One of the most-amazing aspects of the battle over the reform of American public education is that the lack of thoughtfulness among education traditionalists in their defense of failed policies and practices that have done little more than condemn 1.2 million children a year to poverty and prison. This is especially true when it comes to how teaching and curricula should be provided to kids, and whether the families that love them should be able to choose and shape the conditions in which their kids should learn. From where they sit, public education can’t possibly include public charter schools, publicly-financed school voucher programs, or even online providers paid by states (and chosen by families) because these are operations that aren’t run by traditional districts with elected (or mayor-appointed) school boards and executives. This is why they constantly try to argue that charters  – which are run by nonprofit and corporate entities — aren’t “public schools”, even when they are clearly defined as such under state and federal law, and why they argue that the very existence of charters is an affront to “local control” by school districts. And it is why folks such as once-respectable (and now largely-discredited) educational historian Diane Ravitch constantly proclaim as she does today that moves such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s successful effort to expand the state’s voucher program to serve as many as 300,000 more students is “dismantling public education”.

Reformers know this collective line of argument is one of the most-tiresome (and infantile) education traditionalists make, and one that is the most-circular. This is because traditionalists base their notions not on facts or data, but on mistaken interpretations of the very laws that govern public education in this country. Yet it is important to constantly point out this faulty anti-intellectual thinking. Why? Because challenging the illogic posed in traditionalist arguments is key to advancing reform.

Reformers must constantly point to education traditionalists that  public education is ultimately a state government function. All state constitutions charge state governments with the role of providing “free public education” in one form or another, from deciding how education should be financed to how it should be delivered to children and families. So states can shape public education in any way it wants so long as it is allowed in their respective constitutions; if vouchers are allowed to be used as a means for providing public education in a respective state, than the state can do it; same if the state wants to allow for (and finance) public charter schools, blended and virtual learning providers, even homeschooling and DIY education efforts by collections of families and communities.

It must also be pointed out that districts, like other municipal governments within states, are merely recognized as arms of state governments as defined under those constitutions (as well as by the federal government through the No Child Left Behind Act). The U.S. Supreme Court said as much a century ago in the Hunter v. Pittsburgh ruling. This means that districts have no ability for independent action outside of what state governments decide. If a state decides that it wants to allow nonprofit and for-profit organizations to provide education alongside districts, this can be done and the district has no say in it. It also means that districts have no ability to decide whether the financing for education provided by local taxpayers and the state can remain with them even if the children and families no longer use the district schools that once served them.

Reformers need to remind traditionalists that their  opposition to the expansion of vouchers and other forms of school choice is merely a legacy of the 19th-century religious (and ethnic) bigotry of Know-Nothings and Unitarian Protestants toward Catholics, all but some Protestant denominations, and even American Indians. The Blaine laws that ban school vouchers and other public school dollars for educating kids in parochial settings, for example, were crafted specifically to force the children of Irish Catholic immigrants to become good Americans who followed the Unitarian-inspired civic religion pushed earlier in the century by Horace Mann and his allies. Before that, Protestants, fearful of the influx of Irish Catholics entering the nation (and that they may attempt to put the nation under the control of the Pope), did all they could to effectively squelch Catholicism; in fact, it was this bigotry that led to the mass formation of Catholic diocesan schools that still remain the nation’s second-largest collection of education providers. And let’s not forget the federal government’s effort to “kill the Indian, save the man” through Bureau of Indian Education-operated boarding schools that forced kids off reservations and subjected them to educational, physical, and emotional abuse.

Then there is the argument that private-sector involvement in education, be it through companies or nonprofits, is somehow evil. This is a traditionalist argument reformers must also shut down because it is based on a senseless belief that somehow free enterprise and the operations involved in it are somehow evil while government is naturally good and virtuous. Anyone who has lived through Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, and even the recent financial meltdown knows that there is nothing true about it. There’s nothing inherently virtuous about government-run district schools or anything evil in utero about corporations providing schools. The tax status of the organizations providing education don’t matter.

More importantly, in posing these arguments, traditionalists fail to remember that companies and nonprofits are already critical players in how districts provide public education, from publishing textbooks to providing accounting services. Whether or not those private operators always do a good job in those aspects (or, more importantly, if districts do a good enough job of managing their contractors) is a different discussion. But the reality is that public education is quite dependent on the private sector in order to provide some of the most-critical aspects of educating kids (and especially dependent on companies for the taxes that fund their operations in the first place). This fact should be pointed out ad nauseam.

And finally, reformers must point out to traditionalists 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. Based on the track record of late for traditional districts these days, one can even say that the bureaucratic model is outdated and obsolete for this purpose. 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 this (or behave illegally and unethically), be they traditional, charter, or private, should be shut down and not get public funding, while those that do the job deserve praise and support.

The warped, anti-intellectual thinking of education traditionalists deserves to be tossed into history’s paper shredder. And as reformers, it is our job to battle faulty thinking from whoever poses it.

As a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 1990s working at the college’s supercomputer lab, Marc Andreessen found himself wondering what to make of what was poised to become a revolution. Just a few years earlier, a British scientist working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research named Tim Berners-Lee began formulating a way to take the bones of earlier information management systems such as Usenet, Arpanet, and TCP/IP (along with the European networked by Berners-Lee’s employer) and turn it into a system that could be used on a mass scale. By 1990, Berners-Lee and his staff had crafted what is now known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, and effectively opened up what we now know as the World Wide Web.

But it was still a backwater for scientists and computer enthusiasts, largely dedicated to chat rooms and exchanging computers (the early stages of the memes that are as much a feature of the ‘Net as YouTube videos and blogs). More importantly, those who did know about the Web didn’t think that anyone would want to use it. Andreessen understood there needed to be a better way of allowing access to this potentially powerful system — and realized that many would flock to it as soon as the proverbial mousetrap was built. So he began coming up with a new way of interacting with people via the rather novel World Wide Web; by the time he graduated from Urbana-Champaign in 1993, he had created Mosaic, the first Internet browser and the model upon which Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome are built. By 1995, he had teamed up with Jim Clark, the founder of computing pioneer Silicon Graphics to launch Netscape, the first commercially-successful Web browser and the tool that would cause headaches for computing giant Microsoft and other established firms for decades to come.

