Why is it that student surveys are more accurate in determining the quality of teaching than classroom observations? This is a question raised by the study on teacher evaluations released last week by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project. And the likely answer should give school reformers pause in pushing for the so-called multiple measures approach to teacher performance management.

As I noted in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, how to evaluate and manage the performance of teachers has been one of the most-contentious discussions in the battle over reforming American public education. School reformers have largely won the battle over the use of value-added analysis of student test data in teacher evaluations, and, thanks in part to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, 32 states are on the path to using them. But despite the evidence that value-added is the most-objective and most-accurate tool for evaluating teacher performance, education traditionalists have also successfully weakened the use of value-added (and convinced many reformers to go along) by advocating for a “multiple measures” that prominently features the traditional (and largely subjective and inaccurate) approach of classroom observations.

But the MET report — which touts multiple measures — provides more reasons why such an approach is ineffective. For one, it pointed out that surveys of students were more accurate in evaluating teacher performance than classroom observations.  In fact, the student surveys — in this case, the Tripod student perception survey developed by Harvard’s Ronald Ferguson and Cambridge Education — were so accurate in evaluating teacher performance that they were almost as good as value-added analysis of student test score data. For example, the reliability of one classroom evaluation was less than half of a standard deviation in math and a fifth of a standard deviation in reading. On the other hand, the reliability of student surveys was two-thirds of a standard deviation, almost as high as the rather significant seven-tenths of standard deviation for value-added data, the most accurate of the tools for measuring student and teacher progress.

Meanwhile the multiple measures approach — in this case, combining value-added data along with classroom observations and student surveys — watered down the reliability and usefulness of evaluations. When classroom observations and student surveys are weighted equally alongside test scores, the accuracy of the overall evaluation declines by as much as a twelfth of a standard deviation. Even when value-added data and student surveys are given greater weight — accounting for 72.9 percent, and 17.2 percent of the evaluation in one model — the classroom observations are of such low quality that they bring down the value of the overall performance review.

Certainly the very issues of subjective bias and inability to measure the most-important (and unobservable) aspects of teacher quality is one reason why classroom observations are far less useful on their own. But, at first glance, it wouldn’t make sense that student surveys do a better job of assessing teacher quality. After all, children aren’t exactly knowledgeable about what is involved in high-quality teaching, and, in theory, shouldn’t be able to get a handle on subject-matter competency. Let’s also be clear that not every student survey is likely to match up to Tripod’s level of accuracy.

Yet kids may be really good at assessing some important things. As Ellen Gallinsky noted in Mind in the Making, her 2010 book on child development, babies are incredibly good at determining which adults are helpful in their lives and which adults aren’t worthy of their time. And anyone who has spent time with a preschool-aged niece or nephew has seen how quickly they can catch on to what is happening in the world around them. If this is true for those kids, then school-aged children should have a good idea of what adults do (or don’t).

It will take more empirical studies to show this to be true or not, but your editor surmises that the reason lies with what I call the Familiarity Breeds Hypothesis. The more time you spend with someone, the more you know about their particular personality traits, skills, quirks, and even eating habits. Such familiarity either breeds admiration, respect, contempt, or indifference. This familiarity is what leads a couple to either go from simply dating to becoming husband and wife — or break up within a year, and why colleagues can go from simply working with one another to becoming best buddies — or hate each other intensely. It is also why your spouse likely knows you better than you know yourself. And if this is true in relationships in areas outside of education, why wouldn’t it be true when it comes to relationships between teachers and students?

Consider this: Depending on whether they are in elementary, middle, or high school, the average student will spend at least five hours a week with a given teacher and as much as 35 hours a week when they are in elementary. Essentially, a student spends more time with his or her teacher than either the instructor’s colleagues and principal — and definitely more time than the most-impartial evaluator. Given the amount of time the student spends with a teacher, they likely have a better grasp of the teacher’s skillset than any of the adults in a school, even if they don’t actually understand such concepts as subject-matter competency and instructional method. And they also have a better sense of how much a teacher truly cares about them, and is willing to build the kind of long-lasting connections that can improve student success.

This is likely to be especially true for two particular groups of students: At-risk kids struggling with reading and other achievement gaps, and top-performers ahead of the class. After all, both sets of students are looking for help (even when they don’t know how to verbalize it) but in different ways. At-risk students want a caring teacher with strong subject-knowledge competency who can help them address their struggles in their subjects. Top-performers want an instructor who both cares for them and is more-knowledgeable than they are in order to get the challenge they need to continue their success. How a teacher comes off to both groups of students matters because if she can do well by these students, she will also do well by the rest of the class.

If the struggling student senses that a teacher cares for them and can help them improve, that teacher will gain high levels of esteem. If not, the struggling student won’t have much respect for the teacher and will not rate the teacher highly. This is also likely to be true for a top-performing peer. If the teacher lacks subject-matter competency and, in fact, seems to know less than that particular student, then the kid will tune out the teacher altogether.

While kids have intense, up-close dealings with their teachers, the average evaluator isn’t likely to be so familiar and knowledgeable. In traditional classroom observations, a harried principal will only get to spend one pre-arranged hour in the school year with a teacher (who already knows they will be evaluated and, thus, will have rehearsed for the appearance). Even under better-developed and more-rigorous classroom observations used by MET, the observer only gets to watch what a teacher does four times during a school year. Unless the teacher is completely inept, she can put on a good enough show to fool that observer for those times.

The observers may get to notice some how a teacher cares and empathizes for kids in their care, especially in how they talk to a student of a different racial or economic background, or even see how a teacher reduces the amount of time she spends on talking and increases the time spent on students answering questions and otherwise engaging in learning. But they will miss out on some aspects of the instructor’s work because they’re not going to spend enough time in a classroom to get a full picture of what the teacher does. And this is on top of the realities of subjective biases inherent in observations, and the fact that no observation will be able to measure the most-important aspect of teacher quality – whether a teacher has improved the child’s progress and is making gains in their knowledge.

Again, the Familiarity Breeds hypothesis is exactly that. But if it bears out empirically, then it raises some real questions about how to improve classroom observations and, more importantly, whether American public education should still bother with them anyway.

One possible way to improve classroom observations may start with immersing an observer into the classroom of a particular teacher. This means an observer would remain in class for long periods of time, say two months, in order to get a full sense of an instructor’s performance. Why? Because after a while, a teacher would stop putting on a show and actually do what they really do in classrooms because the observer becomes just like everyone else in the class. Which, in turn, allows an observer to really see and analyze what a teacher is doing. But such extensive observations may be too costly for districts to implement and, given that many veteran teachers prefer to work solo, isn’t likely to be welcomed. It could also lead to even more subjective biases that would make evaluations less useful in measuring and even improving performance.

