my niece and my young cousins — and the children my wife and I will have one day. These are kids who are told every day, in word and deed, by teachers and principals who don’t belong in schools, that they can never amount to anything. And I am incensed every time I consider how hard it is even for middle-class black and Latino families such as mine to ensure that our children are taught by high-quality teachers and get rigorous, college preparatory curricula — and furious when I think about kids in the poorest communities who are forced to attend failure factories because many of us continue to defend a failed, amoral vision.

And it is personal because each day, I listen to men and women, who look just like my grandmother looked as a young parent, who struggle each and every day with principals who ignore them, laggard teachers who condescend them, and adults all around more concerned with preserving influence than with helping their children succeed. After listening to their stories — and listening to those of their children — there is no way to not take this personally.

This writer isn’t just pulling this out of the air. Martin Luther King was as willing to challenge segregationists publicly and by name as he was willing to play nice. The Founding Fathers were among the sharpest-tongued men that ever lived, challenging an actual monarch. As with every movement in the past, there will be a need to have harsh, hard, conversations in which we hold men and women accountable for defending ideas that are indefensible.

This doesn’t mean going after the personal lives of people or calling people nasty names. When it comes to discussions in Congressional hearings and in public policy meetings, the bloodless language is quite appropriate. One should choose words carefully, not carelessly, and sometimes, say or write nothing at all. And should all shake hands and say hello, and even, be able to socialize on occasion, without rancor; we are civil human beings, not savages, and besides, you can’t move people to your side if you call them out and behave like a boor all at the same time. But it does mean calling people on the carpet for the mismatch between their ideals and their practices, especially when they don’t want to acknowledge it.

Certainly we must be thoughtful about our rhetoric. But, as Arthur Koestler would say, one should advocate furiously, ruthlessly, or don’t bother. When 150 young men and women drop out each our into economic and social despair, the school reform movement has to take the waste of these lives personally — and offer rhetoric to match. Or, in short, think about your grandmother and about how every child looked like she once did.

As the editors and contributors enjoy the weekend, listen to this rebroadcast of a Dropout Nation Podcast from May 2011 discussing why so many parents are pushing for reform of American public education and embracing the approach originally paved by Malcolm X to do it any way they can. Contrary to what education commentators such as John Merrow may think, parents — especially those whose children attend the nation’s failure mills — are not driven by animus against teachers, but outrage over the low quality of education and the role of education traditionalists (including teachers unions) in perpetuating the nation’s education crisis.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your mobile device. Also, subscribe to the podcast series, and embed this podcast on your site. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Zune Marketplace, Stitcher, and PodBean. Also download to your phone with other mobile software. A new Dropout Nation Podcast will broadcast on Tuesday.

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A key point of this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on helping children stay on the path to lifelong success is that adults who work in our schools cannot use the problems these kids face outside of school as excuses for not providing them with high-quality teaching and curricula. Two forms of such excuse-making can be found in the Poverty and Personal Responsibility Myths of Education, which often condemn our children, especially those from poor and minority backgrounds, with low expectations. In the process, the mythmakers refuse to take responsibilities for their failures, including in providing students with teachers that can do well by them.

In this Best of Dropout Nation from January 2012, Editor RiShawn Biddle takes aim at one more example of this unwillingness among adults (especially traditionalists) to take responsibility for their roles in spurring the education crisis that hurts so many of the futures of our kids. Read, consider, and take action.

One of the biggest barriers to reforming American public education is the soft bigotry of low expectations for our children — especially those from poor and minority households — among many education traditionalists working in classrooms, districts, ed schools, and other outfits. These so-called teachers, school leaders, and others essentially think little of our children (and even less of their families and communities), even as their own capacity for improving student achievement and nurturing young minds is lacking. So they use theories, including the Poverty Myth of Education (either in the “poverty is an inescapable force” rhetoric of Diane Ravitch and her ilk, or the collection of reprehensible stereotypes about incapable poor parents offered up by Ruby Payne and the infamously faulty and skewed Hart-Risley study) as excuses for their failures.

