Committee of the Unthinking: Your editor hasn’t had much praise for House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, his fervent effort to eviscerate the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, his longstanding support for increasing federal special education subsidies that do little more than perpetuate education ghettos that condemn millions of young men and women to poverty and prison, or even his past failure (and that of Early Childhood subcommittee chairman, California Republican Duncan Hunter) to bring Parent Power activists to any of the committee’s hearings. But Kline (and Hunter) deserve thanks for this week’s Early Childhood subcommittee hearing featuring Parent Power activists such as Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel (a Dropout Nation contributing editor) and school choice activists such as former D.C. City Councilman and Black Alliance for Educational Options cofounder Kevin Chavous. Because the hearing once again revealed how both so many Democrat and Republican politicians (other than Kline and Hunter) still don’t get the importance of families being the lead decision-makers in schools and education as a whole.

You can easily surmise this from the questions and the grandiloquent statements made by education traditionalists fellow-travelers on the committee, all of which you can download or watch. There was the wrong and hostile declarations of New York Democrat Carolyn McCarthy, wagging a pencil as if it were a cigar, that charter schools “have the ability of not taking children with disabilities”, and similar words from her California counterpart, Lynn Woolsey; National Alliance for Public Charter Schools honcho Todd Zeibarth had to refute those statements and inform them that there are charters specially designed to work with kids with autism. Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott went on a five-minute round of speechifying, proclaiming that vouchers are terrible because they divert dollars from district schools that think those dollars belong solely to them (instead of remembering that they are payment for providing services to kids, and they shouldn’t get the dollar). Instead of asking why states don’t revamp their school funding systems so that the dollars are voucherized and thus, kids can use them at any school that fits them, Scott simply argued that “those who don’t get vouchers are worse off”.

Then there was Pennsylvania Republican Todd Russell Platts, who used his soapbox to declare that school choice and Parent Power makes things “worse off” because it allows families to “abandon” failure mills and takes families who can be advocates for public education out of traditional district schools (without ever considering that the public education is not about a district or a bureaucracy, but about providing high-quality opportunities for all kids). Platts went on to proclaim that “our duty is to every child, not to the very few” even as he defended traditionalist policies and practices that have denied high-quality education to poor and minority children.

Platt’s speechifying weren’t necessarily shocking nor were McCarthy’s; both are the darlings of the old-school “parent involvement” crowd who, as Temple University Professor William W. Cutler III illustrated in Parents and Schools: The 150-year struggle for control in American education, have long ago been co-opted by traditional district leaders and National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates; Platts, in particular, has long opposed school voucher programs (including the DC Opportunity Scholarship now facing another shutdown attempt by the Obama administration). Woolsey has long benefited from NEA and AFT donations, with $130,800 in campaign donations over her career, according to OpenSecrets.org. Scott has also benefited from teachers’ union largess, picking up $97,000 in donations from teachers unions over time; like fellow Virginian Henry Marsh (who was Scott’s colleague in the Dominion State’s legislature before winning his congressional seat 16 years ago), Scott is the kind of old-school black politician who has not realized the fact that education is the civil rights issue of this time.

But the fact that it isn’t surprising still doesn’t make it any less outrageous. What Platts, McCarthy, Scott, Woolsey and their fellow-travelers, both in Congress and in state legislatures, fail to realize is that families cannot “fix” or be engaged in education when they must tangle with bureaucracies and systems that treat them as afterthoughts and nuisances (when they aren’t being blamed by teachers’ union bosses and failed school leaders for their own performance problems). This is the reality in American public education today.

As Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg of the Sage Colleges have noted in their research on school engagement, urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.” Certainly some of this has to do with the negative experiences these parents have had with schools — especially those failure mills that they once attended and to which their children now go. But it is also about the fact that there are many teachers who look at parents — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — with condescension and disdain. The reality is that we have far too many teachers who look down on poor urban parents who may not be capable of helping their kids because of their own learning issues; who are hostile to those families who want to take an active role in shaping the education their kids receive in school; and would rather keep those families servile. And this disdain trickles down to how children, especially from the poorest households are treated. Contrary to what the GetSchooled Foundation and other groups attempted to declare yesterday in their report on chronic absenteeism, truancy is a natural consequence of kids realizing that they are illiterate, innumerate, and stuck with teachers and principals who treat their parents poorly and can’t help them as students make up ground.

This nauseating approach to families is just as strong in suburban districts such as the ones in Platts’ district– particularly for first-generation black and Latino middle-class households — as it is in big-city districts. As University of Michigan Associate Professor Karyn Lacey noted in Blue-Chip Black, her sociological study of middle-class black families in the area surrounding the nation’s capital, black families living in Fairfax County found themselves battling teachers and guidance counselors who wanted to relegate children to academic tracks that keep them from getting high-paying white- and blue-collar jobs, and finding themselves not informed about their options for preparing their kids for success in school and in life, including opportunities to take Advanced Placement courses or participate in the growing number of dual-credit programs. From inconveniently-schedule parent-teacher conferences to refusals by suburban schools to allow families to tour the classrooms their kids will have to attend, suburban districts are no epitomes of cultures of strong family empowerment and engagement.

The beauty of vouchers, charter schools and Parent Trigger laws is that these tools not only allows families to actually help their kids succeed in school and in life, they also spur parents to be fully engaged in education and learn more about how their kids can get a high-quality education. As James Guthrie of the George W. Bush Institute has pointed out, the only real way that families can really be engaged in schools is if they actually have the ability to actually shape the education their kids receive. They also become the kind of unabashed school reformers and impromptu leaders we need to overhaul American public education. More importantly, choice and power also allow for the very democratic action that education traditionalists tout as a defense for preserving the status quo; when families can choose how their kids are educated, they can be real players in the rest of American society.

Kline and Hunter should use this hearing as an opportunity to challenge their colleagues (especially Platts) and push for making choice and Parent Power key components of federal education policy; this includes encouraging states to embrace vouchers and Parent Trigger laws. On the  latter, they can already count on ranking Democrat (and former education committee chairman) George Miller, who once again proclaimed his support this past March for the passage of Parent Trigger laws.

As for school reformers? The challenge is to now remind congressional leaders such as Platts, McCarthy, Woolsey, and Scott that they need to embrace systemic reform and support the kinds of policies that allow for families to be real players in education. And when they still don’t get it, recruit challengers who will toss these politicians out of Congress for good.

One would think that with the futures of these kids on the line, and $300 million if taxpayer dollars at risk, Connecticut’s legislators would ensure that families, along with administrators, small businesses and other taxpayers would be at the decision making table to help turn around low-performing schools. This would seem to be logical. Yet the only stakeholders allowed in the lawmakers “private” back door “education reform” conversations are the state’s teachers’ unions.

As a parent of color, knowing the achievement is comprised of majority people of color and impoverished communities and after seeing the “secret” partnerships between teachers’ unions and lawmakers, I can only conclude that for these people, the educational needs of some of our children don’t matter.

Ayn Rand once stated that the rights of individuals aren’t subjected to a vote. And this is especially true when it comes to the rights of our children to opportunities for a great education. Yet we as families struggle to give our kids the same opportunities to a better life as we did back in the civil rights struggle against Jim Crow in the last century.

Martin Luther King once declared that the law can’t force men to love me, but it can keep them from killing me. Today, we need laws and policies in education that allow our children, especially children of color and those who live in poverty in rural and urban areas, to get the high-quality education they deserve.