In an ideal world, your editor would simply use the value-added data as the sole measure in evaluations — and this would be possible if we did a better job of recruiting and training aspiring teachers long before they begin work in classrooms. This would screen out those who lack subject-matter competency, empathy for children, and entrepreneurial drive. But there would still be need to measure observable aspects of teacher quality. The better solution may be to move away from classroom observations altogether and take a different approach to multiple measures. Value-added data from standardized tests would be the biggest component, but student surveys would also be included because of their accuracy. Also adding results from formative assessments — which can show how a teacher has addressed particular student issues over the period of a school year — would also make sense.

As I noted in this week’s Podcast, evaluations should also take note of how teachers work with parents, especially as Parent Trigger laws , along with the expansion of school choice, helps foment the Parent Power movement. And another measure should deal with how teachers, working on their own or in collaboration with their colleagues, work to improve student achievement and develop innovative ways of helping kids succeed. A high-quality teacher should definitely be rewarded for developing a new instructional specialty the same way doctors are now specialists in particular areas of medicine.

Ultimately, it may be the students, rather than the adults, who point the way towards improving the quality of teachers who work in our schools.

What to read? These days, this isn’t exactly a question likely on the minds of school reformers. After all, between the dirge of reports, the flurry of op-eds, and the hundreds of tweets churned out daily, there is certainly a lot to read. But everyone needs to take a few days out of the year to just plain read a book. Why? Partly for pleasure. But also because we all need intellectual stimulation, and to glean new ideas and insights on how to overhaul a failed education system; there is so much that can be gotten out of one good book. More importantly, we have to show the importance of literacy own children (including nephews and nieces) and not just talk about it.

This year, Dropout Nation is offering its help by selecting The Top Eight Books of 2011 That School Reformers Should Read. Culled from more than 100 books, the selections include a wide range of texts. This includes three books that aren’t specifically focused on education; after all, school reformers need to continually glean lessons from history and from other sectors in order to build up the movement’s intellectual caliber. (It also makes one well-rounded.)

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 Mrs. Dropout Nation fall to sleep 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)? And would you pay at least $14 to put it on your Nook Color or Kindle Fire (or, for those of you still reading traditional books, pay at least $20 for the paperback or hardcover)?

Below are Dropout Nation‘s selections. Offer your own suggestions in the comments. And, most importantly, read, read, read.

Push Has Come to Shove: Getting Our Kids the Education They Deserve — Even If It Means Picking a Fight: As I noted earlier this month in my American Spectator column, Dr. Steve Perry’s book is  a Parent Power guide that can help families– especially those without any school choice or Parent Trigger options — push for school reform within their own communities. The plain-speaking Capital Prep Magnet School principal offers a step-by-step guide on how to negotiate through the school bureaucracies and force school boards to pay attention. He also explains what parents can do on their own to help their kids succeed in school and in life; and gives an inside look at how laggard leadership, low-quality teaching, and teachers’ union bosses have contributed to the nation’s education crisis. And in the process, he also provides a guide to school reformers on how to rally families on behalf of overhauling American public education. For both families and school reformers, Push Has Come to Shove is a book worth having on the shelf or Nook Color.

Why America Needs School Choice: Jay P. Greene’s monograph offers the most-succinct and persuasive arguments for supporting and advancing vouchers, charter schools, and other forms of choice. Throughout the book, Greene not only cuts through the arguments against choice, he also shows how the lack of school options is contrary to the state of affairs even in sectors heavily dominated by the public sector such as healthcare. Best of all, it can be read in an afternoon.

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice: The abridged version of Raymond Arsenault’s tale about one of the most seminal moments in the history of the late-20th century Civil Rights Movement may not seem like a natural read for school reformers, especially those in the Beltway. But the book offers amazing lessons on how our new voices for reform — including Parent Power activists — must challenge the thinking and tactics of longstanding players in the Beltway who now find themselves at a strategic crossroads. And for other reformers, Arsenault’s narrative should be a reminder of the importance of zealous, unapologetic advocacy and speaking truth to power. Freedom Riders is one of two books featured in Dropout Nation‘s Building a Culture of Genius commentaries this year.

Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools: Based on just the visceral reaction of teachers’ union supporters at an American Enterprise Institute conference earlier this year (and Richard Kahlenberg’s defense of education traditionalists disguised in review form), Terry Moe has written what is probably the second most-controversial book on education this year. And for good reason. Moe provides a cogent analysis of how the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have helped perpetuate a failed vision of American public education that has condemned far too many young men and women to despair. And he also explains how the development of online learning efforts may do more to weaken the influence of NEA and AFT affiliates than the work of reformers in reshaping policy.

Eiffel’s Tower: The Thrilling Story Behind Paris’s Beloved Monument and the Extraordinary World’s Fair That Introduced It: Historian Jill Jonnes’ profile of the construction of the world’s most-iconic monuments was the guiding text for another Building Culture of Genius commentary, this on the need for innovators in school reform. And for good reason. The book offers amazing insights on how Gustav Eiffel managed to navigate the treacherous terrain of political intrigue, and still pulled off one of the greatest path-breaking efforts of all time. From Jonnes’ book, school reformers can glean some lessons on the kind of dynamic minds and path-breaking thinking we need for the reform of American public education.

Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools: There are plenty of reasons why Steve Brill’s look at the three decade-long battle over reforming American public education has become the most-controversial — and most talked-about — book on education this year. One of the most-important reasons lies with its strong, even-handed (if sometimes, incomplete) reporting on how the school reform movement has emerged as one of the most-powerful forces in American policy and politics. Another lies with Brill’s rather sharp insight into the craven defense of traditional public education practices by folks such as Ravitch and American Federation of Teachers President Weingarten — and the tactical errors of school reformers (including the problems that came up with the selection process for the federal Race to the Top effort). Class Warfare isn’t a perfect book; Brill fails to detail the important work of such reformers as Howard Fuller and John Norquist (who brought the school choice movement to life — and brought urban leaders to the fore in school reform — with their successful launch of the nation’s first school voucher program), and leaves out the important work of Greene, Robert Balfanz, Christopher Swanson and Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Michael Holzman in revealing the depths of the nation’s dropout crisis. But Brill has written an important book that can even inform the thoughts of political scientists who aren’t studying education.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention: At first glance, the late Manning Marable’s autobiography of the famed civil rights and religious leader would not seem to be a text that school reformers should read. But the book’s chapters on how Malcolm X attempted — and failed — to launch a grassroots movement after his departure from the notorious Nation of Islam are textbook lessons on why strong leadership and operational skills are critical for sustaining reform efforts. Marable’s tale about the rise of the Nation also shows school reformers how a strong movement can be built when dedicated advocates do all they can to reach down into the grassroots — and his discussion about the religious cult’s downfall offers insight on problems of personality-driven organizations, an issue for some of the foremost outfits in both school reform and among education traditionalists. And finally, Malcolm X’s amazing life and constant reinvention — including how he became an autodidact of the first order — shows how education can spark anyone to turn their lives around for the better.

Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children’s Lives and America’s Future: Your editor will admit that he doesn’t agree with every suggestion or view offered up by University of California, Berkeley Professor David Kirp in this book. Let’s just mention one: It isn’t too late to help children get on the path to success in school and life once they enter school. But Kirp’s book is certainly one of the most-compelling reads any reformer can pick up this year and in the coming days. He strongly and thoughtfully argues for government budgeting and public policy agenda based on the simple idea that all kids deserve that which you would provide to your son, daughter, nephew or other child in your life that you love. More importantly, unlike similar books in this arena, Kirp actually lays out what this should look like in concrete ways.

There were three other books that were so good, yet, because this is only a list of the top eight books (and because of the list’s emphasis on mentioning books that were not specifically focused on education) didn’t make the cut. These Next Three are Stray Dogs, Saints and Saviors, Alexander Russo’s narrative on Green Dot’s overhaul of Locke High School; Richard Whitmire’s profile of Michelle Rhee, The Bee Eater (despite what once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch wants to think); and Nicholas Wapshott’s Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, which offers reformers insights on the driving forces behind other intellectual and political battles (and, is also a fine primer on Austrian and Keynsian economic theory).

Update: Howard Fuller notes that Thomas Friedman’s and Michael Mandelbaum’s That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back should be among the other books school reformers should read; education is one of the issues the book covers. Another reader also puts on the list Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems, which ably tears apart arguments from education traditionalists about the nation’s woeful academic performance against its peers. Given that one is on my Nook Color at this moment (and being read) and the other is in the order queue, your editor, in particular, couldn’t judge either book one way or the other. But I will give my thoughts at the beginning of the new year.

Unlike most publications covering American public education, Dropout Nation has been able to operate without seeking outside support. Thanks to the stunningly strong growth of readership, and the need to expand its capacity for serving you, sources of advertising and outside funding are now being developed. But for now, your favorite news and commentary source will remain an advertising- and foundation funds-free zone.

Given the good fortunes of this publication, Dropout Nation‘s editors and contributors only ask you to contribute your retweets, your word-of-mouth, and your eyeballs to this enterprise. At the same time, we ask you not to donate your time and energy to the organizations that are doing great work to help all of our children succeed in school and in life.

These are just a few of the groups you should support this Holiday season”

• This week, the Connecticut Parents Union launches its Parents Express Bus tour as part of the second annual ‘Tis the Season to Be Reading literacy project. Between this Wednesday, Dec. 14 and Friday, Dec. 16, the bus will travel to cities such as Waterbury, Bridgeport, and Hartford to provide families and their children the information they need to overhaul their schools and get kids on the path to college and career. To help CPU continue this Parents Express bus and expand this effort to the entire state, reach Gwen Samuel.
• In Hartford, Dr. Steve Perry’s Capital Prep Magnet School is looking to help its high school graduates get the money they need to get into — and stay in — college after graduation. In January, it will hold its annual fundraiser hosted by the legendary Bill Cosby. Read Sterling Brilliant, either at (860) 695-9876 or by e-mail, for more information.
• For the past few years, the Grassroots Education Project in Washington, D.C. has worked with fifth-graders at Harriett Tubman Elementary in the city’s Columbia Heights section to help them improve their literacy. They have also helped beautify the school with service projects every January during Martin Luther King Day and in September, just before the start of the new school year. Learn more about what the group is doing and lend a hand.
• Also in D.C., at John Easton Elementary in the city’s Cleveland Heights section, the Reading Boosters program is working with first graders to get them on track to reading proficiency. To volunteer or help in other ways, contact Jeanie Mah at msjcmyu1@gmail.com.
• And contribute to First Book DC so that kids can improve their literacy. And to any First Book branch nationwide.
• For those around the nation’s capital who want to help families address their immediate needs, there is Ransom Miller III’s Project Giveback. This Thanksgiving, the organization fed more than 1,000 families in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland, giving those families a respite from struggle. Learn more about the organization and contribute what you can.
• In Detroit, LaToniya A. Jones and her team at P.O.W.E.R. the Youth are helping young men and women become mathematically literate. Help out this important organization today.
• Nationally, Phillip Jackson’s Black Star Project is working to help all young black men and women succeed. This includes everything from tutoring sessions throughout Chicago to its annual Million Father March. Join the Black Star Project today.
• And don’t forget Black Alliance for Educational Options, which has spent the past 11 years helping poor black families and children escape from the worst American public education offers by expanding high-quality charter schools, advocating for school choice options, and addressing the effects of the nation’s education crisis on young black men. Join BAEO today or chat up its staff on how you can provide donor support.
• Oh, let me not forget Catharine Bellanger, the able Jerelyn Rodriguez and the rest of the folks at Students For Education Reform, which is helping to nurture a new generation of reformers ready to transform American public education. Donate to them today.

There are other organizations that also need help. Feel free to mention them — and information on how to contribute and help out in the comments section. And, most importantly, give. Because our children need it.

(Full disclosure, Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle is a member of the Connecticut Parents Union’s advisory board. A separate firm run by Biddle is working with BAEO on a consulting basis. Dropout Nation receives no funding from the firm.)

What is happening in among some school districts in Idaho offers a glimpse into one of the many changes that will (and have to) come to the teaching profession in general — and American public education overall. Thanks to a state law passed earlier this year, teachers will receive merit bonuses based on meeting a series of metrics related to improving student achievement. For the Wendell district in Twin Falls, which is looking to better-engage the families of the children they teach, the bonus plan has become a blessing in disguise. At Wendell High School, as much as 70 percent of the bonuses that will be handed out is based on whether teachers bring 40 percent or more of parents into classrooms for parent-teacher conferences; similar incentives are in place for teachers in other schools throughout the district. And so far, the move (along with others) have had a good result: Seventy-seven percent of families showed up for the district’s parent-teachers conferences this year, an 18 percentage point increase over the previous school year.

The current generation of teachers — and those who will follow them into the profession over the next two decades — should expect more of this in the future. Engaging families and accepting their lead position as decision-makers in education will be one of the three factors in teacher performance evaluations, will factor into merit bonuses and pay increases, may play a part in grants that they can receive for high-quality work, and could even make a difference between whether a teacher moves up from one performance-based salary band to another or, perhaps, even becoming a principal. This means going beyond far-too-late report cards and oft-inconvenient parent-teacher conferences to really active communication that starts weeks before kids enter their classrooms for the first time.