Netscape wouldn’t last as an independent firm beyond a few years of the dotcom boom; by 1999, it would lose the first round of the browser wars to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and end up being part of AOL (which itself would become irrelevant and part of one of the most-ill-fated mergers in Corporate American history with its deal with Time Warner). But by that point, Andreessen’s thoughts had moved beyond just mere browsers. By the end of the next decade, Andreessen had helped planted the seeds of cloud computing, the new version of old-school time-sharing that is as much a part of corporate life as Excel spreadsheets; funded firms such as Twitter and Instagram; and become a player in voice-over-Internet Protocol phone business by buying into Skype.

While the rest of us were engaged in Web chats, experimented with instant messaging, or like your editor, were launching Web sites and blogs while starting our careers, Andreessen recognized something none of us could really see because our minds were stuck on the existing paradigm: Once people connected to the Internet, a lot of things would happen. They would start surfing the Web with a browser, then visit Web pages. But this wouldn’t be enough. They would soon want to move from being mere content consumers to producers of their own media, launching their own Web pages, directing their own movies and short films, even starting their own businesses using the Web as their sales, marketing, and distribution platforms. As Andreessen pointed out to Wired Editor Chris Anderson in an interview for the tech magazine’s latest edition, “you have economic activity that’s far more advanced, far more distributed than ever before.”

Andreessen was right. From an IT staffer for a Wall Street firm named Jeff Bezos (who used the Web to launch retail giant Amazon), to a financial news journalist named Nick Denton (who took to the Web to found the Gawker media empire); the Web has managed to make creative destruction in many sectors the norm instead of the exception. It has even revolutionized manufacturing. A gadget enthusiast with an idea, a broadband connection, and inexpensive computer-aided design software can launch their own firm, manufacturing gizmos on a small scale with the help of a Chinese outsourcing firm; buy your own cutting and fashioning tools (and add some equally ambitious friends) and you can turn your own garage into a manufacturing plant.

Even sectors that are heavily-regulated to the point of nearly being akin to government such as healthcare are being transformed by the Web. From the use of cloud computing in storing medical records that can be accessed by doctors at a moment’s notice, to the efforts of IBM and the Mayo Clinic to force medicine to use natural language processing systems in handling data (and ending the costly medical errors that come from illegible doctor’s notes), innovation is changing how healthcare is provided on a day-to-day basis.

This, in, turn, has forced all of us to accept new paradigms, even in how we work. Save for those of us working in old-school industrial jobs and fast food, telecommuting and flexible work environments (along with the burden of being always on and ever on call every weekend) have become the norm. The very idea of being constantly connected via some form of device, be it a laptop, a Nook Color, an iPad, or a simple cellphone, has moved from novelty to norm. And the days when newspaper editors, book publishers, encyclopedia crafters, and movie critics served as gatekeepers in determining news and culture is no longer; the myth of common culture, inculcated by Horace Manns and others through schools and other formats has been exposed for what it is.

What does this have to do with school reform? Plenty more than you think. Because the very disruption that has wreaked havoc on book retailers, newspaper publishers, and even first-generation computer-makers will also force the transformation of American public education. It will force school governance structures to change for the better — and restructure the career path for high-quality teachers whose work and talents go unrecognized and unrewarded.

Prompting these thoughts is Education Reform for the Digital Era, Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s latest book focusing on the challenges of making blended learning and smart use of digital tools in schools and districts. And there are plenty. Education traditionalists — especially districts as well as National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates — fear that digital and online tools and systems will fuel more steps in the transformation of public education (and put an end to the practices and policies they so cherish); they also play up on fears that some families have that their kids will have little in the way of interaction with real live teachers, and thus get a low-quality education. They have gone on the offensive to stifle digital efforts; in California, for example, traditionalists have successfully restricted the availability of online courses — and perpetuating Zip Code Education policies in the process — by banning children and families from availing themselves of courses offered by districts outside of the one in which they live. Teacher certification rules (that do little to ensure quality) also complicate the ability to use online learning as a tool for providing children with high-quality instruction across all state lines. Current systems of school finance, which favor the traditional district model and condemn poor and minority kids to dropout factories and failure mills, have not yet been revamped to fund online learning options.

Then there is the reality that most traditional districts are just not very good at using technology; the landscape is littered with examples such as Detroit, where former emergency finance czar Robert Bobb found out that the district bought 160 BlackBerrys that were never used, and reminders that most school districts are struggling to wrangle with the data systems needed to manage school operations (and even a few still dependent on old-school FileMaker software just to manage sophisticated tasks that need more-powerful systems). This, in turn, feeds into skepticism among teachers and education traditionalists (especially those with strong Luddite tendencies and an aversion to anything that may force them to shift their paradigm) that the technology that is being bought will ever be put to good use. The biggest issue of all may lie with reconciling our traditional structures of school governance, especially the traditional district model, which no longer serves children or taxpayers well; abandoning that model could be as much a challenge as enacting school vouchers and allowing for the expansion of charter schools.

Certainly Fordham and the collection of co-authors who put together this book are right in seeing the current problems of making digital education the norm and not a novelty. Those issues certainly need to be addressed. At the same time, the same power of the Web to foment creative destruction recognized by Andreessen three decades ago are as likely to force these changes in ways that no think tanker, school reform activist, district bureaucrat, or teachers’ union boss can ever imagine.