Yet we have teachers’ unions who essentially want to deny our kids opportunities for high-quality education. What they do is the 21st century of lynching. It leads our kids from schools to prisons, where we as taxpayers spend $41,000 a year to incarcerate men and women who could have been kept out of jails if they received a great education. And we have political leaders who support this 21st century form of lynching because only some kids matter to them.

As families, we must vote for people that are willing to pass laws that end 21st-century lynching and keep our dollars from being spent on ineffectiveness teaching and schooling. When more than 40 percent of our children are condemned to prison and poverty, and $300 million dollars of our taxpayer dollars are wasted, we as families, homeowners, business owners, and college students cannot afford for this to continue.

It starts by demanding our legislators to support Gov. Dan Malloy’s SB 24, which will start our efforts towards giving our kids high-quality schools and teachers. We know that the law, as Gov. Malloy originally drafted, will not solve the entire states crisis. But it will help level the playing field towards equitable access to opportunity. And it is the most comprehensive education reform plan produced by any leader in this state.

It must be paired together with efforts to help our kids read, overhauling how we teach our kids how to read. Certainly the “universal reading” bill being proposed could help reduce the nation’s worst racial and economic achievement gaps by retaining third graders that don’t make the grade. But it will not work without passing SB 24, which will hold teachers and principals accountable through comprehensive evaluation of their performance as instructors and school leaders.

Yet other legislators want to support the universal reading law without passing SB 24 as originally crafted. How can our house speaker and senate leaders implement this effort at improving literacy without holding those who teach our children and lead our schools responsible and accountable?

The fact that they stood before teachers’ union leaders this week and pledged to not hold them accountable boggles the mind. What these legislative leaders have said is crystal clear: Teachers’ unions are more important than one out of every two kids who attend our schools. And that they will allow teachers’ union leaders and those who support them to bully families and other taxpayers who only want the best for all of our children.

This is why the uprising among families to protect the rights of their kids to high-quality educational opportunities, both in Connecticut and across the country, has only just begun. We are tired of political leaders and teachers’ union officials who make education all about their interests and not about the children we love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s be clear: The Schott Foundation for Public Education’s latest report focusing on opportunities for high-quality education for black and Latino students is an important report, but not exactly without flaws. For one, the report attempts to use the percentage of teachers possessing master’s degrees and certification status as markers of quality even though the preponderance of data shows that there is no correlation between either of them and student achievement. This is especially clear when one looks at Schott’s own data analysis: District 2, the zoned area for kids living in some of the toniest neighborhoods in New York City (including the Upper East Side of Manhattan) is considered to have far greater opportunities for learning than District 6, whose students come from Washington Heights and other neighborhoods at the far northern end of the borough. Yet only 44 percent of District 2′s teachers hold master’s degrees and have 30 additional hours of graduate coursework compared to 39 percent of teachers in District 6, while both zones have similar levels of inexperienced teachers, instructors working outside of their subject competency, and those not considered highly qualified under the No Child Left Behind Act; the fact that neither zone would have black or Latino students performing at advanced levels in reading (based on a comparison of New York State test data to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress) also belies the credentials-equals-quality argument.

Some of the conclusions reached by Schott in its report also don’t gel with the evidence. Certainly Schott is right to argue that New York City should provide college-preparatory classes (including Algebra II) to all students. But arguing that increasing school funding will help improve the quality of education for poor and minority students, for example, ignores evidence in its own report that the problems have far less to do with money. This includes the underlying issues of traditional teacher compensation (including seniority privileges that protect veteran teachers at the expense of less-senior counterparts regardless of individual talent in improving student achievement) that truly affect the Big Apple’s ability to improve teacher quality for poor and minority kids; the opposition of the American Federation of Teachers local and its bellicose president, Michael Mulgrew, to any effort by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s effort to improve teacher quality; and laggard school leaders, who like the low-quality teachers they oversee, don’t belong in schools (and are just as zealously protected by their own union) and often share the same low expectations for poor and minority kids.

All that said, the Schott report, like the flawed report issued last year by the Brookings Institution, offers more compelling reasons why we must abandon zoned schooling and other Zip Code Education policies that condemn millions of our children to dropout factories, failure mills, and warehouses of mediocrity. On this, Bloomberg and his chancellor, Dennis Walcott, can strike a blow against restricting opportunities for high-quality education — and advance his slow-yet-successful reform effort — by fully embracing all forms of school choice.

Schott and its research czar, Michael Holzman (whose insights grace the pages of Dropout Nation) rightly points out that the educational and economic destinies of so many of New York City’s kids are determined by the zip code in which they live. A black or Latino teen attending a middle school in, say, the city’s East New York section of Brooklyn could immediately improve their opportunities for high-quality education just by moving a few miles into my old neighborhood of South Ozone Park. Same is true for a kid in Harlem whose family figures out a way to find an affordable flat in the area surrounding Columbus Circle (if they can’t get their kid into a charter school above 110th Street). The shameful lack of high-quality options for so many children is especially galling when one considers that even the poorest family in the city’s South Jamaica section has a wider array of choices in restaurants (and can even eat at some of the city’s most-expensive eateries if they save up enough cash) than in high-quality schools.

Certainly Bloomberg and his school czars (including former chancellor Joel Klein and his successor, Walcott) have certainly done a great of making the city’s schools better than they were in the 1980s and 1990s; the percentage of fourth-graders reading Below Basic, as measured on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, declined from 53 percent in 2003 to 39 percent in 2011, while the average black male fourth-grader reads at a grade level higher in 2011 than in 2003. But with black males still trailing three grades behind their white male peers in reading — and all young men trailing behind young women regardless of race, ethnicity, or class — Gotham still has plenty of work to do on providing all children with the high-quality teaching, instruction, leadership, choices, and school choices they need to be ready to help the city and America continue bending the arc of history toward progress.

Meanwhile the city’s past reticence in expanding school choice has meant that few families outside of Harlem and some parts of Brooklyn can avail themselves of high-quality operations such as those run by the Harlem Children’s Zone and Success Academy. Certainly the Empire State’s recently-lifted cap on charter school expansion, along with the lack of high-quality schools within the district itself, made it more difficult for the city to provide greater choices. At the same time, the Big Apple could have long ago allowed for robust intra-district choice — especially since families can easily access transportation thanks to the nation’s largest public transit system (and kids already get free and reduced-priced bus passes to ride from home to school).

The good news is that the city is pushing harder to overhaul its teacher quality system —  especially through its effort to force the AFT local to accept the new teacher evaluation system being implemented throughout New York State. But Bloomberg and Walcott should embrace the findings in the Schott report and use it to spur this second round of reform. Expanding the use of college-preparatory curricula such as Core Knowledge (which is being used in just a smattering of Big Apple schools) would help; so would improving its data system so families can know exactly what’s going on with schools. But families, especially those from black and Latino backgrounds, can’t wait for systemic reform to happen over time. So Bloomberg and Walcott should accelerate school choice and Parent Power.

Bloomberg’s move to allow 50 more charter schools to open throughout the city by the time he begins ending his tenure as Big Apple mayor is a good start. But he should immediately end zoned schooling throughout the city and allow families to send their kids to any school throughout the city. The city should also enact its own form of Parent Trigger law, allowing those families who want to overhaul the very schools in their own neighborhoods to do so; such a step would not only expand choice, but also reduce the rancor from those who have been swayed by the AFT to oppose the closing of failure mills and dropout factories because they can now offer to take control of the schools and revamp them on their own.