And this will also be true for principals: As the weakening of collective bargaining agreements lead to districts handing principals more power over hiring and firing staff, those school leaders will have to be accountable for the efforts of all teachers in improving student achievement. Not only does this mean improving student test score performance — the most-objective and reliable way of measuring student and teacher success — but working more-productively with families who demand better and want to help. So principals must spot teachers who not only do a great job in improving student performance, but who also know how to well with families, especially those from poor and first-time middle class backgrounds who are just learning how to navigate American public education.

These will be jarring changes for many teachers, principals, and schools. But they are needed. Accepting families as lead decision-makers in education is not only critical to addressing the nation’s education crisis, it also helps improve the professionalism of the teaching profession itself. Lawyers and doctors can attest that they cannot do their jobs on behalf of their clients without being responsive to their concerns; same is true for nearly every aspect of the private sector. It is time that education embraces a family- and child-centered focus in helping all students succeed in school and in life.

As Temple University Professor William W. Cutler III noted in Parents and Schools: The 150-year struggle for control in American education that families have never been really welcomed in schools, and have been treated as afterthoughts, nuisances, and political pawns. Principals and teachers have relegated families to helping out on field trips and homework. Superintendents and school boards co-opted parents and parent-teacher outfits for the purposes of winning tax increases, additional federal and state subsidies, and fundraising from the private sector. Education traditionalists conveniently blame families whenever there are revelations of the failings of the system they have long perpetuated.

Education traditionalists always (rightfully) tout the importance of it in student success. Yet their attitudes toward parents hardly makes such engagement likely. From the parent-teacher open houses that are often scheduled during the work day, to report cards that are sent out far too late in the school year for families to do anything to help their kids get back on track (or stay on it), schools don’t do a good job of making it easy for parents to be engaged in the first place. As Dr. Steve Perry makes clear in his new book, Push Has Come to Shove, American public education has done a great job of alienating parents (and making them feel bad about not being as involved as they want to be without making) and a terrible job of including them in school decision-making.

This state of affairs is true for nearly all families stuck with traditional district schools regardless of where they live and how much they earn. As Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews noted in a piece he wrote this month about the fracas between parents at Leesburg Elementary School in Virginia’s Loudoun County and the school’s principal, the very idea of families asking questions is something of an anathema. The condescension displayed in one teacher’s piece on “Burger King parents” and “Grass-is-greener parents” ends up being more typical than rare — especially for  middle-class black and Latino families, who find themselves fighting to keep their kids from being steered off the college route by ability tracking regimes. For big-city families, including those from poor and minority backgrounds, the state of affairs is often even worse. Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg of at the Sage Colleges have noted in their research on school engagement that urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.”

Why have we made it so easy for many teachers and principals to neglect their obligations to families? Start with the structure of American public education, which makes real family engagement and communication less than valuable for schools. Just one-fifth of all American families in position to exercise any meaningful form of school choice — including vouchers, charter schools and intra-district choice. This means that for most traditional districts, families are a captive market, and thus, can be ignored by teachers and administrators, who don’t have to worry about loss of jobs or revenue.  Former New York City chancellor Joel Klein’s tale about how a secretary noted that he could just simply ignore a ringing telephone because it was probably just some parents on the other line is, in most districts, the reality. The fact that family engagement are not categories for evaluation in teacher and principal performance reviews also means that the only time these groups worry about parents is when they have to deal with those with either enough influence to cause pain to their bosses in central offices, or are children of teachers and administrators who work there. And even if a principal wants to be attentive to families, he has limited ability to address  the biggest issues  on their minds: Their relationships with the teachers who instruct their children. Since collective bargaining agreements dictate that hiring is a central office affair, principals can’t just toss out a teacher because they don’t deal well with parents.

Contrast this with private schools, which continuously communicate with families because those institutions depend on paying customers (and, thus, have power), or good-to-great charter schools, which understand that family engagement is critical to building cultures of genius in which the potential of kids are nurtured (and, also depend on paying customers). Both spend a lot of time developing more-welcoming school cultures, creating special days (at convenient times) when grandparents and others family members can visit and check up on school performance. Since principals and headmasters in those schools often have authority to hire, evaluate, reward, and fire teachers, they can easily take the steps needed to foster more-robust family engagement.

Another culprit lies with university schools of education, which train nearly all of the nation’s teachers and principals. Besides failing to recruit aspiring teachers for subject-matter competency and empathy to children, ed schools don’t even select teacher candidates based on their capacity to be as conversant with parents and other adults — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — as they are with kids. Once aspiring teachers are in training, they are rarely taught such matters as cultural competence (which would allow them to communicate with families from different backgrounds) or how to integrate such simple communications activities as calling families into their classroom work. Add in the system of degree-based pay scales, which reward teachers for acquiring degrees (and, in the process, helps foster a class divide in which some look down on less-credentialed families), and the fact that traditional public education structures teaching as a solo activity instead of a collaborative effort, and it is no wonder why many teachers regard parents as problems.

This inability to converse and work with families extends to principals. As The New Teacher Project noted in a study of teacher evaluation it conducted for the Houston school district, most principals would rather spend less time dealing with parents and caregivers. Because most school leadership training programs — including those developed by school reformers — don’t bother dealing with family engagement, principals (and their bosses at the central office) This, by the way, is part of a larger problem of communication within American public education. As Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Steve Peha noted in his series on school leadership, the fact that most principals come from the teaching ranks means that they are better-equipped to talk to children than to lead teachers and converse with parents and other adults.

But now, the expansion of charter schools in big cities, along with the growth of school vouchers and voucher-like tax credit programs in 13 states, have given families more opportunities to choose schools for their kids and not put up with mistreatment. The passage of Parent Trigger laws in three states — which allow families to demand the overhaul of failing schools — along with the emergence of Parent Power groups also means that more districts will have to accept families as lead decision-makers in education. And the efforts of National PTA to demand districts to engage in real family engagement — including its National Standards for Family-School Partnerships and the rewards the organization hands out to schools that make the grade — and actually require it as part of school turnaround efforts has also brought new pressures on teachers and principals used to having it their way.

Meanwhile the systemic reform of American public education is also slowly forcing a change in the relationship between teachers, principals, and the families whose children they serve.