Dropout Nation has spent plenty of time discussing how online education tools offer families and communities the ability to start their own DIY schools that serve the specific needs of the children they love. It is already happening. Even as traditional districts struggle to roll out iPads into classrooms, some 1 million children took online courses during the 2007-2008 school year, according to Anthony J. Picciano of Hunter College and Jeff Seaman of Babson, a 47 percent increase over the number of kids taking online courses two years earlier. Given the rate of growth in those past years, your editor would estimate that the number of kids taking online courses has doubled in the following four school years. While many students were likely augmenting what they learned in school or ex-dropouts engaged in credit recovery programs, more students and families are turning to online courses as their primary way of getting instruction and curricula they need. While these kids are getting their courses, their parents and siblings are also engaged in online learning through college courses. Online colleges account for 31 percent of all higher ed courses by students as schools surveyed in 2010 by the Sloan Consortium, with 6.1 million adults taking at least one course online. And more than half of collegians rate online courses as being the same or better than traditional live classes.

With more families engaged in one form of online learning or another — along with growing evidence that online engagement of all forms doesn’t damage the ability of kids to socialize with others — it will be harder to education traditionalists to play upon fears of technology. More importantly, the very convenience of online learning and ability to customize instruction to student learning needs also means that even more families — especially those with kids wrongly labeled as special ed cases, along with poor and minority households in suburbia who constantly battle with districts to put their kids in comprehensive college-preparatory courses and cannot avail themselves of brick-and-mortar forms of school choice — will demand wider arrays of online and blended-learning choices.

For churches and community organizations looking to help the kids in their pews and neighborhoods stay off the path to poverty and prison, digital learning is even more appealing; they can access high-quality instruction at a lower cost than hiring teachers, and even possibly provide the kids they serve with online guidance counselors who can help kids get prepared for life on the college campus (an especially important issue when working with ex-dropouts who are graduating from high school and entering higher education). The kind of intensive work done by charter schools such as See Forever Foundation’s Maya Angelou schools (along with regular K-12 schooling) can now be done on a mass scale. More importantly, it even could change the game in ways none of us have ever considered. A group of parochial schools could band together to provide online education to an even wider array of students served by other churches, while the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma could do the same, serving other Cherokee communities on the East Coast as well as working together with other tribes in the rest of the country.

None of these groups will stand for any barriers from state education agencies or school districts — and they will fight hard against them. In fact, they won’t have to do much lobbying at all. The nature of the Web is such that it is difficult for any state education agency — or even the federal government — to impose regulation. And the likely consequences could be amazing. Teacher certification, for example, would move away from state teacher licensing boards to national organizations such as ABCTE — or, more likely, American public education would move away from traditional licensing altogether. This, in turn, would speed up efforts to move away from traditional, low-quality teacher evaluations to ones based on objective measures of teacher success in improving student achievement over time.

The greatest potential of digital education lies with revamping how we reward teachers, especially those high-quality instructors who are stuck with the same degree- and seniority-based compensation packages as those who aren’t worth the salaries they collect. This is something that education traditionalists, especially those with a Luddite mentality, never consider. Given that the average teacher likely owns a Samsung Galaxy Android or Apple iPhone, lives in a home equipped with Wi-Fi broadband, and has children using iPads and Nook Tablets, they are probably far more-sophisticated about technology than most would expect and thus, won’t need any form of professional development. More importantly, there are teachers such as Chad Sansing already using video games and other digital tools and techniques in their instruction — and they can help other teachers figure out the ropes.

The possibilities are endless. As Bryan and Emily Hassel of Public Impact noted in the Fordham book, the advance of digital education offers an array of new career paths for high-quality teachers with entrepreneurial savvy, especially in working for online education firms who can offer stock options and other forms of private-sector compensation that would be more appealing that seniority- and degree-based pay scales. One can even imagine high-quality teachers who don’t want to go into administration — the usual route that turns many a high-quality teacher into a mediocre and abysmal school leader — to pursue their own paths. With access to Blackboard, Apple’s e-textbook system, and Citrix GoToMeeting, a teacher who wants to just teach being able to craft their own courses, write their own textbooks, and charge money for instruction; they could also band together to launch their own online and blended learning operations similar to what Salman Khan is doing now with his eponymous flipped learning academy.

Once teachers get their hands on digital and online tools, they will no longer simply be users. They will also not be satisfied with a traditional model of teachers’ unionism that no longer applies in the 21st century (and was never the right fit for education in the first place). One can imagine the kind of professional associations emerging as alternatives to NEA and AFT membership becoming even more widespread, with teachers demanding to becoming as entrepreneurial outside of the classroom as Silicon Valley types such as Andreessen.

The very transformation of society, economy, and culture that Andreessen recognized would happen 20 years ago is also likely to happen in education. And the obstacles that would appear to make these changes a nonstarter aren’t likely to stand up to the creative destruction that always comes with technology. Which is why school reformers must embrace digital learning; along with political mobilization, it is one more tool that can force the overhaul of a failed system.

Winston Churchill could have been called a divisive figure. During the 1930s, the aristocratic scion-turned-newspaper reporter and political leader stood alone, defying conventional wisdom, facing constant derision from rivals and media pundits at the time, for calling out governments throughout Europe and political leaders such as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for vainly avoiding dealing seriously with the increasingly aggressive menace that was Nazi Germany. His ascent to the British premiership in 1940 only came after his rival, Lord Halifax, declined to take the job — and even then, others in the coalition government Churchill would lead didn’t want him in the job.

Thomas Paine was also what one would have called a divisive figure. In his lifetime, the polemicist behind Common Sense and The Rights of Man offended defenders of British monarchy such as British statesman Edmund Burke for defending liberty and freedom for the young American republic, was convicted in absentia for supposed sedition for defending French revolutionaries, and angered the religious for arguing about inconsistencies in the Bible. Even in death, critics declared that Paine only “did some good and much harm”. Same with William Lloyd Garrison, whose strident rhetoric and activism against American slavery — and declaration that enslaving African-Americans must come to an immediate end — subjected him to arrest attempts by Southern politicians and made him a target of more moderate players in political life.