But it’s not just New York City that needs to expand choice and Parent Power. With four out of every five families unable to exercise any form of school choice — and thus stuck sending their kids to mediocre and abysmal schools — expanding choice and Parent Power is critical throughout the nation. As I noted in today’s Midweek Monitor, states such as Alabama need to give families — including those from poor and minority backgrounds — the options and tools they need to help their kids escape failure mills, overhaul dropout factories in their own communities, and ultimately, help their children get the high-quality education they deserve. Meanwhile the Obama administration, which has done a fine job for the most part on supporting the expansion of charters, needs to fully embrace choice and Parent Power as well. Fully funding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program should be on its agenda. The administration should also require states and districts to enact Parent Trigger laws and provisions as part of the next round of Race to the Top.

The Schott report once again reminds all of us that it is high time for systemic reform. All children deserve a high-quality education that is fit for their futures.

Which is why the families filed a Writ of Mandate petition last week in California superior court demanding that L.A. Unified immediately comply with the Stull Act — including making specific recommendations to teachers on their performance. Basing its argument off of information it gleaned from Deasy during a deposition, the Callaghan parents argue that the district has systematically evaded its obligation to evaluate teachers using student performance data — or to conduct proper evaluations altogether — under California’s Stull Act, which governs how L.A. Unified and other districts are supposed to handle teacher evaluations and performance management.

Under the law, newly-hired teachers are supposed to be evaluated every year until they earn tenure, while tenured veterans are evaluated every two years until they reach their 10th year on the job. Teachers have to be evaluated based on the Golden State’s curriculum standards, those evaluations must be put in writing in order to be valid, and corrective action must be required for those teachers who fail to make the grade. But as the families note in the suit, L.A. Unified is doing almost none if this because it has become servile to the AFT and the union that represents school principals. Declare the parents: “The problem is a District that has relinquished its obligations to the students in order to placate more powerful interests.”

L.A. Unified admits that it has the longitudinal student data needed to adequately evaluate teachers as required under the Stull Act, and can establish standards for student achievement as required under the version of the law amended in 1999 thanks to the efforts of then-California Assembly speaker (and now-L.A. Mayor) Antonio Villaraigosa. It isn’t as if L.A. Unified has never used student performance in measuring teacher quality. As the Callaghan brief notes, the district was doing this back in the 1970s and 1980s.

But since the 1980s, L.A. Unified has essentially evaded subjecting teachers to strong evaluations base on objective measures of student achievement, alleges the Callaghan families. Deasy admits this is the case. In his deposition, the superintendent states that “the current system doesn’t best serve adults or students” and does not focus on “the whole part if an education, and that is how students do.”

L.A. Unified has not creates a “uniform” process by which student performance is part of evaluations, nor has it developed a process by which teachers can gain feedback on performance. Even when (or if) the district moves to using student data in evaluations, it will be a challenge because the principals and assistant principals charged with doing the job “are not trained with any regularity or in any kind of uniform way” to either use such data or to even conduct proper evaluations as expected under the state law.

The families aren’t the only ones pushing for L.A. Unified to get its act together and stand up to the AFT and the principals’ union. L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa, who now runs several former traditional district schools as part of the now-defunct school choice effort, filed a friend-of-the-court brief also pushing for the district to fully comply with the Stull Act and revamp its teacher and principal performance management systems. Villaraigosa notes that L.A. Unified essentially admitted that its evaluation efforts were not helping to provide kids with high-quality teachers two years ago when it launched a commission that eventually proposed such an overhaul. The brief also points out that a quarter of all L.A. Unified teachers have said that they never received feedback on their performance from their principals, and 60 percent of those teachers who do get some form of guidance on their performance only find it to be “somewhat helpful”. This dovetails with the National Council on Teacher Quality’s 2011 report on L.A. Unified’s teacher evaluations, which found that just 40 percent of veteran teachers and 70 percent of new hires were evaluated by the district during the 2009-2010 school year. (Contradicting the arguments of the Callaghan parents, NCTQ does note that L.A. Unified’s evaluation procedures do follow the letter of state law, but argues that the district hasn’t made the evaluations more-thorough and of better use for teachers and principals alike, even though state law does allow the district to do so.) Villaraigosa’s decision to weigh in on this front isn’t all that surprising. He has long agitated for L.A. Unified’s overhaul, successfully teaming up with Green Dot Public Schools founder Steve Barr to force the district to embark on the now-abandoned school choice and spinoff plan, and unsuccessfully pushed to put the district under mayoral control.

If the Callaghan parents do succeed in their suit, it will force L.A. Unified to stop negotiating with the AFT local — which has steadfastly opposed the use of student data in evaluating teachers in spite of the trend in other districts throughout the nation and California to do so — and simply get to work on launching a new evaluation system. It would also follow up on a successful suit against L.A. Unified launched three years by the American Civil Liberties Union’s SoCal branch that led the district to abandon the use of seniority in determining teacher layoffs at its worst failure mills. Efforts to force teacher quality reform got a boost two years ago when the Los Angeles Times revealed the performance of the district’s 11,500 elementary school teachers — by name — during its powerful, controversial and much-needed series on the low quality of the district’s instruction. The move led Deasy to make additional moves, including unveiling a rating of schools based on Value-Added analysis of student (and ultimately, teacher) progress.

More importantly, it marks another step in parents forcing their way to the head of the table in education decision-making.

Even as efforts to pass Parent Trigger laws in states such as Florida (and a proposal in Colorado to allow the public to sit in on contract negotiations between districts and teachers’ union locals died in a state legislative committee), more families are demanding their say in shaping education. Using the courts to advance choice, Parent Power, and even teacher quality reform in the manner similar to torts launched by school funding advocates will also have to be part of the arsenal. It is quite likely that by year’s end, groups of families (in alliance with reformers) could file suits over teacher evaluations, either targeting districts or even states such as Connecticut where legislators beholden to AFT and National Education Association affiliates and refuse to pass proposals that overhaul teacher performance management and tenure.

Other lawsuits that may follow will surround the quality of the curricula used by districts. This will be an especially important issue as 45 states and the District of Columbia begin aligning curricula to the Common Core reading and math standards. As Brookings Institution scholars Russ Whitehurst and Matthew M. Chingos point out in a report released today, most districts are choosing curricula that have not been proven effective in improving student achievement (or have even been subjected to any form of rigorous, longitudinal scrutiny). As I noted last year in my column for The American Spectator on innumeracy, just one out of 63 elementary math programs surveyed by the U.S. Department of Education has been rated as having “potentially positive” effects on student achievement; even that rating is based on just one study that met the agency’s stringent research standards. Given the longstanding history of American public education subjecting kids (especially those from poor and minority backgrounds) to lackluster curricula and restricting access to strong, comprehensive, college-preparatory content — along with complaints from middle-class families about the low quality of such curriculum as Everyday Math — expect more families to file suit to force districts and states to provide curriculum that meets and even exceeds Common Core.

In short, what is happening in L.A. will likely become the norm throughout the nation.

The move today by Louisiana’s legislature to approve the expansion of the state’s voucher program can only be seen as a success for children in that state. The centerpiece of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s school reform efforts, the proposal — which would transform the program from one that just serves 3,000 students in New Orleans — will likely help as many as 300,000 more children get out of the Bayou State’s failure mills and dropout factories.

But the passage of the plan, along with one that would allow for the opening of more charter schools, is another reminder of the important shift that is happening, not only within Louisiana’s public education system, but throughout American public education as a whole. Families once relegated to the sidelines are taking more-powerful roles in shaping education decisions decision-making. It’s past time for this to happen. It is absolutely immoral and unacceptable to deny families, especially those from the poor and minority households, the ability to reshape education for their kids and keep them out of the worst education in this nation has to offer.