As more states move to weighted student funding formulas under which funding follows students no matter the school they attend — essentially voucherizing school funding — decisions will move from central offices down to schools. This, along with expanded school choice and the slow disintegration of the traditional district model along the lines of New Orleans’ Recovery School District, will force schools and principals to compete for families (and dollars). More-robust school data systems will lead to additional information on how teachers and schools affect student progress, giving families more information they can use the same way they shop for cars with Carfax.com, Consumer Reports and other guides. The move away from degree- and seniority-based pay scales and into new structures for compensating teachers (including performance-based salary bands, performance bonuses, and even grants that can be used to start new programs) means that teachers will have to be more entrepreneurial in their work, figuring out new ways to work with families. And with more-rigorous evaluations (and the use of Value-Added analysis of student test data in those performance reviews), teachers and principals will have to work more-productively with families in order to help kids succeed.

All these changes, fostered by revelations of mediocrity and abject failure in traditional public education fostered by the accountability and data disaggregation requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, are helping many parents to finally that the old notion that any school or teacher will do is a myth. They will have to be active players in shaping education. Which means teaching and school leadership must change. Many teachers will have to realize that parents will no longer accept arguments that they need autonomy, that they are the sole experts in education, and that they must simply trust that the kids are learning. Principals will have to accept that working with families is as important for their success as evaluating teachers; so they must set the example in their own activities and demand everyone in the building to follow accordingly.

And many teachers and principals will need to stop looking at families as nuisances and enemies. After all, they are the adults who run the schools at the center of the lives of the children these families love. They deserve respect

Our systems of recruiting, training, and rewarding teachers and principals must adapt to this reality. And school reformers must make this happen. The revamp of evaluations offers opportunities to make family engagement and Parent Power key elements in measuring teacher and principal performance. So does the further expansion of school choice; as a report . These immediate solutions can help pave the way for stronger, more-robust relations between families and schools.

So can simply adapting to the times. In an age in which Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail are communications tools for every family no matter their economic status, there is no reason why a teacher cannot inform families immediately once their kids starts veering off track academically. The KIPP chain of charter schools, for example, expects teachers to be available by phone; this should be the case in every school. Principals should make it clear that they expect teachers to start communicating early and often with families — in fact, meeting before the start of the school year. And in an age in which every adult in two-parent household works — and households led by single parents, along with aging grandparents, teachers and principals should make it easier for families to meet them face-to-face.

Over the long haul, the recruiting and training of aspiring teachers must also change. Ed schools, along with alternative teacher training programs, should add ability to communicate (and empathize) with families as a critical element of selecting their candidates. Early clinical training in actual school settings is also important to helping aspiring teachers learn how to work with families. Ed schools must also ditch outdated pedagogies — including the Poverty Myth of Education — that hold little regard for the role of families as leaders in schools. Outfits geared toward developing principals and superintendents such as New Leaders for New Schools and the Broad Foundation should also develop training programs that emphasize Parent Power and family engagement in their curricula.

Parent Power is part of the future of teaching in American public education. It should have always been a part of it. And everyone who works in schools must adapt to these changes — or be left behind in the ashbin of education history.

The 1961 Freedom Rides have become among the most-memorable events in American history — and a major marker of the Civil Rights Movements successful fight to end of Jim Crow segregation. But the Greyhound Bus rides were also the key turning point that reshaped the direction and the tenor of the movement and its leadership. More importantly, it forced John F. Kennedy, an American president who had little interest in advancing civil rights, to finally begin the steps that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and other legislation that ended official (and de-facto) segregation for good. Now, more than ever, the lessons about unapologetic grassroots activism and speaking truth to power are ones that should be embraced by all school reformer in what is sadly turning out to be a post-No Child Left Behind Act era in which some have lost their focus on what they are supposed to do.

At the time the Freedom Rides began, the Civil Rights Movement was at a crossroads. Starting in the 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its legal mastermind, Thurgood Marshall, had successfully used the courts to challenge Jim Crow laws that condemned blacks to second-class status in American society. This included the case of Irene Morgan, a Baltimore woman who had just gotten over a miscarriage arrested by Hayes Store, Va., police in 1944 for refusing to hand her seat on a Greyhound bus to white riders.

The NAACP would take up her case, successfully appealing it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that states could not apply Jim Crow to any form of interstate commerce. The legal and public policy strategy reached its crescendo in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Yet governors and legislators in southern states refused to enforce the court rulings and did all they could to circumvent them. In response to the Morgan ruling, states continued to segregate bus stations and other facilities; other states, including Arkansas and Virginia would respond to Brown by refusing to integrate scho0ls and even shutting down entire school districts in a form of massive resistance. The fact that Marshall and his team were reluctant to actually take it to the streets in protests, unwilling to force states to actually abide by federal rulings, and fearful of being tarred as disloyal by Americans still spooked by fears of communism (and the presence of spies, real and otherwise, working on behalf of the Soviets) made the NAACP a toothless tiger.

At the same time, another strategy pursued by the civil rights movement — the nonviolent resistance inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s successful push for India’s independence — was also struggling. Initially pushed by Bayard Rustin and the Congress of Racial Equality during the 1940s, it gained traction during the 1950s thanks to the arrest of Rosa Parks on a Montgomery, Ala. bus, and the emergence of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. as the leading voice of the civil rights movement. The efforts of King and the newly-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference gained national attention, especially as media coverage of lynchings, bombings and the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, finally alarmed Americans about the viciousness of state-sanctioned segregation.

But King and his fellow nonviolent activists found themselves in a quandary. The fact that black southerners were forced to live daily with segregation — and the violence that came to their doorstep any time they fought against segregation — made them less interested in nonviolent protests. Some, such as a NAACP leader in Monroe County, N.C., Robert Williams, called for “armed self-reliance” and lived up to his word in 1957 when he and other locals shot at Klansmen. (Northerners such as Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were equally as vocal in their support for violent resistance to racial bigotry.) The rest, well-aware of the murders of such civil rights activists as Sam O’Quinn in Centreville, Miss., made others rather docile. Keeping the peace was more important for daily survival than forcing America to realize its due. That King and his fellow pastors, many of whom were the establishment in their own communities (and thus, a tad on the conservative side philosophically) meant that they were not quick to take action and did little in the way of strong, public action. They also had to deal with the NAACP, which opposed King’s strategy (and were also competing with him and the SCLC for attention and resources).

Meanwhile the federal government wished to stay out of the civil rights conversation altogether. President Harry s. Truman desegregated the military in 1947, and Dwight David Eisenhower sent National Guard troopers to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School a decade later. But neither administration was willing to take any further steps towards making America’s promise of equal opportunity for all a reality. Both administrations were unwilling to challenge the traditional view of federalism, which essentially restricted the federal role in governing how states treated citizens under law. They were also more-preoccupied with the Cold War and containing Communism than with civil rights.

