One of the most-prized of my physical possessions is an old Seiko 5 Sportsmatic Weekdater watch that belonged to my grandfather. Grandpa wasn’t sure whether he got the watch in 1965 during a trip to Japan or it was a gift from his brother, Earl. But it did work well enough that he kept it in his collection of watches and other jewelry long after he switched over to other timepieces until he gave it to me in 2007, a year before he went home to God. And after a little cleaning and restoration, this Seiko automatic keeps fairly good time and looks as beautiful as it 48 years ago — even after having taken more than a few lickings that should have stopped it from ticking. In fact, it was the watch I wore the day I married my lovely wife.

My grandpa left me more than just a watch. From the time I was still in my mother’s womb until the day he died, he taught me right from wrong, showed me how to install light switches, and disciplined me on behaving well towards others. That’s just some of the things on which he gave me actual instruction. Over the years, I learned the importance of literacy from watching him read newspapers, gleaned the value of hard work from watching him toil tirelessly to provide for our family, and picked up on the value of being decent and kind to others from how he treated people around him. And as he grew older and battled heart attacks, strokes, and cancers that should have took his life long before he left this earth at age 84 — and ultimately, from his final battles with congestive heart failure — I also learned the importance of being tough and resilient even in the face of adversity. At the end of his life, he knew that all that he did would survive with his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, and will likely last generations beyond that.

The fact that my grandpa’s Seiko has not only outlasted my grandfather, but will likely last beyond the lifetime of my child now growing in my wife’s womb — and the fact that my grandfather’s example has extended beyond his own life — are testaments to this reality: That what we own and what we do lasts beyond our lifetimes. This is especially true when it comes to the communities in which we live and America as a whole. It is why we must build strong legacies that will help our children and their kin continue to bend the arc of history toward economic and social progress.

One of the foremost reasons why we must transform American public education because the crisis that pervades it is leading to far too many of our kids being dropped into the economic and social abyss. Fifteen percent of young men and women age 16-to-24 in 25 of the nation’s big cities — or 5.8 million young adults — are neither working, finishing high school, or studying in traditional colleges, apprenticeships and other forms of higher education, according to the Social Science Research Council in its latest report on the challenges facing young adult dropouts. In an economy in which what you know is more important than what you can with your hands — and in which annual compound growth in real weekly wages for high school dropouts has declined between 1963 and 2008 (even as high school grads, those with some higher ed training, and collegians have seen compounded annual wage growth of at least four-tenths of one percent) — these young adults are ill-equipped to play positive roles in either the economy or the communities in which they live. They are also unable to take advantage of opportunities for economic and social advancement outside of their hometowns; a mere 17 percent of high school dropouts move out of their home communities, according to economist Enrico Moretti, the author of The New Geography of Jobs: Who Wins, Who Loses in the New Innovation Economy, one of Dropout Nation’s Top Eight book selections last year. And the nation is already bearing the consequences of this, especially in the form of the billions in unemployment benefits given to the 16 percent of dropouts aged 16-to-24 (and the 11 percent of peers aged 25 and older) seeking work who are unemployed — as well as welfare benefits for the 40 percent of young adult dropouts who aren’t seeking work at all.

The consequences of their despair extend to children because these young adults are lack the knowledge and skills, along with the discipline and nurturing that comes from education, needed to build positive legacies for them. This is especially true in the case of young women dropouts (especially those from black households) who become out-of-wedlock mothers in part because they see no point in either using birth control, delaying gratification, or seeking a diploma and degree. Thirty-eight percent of eighth-graders whose mothers were high school dropouts read Below Basic proficiency, according to the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress; that more than double the unacceptable levels of illiteracy for peers whose mothers were high school graduates and had either some higher ed training or graduated from college. [Thirty-seven of eighth-graders whose fathers were dropouts read Below Basic, again, double the percentages for peers whose fathers were high school grads and have sought some form of higher education.] This cycle, which began with their parents who were also dropouts, is continued into another generation, with prison, poverty, homelessness, and untreated mental illness being the legacies that plague future generations.

Yet poverty and low levels of educational attainment in themselves don’t have to be destiny for the next generation. These children have genius that can and should be nurtured. Some 3.4 million children from poor backgrounds — many of which came from homes where parents were either dropouts or merely received high school diplomas — were among the top-performers in their schools, according to a 2007 study by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. This should be no surprise. The reality is that cognitive ability is dynamic and not constant, as much influenced by the quality of learning environment (especially in school) and challenge (academically and otherwise) as it is by innate ability and growth over time. Children whose parents are dropouts can learn and succeed if they are provided high-quality education.

This is where the education crisis, whose failures are borne the most brutally by poor children (as well as those from minority households and young men of all backgrounds), come into play. Contrary to the arguments of some, most-recently Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University, growing income inequality is directly related to low-quality teaching and curricula. Children from poor and poorly-educated households are more likely than middle-class peers to attend schools staffed by low-quality teachers. Even worse, those low-quality teachers tend to perform even worse than laggards subjecting middle-class kids to educational neglect; the average low-performing teacher in North Carolina working in school serving mostly-poor kids was four-hundredths of a standard deviation worse in performance in math than a laggard in a middle-class serving school, according to a 2010 study conducted by a team led by Tim Sass, an economist now with Georgia State University.

Just as importantly, poor and minority children are less likely to be provided opportunities to take the kind of college-preparatory courses needed to both graduate from high school and succeed in higher education. Just 22 percent of high school students in Philadelphia (where 82 percent of all students are economically poor) took an Advanced Placement course in 2009-2010, according to the U.S. Department of Education. This lack of access to high-quality learning is a problem caused largely by a century of racialist- and class-driven rationing of education — especially the comprehensive high school model, gifted-and-talented programs (which falsely perpetuate the idea that they are cordons solitaire from the problems ailing the rest of education), and special ed ghettos used to condemn young men considered unteachable by those unwilling to instruct them. Add in Zip Code Education policies such as zoned schooling, school residency laws, and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools which restrict poor families from providing their children with high-quality learning opportunities, as well as the lack of high-quality information on the performance of schools and districts, and it’s little wonder why only 56 percent of high-achieving poor students remain that way by fifth grade — and those peers who are struggling end up on the path to dropping out.

But the failures of American public education aren’t just borne upon the poorest children. High school sophomores from middle class backgrounds were outperformed on the by peers in 24 other countries, and lagged behind peers in 15 countries in science literacy, according to an analysis of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment by America Achieves. Twenty-eight percent of fourth-graders attending suburban schools read Below Basic on the 2011 NAEP, virtually unchanged from the levels in 2007; 14 percent of young men in eighth grade whose parents were college graduates were functionally illiterate, versus seven percent of young women peers. The reality is that when poor children are subjected to educational malpractice, their middle-class peers will be subjected to scholastic neglect. Providing high-quality education to our poorest kids is also key to helping all of our children succeed. 

If we want to leave a legacy for our children — and generations beyond them — that are worthy of our aspirations for them, we must continue to transform American public education. This includes overhauling how we recruit, train, compensate, and evaluate teachers; as well as revamping how we select, train, and reward school leaders. It also includes the implementation of Common Core reading and math standards — as well as the development of high-quality curricula aligned with the standards — in order to provide our kids with comprehensive college preparatory curricula; expanding access to A.P. and International Baccalaureate courses, along with ending rationing of education, is also key. And we must continue to expand school choice as well as Parent Power efforts, along with developing school data systems that provide all families with information they need to make smart decisions.