Decades and even centuries later, Churchill, Paine, and Garrison are regarded as the great moral and political leaders of all time, highly regarded for their forthright articulation and activism of their views on the world. Same is true with others considered “divisive” by their foes and supposedly moderate folks in their lifetimes: American politicians such as Barry Goldwater — now celebrated for articulating conservative and libertarian views that made him a target of left-leaners and even fellow conservatives during his lifetime — and Abraham Lincoln (whose steerage of this nation during the Civil War is now celebrated). Civil rights activists such as Ida B. Wells (who was attacked in her lifetime — and heralded today — for daring to criticize Jim Crow segregation and lynching), and the Freedom Riders organized by the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in 1961. Global figures such as Mohandas Gandhi (who stared down British imperialism in India through non-violent protest), Margaret Thatcher (who along with others such as Pope John Paul II, put an end to Communism), and Simon Wiesenthal (whose celebrated efforts to bring to justice Nazis who perpetuated the Holocaust was not well-regarded by many in the 20th century). The divisive men and women of their lifetimes turn out to be the figures that fought rightfully and morally for the freedoms and liberties we cherish.

This reality should be a lesson for all school reformers as they battle with education traditionalists to overhaul American public education today. There is nothing wrong with being divisive. In fact, there is no way to battle against failed amoral ideas in any time — especially now –without taking stands that force men and women to make choices they would rather avoid.

One of the rhetorical tricks employed by education traditionalists and their fellow-travelers is to declare that a school reformer — especially one who actively advances their ideas in both word and deed — is “divisive” and thus incapable of being a player in education decision-making. Paul Vallas, for example, is considered divisive because his strident reform efforts in Chicago, New Orleans, and now, Bridgeport, Conn., have not been welcomed by American Federation of Teachers unionists, school district bureaucrats, and their fellow-travelers. Same is true for Joel Klein, who remains a lightning rod for the likes of AFT President Randi Weingarten and once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch even though he is considered far more likable. Klein’s role as co-chair of the Council on Foreign Relations panel that offered up a school reform agenda prominently supporting expansion of choice, in particular, has once again served as red meat for AFT and National Education Association bosses, who, like their fellow-travelers in university schools of education, are none too fond of outsiders finding their practices to be wanting.

Then there’s Michelle Rhee, who has riled up education traditionalists with every move she has made since her days founding teacher quality outfit TNTP. From her aggressive effort to overhaul Washington, D.C.’s collection of traditional failure mills, to her current role wooing Democrats and Republicans alike as founder of StudentsFirst, Rhee’s strident activism, sharp tongue, willingness to go bipartisan, and ominous poses on the covers of national magazines have made her no friends among those who would rather keep the status quo ante. This was especially clear last month when Rhee again became a lightning rod for NEA and AFT bosses (and their fellow-travelers among supposedly progressive Democrats) after her appearance alongside Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel and other school reformers supporting Gov. Dan Malloy’s teacher quality overhaul plan.

Vallas, Klein, and Rhee are certainly the most-prominent of the supposedly divisive reformers out there. But they aren’t the only ones. The reality is that it doesn’t take much for anyone to be considered divisive, either by education traditionalists or reporters who don’t exactly always think when they write. Harlem Children’s Zone boss Geoffrey Canada and Green Dot Public Schools founder Steve Barr, for example, have been labeled as divisive simply because they support expanding choice and argue that the view among traditionalists that poverty is essentially destiny is pure hogwash. Same is true for Parent Power activists such as Samuel, Black Alliance for Educational Options cofounder Howard Fuller, and local activists such as AJ Kern and her husband in Minnesota. Even someone writing about the problems in American public education in a way that doesn’t favor traditionalist views is considered divisive; Steve Brill can tell you plenty about that. In short, if you are a school reformer, you are in the view of your opponents a divider.

This shouldn’t be shocking. American public education has long embraced a culture in which anti-intellectual civility — in the form of false consensus, phony collaboration, and embrace of “best practices” — is far more important than honest conflict and strong, vigorous, intellectually- and morally-challenging debate over how to provide children with high-quality education. From where education traditionalists sit, anyone wading into education discussions should just simply stick to working them on what they consider to be ‘real’ strategies and ‘authentic’ solutions that will help kids succeed in school, support teachers in their work, and preserve their vision of what American public education should be. In short, conflict is to be avoided (except when savaging those whom they oppose). And those who stir up conflict through their contrary views are to be vilified.

But as with conflict, being divisive isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, being divisive can actually be a good thing.

For one thing, being divisive means standing by your principles. This is because divisiveness is at the heart of all morals, ideas, and policies, which visible representation of our ideals, ideologies and morality — and human beings, being sentient creatures, aren’t going to always agree. By being divisive, you are declaring the willingness to articulate your views forcefully and take action in equal measure — and you are accepting the reality that your principles will separate you from those who disagree.

Being divisive also means being willing to challenge policies and practices that are amoral, immoral, and untenable to continue bending the arc of American history toward progress. After all, policies and ideas are divisive because they can also serve as threats to — or in defense of — existing influence and power. Conflict with those who benefit politically, financially, or even psychically, from a system of things remaining in place is never a bad thing, especially if the existing order is unacceptable.

Being divisive involves forcing others to clarify their own ideas and beliefs. It also forces people to deal honestly with the implications of their thinking and the consequences of the practices and policies they defend. Being divisive means forcing revelations of which movements have the moral and intellectual high ground. And like conflict, being divisive also leads to the kind of problem-solving that benefits society as a whole.

And being divisive means to embracing the mantle of true leadership. Certainly leadership does involve occasional efforts to reach sensible organizational and movement-level consensus. But as shown by politicians such as Ronald Reagan and civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, true leadership generally means making decisions and taking positions that are going to afflict the financially, ideologically and politically comfortable — including your own friends and family.

It is the divisive who force the positive changes that have improved the world for all of us. It is because of the divisive Moses and Hammurabi that we have the soul-freeing concepts within Christianity, Judaism and the Golden Rule. Thanks to divisive Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin (along with the equally divisive William Wilberforce), slavery is no longer acceptable and women’s rights in most of the world is a given. It’s because of those divisive economists such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill that we now have a global economy that has helped make prosperity a reality for many (if not all) people even in countries such as China. And because of such divisive civil rights activists such as Bayard Rustin and James Farmer, Jim Crow segregation is now a thing of the past.