As Dropout Nation has reported over the past few years, more families are realizing that they can no longer assume that their children will fare well in just any school. Thanks to the work of the school reform movement — including the work of standards and accountability advocates and civil rights-based reformers in advancing the array of measures that would eventually come together in the No Child Left Behind Act — parents know more about the abysmal quality of teaching and curricula endemic in both the worst urban districts and mediocre counterparts in suburbia. And this data, along with the first wave of school choice efforts that started in the early 1990s with Milwaukee’s school voucher program and the first charter schools opened in Minnesota, have allowed families, especially those from low-income backgrounds, to realize that they don’t have to take anything that is given by traditional districts.

As a result, more families are banding together (often with small help from already-established school reformers) to launch their own grassroots efforts. One of the earliest offshoots began some years ago when Latino families teamed up with Green Dot Public Schools to demand the Los Angeles Unified School District hand over control of the riot-plagued Thomas Jefferson High School, and eventually, forced the district to hand over the even more-troubled Alain Locke High School. Those efforts, along with push by then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democrat-controlled legislature to gain a share of federal Race to the Top funding, led to the passage of the nation’s first Parent Trigger law. By last year, groups such as the Connecticut Parents Union (on whose advisory board your editor serves) had sprouted up throughout the country, and, along with long-established groups such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options, were agitating for the enactment of Parent Trigger laws, pushing for the expansion of charters and vouchers, and weighing in on such issues as overhauling teacher evaluation systems.

This year, Parent Power efforts, along with initiatives to advance school choice, have faced some challenges. Families of kids attending Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, Calif., are now likely to file a civil suit against the school district after it rejected its Parent Trigger petition. Efforts to pass Parent Trigger laws in Florida were defeated on the floor of the Sunshine State’s senate while Colorado legislators put the kibosh on a similar proposal. Meanwhile National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates, along with their fellow-travelers among traditionalists such as once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch, have worked furiously to proclaim that Parent Power groups are somehow mindless dupes and “AstroTurf” fronts for supposedly evil school reform philanthropists; the fact that Parent Power groups are still greeted with skepticism among Beltway reformers (along with the fact that the unions use their vast funds to prop up groups such as Leonie Haimson’s Class Size Matters and its affiliate, Parents Across America), doesn’t seem to factor into their thoughts. And even as they badmouth families, they also engage in intimidating families daring to speak out on the ground, and are working together with traditional districts to push back against Parent Power and choice initiatives in states such as Mississippi and Alabama.

But for every setback, Parent Power activists are making clear that they are here to stay. The Connecticut Parents Union has managed to make waves throughout the Nutmeg State with efforts such as teaming up with Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst on a rally on behalf of Gov. Dan Malloy’s school reform efforts; while Buffalo ReformED has shed light on the continued efforts of the AFT local to oppose the modest teacher evaluation overhaul being mandated by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Then there’s Louisiana. Even as NEA and AFT affiliates rallied rank-and-file members to the state capital in order to remind legislators that they will attempt to make them pay for opposing the union’s will, Parent Power groups such as Black Alliance for Educational Options rallied members to call state senators and  made clear that  families would no longer sit on the sidelines. The efforts of the Parent Power groups paid off as the state senate not only passed the voucher and charter school expansion bills, but even passed an overhaul of the state’s teacher performance management system that effectively ends near-lifetime employment privileges that have left far too many low-quality teachers in classrooms.

The upcoming victory in Louisiana won’t sit well with NEA and AFT officials in either Baton Rouge or at the respective national headquarters in the Beltway. Nor will it sit well with either education traditionalists, old-school “family engagement” groups, or even among old-school civil rights groups who aid and abet them. After all, they have managed to essentially render all but a few families nuisances and afterthoughts within American public education. From where they sit, allowing families to actually choose the schools their kids attend offends their adherence to the traditional district model in existence since the days of Horace Mann. For traditionalists, Parent Trigger laws are even more an affront because it violates their belief that only supposed “experts” such as themselves can actually what kids can learn and who should teach them. From where they sit, families should barely be seen and almost never heard, except when they are called upon to help their kids with homework, staff field trips, run bake sales to fund school budgets, and be the scapegoats for the failures of teaching, curricula, and leadership.

This is nothing new.  The traditional structure of district-run schools and centralized bureaucracies that has been at the heart of American public education since the 1840s has always been driven by an inherent distrust of families (especially Irish Catholic immigrant households of the 1840s, and black, Latino, and other minority and immigrant families of the last century). As Temple University Professor William W. Cutler III illustrated in Parents and Schools: The 150-year struggle for control in American education, teachers unions, school boards, superintendents and administrators considered parents and the groups that represented them to be little more than tools for their co-opting.  parents groups such as the United Parents Association in New York City were often enlisted as partners to further their goals and little else. The fact that many of the early groups that arose to represent parents were run by middle-class women whose desire to improve the lot of poor kids were mixed in with their own disdain for their parents also played a part in this co-opting.

This was particularly made clear in the 1968 when mostly-black families overseeing the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board dared to fire 13 teachers (along with administrators). This aroused the ire of the AFT’s New York City local, which, under the leadership of future national AFT president Albert Shanker, had earlier rendered the district servile; by the time the decade was over, the union, with the help of New York City and Empire State politicians, effectively squashed this pre-Parent Power movement effort. And in many ways, this disdain of families — as much driven by class and race as it is by pure and amoral power considerations — remains as inherent in the viewpoints of teachers’ union bosses, school superintendents, ed school professors, and even a large number of teachers.  It is why parent-teacher conferences are inconveniently scheduled, why parents don’t learn about their kid’s progress until it is far too late to help them succeed, why parents of kids in special ed find themselves filing lawsuits just to make the district come up with individualized learning plans, and why there are battles between families and gatekeepers over whether kids can take A.P. courses needed to prepare for success in college.

What these education traditionalists fail to realize — or admit — is that many families are no longer willing to accept this bargain. Poor and middle-class urban families long ago recognized that education is critical to revitalizing communities and helping their kids be prepared for successful futures in an increasingly knowledge-based economic future — and have long-concluded that traditional public education practices such as zoned schooling and ability tracking no longer work (if they ever did in the first place). Thanks to data on student, school, and teacher achievement unleashed as a result of developments such as Value-Added Assessment and the passage of No Child, a larger number of middle-class suburbanites realize this too. The very technological changes wrought in the rest of society that have helped people become their own news media outlets, curate their own music choices, even create their own encyclopedias (and have crippled the traditional gatekeepers in those realms) is also reshaping the way families want to engage in shaping education.

More importantly, families are recognizing that  the “experts” really don’t know what they are doing, that it is the very practices championed by traditionalists — from near-lifetime employment for teachers regardless of their ability to help kids succeed;, to the overuse of the overdiagnosis of learning disabilities (especially among young black men, whose reading deficiencies are often diagnosed as being special ed problems) — are the underlying reason why schools fail to improve student achievement. The fact that American public education spends $591 billion abysmally, resulting in long-term pension and retired teacher healthcare burdens that families must bear as taxpayers, also weighs on their thoughts. As a result, more families are demanding their rightful positions at the adult table of education as lead decision-makers, and are unwilling to go back to the little table and obediently go along with whatever their counterparts working in education demand.