The incoming president in 1961, John F. Kennedy, shared this reluctance to delve into the civil rights battle. A fierce Cold Warrior, he was more than willing to ignore the concerns of the very African-American voters who helped him win a narrow victory over Richard Nixon the previous year. Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, also made sure to push the one true civil rights activist in the administration’s cabinet, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson (who actually worked to pass the nation’s first civil rights act during his term as U.S. Senate majority leader) to the wayside.

As both camps struggled with their own strategies and battled with one another, a new group of voices for freedom emerged. Starting in 1959, students attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities began conducting sit-ins at local restaurants and stores, demanding to sit and be served alongside whites. These protests began capturing national attention a year later when four students attending North Carolina A&T in Greensboro sat down at a lunch counter in a local Woolworth’s and ordered coffee; 20 more students would come a day later to take their place, launching one of the biggest sit-in protests of the era — and fostered sit-ins by HBCU students in cities such as Nashville and Atlanta.

These students, well-educated, talented, and energetic, were tired of being treated as second-class citizens by Jim Crow segregationists. They were also especially annoyed with the NAACP and Dr. King’s SCLC, which refused to fully support their protests and were unwilling to be the strong grassroots activists these young men and women expected them to be. And they would form their own group, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, to rally their cause. From this group would come a generation of black leaders both legendary and otherwise, including John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, mathematician Bob Moses and (unfortunately) Marion Barry. They were joined by older civil rights leaders such as Ella Baker and who were equally ready to take action and were just as frustrated with the reluctance of the NAACP and SCLC to join common cause.

But one established organization was more than willing to join these young protestors. And that was CORE. An offshoot of the international Fellowship of Reconciliation movement, the organization had attempted to rally support for nonviolent protests with such efforts as the Journey of Reconciliation, a bus ride that attempted to test southern compliance to the Morgan decision. But by the 1960s, CORE was in the doldrums. The ouster of its dynamic cofounder, Jim Farmer, along with the unfamiliarity with nonviolent protest and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigations of alleged communists, forced the group into the wilderness. Having been the pioneer of nonviolent struggle, the emergence of King had stole its thunder; nor was it welcomed by either King’s supporters or national NAACP leaders. But the new, campus-based civil rights activists were more than ready to get any support from any established group. And even before the Greensboro protest, CORE began staging its own sit-ins and nonviolent protests in cities such as Miami.

But CORE was ready to do more, especially after Farmer returned to CORE in 1961 to retake its reigns. A tireless protester, Farmer decided that it was time to dust off one of the organization’s earlier efforts, the Journey of Reconciliation, and do a new series of protest Greyhound rides into southern cities. Calling it the Freedom Ride, Farmer and his team recruited a rainbow coalition of 13 men and women, including SNCC cofounder Lewis, and Jim Peck, a longtime CORE player, to ride on Greyhound and Trailways buses into Mississippi and Alabama. The selection was deliberate. Farmer wanted to present a face of unity, that blacks and whites could live together in brotherhood. He also wanted to make sure that the Freedom Riders were ready for anything. This meant not only mixing northern whites with their black counterparts, but even brought in the young HBCU students who were experienced with — and tired of — segregation.

They took to the road on May 4 of that year — and rode into history. At first, the riders encountered little trouble as they road through Virginia and North Carolina; one of the riders, Joe Perkins, was arrested after sitting at a shoe-shine station designated for whites. But then, in Rock Hill, S.C., Lewis was assaulted after walking into a whites-only waiting room at a Greyhound bus station. By the time the riders arrived in Atlanta, their tour had begun to capture attention and was even a distant thought in the minds of Robert Kennedy, the newly-appointed U.S. Attorney General, and his staff. The ride had also gotten the attention of Alabama’s police officials and the United Klans of America — and they had already begun conspiring to maim CORE’s crew.

When the Greyhound bus carrying some of the Freedom Riders came into Anniston, Ala., the Klan was ready. Aided and abetted by police officers, and Alabama highway patrolmen riding alongside the Freedom Riders on their bus, the Klansmen and their crew attacked the bus, smashing windows and damaging its shell. Unable to get the Riders off the bus so they can beat them, the Klan then firebombed the bus, the pommeled the Riders as they fled out of the flaming wreck. Only the fast work of the legendary Fred Shuttlesworth kept the Riders from facing an even nastier fate.

Their colleagues on the Trailways bus suffered an even worse fate. While they road from Atlanta to Alabama, Klansmen on board the bus began beating up the Riders; Peck, was particularly beaten up, with blood spurting from his face. Once the Riders got into the state capital of Montgomery, the notorious sheriff Bull Connor allowed local Klansmen to suffer even more beatings. In front of CBS newsman Howard K. Smith and other reporters, Klansmen along with other bigots chased down Peck and his colleagues, beating them mercilessly. By the time the day was over, the Riders were either in local hospitals or in Shuttleworth’s home recovering and waiting.

Thanks to Smith’s coverage and that of his fellow reporters, the beatdown of the Riders caught national attention. For the Kennedy administration, the exposure of Jim Crow violence wasn’t what it wanted. More-interested in fighting the Cold War than in dealing with the civil rights struggle, JFK and his brother, Bobby wanted to do anything they can to keep the problem on the hush. Through the administration’s point man, newspaperman-turned-Justice Department official John Seigenthaler, the administration managed to get the Riders out of Montgomery (by plane) into New Orleans, where CORE celebrated the anniversary of the Brown ruling and facing criticism from media players, the administration, and traditional civil rights organizations, wondered what it would do next.

But even as the original Riders, battered and beaten, began recovering from their wounds, new protesters were coming. The leadership of SNCC, including feisty, dynamic Fisk University student Diane Nash, decided to pull together a contingent of students to embark on their own Freedom Ride; Lewis, who had left the original Ride before the Anniston and Montgomery showdowns (in order to win a fellowship) joined them. They didn’t bother waiting for help from King, the NAACP or even on CORE (which was reluctant to undertake another civil rights road trip), and they ignored entreaties from the Kennedy administration (which would rather have seen the civil rights movement disappear altogether). They sent 10 volunteers, including Lewis, to go to Montgomery. But when their bus arrived in Birmingham, police officers stopped the bus from going further; the Riders were then arrested and jailed along with Shuttlesworth (who was detained for helping the Riders make their way). When they finally got into Montgomery, they faced another round of violence from Klansmen, who didn’t discriminate in their beatings; they even mercilessly beat Kennedy administration point man Seigenthaler when he tried to intervene.

Even as the first SNCC riders were being arrested and jailed, SNCC kept sending more Riders. So did CORE, which teamed up with SNCC on the protests. Their efforts, along with the public fascination with the movement and the growing group of collegians and middle-aged civil rights activists ready to join the Riders, finally forced the NAACP and King to offer their support. Together with SNCC and CORE, they formed a coalition that recruited and trained aspiring Riders to be ready for the roughness of Jim Crow injustice.