Being divisive about challenging a failed, amoral system that condemns 1.2 million children a year to poverty and prison is at the heart of the school reform movement. And this is a good thing. There is nothing wrong with actively opposing a traditional system of compensation that has fostered teacher quality policies that subject our poorest children to the worst American public education offers. And, more importantly, there is nothing terrible about pushing to end policies that do little more than harm the futures of children who deserve better.

The reality is that we need more supposedly divisive figures such as Rhee, Jackson, Klein, and Vallas because it takes Churchills, Paines, and Garrisons to win ideological, political, and economic wars. And let’s be clear: The battle over the reform of American public education involves all three. This isn’t to say that there is no room for conciliatory figures. They are needed. The lack of such a figure is why Rhee’s reform efforts were short-circuited in D.C., while the presence of such a figure in New York City in the form of Mayor Michael Bloomberg (along with Klein’s own genial nature) is why the reform effort under Klein’s tenure has continued to succeed even after he left the job. But you cannot transform a sclerotic system that continues to benefit its incumbents (even if the kids they say they care about suffer from educational neglect) with a few kind words and gestures. You have to fight fire with fire.

In short, school reformers should accept — and fully embrace — being divisive. Because it is the only way we can transform American public education.

A few times every year, the Landmark Mall in Alexandria, Va., near Dropout Nation‘s headquarters, hosts a carnival in its parking lot. Each and every day during those weeks, families from around the city and nearby Fairfax County bring their kids to the carnival so that they can ride on the Ferris Wheel, enjoy the carousel, and even partake in cotton candy.

One day, your editor noticed the crowds and was amazed by the numerous young faces coming there, the children of poor immigrants working hard to provide their kids with both a great education and a little joy. It made me remember one of the reasons why so many of these families come to this fair: Because of the high cost of taking a family a four to the Six Flags theme park across the Potomac in Prince George’s County, Md. — and served as a reminder that my wife and I were blessed to  be able to easily afford a day of rides for my future children at one of the nation’s more-expensive childhood activities.

And it brings up one of the issues that school reformers must continually address as part of the reform of American public education: Helping our poorest and minority children get the cultural experiences that are part of expanding their knowledge and preparing for success in the outside world.

Every now and then, I am reminded that I had the great fortune, not only of being born in New York City, the epicenter of the nation’s cultural life, but being born into a family which had the mean to provide me with strong knowledge of music and art. By the time I had reached high school, my mother and grandparents made sure I had listened to hours of Rachmaninoff and Duke Ellington, took trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Smithsonian’s Air, Sea, and Space Museum, and had been able to travel beyond the boundaries of my hometown. Even if didn’t travel beyond America’s borders until my adulthood, I could learn about Canada, Japan, and Mexico from my mother (who had went to that country both in her child and adult years), and my grandfather (who was there during the occupation after World War II).

This isn’t so for so many poor children, regardless of their race or ethnicity. For families from poor and minority backgrounds, providing their kids with cultural knowledge — especially through travel, trips to the museum, and attending ballet showcases — can be cost-prohibitive (and that’s if they have received a high-quality education that helped them understand the world around them in the first place). A single mother in New Orleans would find herself unable to afford the $75 price tag (excluding food and drink) to her two sons to the local Jazz and Heritage Festival, while a family of four in Indianapolis would wince at the $123 price tag to attend a symphony event featuring the group Pink Martini.

As a result, young men and women struggle not only in literacy and numeracy, but in understanding the world around them. There’s a good chance that an Atlanta kid on the path to dropping out not only can’t read Tom Wolff’s A Man in Full, but has never been to the High Museum of Art or traveled beyond the I-285 perimeter. The problem isn’t just limited to kids graduating from high school. One reason why black high school students getting ready to attend college do so poorly on the verbal portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test is because of their lack of knowledge about the rest of American culture; white middle-class students, more-likely to have been exposed to cultural classes, will do better because they know more about the world around them. It also matters in helping poor kids become adults who can move into the middle class. As a plumber who has read The Canterbury Tales can also move up socially, converse with executives, play his part as a leader in his community, and even pave a path for his children to continue along into middle class society, so can a truck driver who has listened to Philip Glass’ Four Movements for Two Pianos. 

Elementary school kids in Miami listen to classical music from the Black Violin collective.

Contrary to the arguments of education traditionalists, the problem lies not with a lack of art and cultural classes, or the supposed narrowing of curricula resulting from the efforts of standards and accountability advocates (including passage of the No Child Left Behind Act). As both the U.S. Department of Education and Quadrant Arts Education Research’s Robert Morrison have pointed out, arts and music classes remain the norm throughout American public education. While there has been slight declines in the number of drama classes at the high school level, arts and music classes are still a part of the curricula for students. But simply offering cultural courses does little to provide kids with the kind of knowledge about music and art that can open up minds and help them get the learning they need for lifelong success.

Schools should actually connect cultural education courses — and knowledge about music art — to lessons learned in reading, math, science, and history. More importantly, cultural and core courses should reinforce each other’s lessons in order to help kids build their knowledge. Why? For one, both are critical to each other. Background knowledge on the world, including understanding of Vivaldi’s L’incoronazione di Dario and Handel’s Messiah, is as critical to reading comprehension as phonics and whole language mastery. As I l figured out as a student learning how to play the piano and French horn, learning how to read musical notes involves understanding math (including the abstractions that will come down the road in the form of algebra and calculus). A science teacher, for example, could use ballet’s pas de deux to teach about the conservation of angular momentum, while a music teacher can talk about the historic forces that shaped Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Year 1812, Festival Overture in E flat major. More importantly, using cultural knowledge in core subjects and vice versa helps makes courses relevant and interesting for children, especially those who are already struggling with literacy. One can imagine the possibilities of engaging such students in a class discussing the progressive development of rhyming structures from Italian sonnets to Jay-Z’s Big Pimpin’ to the lyrical masterpieces of Saul Williams.