But when data and evidence makes mincemeat of Poverty Mythmaking won’t sustain their views, then education traditionalists will embrace another school of thought: The Personal Responsibility Myth that ascribes academic failure to single motherhood, the lack of two-family homes, a lack of values, and the stereotypes of certain minorities — particularly young black men — as wastrels, drug dealers and worse. After all, it’s easier to declare that the kids and the homes from which they come are somehow defective instead of admitting the impact of educational neglect and malpractice.

So it wasn’t exactly surprising when Phi Delta Kappan, one of the foremost magazines on the education traditionalist front, allowed Milwaukee Center for Independence Vice President Tracey Sparrow and her sister, Abby (a teacher in D.C.) to indulge in such fantastic thinking — this time, about the young black men who, along with other young men from different racial and economic backgrounds, suffer the most from the nation’s education crisis — in six full-color pages. Focusing on a group of young black men they seemingly pulled out of central casting, the Sparrows culled such quotes as “[young black men] don’t take stuff seriously because we want to smoke, do alcohol, and steal”, and are too influenced by rap music. The Sparrows also found time to play blame-the-families, pulling quotes such as “Black parents give up on their kids and let them do whatever.”

From where the Sparrows sit, their interviews “reveal that the young men interviewed are clear that the challenge of educating black males is much bigger than the schoolhouse.” And ultimately, schools can do nothing to provide these young men the tools they need for success. What the Sparrows (and Phi Delta Kappan, by association) have actually have shown is that traditionalists would rather believe stereotypes and fantasies that make them feel good about their failed vision of education.

For one, the profiles themselves would not stand the legendary Leon Dash’s sniff test; after all, his famed Washington Post profiles were gleaned after months and years of interviews, asking the same questions (and gathering string from other interviews) to finally pierce through the stories people tell the facts instead of the yarns they think (and know) their interviewers want to hear. The fact that the Sparrows didn’t even cite anything in the way of statistics — and declared that they “did not approach this as a rigorous academic study” – makes clear that they weren’t exactly looking to do more than aid the comfortable in classrooms at the expense of the children whose futures they are supposed to nurture.

The Sparrows also fail to acknowledge that American public education is academically neglecting kids — especially young men of all backgrounds. This is clear from the fact that one out of every two young American Indian men in ninth grade — kids who mostly live outside of big cities — will drop out by senior year in high school, as will one out of every two young Latino men. The fact that young men from middle-class households who, in theory, have strong moral values and be exposed to good parenting, are also struggling in reading and other aspects of academics should also give pause. One out of every five young white male high school seniors from college-educated households were functionally illiterate according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress. So were 42 percent of young black male eighth-graders whose parents were college-educated as well as three out of every ten of their American Indian peers according to NAEP’s 2011 exams.

When one looks at the low level of academic performance of American students against the rest of the world — including the fact that white students were outperformed by peers in 16 other nations on the most-recent PISA exam, and that our country has a lower level of proficient students than 22 other nations — then it is clear that the problem isn’t the perceived engagement of families in student learning.

If fact, the reality is that there are plenty of families, regardless of their race or economic background, be they single mothers or blended households, who are pushing hard not only to just be engaged in education, but to actually take power in schools. There’s the work of parents unions in Connecticut and Texas to enact Parent Trigger laws and take control of failing schools, as well as the grassroots efforts of Buffalo ReformEd in the biggest city in western New York State, and the evangelistic efforts of Parent Revolution in California. Then there are the efforts of parents in Adelanto, Calif., who are working to take control of Desert Trails Elementary School from a district that has been promoting academic failure for far too long. And then there are the families who are exercising school choice, either by using school voucher plans or sending their kids to public charter schools in their communities. These and other parents are finally coming to the realization that the myth that any school can serve their child is no longer true (and chances are that it was never so) — and are no longer willing to tolerate teachers and school leaders who consider them to be afterthoughts, nuisances, and troublemakers be cause they demand power.

Meanwhile the Sparrows (and by association, Phi Delta Kappen) fails to address the abysmal teaching, subpar curricula, and cultures of mediocrity and deficiency within American public education that is at the heart of why so many children from all households have been condemned to economic and social despair.