The best heirloom we can all leave for our children is a better world in which they can all live. Advancing the reform of American public education is one way to make that a reality.

What could American public education look like when we shift its definition from being a collection of district bureaucracies and other traditional entities to a system of publicly financing high-quality educational opportunities? One example could be found in Technology, Entertainment and Design, the collection of annual conferences featuring global and local thoughtleaders whose annual TED Talks conference in Long Beach, Calif., now rivals Davos and Allen & Co.’s famed Sun Valley Conference as a major convening for top players.

Over the past decade, TED has expanded far beyond the original Talks confab. Since 2008, its TEDx operation has worked with top professionals and budding thinkers in locales as varied as Bozeman, Montana, to pull together the kind of conferences and learning sessions that could only be attended by those either lucky enough to attend the main TED Talks, big city denizens who could go to their local cultural institution, or the lucky few who lived near such university towns as , Ind. These days, some 1,300 TEDx gatherings are held annually around the world Bloomington , allowing even those in small towns and rural areas with big ideas to build cultures of genius for their communities. In fact, one can say the quality of many of the TEDx sessions are so good that they rival the lectures given each day on university campuses. Meanwhile the main TED Talks are now easy to access online thanks to the organization’s decision in 2006 to distribute the sessions online; one can now easily watch such sessions as former Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation official Tom Vander Ark’s symposium on the development of online and blended learning.

As Microsoft staffer (and Vander Ark’s former editor at what is now Getting Smart) Douglas Crets points out, TED is essentially exploiting the reality that “Academia is less expensive to create than before”. The TEDx sessions, in particular, are now fostering a new generation of public intellectuals whose ideas may end up influencing how we see the world. This is because the TEDx sessions, like the main TED Talks before it, allow any man or woman with amazing ideas to gain influence without first having to attain the pedigree once conveyed by university tenure and writing in academic journals. One can only imagine the potential that TED has yet to exploit: The TED Talks library is already a sort of online learning operation without   without exams and the ability to earn a baccalaureate or graduate degree; TED could actually go further and offer degrees or professional certificates on its own. TED could also bring together the highest-quality and most-interesting of the TEDx conferences to create a sort of blended learning effort that could be as good as any from a traditional or for-profit higher ed institution.

Certainly this isn’t exactly pleasing to those in traditional higher education circles. Harvard economist Umair Haque (the subject of Crets’ recent round of critical tweets) declares that TED sessions “devalue the very idea of great ideas, stripping them into commodities” largely because those ideas aren’t going through traditional university filters. From where Haque sits, TED offers nothing more than ” sexy-info-McNuggets” that don’t have the supposed “subtlety and inherent difficulty of truly great ideas” that Haque thinks he offers. Some of his colleagues would scoff at the idea of  TED being a higher ed institution. [Of course, one has to beg askance of anyone who tosses around terms such as "neofeudalism" which are meaningless to thinkers and the general public alike.] But anyone who is familiar with higher ed can attest, the reality is that association with a traditional university isn’t a true signal of quality, either in scholarship or in ideas. From the dubious scholarship of the likes of infamous black studies professor Leonard Jeffries and ethnic studies scholar Ward Churchill, to the reality that most top-ranked universities are so because of their graduate programs (while their undergraduate courses can often be shoddy because of the perverse consequences of tenure being awarded based on research instead of quality of instruction), being an academic superstar doesn’t necessarily mean being worthy of consideration in the marketplace of ideas. And considering the slipshod nature of the accreditation process by which universities are blessed — which has allowed degree mills such as the now-shuttered Southeastern University in Washington, D.C. to operate unchecked for decades — one can easily say that TED’s session would likely be better than what is offered by far too many campuses.

The disruption that TED is wrecking upon the definition of what being an academic and public intellectual can be is amazing to watch. The fact that TED’s efforts plays into the redefining of higher education that began with the online learning efforts of Apollo Group’s University of Phoenix and has advanced with universities such as MIT offering non-credit courses online is also reaffirming Crets’ argument that academia can be replicated less expensively than ever. And these sorts of disruptions and redefinitions are now happening in American public education.

The growth of public charter schools, which are now either the dominant or number two providers of K-12 education in cities such as New Orleans and Detroit, has exposed  the ineffectiveness of Zip Code Education practices that have long been used by traditional districts to ration what was considered high-quality education. When poor and minority families learn that they can send their child to any high-quality school they so choose, they no longer accept such racialist policies as the norm. This expansion of charters is, in turn, fueling the expansion of other vehicles for school choice, including the creation of vouchers and voucher-like tax credits in more than 15 states over the past three years. More importantly, the expansion of choice has allowed for the development of new models of building school cultures that nurture the genius of all children, and have accelerated the end of the traditional district model whose emphasis on scale is obsolete in an age in which quality of teaching and curricula matters. It has also spurred the passage of Parent Trigger laws in seven states (with more on the way) that allow families to overhaul schools in their neighborhoods as well as to expand the meaning of choice to mean more than escaping failure.

Charters have also shown clearly that families, community groups, and even churches can launch schools that provide high-quality education. AT the same time, it is more than just about providing kids with good and great teachers. Because charter operators can structure their curricula to meet the cultural and even religious needs of the children they serve, it has opened opportunities for American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities to launch schools that provide both comprehensive college preparatory curricula and full immersion in one’s culture or language. This isn’t exactly pleasing to traditionalists who like Horace Mann in the mid-19th century only want children to abide by what is essentially a civic religion. But this redefinition of what public education is also fits into what America’s Founding Fathers wanted the nation to be: A nation in which life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and cultural pluralism is the norm and not the exception.

The emergence of the Knowledge is Power Program as one of the nation’s premiere charter school operators — as well as the success of Green Dot, Rocketship, and other players — has offered a new approach to structuring the operations of American public education. Just as importantly, their work in providing high-quality teaching and curricula in big-city locales long dogged by failure mills has also broken the myth that only good and great schools can only be available to families in suburbia (as well as magnified the failures of suburban districts in improving the achievement of its poor and middle class kids). One cautions against the idea of charter school operators becoming bigger; after all, the scale of the traditional district is one reason why so many fail in providing high-quality instruction and curricula. At the same time, one can imagine even more charter operators emerging to serve urban and even rural locales where high-quality schooling is the exception and not the norm.

But the disruption isn’t just happening in school operations and governance. The emergence of Teach For America as the leading alternative to traditional ed schools — accounting for 10,000 new teachers coming into the profession in 2012 — has spurred the launch of new teacher prep programs geared toward moving away from the traditional focus on theory and toward successful real-life teaching. Ed schools continue to harp on the fact that TFA recruits only have two-year stints and try to dismiss the quality of its preparation. But as more data shows that TFA does a better job than ed schools  in training teachers for the rigors of working in urban classrooms — and the emergence of school leaders from its ranks such as Indianapolis Deputy Mayor Jason Kloth (who runs the city’s education initiatives) proves the value of its focus on recruiting subject-competent collegians with strong entrepreneurial self-starter and leadership abilities — the failures of ed schools in selecting and training aspiring teachers is magnified. It is even spurring the launch of new graduate schools of education outside of traditional higher ed such as the Relay Graduate School launched by charter school operator Uncommon Schools, KIPP, and Achievement First.