Yet few traditional districts do a good job of linking, integrating, and reinforcing cultural and core courses, much less making lessons in both sets of courses relevant to the students who must learn them. Save for schools that use Core Knowledge’s reading curricula, few districts provide the kind of reading curricula that adequately helps students with phonics and whole language, much less provide kids with cultural knowledge. While Common Core standards in reading and math will help address some of these deficits, it won’t work unless states, districts, and schools develop curricula that actually aligns with those standards and also integrates art and cultural knowledge. This isn’t difficult to do: Schools such as Harlem Link Charter School in New York City already do this every day in their classrooms.

But it will take more than addressing curricula. While we don’t have enough information to surmise this, it is quite likely that the crisis of low-quality instruction endemic throughout the rest of American public education is also problematic among the nation’s arts and cultural teachers. This problem will be especially hard to ignore as efforts to overhaul teacher evaluations, especially for teachers working in core subjects (and the use of student test score performance data to measure their performance). Given that cultural courses are not likely to be subjected to testing, and the reality that states and districts must find ways to deal with $1.1 trillion in teachers’ pension deficits and unfunded retiree healthcare costs, there will be more-scrutiny on the quality — and necessity — of teachers in cultural subjects. One possible solution may lie in moving away from cultural teachers having full-time jobs and moving to a system of contracting with professional artists and musicians ready, willing and able to take on teaching those subjects at least on a part-time or contractual basis. One can imagine a district putting together a team of professional musicians who can teach at several schools throughout the school year.

But simply integrating lessons and addressing teacher quality isn’t enough. Schools and districts do plenty to provide students with field trips to museums and cultural events that provide kids with some exposure to the world around them. But this is rather shallow. For one, the trips are rarely interactive; kids merely end up taking a day off from school without gaining any knowledge in return. Another issue lies with the fact that districts and schools do little to build close ties to cultural institutions, both in their communities and throughout the nation and world; the latter is especially easy to do in the age of the Internet, which allows people to explore the world at their fingertips. Especially for kids in parts of the country outside of the major metropolitan areas where culture is plentiful, it means that they will never get to see Old Master portraits up close, watch Alvin Alley performances in person, or even get to hold an insect fossilized in amber (unless their families have the money and knowledge needed to provide those experiences to them).

It doesn’t have to be that way. The Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other institutions have already developed online platforms that allow for kids to do everything from exploring a particular exhibit to engaging in activities such as learning how large the Sun would be if it were a vegetable. Organizations are also working in this space, providing schools with the ability to bring art exhibits into classrooms through virtual means. Meanwhile districts should work to build stronger partnerships with museums, dance troupes, universities, and other players in the cultural space. A district, for example, could actually work with a coalition of arts institutions in their community to craft year-round programs

But we can’t count on districts to do this. School reformers and Parent Power activists can do plenty on their own to work with cultural institutions and help families help their kids get strong cultural (as well as academic) instruction and curricula. After all, plenty of school reform philanthropists also give money to museums and art troupes; while Parent Power groups (along with traditional parent involvement outfits) spend time helping parents understand how to navigate school systems. One possible model may lie with famed surgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson’s initiative to build reading rooms where young boys and girls engage in building their literacy games such as reading contests, while moms and dads can enjoy coffee and join their kids in learning. One can easily see, say, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation teaming up with Pacific Northwest Ballet to build dance education rooms.

Every child, no matter who they are or where they live, deserves a well-rounded education that As reformers, we cannot simply just think about the importance of mastering reading, math, science, and history. We must also ensure that they get a comprehensive cultural education that helps them succeed in the adult world.

One cannot help observing the strange bedfellows that appeared during yesterday’s appearance by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan before the House Education and the Workforce Committee. You had the committee’s chairman, John Kline, who has attempted to bolster his faux conservative credentials with talk of overly expansive federal education policy, declaring that he was “disappointed” in Duncan and the Obama administration for not increasing federal special ed funding. You had Democrats such as Ranking Minority Member George Miller praising Race to the Top and other competitive grant programs launched by the administration since it took office (even as Miller sparred with Kline over proposed reductions in spending increases from House Budget czar Paul Ryan). You had Duncan defending reductions in so-called Impact Aid subsidies, while Republicans chastised him for it. And you had Republicans defending the very formula-based school funding approaches they had long decried while a food number of Democrats (along with Duncan)making fairly conservative cases for moving towards genuine accountability in federal spending (albeit slowly, and definitely not when it comes to the president’s community college initiative).

Certainly this reflects the nature of presidential election cycles, with the party holding the White House defending its record against congressional leaders acting as proxies for their party’s standardbearers. But when one then watches what is happening in the nation’s statehouses, one can easily understand why the battle over reforming American public education cannot be understood through the lens of traditional politics.

Consider New Jersey, where a Republican governor and a Democrat-controlled state legislature have come together over the past two years to pass a series of reforms to the Garden State’s teacher compensation system. Or look at Connecticut, where the governor, Dan Malloy, is more in agreement with Republican counterparts in the legislature than the leadership among his fellow Democrats. Then there is Washington State, where a cadre of Republicans and Democrats are challenging the outgoing governor, Christine Gregoire, over allowing for the existence of charter schools; while home goods heir-turned-venture capitalist and longtime Democratic Party financier Nick Hanauer is flirting with backing Rob McKenna, the school reform-oriented Republican nominee presumptive, out of frustration with the intransigence of fellow Democrats on overhauling the Evergreen State’s school system.