They had plenty who wanted to join. Some 400 people would join the rides that year, according to historian Raymond Arsenault, the author of the 2006 book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. One-third were southern blacks who grew up with the horrors of state-sanctioned discrimination and wanted to rid the nation of it. They knew that in order to rally their brothers and sisters to change things for the better (and knowing that their elders were not willing to risk their own lives to do so) they had to step up, step out and do something. And they did pay the price. Alabama and Misssissippi officials, ready to defend Jim Crow at any cost, jailed every Freedom Rider who arrived into a bus station.

The Riders didn’t necessarily have public opinion on its side. Middle class whites, in partcular, were not all that interested in ending state-sanctioned racial bigotry. As Arsenault pointed out, 64 percent of Americans polled by Gallup who knew of the Rides disapproved of them. Most thought of the Freedom Riders as troublemakers disturbing a status quo that was tolerable (even if they also opposed racism). But the Riders were succeeding. Their example helped foster and energize civil rights activists even in Jim Crow hotbeds such as Neshoba, Miss.; by August, locals were also participating in Freedom Rides, challenging segregationist mythmaking that only outsiders were agitating for the end of the status quo. The Rides would to the first series of voter registration drives, bringing in natives such as Fanny Lou Hamer, whose demand for her Democratic Party affiliate to be seated at the party’s 1964 convention would be the beginning of the end of segregationist political power.

The action on the ground (and the accompanying violence and injustice perpetuated by Jim Crow regimes), along with King’s renewed advocacy, the agitation of SNCC and CORE, and support from presidential aspirants such as New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, also backed the Kennedy administration into a corner. The fact that the protests attracted international attention — and was threatening America’s global standing as the beacon of liberty against the threat of Soviet communism — also caused John and Bobby considerable anguish; that other administration officials, including Seigenthaler and future U.S. senator Harris Wofford, supported the Riders, also meant that the administration could no longer accomodate race-baiting politicians such as Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and his fellow-traveler in the U.S. Senate, James O. Eastland, who held sway in Democratic Party politics. By July, Bobby Kennedy had petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to pass a rule ending separate-but-equal in bus stations and Greyhound rides; by year-end, it became a reality. The federal government was shamed and prodded into expanding its role in ending racial discrimination, a step that would be expanded under the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Kennedy’s less-bigotry-tolerant successor, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

By year-end, the Freeom Rides were done. Struggling financially,CORE suspend the protests and handed off the legal representation of the Riders to the NAACP’s legal arm. But the impact of the Rides reached far beyond that year. It was the Freedom Rides that would help accelerate the plans for the March on Washington two years later, along with King’s I Have a Dream speech. It helped spur such antidiscrimination marches as those in Selma, Ala., and Montgomery. And even as SNCC disappeared into the ether, and CORE became a shell of its former glory, their strong advocacy would ultimately lead to America finally fulfilling its promise of equal legal and social opportunity for all under law; that Riders such as Lewis would go on to prominent political careers further proved the significance of the Rides in fostering servant leaders for social reform.

Five decades later, the Freedom Rides offer important lessons for school reformers, who now face an environment in which their push to overhaul American public education is attracting new voices, yet the think tankers, advocates and social entrepreneurs whose strategies have catalyzed this find themselves at a crossroads. The move by President Barack Obama last month to essentially gut No Child, along with efforts by congressional and Senate Republicans to push for the same now means that federal education policy is less-focused on pushing for systemic reform and holding states and districts accountable for improving teaching and curricula. Reversing this backslide is critical toward continuing school reform’ momentum. It is also critical to get Beltway reformers and social enterepreneurs such as charter school operators to work more-closely with grassroots advocates. And it is important to remind some Beltway reformers that focusing on poor and minority children will not only help all kids, but can even win suppoet from middle class blacks and Latinos, who will make up the majority of all Americans by mid-century.

This means that our new voices for reform, including the growing Parent Power movement must challenge education tradtionalists and political leaders through strong, vocal advocacy. This includes taking to the streets in a proverbial sense, using the Innternet to rally families, challenge failing and mediocre districts and even forcing state and federal leaders to expand choice and pass Parent Trigger laws. Using the courts as tools for reform alongside grassroots advocacy and policymaking is also key; as seen with films such as The Lottery, video and film can also serve well in furthering reform. And the new voices must call out longstanding reformers when they support positions or ideas that will weaken the ultimate goal of overhauling education for all children. This must be dome smartly, since new voices must also think through any flaws in their own efforts; but it should be done.

Fifty years after the first Freedom Riders changed America for the better, school reformers can follow their example. And help give our children schools fit for their futures.

When a film as compelling as the box-office hit Moneyball – and the Michael Lewis book on the work of Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane upon which it is based — comes along, it can be too easy for education reporters and thinkers to scour for comparisons to the battle over the reform of American public education, and come up with a series of oversimplifications. Such is the case of This Week in Education‘s Alexander Russo, who proclaims that the aftermath of the book offers these lessons for reformers pushing for more and better use of data such as Value-Added: That while the use of the statistical concept called Sabermetrics — which tosses out old school measures of baseball success for a series of new data points (including a focus on on-base percentage) — have not helped teams yield the successes they wanted; that big-money clubs continue to dominate sports regardless of data; and, in essence, that school reformers should expect the same results.

Russo is correct that there are lessons reformers and traditionalists can glean from Moneyball. But not the ones he claims. For one, sports isn’t exactly like education. Certainly, Major League Baseball is a monopoly of sorts. But it is ultimately a part of the competitive entertainment and sports sector. Baseball teams such as the Athletics and the Yankees compete against one another for World Series titles, talent, and revenues — and, at the same time, must battle for market share and fan dollars against big-league football, basketball and hockey teams in their respective local and regional markets. Teams are use data in the same way companies such as Google and Microsoft do so in their competition in the search and cellphone operating system markets: To gain an advantage over one another in scouring for talent and gaining market (or league) supremacy. They hardly use it to make players better at their sport; the talent does that hard work for themselves.

School districts, on the other hand, don’t really compete against one another; even in cities such as Indianapolis and Houston that are home to numerous school districts, there are marginal differences in salary scales, benefits and work conditions. Forget the U.S. Department of Education’s report on teacher salaries, which doesn’t include data on the fringe benefits that actually account for the bulk of teacher compensation. The combination of seniority- and degree-based pay scales, near-lifetime employment rights, and seniority-based privileges (including the ability to transfer into any school within a district and bump a less-senior instructor) means that few teachers will move across districts; when teachers leave, they usually leave education for good. Only 7 percent of newly-hired public school teachers who were earning less than $40,000 in 2008–09 remained teachers a year later, according to the U.S. Department of Education, while only four percent of new hires teachers earning $40,000 or more in that same period left for greener pastures. The fact that there is so little information on the performance of individual teachers — thanks to desultory performance evaluations and the opposition from teachers’ unions to the use of Value-Added student achievement data in assessing teacher performance — also makes the talent market far less than robust.