Meanwhile the dominance of state governments over teacher certification — which has proven long ago to be useless in vetting the quality of teachers working in classrooms — will also be disrupted. The U.S. Bureau of Indian Education, for example, could easily launch a certification process of its own, allowing for it to improve the quality of teaching in every one of its schools throughout the country (and no longer having to put up with 23 states and their respective teacher and principal certification processes). Such a move would make sense given its effort to essentially bring order to its role as both a charter school authorizer and state education agency of sorts. One can easily imagine teacher quality reform outfit TNTP effectively doing the same thing — this time with an emphasis on performance in improving student achievement over time instead of merely passing the less-than-useful Praxis exams — and helping school operators gain access to a steady stream of high-quality teaching talent.

Then there are the innovations that are likely to come from Common Core reading and math standards. One of the most-appealing aspects of the standards lie in that they do more than just emphasis  providing students with strong college preparatory curricula. Because the standards focus also on critical thinking — from comparing and contrasting ideas, to linking ideas across in writing and reading — it allows anyone, including teachers and families, to craft high-quality curricula on their own. This isn’t exactly appealing to traditional textbook publishers or to the most-radical of traditionalists. But as Peter Zamora of the Council of Chief State School Officers noted yesterday at a panel on Native education, it throws open the doors of curriculum development to anyone with substantive ideas on what kids should learn. Even Native Hawaiian teachers can weave cultural content into, say, a discussion about Romeo and Juliet. 

Yet the possibilities are just emerging. Imagine if there was a TED for education, starting with a series of annual learning sessions taught by high-quality teachers — including mothers and fathers who have proven success in homeschooling —  on the national stage, then launching a franchising system in which families, teachers, community groups, churches, and others can start schools under that umbrella. Such as effort could help nurture emerging teachers and school leaders who don’t have to go through traditional teacher compensation systems or deal with the perverse consequences of seniority-based privileges on teacher quality. At the same time, such an effort could even reshape how we teach children in classrooms. One of the grim realities is that the average classroom and approach to instruction looks little different than it did 160 years ago, even as the world have moved away from the Pony Express to the World Wide Web. A new collection of schools could spur changes that haven’t yet been imagined.

Certainly traditionalists in K-12, like their peers in higher ed, aren’t too happy with these changes. After all, from where they sit, all of these disruptions are the end of public education as they think it should be. The fact that the new definition of American public education includes charter schools operated by corporate and nonprofit outfits , as well as a more-active role in shaping curricula by the likes of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is particularly intolerable to them. In fact, the This is true — and it is a good thing. For far too long, the traditional policies and practices in American public education has  policies and practices have done little more than condemn 1.1 million children a year to poverty and prison. From condemning young men of all backgrounds to special ed ghettos, to the overuse of suspensions and expulsions, to the unwillingness to use data in addressing instruction and leadership, to even the continued operating of schools and districts that have long ago proven inept at serving children,  the traditional public education model hasn’t worked for families and children for a long time (if it ever did). It is high time to toss the old definition of public education into history’s trash can where it belongs.

What’s clear is this: That public education is not about the kind of organization that provides instruction and curricula, but how it is financed and regulated. Charter schools, private schools, online schools, DIY operations, and even teachers working together or on their own, are as capable to provide high-quality education (and even promote good citizenship) as a traditional district. What matters more is not whether the school operators are government or private, but whether they provide our children with good-to-great teachers, strong, comprehensive college-preparatory curricula, and cultures of genius that nurture the genius inherent in all kids. Those school operators that don’t provide high-quality education, be they traditional, charter, or private, should not be allowed to exist, while those that do the job deserve praise and support.

We need more TEDs and KIPPs in American public education. And we need to keep redefining public education in order to achieve this ideal: Helping children gain the knowledge and skills they need to build brighter futures for themselves and the world around them.

Yesterday’s news that Chicago’s city government struck a deal with software giant Microsoft for cloud (or remote) e-mail and desktop application services certainly garnered attention from those who follow and cover the tech sector. After all, the four-year contract once again served as a reminder of the software pioneer’s evolving strategy in the cloud services arena, as well as put rivals Google and Amazon on notice that it remains a formidable outfit which can leverage its overwhelming presence on the desktops of every corporate and public sector operation. The fact that Chicago city government has embraced the kind of less-infrastructure-is-more -productivity thinking about technology that is increasingly the norm among Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial outfits (which, in some ways, hearkens back to the early days of computing when companies shared time and computing power on old-school mainframes) also points the way for other municipal and state governments struggling to serve taxpayers with less cash.

But for the school reform movement, the Microsoft-Chicago deal is an important reminder that revolutionizing American public education extends beyond overhauling teacher quality and school leadership, building up blended and online learning opportunities, revamping curricula so that all children get college-preparatory learning; and expanding Parent Power and school choice. Revamping how districts and other school operators handle their back office and technology activities is also critical to ensuring all kids get high-quality education.

One of the less-discussed aspects of the nation’s education crisis is the woeful deployment (or, to be more-precise, non-deployment) by districts of technology and other capital-intensive activities. Reformers have spent time advancing efforts by states to develop comprehensive, useful school data systems such as those in Florida (where data from districts, state universities, and even workforce development agencies are combined to provide long-term information on student progress). They have also devoted energy to building online and blended learning options. But less effort has been put into addressing the low levels of capacity among districts to actually use technology in order to handle their back-office (and even front-office) operations in efficient ways. The woeful handling of data by small and mid-sized districts in California — including the use of Excel spreadsheets and FileMaker software to handle student performance information — that I documented back in 2008 in A Byte At the Apple remains very much the norm today. Even the nation’s big city districts fail to use their scale to make smarter IT decisions and spending purchases, or develop systems to better track such matters as textbook purchases. More often than not, a big-city district such as Chicago Public Schools can actually under-invest in IT, spending just one percent of a $5 billion annual budget on its technology infrastructure.

None of this is surprising. After all, inefficiency is endemic throughout American public education — and the technology inefficiencies end up inter-playing with bad decisions in other aspects of school back office functions. Spectacular episodes of back office mismanagement such as those in Detroit — where a 2009 audit found that Detroit bought  unused 160 BlackBerry smartphones and 11 motorcycles on the taxpayers’ dime — are just headline-grabbing examples of what happens in districts every day. As Michael Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools documented two years ago in a presentation at the American Enterprise Institute, some districts keep just 69 percent of school buses in operation throughout the school year; this can be a sign that either the districts have too many buses in their fleets or don’t have the capacity to repair those vehicles quickly. A district can spend as much $196 on each item they acquire through antiquated purchase order processes (which often involve teachers and principals going through central bureaucrats to pay for purchases as small as association memberships); these processes slow down the delivery of needed supplies, consume taxpayer dollars that can be used to improve teacher and curricula quality, and keep bureaucracies in place even when they are no longer needed. And then there are the inefficiencies that come from how districts manage school lunch operations and maintain buildings; Cincinnati, for example, found that it saved at least $10 million annually after it revamped its food and building services operations.

The consequences of antiquated IT management are devastating for children, families, and taxpayers alike. From payroll and human resource systems used to oversee the three out of every five dollars American public education spent on teachers in 2010, to the systems charged with keeping tabs on textbooks and other inventory, IT plays a major role in all aspects of education operations. The low quality of information technology services is likely one reason why districts and other school operators wastefully deploy the $23 billion spent annually on school transportation, and the $49 billion spent on capital maintenance. And in an age in which districts and states must make tough choices on handling $1.1 trillion in defined-benefit pension deficits and unfunded retired teacher healthcare costs — especially when Medicaid costs will squeeze education funding for the foreseeable future — better IT management equals more money.