Meanwhile the toughest states for advancing reform are not the ones in which Democrats dominate, but in those states with majority-Republican voting bases. Earlier this week, legislators in Kansas, under pressure from school districts (and nativist fears) shot down an effort to launch a voucher-like tax credit initiative. In Alabama, the battle over allowing for the authorization of charter schools is as much shaped by the influence of the state’s districts (which wield considerable political influence in legislative districts) as the now-weakened National Education Association affiliate there; even with a Republican governor and legislative chieftains supporting the creation of charters, their fellow party members could end up voting the other way. And as seen earlier this month in Florida, when a Parent Trigger law went down to defeat, Republican legislators are willing to kowtow to NEA and American Federation of Teachers affiliates, and the so-called parent groups that aid and abet them.

The reality is that in most cases, debates over reform have far less to do with political ideology than with the power relationships (and often complementary views on the potential of poor and minority children) that often exist at the state and even school district levels. Especially in Southern states outside of Texas (where districts are often county-based), and even in the Rust Belt, school districts are often the biggest employers in their communities and the most-powerful political players in communities. Plenty of state legislators, regardless of party affiliation, have gotten their start serving on the school board with support from the local teachers’ union affiliate; their relatives often also work for the district in some capacity. These relationships, along with the interest of politicians in keeping office, often lead to legislators being far less interested in embracing any sort of systemic reform.

The fact that even suburban districts have become as dependent on federal special education and Title I dollars as urban district counterparts also plays a part in legislative and congressional considerations. Consider the case of House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman Kline. Among the school districts Kline represents from back home in Minnesota is South Washington County, where special ed students account for 11 percent of total enrollment, according to Dropout Nation‘s analysis of U.S. Department of Education civil rights data; 40 percent of students in the Carver-Scott Educational Cooperative (which serves nine districts) are labeled learning disabled. Such large numbers explain why Kline is so adamant about increasing funding for special education programs that do little for the children in their care.

This shouldn’t be shocking. One of the reasons why old-school civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People fight so hard against charters and school choice is because veteran teachers and teachers’ union affiliate bosses (all beneficiaries of defined-benefit pensions and other aspects of traditional public education) make up the majority of their memberships; the fact that such groups are recipients of teachers’ union largesse also makes it difficult for them to break ties without risking their finances. Same is true for old-school parents-teachers groups and other outfits associated with education traditionalists. While there may be internal struggles over education policy positions, the fact that status quo defenders still hold control within these outfits means that they will provide little support for anything but the mildest of reform solutions.

Such relationships also explain the alliance between the Obama administration and reform-minded Republican governors who have been as willing to embrace Common Core standards as their Democrat counterparts (and even more willing to support Race to the Top, the Investing in Innovation effort, and other competitive grant programs than either their own congressional counterparts or Obama’s Democrat allies in statehouses). One of the reasons why the action on reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act has stalled because Kline doesn’t have much support either from Republican governors (and just as likely, from House Speaker John Boehner) to move ahead with his piecemeal effort to scale back the federal role in education policy. It is also why complaints from otherwise thoughtful conservative school reformers that the Obama administration is forcing states to enact Common Core standards through efforts such as granting waivers from accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act don’t actually stand up to scrutiny. If anything, reform-minded governors of both parties embrace a more-expansive federal role because it serves as a way to overcome opposition from education traditionalists who have, until recently, dominated legislatures on the school front.

Enacting Common Core standards, for example, makes it easier to overhaul curricula standards that in most states hardly meet up to international scrutiny. It also reduces the number of battles that governors and chief state school officers must have over what should be (or shouldn’t be) in textbooks. As seen this month in Tennessee, where state education czar Kevin Huffman has to worry about legislators mandating what should be taught in science courses — and in states such as California, where discussions over history curriculum can break down over whether Cesar Chavez should be included in history textbooks — there are plenty of forces that can derail any effort if not for some (perceived) intervention from the federal level.

But the alliances across the political aisle shouldn’t be surprising. One of the interesting aspects of the battle over the reform of American public education has been the lack of correlation between party affiliation and school reform positions. In Indiana, the latest round of reform efforts were spurred by the odd alliance between Stan Jones (an appointee of former Hoosier State governor and later U.S. Senator) Evan Bayh), former Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson (a Bayh protégé), Derek Redelman (a Republican who ran the successful election campaign of Jones’ rival for state schools chief, Suellen Reed), and Kevin Brinegar (Redelman’s boss at the state chamber of commerce). In fact, Redelman ended up becoming a fierce foe of Reed, who opposed nearly every reform measure undertaken by the state. In California, it took a Republican governor in Arnold Schwarzenegger and a state Democratic power in Gloria Romero to enact the nation’s first Parent Trigger law and allow for student performance and teacher performance data to be tied together for improving teacher evaluations. In Texas and Florida, the reform efforts begun under Democrat governors were expanded upon by Republican successors, often teaming up with Democrats disaffected by the lack of will among their fellow-travelers to do the right thing by children.

Chances are, such relationships will continue, this time between reform-oriented state school superintendents and civil rights groups. This was on display earlier this week at the Council on Chief State School Officer’s annual legislative confab, where a special breakout session between civil rights groups and state education leaders was held. Indiana Superintendent Tony Bennett (whose state has taken a slight backslide on accountability courtesy of the Obama administration’s No Child waiver gambit), demanded that civil rights groups hold accountable state education departments for enforcing their accountability provisions, and noted that one of the reasons why one Hoosier State accountability law, Public Law 221, was ineffective because no one forced state officials — including Bennett’s predecessor Reed — to seize control of failure mills and shut down dropout factories. Given that federal education policy — including Race to the Top and No Child – have signaled the reality that states, not school districts, control the direction of education, civil rights-driven school reform groups will have to become more-involved in state-level advocacy; and those groups are getting the message.

This isn’t to say that traditional politics won’t get in the way. It is the anger among movement conservatives over the excesses of the George W. Bush presidency in other areas that as much explains the rhetoric of Kline and newly-elected Republican congressmen as the parochial concerns at home (as well as why Republican presidential candidates have all but avoided discussing education policy). Meanwhile the budding alliance between NEA and AFT affiliates and progressive elements within the Democratic Party could end up causing trouble for centrist Democrat reformers. Then there are the divides among conservative, libertarian, centrist and liberal Democrat reformers over everything from the abolition of teachers’ union collective bargaining privileges, to questions over whether addressing achievement gaps should be a focus of reform efforts. Particularly among centrist Democrats, they must always keep in mind that their own efforts to weaken teachers’ union influence are no different in substance than those of Republican governors such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, and thus, must walk a fine line on their rhetoric.