They want to be able to not only choose schools for their schools and not be restricted by Zip Code Education practices. Even more, they want to actually shape what and how their children learn. This means the expansion of vouchers, tax credit plans, and charters, as well as the passage of Parent Trigger laws, the embrace of homeschooling, and the creation of DIY schools that serve their children and those of their neighbors and even fellow parishioners. As seen in Adelanto, where the Desert Trails parents have eschewed handing over the school to a charter school operator, more parents are willing to do the hard work of running schools so they can help their kids achieve better lives. And they are going to demand more information, including on how teachers perform in the classroom, so that they can decide for themselves what is best for their kids.

This certainly doesn’t make education traditionalist comfortable. Nor does it comfort Beltway and operator-oriented reformers, who are concerned that families will somehow muck things up. But the reality is that families can serve as powerful players in transforming failure mills and warehouses of mediocrity into cultures of genius that serve all children well. Why? Because choice implies both power and responsibility. As James Guthrie of the George W. Bush Institute has pointed out, the only real way that families can really be engaged in schools is if they actually have the ability to actually shape the education their kids receive. At the same time, this choice and power requires families to think through their decisions carefully, which means weighing all available information.

Even if families don’t get things right, these reformers must accept Parent Power because to not do so is the height of moral and intellectual hypocrisy. After all, reformers (along with traditionalists) go on an on about the importance of “teacher’s voice” in shaping the transformation of American public education — even though the reality of how teachers work (in silos, out of sight of one another, often without the strong subject-matter competency needed to help kids succeed) makes them far less expert on education than they may think. That is all well and good. The reality is that for all the talk from the NEA and AFT about how they represent teachers, the reality is that their defense of seniority- and degree-based pay scales, reverse-seniority layoff policies, and near-lifetime employment privileges through tenure do little for the younger, more reform-minded teachers who realize the damage these policies do to their profession and, ultimately, to the children in their care. And we need all voices in order to transform this failed system.

So if the voices of teachers are important, why aren’t the voices (and power) of parents even more so? After all, they are the taxpayers supporting American public education. More importantly, the children served by American public education are the young men and women these mothers, fathers, grandparents, and guardians love and will ever have. It is absolutely immoral and unacceptable to tell these families that they shouldn’t do everything they can to help their kids succeed — and absolutely repugnant to keep these families from exercising power on their children’s behalf.

What these reformers should do is expand Parent Power and help these families by pushing the development of comprehensive, longitudinal, easy-to-understand data systems that can help families get the data they need to smartly exercise power. They should team up with grassroots and community players on the ground and work with families. And they should work with education entrepreneurs to create high-quality online systems that families can use to do what they want (from providing their kids with tutoring to starting their own schools).

Whether traditionalists or some reformers like it or not, Parent Power is here to stay. And our kids will likely be the better for it.

Once again proving that she couldn’t think her way through a simple policy discussion, Ravitch trots out an easy to discredit class warfare argument: That Parent Trigger laws aren’t credible because school reform philanthropists such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have provided support. Because of this, Parent Power groups who support the passage and use of Parent Trigger laws can’t possibly be legitimate — and those families who also support it are also dupes who are serving as fronts for charter school operators.

Of course, she fails to mention fact that two of the leading Parent Power groups, including the Connecticut Parents Union and its allied organization, the State of Black CT Alliance, have never received a dime of such funding. She also fails to mention that charter school operators are generally not all that interested in turning around failure mills and, as seen in Connecticut, haven’t always played well with Parent Power groups (points I made earlier in the Times piece).

On any intellectual level, what would be wrong with charter operators taking over and overhauling failure mills if parents choose them to do the job? After all, one of the most-successful school overhauls so far is the Locke High School effort in Los Angeles, which is currently being overseen by Green Dot Public Schools, one of the nation’s foremost school operators. And given the success of charter operators such as Green Dot and KIPP, (along with some for-profit operators), ditching failed district management for successful, high-quality operators would not be such a bad idea at all.

The fact that some groups are receiving those dollars hardly makes their view illegitimate — or makes parents pawns. Based on her logic, education traditionalists such as her can’t also legitimately fight for their views. After all, Ravitch is an officer of one status quo defender, Leonie Haimson’s Class Size Matters, which collected $25,000 from National Education Association coffers in 2010-2011; the group (along with Haimson) is also a founding member of Parents Across America, whose members also include fellow-travelers such as Rita Solnet. The fact that Ravitch also collects generous speaking fees from NEA and American Federation of Teachers affiliates for peddling what can at best be called her faux Camille Paglia act also makes the argument rather suspect — and the class warfare rhetoric especially rank.

As I always say on these pages, it’s not about having money or even necessarily the sources of it. After all, NEA funding has found its way to school reform outfits such as Center for American Progress while the Gates Foundation also funds the NAACP. What matters more is what is done with it. Last I checked, what Ravitch and her, umm, corporate sponsors among NEA and American Federation of Teachers affiliates do with those dollars is absolutely amoral. They defend a system that restricts the ability of families — especially those from poor and minority households — from helping their kids get the high-quality teaching, curricula, and cultures they need in an increasingly knowledge-based world. From opposing the expansion of charter schools and vouchers, to the intimidation tactics against families demanding reform of failure mills in their own communities, Ravitch and her fellow-travelers essentially say that parents should simply accept mediocrity and educational malpractice. And on its very face, this is morally unacceptable and intellectually dishonest.

Ravitch displays more of the latter in her second argument: That Parent Trigger laws are “terrible” because a majority of families, tired of schools failing their children, dare to use democratic means to force overhauls of schools subsidized by their tax dollars. Given Ravitch’s longstanding pretensions to supporting “democratic processes” in running schools and districts, one would think Parent Trigger laws would be up her proverbial alley. But the reality is that Ravitch doesn’t believe that families should have any meaningful role in school decisionmaking. This is nothing new; Ravitch has made this clear ever since she wrote The Great School Wars: A history of New York City schools, in which she chided families in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville (scene of the infamous Parent Power battle) for rightly demanding the ability to directly hold schools and teachers accountable for student achievement. As with her fellow education traditionalists, Ravitch thinks that families should be rarely seen and never heard except when they admirably parrot her bromides (or when she can blame them for what is really the systemic failures of American public education).

But Ravitch’s intellectual dishonesty is to be expected. This month alone, she furthered damaged her bona fides as an educational thinker with her facts-bereft New York Review of Books critique of Arne Duncan’s tenure as U.S. Secretary of Education. Certainly one can find fault with Duncan’s handling of the No Child waiver gambit; he must also take heat for teaming up with Sen. Tom Harkin on the rather shady targeting of for-profit colleges. But Duncan, along with President Barack Obama, has done an otherwise fine job in pushing systemic reform — especially in pushing for performance-based teacher evaluations and the expansion of charter schools. More importantly, as New Schools Venture Fund’s Benjamin Riley pointed out in his comments, Ravitch’s spectacular errors (including her failing to note Duncan’s derision of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s successful abolition of collective bargaining privileges) prove once again that she cannot support her own arguments with facts.

Wilkins’ argument, on the other hand, is less one based out of any intellectual deception. Instead, Wilkins exhibits a failing typical among Beltway reformers (and one that I’ve criticized over the past few weeks): The idea that parents are too unsophisticated to make smart decisions. Declaring that “the trigger seems promising”, Wilkins then goes off to offer an argument similar to that of Ravitch: That Parent Trigger laws may serve as stalking horses for for-profit charter school operators. From where she sits, “these companies will use the trigger to exploit desperate, frustrated families” while offering low-quality education.