We know that 40 percent of all children enter school with reading problems regardless of what families do at home. This is especially true for young men, because the areas of their brains in which language and literacy is developed lags behind that of their female schoolmates. Yet most traditional districts fail to offer any form of intensive reading remediation that can help these kids catch up and stay on track. At the same time, the nation’s university schools of education continue to poorly train teachers in reading instruction; just one in five ed schools in Illinois surveyed by the National Council on Teacher Quality in one study adequately trained their students in reading instruction. The consequence are dire. As Reid Lyon determined in 1997, most black boys landed in special education because they struggled in reading. And as Stanford University Researchers Deborah Stipek and Sarah Miles determined in a 2006 study, low literacy levels in first grade are strong predictors of aggression and other school discipline problems two grades down the line.

Then there is the fact that traditional districts deny rigorous college-preparatory curricula to poor and minority students. As former National Math and Science Initiative president Tom Luce noted last year, even with the growth in students taking A.P. courses, far too many black and Latino students are shied away from them. This happens despite the fact that A.P. participation increases their likelihood of kids graduating from high school and completing college. In Atlanta, for example, just 7 percent of black students were taking AP courses during the 2005-2006 school year, while 31 percent of their white high school peers took those courses. Meanwhile district bureaucracies do little to inform parents of these opportunities for rigorous learning and fight those who are aware of them.

Meanwhile there is no way to dance around the general consensus that schools account for at least 40 percent of student achievement and that teacher quality accounts for as much as half (if not more) of student success. If one argues that schools account for half of variation in student achievement, then likely teacher quality looms even larger. That’s even before one considers that researchers admit that their own research may understate importance of schools (and teachers).

What Personal Responsibility mythmakers such as the Sparrows (and their counterparts among the Poverty Myth crowd) are unwilling to do is acknowledge that American public education often does little more than chew up the futures of young black men and toss their lives out into the garbage like cleaned-off chicken bones. They are unwilling to admit the systemic problems why this happens: Low-quality instruction; mediocre curricula; abysmal recruiting and training of teachers and school leaders; Zip Code Education policies that deny high-quality educational choice to children and the families that love them; overdiagnosis of illiterate children (especially young men) as being learning disabled; school cultures that treat families as afterthoughts and nuisances; and a system of low expectations (including social promotion and a belief that only some kids deserve high-quality education). And they would rather conjure up fantasies of young men led astray by hip-hop music and wayward parents than address the cancerous beliefs they hold.

In the process, they essentially declare that these young men and women are mere throwaways whose lives are not worth saving, and that pursuing systemic reform is not worth doing. All in all, their beliefs are absolutely amoral and inhumane. And absolutely unacceptable.

Certainly good parenting and strong family structures can’t be helpful in improving educational outcomes. In fact, taking responsibility for shaping how schools serve children is at the heart of Parent Power and school choice. But at the same time, Personal Responsibility mythmakers and other education traditionalists are simply advocating stereotypes of young men and women that absolve them of their responsibility for perpetuating a system that fails far too many of our children. The kind of mythmaking that the Sparrows and Phi Delta Kappan has engaged in should not be tolerated. Simply put, they deserve our collective scorn.

On this Martin Luther King Day rebroadcast of the Dropout Nation Podcast, RiShawn Biddle takes a look at the progress of American history from 1890 to today, and explains why overhauling public education is critical to keeping it going. In an increasingly global and knowledge-based economy and society, high-quality education is critical to sustaining the nation’s place as the superpower and help all children emerge from poverty into the middle class.

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, Stitcher, and PodBean. Also download to your phone with other mobile software. A new Podcast will broadcast this week.

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As you enjoy the football and the first weekend of the New Year, listen to this rebroadcast of the Dropout Nation Podcast from December 2011 on why we can’t simply “improve” American public education or count on one silver bullet to overhaul a failed system. We must replace our Model T and broken pocket watch system of educating children with one that will help all kids succeed.

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, Stitcher (for those of us using our Androids and iPhones), 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 broadcast on Monday.

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