But school reformers will continue to find themselves working across political and ideological lines. Because, as legendary Prohibition activist Wayne Wheeler would say, reformers have to work with everyone who will support them. And because they increasingly find that their own politically ideological fellow-travelers don’t share the same views on helping all children succeed in school and life.

This is the questioned raised in a way by Virginia teacher and writer Chad Sansing in his response to yesterday’s Dropout Nation commentary on why teacher performance data culled from Value-Added analysis of student data should be released to the public as it is today by New York City’s education department. From where Sansing sits, “neither school choice nor teacher choice should be unduly influenced by scores” and other test-related data that he feels incompletely reflects his work in improving student achievement. As far as he is concerned, if the test data is to be published, go ahead and release his “evaluations, PD – everything” involving his work.

Sansing is one of the more-thoughtful polemicists in education right now, and probably one of the best teachers out there. But I’m not going to say that Sansing is correct in both his assertions. For one thing, Value-Added data has proven to be the most-accurate in objectively evaluating teacher success or failure in improving student achievement. Another thing:  I don’t think anyone’s entire personnel folder should ever be put into public view; after all, the information in those files often have little to do with the matters with which families and everyone else should be most-concerned: The ability of a teacher to improve student performance over time, and whether that instructor has the empathy and care for lives all every child in their classroom. As I discussed yesterday, the matters with which school operators and leaders must be concerned are going to be different from what concerns families, which means different levels of information should be released to the public while other data should not. Those parents who are leading a school overhaul as part of a Parent Trigger effort or launching schools of their own, will care about whether a particular teacher plays nice with others or even if the teacher has started a program addressing early childhood illiteracy (and they would learn that through their own human capital activities). Other parents won’t care a wit.

All that said, Sansing is right in saying that families should get all the data they need in choosing schools and teachers. He’s also hit upon one of the biggest problems in American public education: That school data remains a black box of sorts, unavailable and unusable for  parents, policymakers and even teachers and principals to make smart decisions. This is especially true when it comes to teacher quality. While a few states — notably Indiana — offer some basic data on a teacher’s credentials and time in the classroom, almost none of them provide data systems that help parents know how well an instructor does in improving student achievement; essentially you don’t actually see either Value-Added analysis of standardized tests or even results from formative assessments that can show how well a teacher has done in diagnosing and addressing particular learning needs of the students in their care.  Moves such as California Gov. Jerry Brown’s decision last year to cancel development of the CALTIDES teacher database (which would have been linked up to the long-troubled CALPADS student data system to provide longitudinal information on teacher and student performance) hasn’t helped on this front.

Even worse, families (and even principals) don’t even have data on whether a teacher is highly-regarded by students (the best signal for levels of empathy), or the number (or socioeconomic background) of students directed by a teacher to principals and academic deans for suspension, expulsion, and other school discipline (which can also show whether a teacher is capable of teaching students of backgrounds other than her own). Given that just 33 percent of teachers working in our middle- and high schools are working in subjects for which there is test score data, the lack of information on teacher empathy means that neither families nor school leaders can get a handle on how well those instructors are serving children. Which means many kids aren’t getting the high-quality caring teachers they deserve.

There are certainly ways to gather information on the empathy of teachers through evaluations. As the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching initiative made plain in its latest report, student surveys such as the Tripod regime developed by Harvard professor Ronald Ferguson and Cambridge Education are far more accurate in measuring teacher performance than even the most-sophisticated classroom evaluations (and almost as accurate as Value-Added test data). Surveying students annually on teacher empathy can be done effectively and the results can disseminated. The problem is that the traditional evaluation systems still in place — and defended implicitly by National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates — all but eschew any form of strong, comprehensive evaluation, and champion so-called peer review programs that have proven decent at measuring observable aspects of teaching (and ineffective in removing low-quality teachers overall).

Requiring student surveys to account for at least a fifth of an overall evaluation (with Value-Added analysis of student test data and information from formative assessments given through an objective instrument making up the 60 percent of evaluations) makes sense and should be done; this information should then be provided as part of a database on individual teachers that families can use for their own decision-making and activism. Providing data on the number of students referred by teachers for discipline is also a good idea.

But it’s not just about the levels of teacher empathy that families will want to know. There is the matter of whether teachers interact well with parents themselves regardless of socioeconomic background. For poor and minority households, such information is incredibly important. As Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg of at the Sage Colleges have noted in their research on school engagement, urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.” But it isn’t just poor urban families who deal with disdain. University of Michigan Associate Professor Karyn Lacey noted in her sociological study, Blue-Chip Black, black families living in Fairfax County found themselves battling teachers and guidance counselors who wanted to relegate children to academic tracks that keep them from getting high-paying white- and blue-collar jobs.

Such information is unlikely to be collected by districts and even individual schools in any meaningful way, largely because it also involves considerable costs that are difficult to bear (especially given that many use Excel spreadsheets and outdated FileMaker software to handle their database needs). The fact that such information is subjective and thus, easily skewed, also comes into play; so does the reality that families, like even the adults in schools, don’t really know what teachers are doing behind classroom doors. But this is a matter with which the private sector can help. There are already efforts by outfits such as GreatSchools.org to rate schools, and if high-quality data on teacher performance and empathy become more-widely available, a private-sector firm can easily combine such information with individual family feedback to create a comprehensive database that any parent can use. One can easily see special editions of Consumer Reports focused on the best teachers for your child, with sections on math, science, and even music instructors segmented by locale or region.

And thanks to the release of teacher performance data in New York City (along with the Los Angeles Times’ laudable and valuable effort from two years ago), such data systems can become the norm — and for the better.