Certainly there are charter school operators who shouldn’t be allowed to control schools of any kind. But that’s not necessarily a problem of for-profit operators alone. Considering that some of the most-spectacular failures within the charter school movement have happened with nonprofit outfits such as a credit recovery-driven program run by Indianapolis’ Flanner House social services nonprofit (which was shut down after discovery of alleged fraud and misspending of public funds), one can easily say that low-quality education isn’t just a problem of for-profits alone. Wilkins also indulges in a logical fallacy: That somehow profit is a bad thing. If anything, modern society and all of the wonderful technologies, services, and improvements in life and health that we have experienced is largely due to the efforts of companies that both pursue profit (because their first obligation is to repay creditors and shareholders who finance their efforts) and innovation (which keeps them around as going concerns). EdTrust and its fellow reformers, for example, are quite dependent on the beneficence of philanthropists and foundations which earn their money in the for-profit world.

If Wilkins really wants to do something about improving the quality of charters, she would start by demanding that states do a better job of selecting charter school authorizers charged with selecting and overseeing the schools. This would include getting school districts out of the business (they shouldn’t be in charge of authorizing charters in the first place). Another solution lies in expanding the pool of potential charter operators to include families and community groups, both of which can use digital tools to launch their own schools.

Meanwhile, the bigger problem with Wilkins’ argument is that it assumes that parents aren’t smart enough to make good decisions in structuring school operations. As I made clear earlier this month in my critique of similar statements from Andy Rotherham, this is hardly the case. The Parent Trigger efforts attempted so far have involved both a mix of families teaming up with charter school operators, and families such as those at Adelanto, Calif.’s Desert Trails Elementary School (which want to operate schools on their own). Families aren’t going to be perfect in making decisions. But that’s a given: Human beings aren’t perfect at doing anything. But to argue that families can’t run schools (and cannot figure out ways to reach common ground with those families who may not support the effort) ignores the reality that this is done every day by families in every aspect of life.

One can argue that Wilkins’ suggestion for a Parent Trigger process — allowing families to decide to pursue a takeover, and then choose from a group of high-quality operators with proven track records — isn’t such as a bad idea. At the same time, Wilkins and other reformers need to remember what they are supposed to be: Men and women who believe that families should be the lead decision-makers in education, and can make smart decisions so long as they have high-quality information and some guidance of their choice. In short, the very opposite of Ravitch and her ilk.

Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times

To understand why Parent Trigger laws are critical parts of expanding school choice and Parent Power, consider P.S. 45 in my home neighborhood of South Ozone Park in New York City and its strong ties to the families who send their kids there. Better-known these days as the school that hip-hop star Nicki Minaj attended long before she found inexplicable fame (and the onetime grounds of a certain editor and education columnist), P.S. 45 isn’t exactly one of the Big Apple’s finest schools. While it garnered a ‘B’ overall among its peer group of elementary schools in the Big Apple, just 64 percent of its students scored at level three or four on the math portion of New York State’s standardized tests while a mere 52 percent scored at the top levels on the reading portion. It has also not done well in closing achievement gaps, especially among young black and Latino men.

One can imagine the parents of kids attending P.S. 45 would send their kids to other traditional, charter, or even private schools if choice was available. This could include the better-performing P.S. 97 in the Woodhaven section of Queens, or St. Clare’s School in the Rosedale section of the city. But for those families, especially single mothers and blue-collar households, choice sounds great in the abstract until one thinks about the high cost of transporting their kids out of their own neighborhoods just so they can get a high quality education. This is especially for a community (part of the zip code of 11436) in which 69 percent of residents own their homes (higher than the national average of 66 percent) and (along with apartment tenants, through their rents) pay hefty Big Apple property taxes to finance district operations.

Then there are the ties that bind P.S. 45 to the neighborhoods surrounding it. The school has been around since the first days of the 20th century, just when the South Ozone Park neighborhood was transitioning from farming into one of the earliest New York City suburbs; there is a plaque dedicated to World War I veterans who attended the school right at its front door. Its doors have been open for the community’s myriad transitions, from farming to suburbs for up-and-coming German and Jewish households, to comfortable bedroom neighborhoods for blue-collar black families, to the current mecca for Caribbean and Latino families. It’s officially named the Clarence E. Witherspoon School after a local community leader and contemporary of my dearly departed grandmother. In short, P.S. 45 is as much a part of the lives of the people who live in it as nearby Baisley Pond Park and John F. Kennedy International Airport.

As one of the two generations of my family who attended P.S. 45, I can understand why those who live in the neighborhood don’t simply want to walk away from it. But they aren’t going to just want to keep the status quo in place either. More than likely, these residents — many of whom are first-generation middle class residents, entrepreneurs, and blue-collar workers — would use a Patent Trigger law to remove control of P.S. 45 from the New York City Department of Education, and lead an overhaul so that all families and their kids have a wider array of choices. It is why Parent Power groups in four states have successfuly passed Parent Trigger laws — and why Parent Power groups in Florida will fight to revive a Patent Trifger Bill defeated this week thanks to cowardly Republicans in the Sunshine State’s upper house.

This reality that Parent Trigger laws are as much a critical element of choice as vouchers and charters is something that my otherwise more thoughtful friend, Andy Rotherham, fails to consider in his latest Time column. Proclaiming that Parent Trigger laws are akin to “handling real firearms”, the proprietor of Eduwonk argues that they aren’t as sustainable as other forms of choice preferred by the Beltway crowd. Why? Because, in his mind, it could fuel too much “chaos” and “disruption” when a majority of families manage to take over a school, displeasing those families in the minority who would prefer to keep the school in traditional district hands. More importantly, Rotherham doesn’t see how families can succeed in overhauling schools when traditional districts have only a 1 percent rate of success (and charter school operators would rather control their own schools).

Yet Rotherham fails to remember that turnarounds of failing schools rarely succeed because they are handled by equally failing districts. The cultures that breed failure in the central bureaucracy tend to extend into schools, especially since collective bargaining agreements and state laws essentially render principals mere figureheads stuck with useless roles as “instructional leaders”. The fact that the principals (many of them former teachers) may not have the leadership skills to do the job and have become part of the dysfunctional culture within districts also plays a part.

This isn’t exactly true with a parent-operated school turnaround because they would be in charge of managing the school (if they used the Parent Trigger law to take full control from the district). Certainly families will need to pick up their copies of Anthony Bryk’s Organizing Schools for Improvement and learn from the experiences of Green Dot Public Schools in its conversion and turnaround of Locke High School; they’ll even have to become savvy in management strategy. But it isn’t exactly impossible for a group of dedicated parents to turn around schools. Thanks in part to digital learning tools, families taking over a school can bring high quality instruction to classrooms. And there are other resources, especially within communities, that can be brought to bear in revamping a school.

More importantly, Rotherham embraces a far more limited idea of school choice, mostly that it is one of escape from failure. But school choice isn’t just about families moving their kids out of failure mills and dropout factories. It is also about the ability to choose the very structure of education for the kids they love, and the ability to push for reforms directly in their communities. And why not start with the school in their own backyard.

This isn’t simply about holding on to romantic notions about the buildings. Even if choice fully flourishes, families are still going to want real choices in their neighborhoods. After all, there is the high cost — both in time and transportation costs — of sending kids outside of neighborhoods. As Dianne Piche of the Leadership Council for Civil and Human Rights noted last year in a Center for American Progress forum, single mothers, in particular, have to also think about childcare, especially since they must pick up their kids from school and daycare. It just makes sense for families to take charge of neighborhood schools from central bureaucracies and teachers’ union affiliates distant from their concerns for their children, or at the very least, use Parent Trigger laws to become lead decision-makers in the school with the district paying heed.