But it isn’t just about wasted money. As Nook HDs and Kindle Fires take the place of print textbooks and notebooks, districts and other school operators must be able to support the use of such technology on a wide scale. Yet far too many districts struggle just to replace aging Macintosh computers, much less deploy new technology. This struggle (along with the resistance of National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers affiliates, and other public sector unions, to the use of technology that can result in lost rank-and-file members) is why few districts have followed the example of New York City in developing innovative instruction and curricula efforts such as School of One, or have taken on efforts to keep laggard early career teachers from getting near-lifetime employment.

The incompetence of districts in handling technology also complicates support for systemic reform. District bureaucracy snafus contribute to the lack of confidence among teachers — especially traditionalists already opposed to all aspects of systemic reform. From their perspective, why should they trust a district to provide comprehensive objective data-based teacher evaluations properly when it can’t even get the e-mail servers to work properly? This, in turn, also reinforces unsophisticated mindsets about the use of data in structuring instruction and teacher performance management, which then plays into traditionalist arguments against overhauling evaluations and other efforts. Meanwhile the failures on the technology front also complicate efforts to move away from the traditional district model (which would be obsolete even if districts got better at IT management) to the Hollywood Model of Education. A state education agency or municipal government overseeing a collection of independent school operators would need the technology infrastructure and expertise to handle the tough work

Certainly the fact that districts are government agencies, and thus, don’t yet have the same levers for accountability such as loss of customers (and their dollars) is a culprit. The fact that rural districts often have less-than-adequate access to high-speed broadband — which is key for availing the use of cloud-based services — is also a factor. Then there’s also the reality that district procurement processes, like other public-sector purchasing regimes, focus more on cost-effectiveness than on balancing spending considerations with quality concerns. And let’s not also forget the influence of iron triangle relationships between districts and existing vendors (who often know how to work procurement bureaucrats, who themselves want to make sure they can move over to a firm once they tire of public service), which also explains why some technology firms continue to get contracts despite their almost deliberate unwillingness to control costs.

Yet as Chicago has shown, governments can make smart technology decisions when leaders make doing so a top priority. Rules governing procurement processes are often structured to favor preferred vendors over others; they can also be crafted to promote more-balanced approaches to technology decisions that aren’t just about costs or favoritism. The problems of IT-decision-making within American public education are ones of thoughtlessness, lack of sophistication, abysmal leadership, and a mindset against the use of outsourcing (and the private sector operators) that defies logic.

The first problem lies in the fact that school operators don’t put much the kind of thought into IT spending that is the norm for private sector peers. Two-thirds of districts surveyed by Grunwald Associates on behalf of the Consortium for School Networking never used return on investment calculations as part of their technology purchasing or evaluation activities; only one in five districts use student test score data in evaluating the efficacy of their technology efforts, while just 43 percent even think about the cost of deployment and maintenance of technology purchases in their decisions. It is little wonder why a district can end up overspending on antiquated BlackBerrys when they could simply deploy more-effective (though security breakdown-prone) approaches such as bring your own device — or under-spending on technologies that can actually make operations effective such as the cloud-based data storage services Amazon provides. It is also why many districts under-invest in IT infrastructures and even delay much-needed technology updates.

The second is one endemic throughout American public education: The lack of sophisticated thinking about using data in making IT and other operational decisions. This shouldn’t be surprising. Districts are just beginning to use teacher evaluation data (and the underlying value-added analysis of student test growth) in making performance management decisions and restructuring how teachers work in order to maximize high-quality talent (as well as make teaching a more-rewarding profession). The fact that most school leaders aren’t trained in such principles of business management as organizational planning — and that most principals and superintendents come from the teaching ranks — also complicates matters. As Contributing Editor Steve Peha pointed out two years ago, it is difficult for teachers to deal with the transition from managing classrooms to managing teachers with whom they feel residual sympathy; so it isn’t surprising that school leaders would also struggle in other aspects of management. The continuing fetish among some traditionalists and reformers that principals should only be focused on being instructional leaders ignores the reality that school leaders must work more like corporate division executives who must be focused on making everything at the building level work well for kids and teachers.

Then there is the fact that far too many school leaders shouldn’t be in those jobs. When school leaders are failures, they fail in all aspects of their management. As seen in Detroit, one should as much expect failed school leaders to mismanage IT matters as they abet educational malpractice. Former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein also proved in his tenure running the Big Apple’s schools, savvy and strong school leaders are also people who understand how technology impacts all aspects of school operations, and works diligently to embrace smart approaches to handling technology. For all the talk among some reformers about the importance of embracing “cage-busting” leadership, there is surprisingly little discussion about the need for school leaders to master the basics about managing IT operations that can do plenty to ruin their efforts on the ground.

Finally the resistance to outsourcing aspects of school operations — an extension of the traditionalist belief that any involvement of the private sector in education is an anathema — also makes it difficult to use IT in effectively managing school and district operations. Forget for a moment that this conceit ignores the reality that American public education is already dependent on Corporate America for tax dollars that sustain operations as well as for providing goods and services necessary to run schools. By ignoring the economic and operational benefits of handing off IT and other functions to corporate firms, American public education is failing to use techniques that can allow them to focus more on improving the quality of teaching and curricula provided to the children in their care. One can easily argue that districts shouldn’t even be doing more on the IT front other than managing those contractors providing the services (and holding them accountable for results). In fact, by yielding savings from managing back-office activities properly, districts could then use those dollars to build cultures of genius in which all kids learn.

Certainly reformers are doing plenty to overhaul school leadership, push for the development of data systems, promote the acceptance of the new fiscal norm in education, and battle failed mindsets that have burdened education for far too long. Yet reformers still haven’t focused enough on the mismanagement of IT activities. The efforts undertaken by the Council of the Great City Schools — including the development of a system that helps districts analyze and make decisions on operational activities — are important steps. There needs to be more of them. The kind of institutional reform outfits like TNTP that predominate in the teacher quality arena should also become prominent in education IT management. There’s no reason why think tanks such as American Enterprise Institute (which has done plenty of work on the school efficiency front) don’t focus more on technology.

While all this happens, school leaders should rip a page from Chicago’s decision to let Microsoft manage key aspects of its IT infrastructure, as well as learn from the growing number of firms and governments outside of education that have moved toward cloud-based IT offerings. There’s plenty that can be done to make IT work for supporting the high quality work that helps our children.

As your editor, I’m loathe to comment more than necessary about last week’s massacre of 26 lives — all but six children under the age of seven — in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. From where I sit, rare incidents of mass carnage tend to bring as much of the worst out of people as they inspire the good. So far, I haven’t been proven wrong. From simplistic calls for gun control laws, to senseless proclamations about the propensity for violence among the mentally ill, to the scapegoating of any bogeyman available for the picking, far too many people have allowed their righteous indignation at the slaughters of these innocents to overwhelm their thoughtfulness.

Yet any close look at the Newtown massacres shows that this, like so many incidents, avail no one of a simple solution. For one: Mass murders are incredibly rare, with 100 incidents in the past three decades, or less than one percent of the 13,913 homicides reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation last year alone. The fact that mass murders are rare — along with the fact that the mother (and victim) of Adam Lanza, who committed the heinous murders — was a law-abiding gun owner, makes it is hard for any thoughtful person to use mass murders such as what happened in Newtown as either a strong case for enacting new gun control laws or for crafting laws allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons in classrooms. One would even dare say that both sides of the gun control debate appear to be craven opportunists instead of being compassionate caregivers to the families of the victims in their time of suffering. The fact that less than two percent of homicides involving youth happen on school grounds, according to the U.S. Centers on Disease Control, and, even with questionably-reported statistics, that school violence has been in decline for the past three decades, also makes the Newtown massacres even less-useful for any solid discussion about preventing crime against our children or about the use of school discipline in schools. Such overreaction over the massacre in Columbine High School in 1999 was one reason for the overuse of suspensions and expulsions (as well as passage of zero-tolerance laws) that are a major culprit in the nation’s education crisis, and why 150 children drop out each hour into poverty and prison.