The other thing is that money isn’t nearly the factor in the success of Major League franchises as Russo may think. Consider the success of the Florida Marlins, the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Atlanta Braves, and the Tampa Bay Rays, all of whom whose revenues are at least $200 million less than that of the Yankee and $72 million less than that of the Red Sox. Small- and middle-market franchises have won eight of the last 20 World Series titles since 1991, and appeared in 15 of those title games in that period; of the ten largest franchises in the league according to annual valuation of sports clubs conducted by my former Forbes‘ colleague, Kurt Badenhausen, just six of them have won titles in 20 seasons — and only the Red Sox and the ever-loathsome Yankees have won more than one in that period.

But there are some things that school reformers can be gleaned from the use of data in major league baseball. Those lessons lie in the importance of leadership in embracing data in sophisticated ways, the critical need for strong leadership in order to achieve success in the first place, and the realization that there is no one solution for solving the nation’s education crisis.

The success of the Athletics, along with the emergence of a younger generation of baseball executives who embrace the use of data, led to other teams adapting sabermetrics to at least some of their operations. The first to do so was the Red Sox, which hired Beane acolyte Theo Epstein in 2002 to revive its then-floundering fortunes. The New York Yankees would follow suit for its own reloading effort, with General Manager Brian Cashman hiring his own crew of Sabermetricians, and the St. Louis Cardinals. As it turned out, it worked well for all three teams as they won several World Series titles during the last decade; Boston, in particular, thrived under sabermetrics with Epstein’s clubs winning two World Series titles with a crew that consisted of big-names (Manny Ramirez) and cast-offs. Thanks to Sabermetrics, the Yankees and the Red Sox could take their deep pockets and spend smartly on talent, acquiring the balance of stars, rising talent, and workaday players who are critical to the success of teams.

But not every team that used Sabermetrics fared well. Back in 2001, the Toronto Blue Jays brought in a Beane understudy, J.P. Ricciardi, to turn around a franchise that had been one of the most-successful during the 1980s and 1990s. Eight years later, Ricciardi left the club having succeeded little. The reluctance of the Blue Jays’ owner, Canadian cable giant Rogers Communications, to open up its coffers to acquire top talent, along with Ricciardi’s own poor decisions on those rare occasions he did get to purchase talent (including the ill-fated signing of slumping slugger Frank Thomas) overcame smart moves made by the club using Sabermetrics such as the development of Roy Halliday and Shawn Camp).

Paul DePodesta did succeed during his tenures developing players for the San Diego Padres; he did even better as general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, where his trade of expensive flukes such as Paul LoDuca led to the team reaching the playoffs in 2004. But a year later, he was fired by temperamental owner Frank McCourt, who was unhappy with DePodesta’s search for a replacement for fired manager Paul Tracy; DePodesta couldn’t fix the dysfunction that had plagued ‘Dem Bums since the last days of Tommy Lasorda’s tenure as team manager, nor, as it turned out, could save the franchise from McCourt’s financial and managerial fecklessness.

As for Oakland? After seven straight seasons of playoff appearances, the franchise has missed the playoffs for five straight years. While some want to say that the Athletics’ problems are reflective of the problems faced by all small-market clubs, the fact that  The fact that other teams have adopted Sabermetrics means that Beane has lost the advantages he once had in scouring for talent. But Beane has struggled to change his game up. While he is now scouting high school players in order to develop the Athletics’ pipeline of talent and has focused on data related to the defensive skills of potential talent, he hasn’t exploited other opportunities to field strong teams with top hitters and base runners. Some of the trades he has also pulled off as of late have also been flops. The results are clear: Although the Athletics led the league in 2010 in defensive efficiency — including fewest runs allowed — the team still remained a mess. And this year’s club, a cellar-dweller, is no better.

The lesson of Moneyball for school reformers and education traditionalists isn’t that data doesn’t matter. As seen in the success of the Red Sox (until late) and the Yankees, both of which are adherents of Sabermetrics, such an argument cannot be made with a straight face. Nor can anyone simply say that money doesn’t matter either. What is clear is this: When you use data in a sophisticated way to shape instruction, curricula and the ability of families to be lead decision-makers in education, this allows for money to be spent more-wisely. As seen in the case of Oakland, using data in sophisticated ways to identify talent and structure work can yield some success — and when used by a big-market franchise, can lead to even greater success. One can say with confidence that if education data was used more-effectively in evaluating teacher performance, fewer teachers would remain on the job, and more schools would become cultures of genius in which the potential of all students are nurtured.

At the same time, it is important to have strong leaders who not only know how to use data effectively and in innovative ways, but also have the other talents needed to lead schools and districts. Certainly principals should use value-added data in order to better-structure instruction; as Dropout Nation noted earlier this year, one can imagine a principal creating collaborative teaching structures in which teachers strong in reading can handle such instruction for an entire fifth-grade group, while peers talented in math teaching can handle those activities. But it is also important for principals to have strong decision-making skill, political savvy, entrepreneurial drive, strategic thinking ability, and talent for motivating staffers to success found among successful managers and leaders in other fields. This goes double for superintendents at the district level, who must tackle dysfunctional cultures in order to turn around failing and mediocre districts.

Ultimately, it means that we must overhaul how we recruit and train principals to serve in schools; since teachers will still account for many of the folks coming into school leadership, it also means overhauling how we recruit and train aspiring teachers in the first place. And it also means giving principals the ability to make tough decisions in the first place. This means moving hiring and firing decisions from central offices to principal’s offices, developing rigorous teacher evaluation systems  that principals can use to keep and reward teachers successful in improving student achievement (and weed out those who cannot), and putting an end to tenure, which has helped to ensure that laggard instructors remain in place to foster systemic dysfunction. It is crazy to ask principals to be instructional and managerial leaders when the structure of school decision-making render such work to be a near-impossibility.

And ultimately, there is no silver bullet for the nation’s education crisis. It will take a myriad of solutions — including better and more sophisticated use of data — in order to improve the quality of instruction, curricula and leadership in order to help all of our children write their own stories. There is no need to denigrate one tool or particular focus, something that a few reformers themselves (including Rick Hess) must keep in mind. As the Rays remind us in its successful push into this year’s playoffs can attest, school reformers will need all kinds of solutions and players in order to build schools fit for our kids.