Meanwhile, in declaring that “Schools should teach about the French Revolution, not have their parents act it out”, Rotherham reinforces a conceit found far too often found among Beltway reformers (and, as evidenced from Teach For America President Wendy Kopp’s thoughtless piece on releasing teacher performance data, even among some operator-oriented reformers): That families — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — just aren’t equipped to make smart decisions when it comes to school operations. Generally Rotherham is more thoughtful (and less glib) about the role of families in education than many of his counterparts. But in evaluating the efficacy of Parent Trigger efforts, Rotherham fails to realize that parents can actually make smart decisions, especially when they have high-quality information and some guidance available to them. This isn’t to say that they will always make the best choices; they will make mistakes along the way. But to argue that families can’t run schools (and cannot figure out ways to reach common ground with those families who may not support the effort) ignores the reality that this is done every day by families in every aspect of life.

At the same time, Rotherham fails to remember that for all the preening of Beltway reformers, the most-successful school reform efforts have been — and continue to be — done by folks who didn’t know much about education until stumbled into reform. This includes mothers and fathers spurred to take action and become what former National Urban League president Hugh Price calls impromptu leaders by concerns for the futures of their children.

It was a mother, Virginia Walden Ford, whose activism forced the reforms that are slowly improving D.C.’s traditional public school system and bringing high-quality options into the poorest neighborhoods. It was Gwen Samuel, a mother from Connecticut bereft of shiny public policy credentials, who led the passage of the nation’s second Parent Trigger law and has spurred the current efforts at reforming teacher quality and expanding school choice happening in the Nutmeg State. Then there is the work of Shree Medlock, the National Advocacy Director for Black Alliance for Educational Options, who began her work as mother concerned about her own child’s progress in school. And then there is the work of Parent Power groups in Buffalo, N.Y., and in other parts of the nation, who are challenging district bureaucracies and affiliates of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers to transform education for their kids.

Certainly not all families are going to want to attempt to overhaul schools (much less start their own); this is why we must also expand all other forms of choice and Parent Power, from open enrollment within districts to vouchers and voucher-like tax credit plans. At the same time, families who want to overhaul the existing schools within blocks of their homes should be able to do so. And more than likely, they can do a better job for their children than dysfunctional district bureaucracies that have failed generations of children for far too long.

Now let’s make this clear: McDowell is no saint. After all, she also faced separate charges for other crimes. As I noted last year, McDowell was certainly doing right by her son in a good number of regards. But as I wrote last year, we cannot simply gloss over McDowell’s shortcomings no more than we would forget those of poor-performing teachers and incompetent principals. All are responsible for the lives of children — and none of them can afford to fail them.

At the same time, the reality is that McDowell was being used by Norwalk city and district officials as an example to other families willing to do anything to help their kid succeed. If McDowell was found guilty by trial for what can laughingly be called theft of educational services, she was going to spend 20 years in prison and repay the district back tuition. That was about as much time as she would have gotten for the three other charges.

Which leads to the heart of the matter: No parent should have to fight so hard to help their kids get a high-quality education. Far too many parents, especially those from poor and minority backgrounds (and even many from the middle class) can’t access high-quality teaching and curricula for their kids. Contrary to what education traditionalists and the organizations and people that abet them want to proclaim, the problem isn’t choice, but the Zip Code Education policies — from intra-district zoned schooling policies, to restrictions on the existence and expansion of charter schools, vouchers, and other choice — that limit the ability of families to give their children what they deserve.

When it is far easier for poor and middle class households to get a wide array of high-quality options in areas of life in which the stakes are low such as dining, than it is for them to provide their child with good-to-great teachers and schools, we are dealing with a moral, intellectual, economic, and existential crisis that damages individuals, families, communities, in fact, this entire nation. Even worse, it is utter hypocrisy. Teachers, school leaders, and other players who defend the status quo in American public education have no right to blame parents for the academic problems facing their kids when the policies they defend effectively keep families from actually taking proactive action for them.

Tanya McDowell is no saint. She is also no different than Kelley Williams-Bolar, Annette Callahan, Marie Menard, your mother, or mine. Like all mothers, Tanya fought fiercely to provide her child with a life better than her own. She didn’t necessarily mother her son the right way. But she also doesn’t deserve prison time for doing what any parent should do when it comes to providing her child with a school fit for his genius and his future.

This must be made right. It starts with Gov. Dan Malloy, who now has an important opportunity to live up to his determination to be the School Reformer-in-Chief for the Nutmeg State, by immediately granting her a pardon, and declaring that it is time to expand school choice in his state. He should also back the efforts of the Connecticut Parents Union to abolish and revamp school residency laws in order to expand choice and Parent Power — and should also show up on March 14 for the rally on school reform the group will be holding. (You can sign the petition asking Malloy to pardon McDowell, if you so choose.)

Meanwhile legislators should join Malloy by moving immediately on revamping those rules, and begin the long-term overhaul of the state’s school funding system. This means the state taking over full funding of education, essentially turning those dollars into vouchers so they can follow a child to the best school opportunity for their needs.

But it’s not just time to end Zip Code Education in Connecticut. It is time for it to end in every state throughout this nation. This will take more than just petitions. As I made clear in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, it will take armies of families and school reformers, playing for keeps, tackling education traditionalists (especially school district bureaucracies) with bare knuckle tactics, just to end Zip Code Education and overhaul American public education. It cannot be incremental change either. Each day, we must commit to radically-yet-patiently transforming these systems. And it will mean hard battles day after day, both in rhetoric and in political action, in order for our children to get what they deserve.

Where a child lives should not determine the quality of teaching and instruction they must have in order to be successful educationally, socially, and economically.

This observation comes courtesy of a sermon on the fundamental aspects of the Baptist faith given yesterday by Rev. Dr. Howard-John Wesley, the pastor of the Alfred Street Baptist Church, one of the nation’s most-prominent African-American religious institutions. Part of a series he is giving on the underlying reasons why Baptists conduct religious services and pursue evangelism as they do, Wesley focused on why Baptist churches “elect” pastors, don’t have (and aren’t supposed to have) bishops that govern their affairs, and operate autonomously (save for their affiliations with a particular convention, or group of Baptist churches) at the direction of the membership. This autonomy differs greatly from the episcopal hierarchies of priests, bishops, and prelates that dominate Catholic, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, and Presbyterian denominations.

At the heart of the differences is the interpretation of Matthew 16: 13-19, in which Jesus singles out the Apostle Peter for saying what his other colleagues did not: That Jesus is the Son of God and our Lord and Savior. Among Catholics and other hierarchy-dominated denominations, the interpretation of that scripture suggests that Jesus chose Peter to be the “rock” or the leader of the church on earth. In turn, every cleric claims to be Peter’s successor and has a special relationship with God and Christ that others do not. As a result, the average person can only have, at best, something of a personal relationship with God; even in many Protestant faiths, they must go through intermediaries as part of their worship. And, in turn, the hierarchies of clerics are in charge of churches; congregations can’t choose their own pastors or govern their churches without intercession from the array of bishops and other clerics in the Vatican or Canterbury Cathedral.

But among Baptists, whose denomination is shaped by the strict reading of the Bible (along with its birth as a reaction of English Separatists to the Church of England’s continued embrace of Catholic hierarchical structures), the scripture reads differently. It wasn’t that Jesus singled out Peter, but singled out his confession of faith in God and belief in Christ’s role as savior. In short, one’s status as being born again is not based on hierarchy, but on one’s own faith in the Creator and His Son alone. More importantly, because Jesus alone is leader of the church on earth, there can be no priestly hierarchy. Essentially, Baptists believe that anyone can have a personal relationship God and don’t need to access priestly intermediaries. And because every Baptist can know God and only needs to confess their faith (both through baptism and their testimony), every member can be trusted with governing the church on behalf of Jesus Christ.