Anyone using Newtown as a fulcrum for a discussion about the role of mental illness and mental health treatment must also keep a few things in mind. The first? That few of the mentally ill ever commit a violent crime. This includes those diagnosed with schizophrenia — a disease often associated with violent crime in the public imagination — who are less likely to commit a violent crime than someone with bipolar disorder or major depression. If anything, as Heather Stuart of Queens University in Canada has pointed out, the mentally ill are more-likely to be subjected to violence than those of us in (arguably) good mental health, and are especially prone to abuse by relatives and significant others taking evil advantage of their vulnerabilities. A drug addict or alcoholic is three times more likely to commit a violent crime than anyone with a mental illness, according to medical sociologist Jeffrey Swanson of Duke University based on data from the National Institute of Mental Health’s Epidemiologic Catchment Area. Certainly a real discussion needs to be had about overhauling the other super-cluster of failure that is the mental health treatment system, a matter about which I have become well-versed on a personal level as a relative of someone with a mental illness. This is especially clear from the horrific fact that prisons and jails have now replaced the barbaric institutions known as insane asylums as the mental health centers of first and last resort for young men and women who are both homeless and mentally ill. But as with any incident of mass murder, Newtown will prove far less useful in advancing such discussions one way or another.

Meanwhile we all need to be sensitive about the conversations we have and how we have them. Behind every incident such as the Newtown massacre are people. Mothers and fathers who are grieving. Sisters and brothers who are in sorrow. Communities where the victims are known and beloved by even the most-distant of neighbors. It is important to have honest conversations about the ills that plague society. But we must also take care to remember that times of tragedy are not about our own concerns. We should spend our time praying for the families, and supporting organizations that are helping them during their moments of sorrow. One way to do this is to support the Connecticut Parents Union’s effort this week to provide counseling and teddy bears to Newtown’s families. Another is the effort being undertaken by the United Way there. And, most importantly, pray for the families; they need that more than any sloganeering and punditry.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t some lessons that can be learned from the Newtown massacre — or that they cannot be applied starting now. Certainly there are. The most important of them is that we must build nurturing cultures so that our children know their own names and weather the storms and tragedies that come as part of being alive.

This starts with our families providing love, moral fiber and undying faith. As Proverbs 22:6 makes clear, a child who is taught well by their parents and caregivers will stay on the path to being a healthy, confident person of character. It also includes our schools — and not just about academics. We serve our children well when we transform education in order to ensure that they are taught by high-quality teachers and school leaders who care for them, and attend schools whose cultures build up them up. Finally, each and every one of us should take a child who is not our own under our tutelage. This was a point Howard-John Wesley, the pastor at Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va., made clear in a sermon he gave yesterday. As the old African proverb made clear, it truly does take villages to help our children become men and women of strong character.

Most importantly of all, we must keep in mind our obligation, both to our children and to our fellow men and women, the role we each must play in improving the world in which we live. This extends beyond the systemic reform of American public education or overhauling any of the social systems that feed into our communities. As Americans, we have an obligation to live up to what Jonathan John Winthrop, and later, Ronald Reagan, would call our status as the shining city on a hill upon which the eyes of the world shall rest. We cannot fail to meet our obligations at the hill’s summit, especially when it comes to the futures of our children. When we volunteer at a soup kitchen, launch a ministry within our churches, or simply donate to a worthy cause, we are doing our part to make our nation and our world better places in which to live.

Let’s take this time to pray for the families. Let’s put the energy unleashed by this tragedy to thoughtful and productive use. And let’s teach all of our children well.

School reformers have plenty of op-eds to read, policy papers to peruse, and endless tweets coming through their Twitter feeds. But every now and then, everyone needs to pick up a few good books and just read. And not only for pleasure. The need for intellectual stimulation and new ideas for reforming American public education — especially from those outside of policymaking circles — makes thoughtful polemics more-important than ever. And besides, we need to be good examples to the children in our lives.

All of these reasons are why Dropout Nation offers its help this year by selecting The Top Eight Books of 2012 That School Reformers Should Read. Culled from more than 100 books, the selections include a wide range of texts. This includes two books not specifically focused on education from which reformers can gain insight, and build up the movement’s intellectual caliber. It also includes two books by icons of the civil rights movement of this past century who struck blows for bending the arc of American (and world) history; reformers must also heed those lessons from one of the building blocks of the modern school reform movement today.

The selections were judged on four criteria: Does it have a strong narrative or polemical power (also known as “is it well-written” or, would Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle’s wife fall asleep on it)? Are the lessons relevant to the reform of American public education? Is the book thought-provoking (or does it offer new arguments or new thinking on familiar issues)? When research is involved in the narrative, does it stand up to scrutiny? And would you pay at least $14 to put it on your Nook or Kindle Fire (or, for those of you still reading traditional books, pay at least $20 for the paperback or hardcover)?

Below are the selected books. Offer your own suggestions in the comments. And as we say here around this time of the year, read, read, read.

The Achievable Dream: College Bound Lessons on Creating Great Schools Certainly former College Board President Gaston Caperton and Richard Whitmire (whose biography of Michelle Rhee was among the honorable mentions cited in last year’s Top Eight) have put together some important examples of successful systemic reform efforts. But The Achievable Dream doesn’t just talk about the jobs well done. Particularly in looking at the effort of the Harrison district in implementing a performance pay plan, Caperton and Whitmire illustrate the slow and tough work reform-minded school leaders must undertake — including working with veteran teachers who prefer the guaranteed benefits that come with degree- and seniority-based pay scales — to move away their operations away from fiscally- and educationally ruinous traditional teacher compensation. In short, it is a worthy addition to the school reform bookshelf.

A Mission from God: A Memoir and Challenge for America  At first glance, James Meredith’s autobiography (the subject of an upcoming Building a Culture of Genius commentary) would not seem like a natural book for reformers to pick up. But the civil rights icon’s story about how he undertook a years-long , single-minded, and (given his presence in the Jim Crow South) death-defying effort to state-sanctioned racial bigotry by becoming the first black man to officially attend the University of Mississippi shows reformers — especially those from the Beltway — how impromptu leaders can emerge from the grassroots to take down status quo thinking, bring down injustice, and transform lives for the better. And Meredith’s passionate call for the reform of American public education — and his thoughtful reminder of how transforming our schools is part of rectifying the damaging effects of racial bigotry on American society — is one that all should embrace.

Thinking, Fast and Slow There are at least three good reasons why DN Contributor Alex Hernandez used Daniel Kahneman’s book on how people think in his critique on the expertise myth that is endemic within American public education. The first lies in the book’s cogent analysis of how biases such as hindsight, as well as beliefs that we have better understanding of past events and other matters , makes us overconfident in analyzing actions and activities around us. The second? Kahneman offers important insights on how reformers and everyone else can understand errors in decisions and choices, especially our own. Finally, Kahneman’s explanation of why expertise is only useful when combined with objective and accurate data — and valuable when it is acquired in stable conditions in which events can be predicted — is humbling, especially to reformers and traditionalists who don’t always think about the consequences of faulty thinking.

Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better For school leaders looking to help good and great teachers build upon their talent (and beat the general rule that teachers are no better after 25 years on the job than they are after four) Doug Lemov’s follow-up to Teach Like a Champion, co-written with his Uncommon Schools colleague, Katie Yezzi, and teacher Erica Woolway cannot make it easier. That’s because it isn’t. As Lemov, Yezzi, and Woolway point out, it can be easier to help teachers practice habits that lead to failure in improving student achievement than to train instructors on ways to achieve success. At the same time, Practice Perfect also offers plenty of insight on what can be done to improve teacher quality inside the school building. And this is always a manifest benefit for our children.

The Urban School System of the Future: Applying the Principles and Lessons of Chartering  One can argue that there is at least one flaw in Andrew Smarick’s otherwise-excellent treatise on how reformers — especially reform-minded mayors — can push for the end of the traditional district model. Those of us who would prefer state education departments to provide oversight for schools (a move embraced by Dropout Nation through the Hollywood Model of Education) will not be a big fan of Smarick’s concept of mayoral-appointed chancellor regulating all the education players in an urban area; this despite the fact that this publication is generally supportive of mayoral control for traditional districts. Yet that flaw doesn’t deflect from Smarick’s strong overall argument for why traditional districts are obsolete for providing education in an age in which scale is far less useful in providing all kids with high-quality education than strong standards in teaching, curricula, and school leadership.

The New Geography of Jobs: Who Wins, Who Loses in the New Innovation Economy Anyone looking to understand the consequences of the nation’s education crisis — and any municipal chief executive looking to make the case for mayoral (or county executive) control — need only to pick up University of California, Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti’s text on the underlying reasons why some American cities are thriving in an increasingly knowledge-based economy. Moretti’s discussion about how “brain hubs” — or municipalities with large numbers of highly-educated white- and blue-collar workers — continue to thrive economically and socially because talented men and women understand the multiplier effect of being around equally well-educated peers, should motivate every city leader to become bold school reformers. At the same time, Moretti’s observations about income inequality is represented by the low levels of mobility among high school dropouts and high school graduates with no higher education training (who, unlike the college-educated, cannot move out of economically laggard communities because they lack high-quality education) is one that should inform reformers in their efforts to transform American public education.

Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High School Sometimes, reformers must be reminded about why they are working to reform American public education. And several reminders can be found in Melba Patillo Beal’s diary of her year attending the first high school in the American South desegregated after Brown v. Board of Education (and the alma mater of the wife of this magazine’s editor). Beals’ description of the first day she attended Central High — and how she had to confront adults who would rather see her remain uneducated (and, in fact, dead) than see her attend the city’s top high school at the time — can’t help but arouse moral indignation. And this is indignation that reformers should use today in confronting adults who, like those who gathered in front of Central High then, think just as lowly of poor and minority kids, and want to keep Zip Code Education policies that are just as damaging to futures now as state-sponsored racism was then.

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character: There’s quite a bit with which Dropout Nation finds fault with What It Takes author Paul Tough’s latest tome on the role of character-building in helping students achieve lifelong success. For one, he buys too much into both the Poverty and Personal Responsibility myths held by most traditionalists, papering over the systemic issues — including low-quality teaching, lack of strong, college-preparatory curricula, and the disdain among many teachers and school leaders for poor and minority families — that have led so many kids onto the path to poverty and prison. The fact that Tough essentially dismisses the role of strong, comprehensive college preparatory curricula (especially intensive reading remediation for young men) in building strong character and helping all kids know their names is also disheartening. Those looking for a more-thoughtful book on the importance of helping kids develop executive function they need for success later in life would be better off reading Ellen Gallinsky’s excellent Mind in the Making. At the same time, Tough smartly illustrates the importance of foster nurturing cultures of genius in every school that can help all children — especially those coming from home lives of dysfunction — develop the emotional fortitude needed to succeed in adulthood. And in showing how KIPP and other schools and systems are building these cultures, Tough offers a road map that all players in the school reform movement should consider in their efforts.

As usual, there are five books which were so good, yet because Dropout Nation only lists eight top books, didn’t make the cut. This Next Five include: Getting Smart, Tom Vander Ark’s important exploration of the role of digital learning in transforming education; The Diverse Schools Dilemma, Thomas B. Fordham Institute research czar Mike Petrilli’s text on the challenges facing middle class and white families in big-city schools (even though Petrilli buys into not-so-thoughtful notions about how economic status of families structure their engagement and power in schools); The Last Lion, the biography of Winston Churchill (a subject of a Culture of Genius essay on the importance of being divisive in advancing reform) started by famed historian and journalist William Manchester and completed after his death by Paul Reid; Pension Games, the Chicago Tribune’s collection of reports on the consequences of defined-benefit pension deals between state and local governments and public sector unions such as the National Education Association affiliate there; and Leverage Leadership, a key primer on building cultures of genius written by Lemov’s Uncommon Schools colleague, Paul Bambrick-Santoyo.

As your editor, one of my jobs is to blow off the rhetorical fog and reveal what is actually on solid ground. And there is no current issue in the battle over reforming American public education so much in need of fog-clearing than the debate over enacting and implementing Common Core standards in reading, math, and science.

Over the past couple of years, reformers such as University of Arkansas education maven Jay P. Greene, Stanford University’s Williamson Evers, and Jim Stergios of the Pioneer Institute have decried the standards developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governor’s Association (with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), battling fiercely with erstwhile allies such as Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, his boss, Checker Finn, and centrist Democrats. The battle is also happening on the education traditionalist side, albeit with less fervor, with progressives such as former  Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) boss-turned-well-paid education consultant Mike Klonsky opposing the standards and diverging from the support given to the initiative by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

From where Common Core supporters sit, the standards are far superior to those already implemented throughout the 50 states, ensuring that all children will get strong, comprehensive college-preparatory curricula. With every state enacting Common Core, students would get the same quality of curricula no matter where they are or go; this would be especially helpful to military families who often shift from state to state, as well as those who move from school to school within states. By having set standards across the nation, it also makes it easier for those who develop curricula to provide high-quality content that students will use in their studies. No more of the kind of funny business – including approving shoddy textbooks and standardized tests that don’t align to standards – that can make a mockery of even the highest-quality state standards.

Common Core opponents, on the other hand, contend that developing national standards are hardly much better than state standards currently in place; in the case of some states, notably Massachusetts (which replaced its standards for Common Core), the national standards are ultimately a set-back for children within those states. From where they sit, Common Core will also neuter innovation in curricula development and other aspects of systemic reform. And the fact that both the Obama administration, and major reform player such as Gates, are backing Common Core is anathema to both movement conservatives and progressives alike; the former (who are generally supportive of reform, but skeptical of anything involving either Obama or the Beltway) perceive Common Core as an expansion of the federal role in education that violates the Constitution, while the latter views anything involving the private sector as a corporate plot to take over American public education.

Thanks in part to the backing of President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Common Core supporters have managed to get the standards enacted by 45 states and the District of Columbia. But they are far from victorious. Within the past year, Common Core opponents have managed to keep states such as Texas and Virginia from embracing the curricula reform effort, and have managed to lead nearly-successful efforts to overturn decisions by state education officials in South Carolina to enact them. As a result, some reform-minded state leaders such as Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett — who are generally used to standing up to teachers’ union leaders, ed school deans, and other traditionalists — are wavering in their support for the standards.

Meanwhile Common Core opponents have marshaled some evidence against the efficacy of Common Core in the form of Tom Loveless’ annual report on education for Brookings issued earlier this year. Loveless predicts that Common Core will have little effect on achievement largely because his analysis shows that there is little correlation between past implementation of standards and student performance growth. He also ridicules the argument advanced by Common Core supporters that the differences in how subjects are taught in different states requires national standardization, noting that the Gates Foundation’s namesake “would have a difficult time showing how [Massachusetts and Mississippi] —or any other two states—treat multiplication of whole numbers in significantly different ways.”  There are problems with Loveless’ analysis (and I’ll mention two of them later in the piece). But the fact that the report comes from one of Brookings’ three lead players (along with Russ Whitehurst and Darryl West) on school reform has proven to be good ammunition for Common Core foes.

Again, there is no easy dividing line within this aspect of the battle to reform American public educations. Common Core is one of the few things on which reformers such as the Fordham and traditionalists such as the National School Boards Association share common cause. At the same time, you have the strange bedfellows of such fierce reformers such as John Chubb (now of Education Sector) agreeing with equally forceful traditionalists such as Education Week columnist Anthony Cody. You have folks such as Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, and once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch asking some hard and (and with the exception of Ravitch) honest questions about how the standards will be implemented and whether the bipartisan politics driving the standards effort will hold. There are also many in American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities who look at Common Core as just another effort by those outside of Native communities to essentially embrace notorious Carlisle Indian Boarding School founder Richard Henry Pratt’s maxim of “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” From where they sit, it is hard to reconcile national standards with their particularly unique efforts to teach kids the Native culture (including immersion of students in Tribal languages) they want to preserve.

The Need for Honesty from Common Core Supporters

As I said, your editor’s job here is to fan away the smoke on both sides — and there is plenty of it — and get to the heart of the matter. Let’s start with this: Common Core standards alone won’t advance the overhaul of American public education. But our children regardless of background will not get the comprehensive, college-preparatory education they need and deserve without it.

One of the biggest problems for Common Core supporters has been their unwillingness to actually admit what is plain: That their goal is to essentially create national reading, math, and science curricula. This has been clear since the early part of the 1990s, when federal officials, at the behest of some reformers, supported the roll-out of Robert Slavin’s Success for All and other programs across the country. It has accelerated in the last decade, thanks to efforts such as the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse, which has revealed the shoddiness of the curricula states and districts select for use in classrooms.

The entire standards and accountability movement, in fact, is based on the implied notion that all children, regardless of background, should get the same high quality education — and that means common curricula. The Obama administration’s implicit support for states enacting Common Core, embedded through both Race to the Top and the No Child waiver gambit, is only the most-recent step in moving away from the patchwork of standards and curricula (often developed by teachers on their own in slapdash fashion) that has dominated American public education for most of the past two centuries.

By trying to maintain the guise of Common Core as a completely voluntary affair, its supporters have essentially played into the conspiracy theorizing of the most-rabid opponents of the effort. Opponents may be verging on the illogical. But who can blame them? Common Core defenders haven’t been willing to engage in an honest, thoughtful, and much-needed discussion about whether we should stick to the cookie-cutter approach to curriculum and standards, or take the direction of strong standards that will help good and great teachers help all kids succeed in school and in life. It is an argument supporters of Common Core can actually win, but only as long as they take up the arguments, and deal with the opposition in an intellectually honest manner.

Common Core advocates have also oversold both the quality and potential benefits of the standards. Although Common Core standards in reading and math are superior to all but a smattering of states, this isn’t exactly saying much. Only two states — Massachusetts and Hawaii — have math standards that meet those set by Singapore and the six other top-performing nations in that subject, according to the American Institutes for Research. Mathematicians are correct in asserting the math standards aren’t as good as they should be. This doesn’t preclude further improving those standards. But it does mean that Common Core supporters must acknowledge the facts at hand.

Common Core supporters still need to address the curricula quality question (and the textbooks that are part of the problem). Photo courtesy of http://thankstextbooks.tumblr.com

Then there are the rubber-meets-road questions. The first: How to make sure that states actually implement the standards? One of the key reasons why so many states have adapted Common Core so far is because of the Obama administration’s implied support for them, especially through its effort to eviscerate the No Child Left Behind Act’s accountability provisions. In exchange for granting waivers to states allowing them to ignore these and other provisions of federal law, states have to implement “college and career-ready” standard. But as Dropout Nation has noted ad nauseam in its coverage of the Obama administration’s No Child waiver gambit, the Department of Education can’t actually enforce this promise because it cannot by law force states to follow up on its promise by putting actual curricula in place.

This leads to the second issue: Ensuring that curricula actually meet the underlying standards. This is a question that has become especially important last week when Fordham’s Kathleen Porter-Magee took aim at textbook publisher Heinemann and a team led by writing curricula player Lucy Calkins for publishing a new polemic that attempts an “ideological co-opting” of the standards and tries to defend the publisher’s “existing—and poorly aligned—materials”. Given the struggles states have had with matching curricula to standards — largely a consequence of the very cookie-cutter approach of allowing districts and teachers to develop their own curricula to meet them — this is a concern that Common Core supporters should address with greater candor than they have.

Then there is the reality that standards alone won’t address all aspects of the nation’s education crisis. Strong standards on their own are meaningless without corresponding curricula. This is a lesson that standards and accountability advocates should have gleaned after the past three decades. One of the reasons why state standards have only been moderately successful in spurring improvements in student achievement is because they have rarely spend the time on choosing curricula that actually meets those standards (and in many cases, is useless in helping kids learn). The considerable opposition to the Everyday Math curriculum used in states has as much to do with the fact that it rarely meets state standard as with the general opinion that its approach to teaching math is a massive fail. Even if the curricula is aligned with the standards, the curricula won’t work if teachers are not capable of improving student achievement, if school cultures damn some kids (notably those from poor and minority backgrounds) to low expectations, and if school operators aren’t held to high expectations (as well as rewarded and punished accordingly).

As with all other reforms, Common Core won’t work without comprehensive, college-preparatory curricula that meets the standards; high-quality teachers who have the subject-knowledge competency, empathy for all children regardless of background, tip-top classroom management skills, and entrepreneurial self-starter ability to lead kids to the right path; strong school leaders who know how to foster cultures of genius in which all kids can learn. None of these, in turn, will work without a strong framework of accountability that ensures that school operators are improving student achievement. The fact that some Common Core backers (including Petrilli and some centrist Democrats) are also pushing to eviscerate federal accountability effectively is especially saddening; common standards without common accountability makes no sense at all.

The Time for Common Core Foes to Put Away Their Fantasies

All this said, the foes of Common Core are engaging in fantastic thinking. Given how much I respect the work of Greene, Evers, Stergios and many of those opposing Common Core, I would rather not say this. But let’s be clear: They fail to remember the moral, intellectual, and systemic importance of providing all children with strong, comprehensive college-preparatory curricula that they need in order to write their own stories.

Let’s start with this reality: Most of our kids are getting low-quality curricula. This is apparent in the low performance of the nation’s 15-year-olds on the 2009 PISA test of student achievement. As Fordham noted earlier this year, 38 states had science standards that earned a C or lower in 2011, a seven state increase over 2005. It is even more apparent when one looks at the courses they actually take. Just 13 percent of high school students took strong, comprehensive courses, according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress; this included a mere seven percent of black students and six percent of their Latino schoolmates. It is also unlikely that the average middle-school student will take the kind of math and reading courses they need to take on even more-challenging college prep coursework; as Dropout Nation noted earlier this year, a mere 15 percent of midlde-schoolers served by the Minneapolis district took Algebra 1, a key course for students to take on calculus and other forms of high-level math.