What results is a different and, what Wesley implies, a more mature form of religious faith. Members are responsible for keeping their churches on an even keel, from developing the structure of leadership within churches (outside of the Biblical-mandated pastor and deacons ordained by the church from the congregation), to determining which ministers should be ordained and, thus, allowed to be the servant leaders of other churches. Pastors must interview for their positions instead of being brought in by an outside hierarchy; they retain their jobs at the pleasure of the congregations they lead. Congregants can split off from each other if they disagree on the direction of the church. And being a Baptist is no birthright; unlike in other faiths, in which babies are baptized soon from birth, Baptists only allow those children and adults who have chosen to confess their faith in God to do so.

Ultimately implicit in Baptist doctrine is trust in the ability of congregants to continually develop in the walk with God, Christ and the Holy Spirit; constantly improve their understanding of the Bible; and participate in shaping decisions within their congregations. A pastor may be highly respected (and in African-American communities, where racial bigotry has made leadership roles outside of church a rarity, almost elevated to the level of cultish adoration); but he is no more an expert on understanding the Bible (even when he has a doctorate before his title) than the average congregant in the pews. This trust and inherent liberty is one of the reasons why the Baptist denomination is the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination (claiming 15 percent of all church-going Americans); and one of the few denominations that has resisted declines in congregants — and has actually experienced growth in the past three decades. It is also why the Baptist denomination remains the most-prominent among African-Americans regardless of economic status.

And this trust in congregants to master their understanding of their faith is the kind of f trust American public education must show when it comes to the role of families as lead decisionmakers in education.

One of the most- fascinating aspects of the latest discussions over releasing teacher performance data — especially the release of Value-Added data on some 18,000 teachers released by last week by New York City’s Department of Education — is that education traditionalists, education commentators, and even many school reformers essentially think that families can’t possibly use thoughtful judgement in reading results and don’t even have the ability to master it. From where they sit, such data should be restricted to experts such as themselves, who have the higher education credentials and other expertise as education players to think things through. In short, they look at parents as being  no different than their children: Infantile and incapable of smart decision-making even when given good guidance.

This isn’t surprising. Education has long been the most expert-driven sector in education, with ed school professors, teachers, and principals share the conceit that only they have the knowledge needed to run schools. In fact, as much of traditional structure of district-run schools and centralized bureaucracies that has been at the heart of American public education since the 1840s is driven by an inherent distrust of families (especially Irish Catholic immigrant households of the 1840s, and black, Latino, and other minority and immigrant families of the last century) as by the desire to create a Unitarian-driven civic religion. Instead, families are supposed to trust the experts because they have some secret knowledge about education that parents can’t learn. It is one reason why Zip Code Education practices such as zoned schooling remain in place, why ability tracking and the comprehensive high school model remain popular among so-called experts, and why teachers and guidance counselors (using such tools as IQ tests) are the gatekeepers to gifted-and-talented programs. It is also a key reason why so many school leaders and teachers’ unions oppose all forms of school choice  (except in the form of magnet schools which are mostly-geared toward satisfying desegregation orders and thus, choice is still restricted).

This expertise conceit can be seen every day in the way families –especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — are treated in schools. From inconveniently-scheduled parent-teacher conferences, to the lack of meaningful communication about student progress until it is far too late to help kids succeed, to the battling between families and gatekeepers over whether kids can take A.P. courses needed to prepare for success in college, far too many teachers and school leaders do so much to disengage families from playing active roles in education (even as they complain about a lack of “parental involvement”). As grassroots school reformers such as Gwen Samuel of the Connecticut Parents Union, AJ Kern in Minnesota, and the legendary Virginia Walden Ford can attest, this disdain becomes hostile opposition once parents step up and advocate on behalf of their child.

Such condescending thinking fails to consider the reality that the “experts” really don’t know what they are doing. After all, it is the decision by experts to push ability-tracking and the comprehensive that have led to the low-quality teaching and curricula to poor and minority students that is a culprit behind the nation’s education crisis. It is the work of experts that has led to such practices as the overuse of suspensions and expulsions, and the overdiagnosis of learning disabilities (especially among young black men, whose reading deficiencies are often diagnosed as being special ed problems). Thanks to experts, we have a system of teacher training that, as both former Teachers College President Arthur Levine and others have pointed out, has been ineffective in recruiting and preparing aspiring teachers for classrooms.  And because of so-called experts, families in cities such as Detroit and even the toniest suburban communities are stuck sending their kids to abysmal and mediocre schools.

Meanwhile the expertise mentality fails to consider the reality that it will take more than experts in American public education to transform it from its sclerotic, child-damaging state. This means that families are key to expanding opportunities for high-quality education for all children — especially their own. It was Ford who forced the reforms that are slowly improving D.C.’s traditional public school system and bringing high-quality options into the poorest neighborhoods; while it was Latino parents in Los Angeles, aided by Green Dot founder Steve Barr that has led L.A. Unified to undergo its (albeit fitful) overhaul. And it is the work of parent-led reform groups on the ground — including Parent Power activists in Buffalo, N.Y., and states such as Connecticut — that are making the strong pushes for reform that allow for other reformers to successfully advocate for their own solutions.

The reality is that families can and should no longer just trust the “experts” behind districts and schools that are failing their children and have failed at least two previous generations. Instead, they must become active players in shaping education for their children. They must ask tough, thoughtful questions about what is being taught in classrooms, demand information on the quality of the teachers working in classrooms, play stronger roles in shaping the overhauls of traditional district schools (and in the operations of charter schools serving their kids), and even start their own schools and literacy programs.

As in understanding Biblical scriptures, learning how to be powerful players in education isn’t an insurmountable activity. If families are given high-quality information, offered some guidance, and allowed to actually exercise choice and power, they can serve as powerful players in transforming failure mills and warehouses of mediocrity into cultures of genius that serve all children well. This can be seen from the slow, fitful expansion of school choice. As it turns out, choice begets engagement, action, and expansion of knowledge. Why? Because choice implies both power and responsibility. As James Guthrie of the George W. Bush Institute has pointed out, the only real way that families can really be engaged in schools is if they actually have the ability to actually shape the education their kids receive. At the same time, this choice and power requires families to think through their decisions carefully, which means weighing all available information.

When families exercise power and responsibility, they can do plenty for their children. University of Michigan researcher Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgen of Brigham Young University noted in their 2005 study, minority families and parents in high-poverty districts were more likely than middle-class parents to request a teacher for their child based on how teachers improved student achievement. Meanwhile a report on the open enrollment effort in Charlotte-Mecklenburg  County, N.C.’s school district released last October by the National Bureau of Economic Research also shows that parents with school choice options are quite capable of steering their kids to the kinds of school options that help them succeed in school and in life.

We must stop treating parents as if they are incapable of making smart decisions in education. Instead we must trust them with all the information needed to understand and solve the problems within public education. This means publishing teacher performance data and offering guides on how to analyze those numbers. It means giving them the power to choose high-quality school options and working with them to shut down and overhaul failure mills. And it includes improving data systems, and starting family information centers where they can seek out information and assistance in decision-making.

Essentially, American public education must become more like Baptist churches and ditch Catholic-style hierarchical and paternal thinking. It would do all of our children much good.