In arguing that standards won’t make a difference in improving student achievement, Common Core opponents (and skeptics such as Loveless) ignore the role stronger standards (along with other reforms) have played in improving student achievement within the decade. This is clear when one looks at the gains in student math achievement as measured through the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The percentage of fourth-graders who scored Below Basic (or were mathematically illiterate) declined from 23 percent to 18 percent between 2003 and 2011; the percentage of fourth-graders scoring at proficient and advanced levels increased from 32 percent to 40 percent within that same period. This is because math curricula has improved (albeit nowhere near at the level they need to be). This is also true when it comes to reading, which explains why fewer kids are reading at levels of functional illiteracy than before the year after the passage of No Child a decade ago.

As I have noted, stronger standards alone aren’t the only reason why student achievement has improved within this period; at the same time, the higher expectations for student success fostered by the standards (along with the accountability measures put in place by the No Child Left Behind Act, the expansion of school choice, reform efforts by districts such as New York City, and efforts by organizations such as the College Board and the National Science and Math Initiative to get more poor and minority students to take Advanced Placement and other college prep courses), has helped more students achieve success.

Yet Common Core opponents fail to realize that the importance of consistent standards as an element in reform.

Meanwhile Loveless, in particular, conveniently ignores of the reasons why standards haven’t always worked out as well as expected: State processes – or, more to the point, lack thereof – for matching standards to curriculum. Although standards and accountability advocates have succeeded in getting states to at least create a process for developing standards, the lack of work on overhauling how states select textbooks (which is often both corrupt and incompetent) has resulted in shoddy materials that rarely align with standards and thus fails to help students learn. There’s also the fact that states have long allowed districts and teachers to simply come up with their own curricula (a legacy of the slapdash approach long in vogue within American public education) in the vain hope that they would actually align teaching with them. Expecting districts to do the work on curriculum development – especially in light of their struggles to handle basic tasks – was never smart. And considering that far too many of our teachers lack the subject-matter competency needed to properly instruct their students – and that our nation’s university schools of education do worse in recruiting and training aspiring teachers – states should have long ago developed more comprehensive decision-making processes.

As for innovation on curricula? What innovation? Certainly there is some amazing work by Native communities on developing culturally based education (including language immersion efforts by Native Hawaiian charter schools). There is also some innovative curriculum development efforts being done by teachers, schools, and others on the margins; this includes the efforts by Harlem Link Charter School in New York City to make sure that students are learning reading, math, history, and science throughout all of their classes. But the reality is that much of the work out there actually isn’t all that innovative.

More importantly, innovation isn’t a virtue in and of itself. Some of the what reformers and others consider to be the best curricula – Direct Instruction, Core Knowledge, and Singapore Math, to name three – have been around for decades and aren’t all that innovative. At the same time, some of the most-innovative efforts at developing curricula – notably the New Math craze of the late 1960s – did little to improve student achievement.

What Common Core foes fail to recognize is that standardization isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Done properly, standardization can actually allow for more innovation in curricula development because there are now commonly agreed-upon content areas around which a variety of curriculum developers can rally. This is true in nearly all aspects of technology and life. For example, it was the tacit acceptance of the Microsoft DOS/Window standards (fostered by the move by IBM and the Microsoft to license the operating system to other computer-makers) that helped advance the development of the technologies that have helped boost productivity and improve quality of life; free from having to develop their own operating systems, computer makers could now compete on price affordability and wide arrange of features that have benefited consumers. It even forced Apple Computer to change aspects of its own proprietary operating system to meet the expectations set by Microsoft and adapted by the market, making it a competitive alternative. From the adoption of Hypertext Markup Language (which spurred the development of the Internet) to the wide use of the Android operating system (which has helped lead to a boom in smartphones and tablet-style computers), standardization has proven to be a boon, not an obstacle, to innovation.

Sure, Common Core foes would be right in pointing out that these examples of standardization happened in the conditions of free markets. It would also be fair to note how poorly government-sponsored standards efforts have generally fared. Yet there are some fine examples of how similar efforts (especially in medical education, which involves public universities and private sector counterparts) have been successful. More importantly, given that education will continue to be a government-controlled activity for the time being (and even the expansion of school choice wouldn’t fully change that), advancing Common Core just makes sense.

Opponents of Common Core seem to act as if an absence of national standards will somehow yield better results for our children. But after 140 years of American public education operating without standardized curricula and standards, this is clearly not so. The fact that only one math program so far has had enough data to prove that it may be effective in improving student learning (the widely-reviled Everyday Math) has proven clearly that Common Core foes need to stop hoping against hope.

And Why Our Children Need Common Core

Allowing teachers, principals and districts to continue developing their own curricula without any North Star — the longstanding practice in education — didn’t matter because education wasn’t a factor in economic and social achievement. But we now live in an age in which what a child knows is even more critical to their economic and social success than ever. If we are to continue the social mobility that has helped America bend the arc of economic and social history toward progress, we need to provide our kids with the curricula and standards that, along with high-quality teaching, helps make this happen. If we are to live up to our obligations to God and our fellow man – and be the city upon a hill that Jonathan Edwards and Ronald Reagan said we must be – then the patchwork of standards currently in place can’t stay the status quo.

For those of us who are Christians, this is particularly important. Jesus Christ declared in Matthew 25:46 that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”. This isn’t just about simply providing physical food to the least of us. Our children, especially those who are the poorest and come from white, black, Latino, Asian, and Native households, need the intellectual, spiritual, and economic nourishment that only comes from high-quality education. Allowing the continuation of shoddy and abysmal curricula standards is akin to starving our children — and that’s not what Jesus would do.

There is a clear need for rigorous, demanding, college preparatory standards that will help foster the creation of the kind of rigorous curricula our children need for their future success. Common Core’s implementation will help meet it. And the standards will also help foster cultures of high expectations in which their inherent abilities are nurtured.

Standards are more than just benchmarks of what kids should learn. As with so much public policy, it is a clear communication in action of the expectations we have for our society, especially when it comes to ensuring that every child gets a high-quality education. When we set the bar high for our children, and more importantly, for the schools, leaders, and teachers who serve them, we are declaring that kids should get the education they need to write their own life stories. Save for the high school movement of the turn of the 20^th century, American public education has engaged in practices – from ability-tracking to the comprehensive high school model – that have been based on the idea that only some children are deserving of high-quality education. And as it has been seen earlier this month with political scientist Andrew Hacker’s polemic against providing all students with algebra instruction, it remains endemic.

By enacting Common Core standards, school reformers are making clear what we have long known: That all kids, regardless of background, can master college-preparatory curricula, and should get high-quality teaching, nurturing school cultures, and strong school leaders. Enacting Common Core also serves to force reforms throughout the rest of American public education. Common standards make it harder for education traditionalists to argue against using school data in evaluating teachers, while shining a clear light on how poorly ed schools are training teachers to implement curricula.

All this said, Common Core standards should be the ceiling and not the floor. Although better than what is in place, we can do better. This means that Common Core supporters must use the standards as the next logical starting point for helping all kids succeeds, and not just the end of the line. They must also do a better job of holding textbook publishers and other curriculum developers accountable for aligning their materials to standards. The federal government should start by stepping up the efforts of the What Works Clearinghouse in vetting curricula; this work must also be done by the two state consortia charged with developing the new assessments that will be launched alongside the standards.

But we can no longer stand pat on implementing Common Core standards. Our kids deserve better than the patchwork of mediocrity that has largely been the norm throughout American public education.