This was adapted from a speech I gave on Saturday at the Restoring Excellence in Education conference in St. Cloud, Minn. The conference is the next step in that group advancing the reform of education in the Great North State, which has trailed behind states such as Florida in overhauling its schools.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg, professors at the Sage Colleges have noted in their research on school engagement, urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.” While some of this may have to do with the negative experiences these parents have had with schools, it also has to do with the reality that there are many teachers who look down at parents — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First of all, I am extremely proud of the effects of No Child Left Behind. For the first time, the federal government basically demanded results in return for money. It started by saying, We expect you to measure [student performance]. As a result, there has been a noticeable change in achievement, particularly among minority groups. And I’m proud of that accomplishment and proud of the fact we were able to work with people from both parties to get it done.

When I think back about No Child Left Behind, it’s one of the really positive things our Administration accomplished along with Congress. So on the 10th anniversary, it’s time to celebrate success, but it’s also a time to fight off those who would weaken standards or accountability. I don’t think you can solve a problem if you can’t diagnose it, and I don’t think it is fair for parents or students not to be informed of how their schools perform relative to other schools and how their children perform relative to other children.

Former President George W. Bush stating what should be obvious to all about the importance of the No Child Left Behind Act in fostering the first steps towards systemic reform of American public education. What is needed now is to expand accountability, especially in addressing the low quality of teacher training in the nation’s ed schools, not scaling back as being proposed by far too many people who should know better.

[If] a great teacher is leaving, parents should hold bake sales or pass the hat around in hopes of collectively offering the teacher as much as a $100,000 bonus to stay for an extra year… Conversely, a very poor teacher has the same effect as a pupil missing 40 percent of the school year. We don’t allow that kind of truancy, so it’s not clear why we should put up with such poor teaching. In fact, the study shows that parents should pay a bad teacher $100,000 to retire (assuming the replacement is of average quality) because a weak teacher holds children back so much.

New York Times Columnist Nick Kristof, gleaning the lessons from the recent Harvard-Columbia study on value-added analysis of teacher quality. (Dropout Nation offers more thoughts on improving teacher quality in this week’s Podcast and Building a Culture of Genius commentary on teacher evaluations.)

“We know that great teachers have the power to help students catch up when they’re behind. But you can’t catch up when you don’t have access to the best teachers.”

Arun Ramanathan of the Education Trust’s California branch discussing the outfit’s latest study on teacher quality in the Los Angeles Unified School District. This study comes on the heels of an agreement between the district and its American Federation of Teachers affiliate over revamping teacher performance management — and a lawsuit from families of L.A. Unified students suing the district to force it to improve its teacher evaluations and use student test data in teacher performance management.

“People who care about improving early childhood education need to be deeply concerned about taming the growth in college tuitions, for at least two reasons. First, skyrocketing tuition makes it more difficult and costly to raise the higher educational credentials of the early childhood workforce. Second, unless we reign in college costs, there’s a strong risk that public funding to support higher education affordability will wind up cannibalizing or squeezing out early childhood spending. That’s because most policy efforts to date to improve college affordability have focused on providing increasing public funds to help students pay for college. But, with ever-rising college costs that outstrip inflation and government revenues, this strategy can sustain and expand access only if it consumes increasing shares of government revenue”

Sara Mead, pointing to another state budget priority that will play a part in shaping school reform conversations — and not only for early childhood and prekindergarten programs. Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle made the same points in yesterday’s The American Spectator column on growing Medicaid burdens.

There have been new developments since yesterday’s Dropout Nation report on Waukegan, Il. mother Annette Callahan’s battle with the Beach Park school district over its efforts to remove her two children from its schools.

Last night, after a lengthy meeting (and after Dropout Nation readers and others flooded the district with letters and calls), the Beach Park school board agreed to allow Annette’s two children, Josiah and Hannah, to remain in the district and continue in its middle schools once Annette and her ex-husband, Samuel, come up with a “concrete” plan for the kids to live in its boundaries. As it was reported yesterday, Beach Park wanted to remove the two kids from Howe Elementary because, despite the fact that the husband lives in the district and has both kids named on his apartment lease, the kids spend more time with her in Waukegan. Based on that argument, the students, as far as Beach Park bureaucrats were concerned, were not residents of the district.

During the hearing, Beach Park board members were surprised to learn that Annette had not received copies of the evidence used by the district in determining Josiah’s and Hannah’s residency. The board noted that Annette should have received all information pertaining to the case. After a closed session, in which the district’s investigator stormed out of the room, Beach Park board members made its ruling.

Even before the hearing, Annette and Samuel was able to secure some legal help. Heartland Institute education policy director Bruno Behrend wrote in to Dropout Nation and offered to take on their case. A lawyer by training who can practice in Illinois, Behrend argued in the inaugural Conversation at Dropout Nation podcast for families to use the courts to secure school choice and Parent Power.

Certainly there is still some uncertainty as to what Beach Park demands in a “concrete” residency plan. That said, for Annette, Samuel, Josiah, and Hannah, the Beach Park ruling keeps the kids in a school in which they were thriving. As Callahan said yesterday during a press conference, she was able to work with teachers at Howe to help get the twins on track after years of alleged educational neglect and malpractice in the Waukegan district. If not for the ruling, Annette and Samuel would either have to return Josiah and Hannah into a school environment in which they were falling behind academically or look at other options.

At the same time, Annette and Samuel are one more example of why we need to end residency laws and other Zip Code Education policies that condemn families and children to failure mills, restrict them from the kind of school choice they need to help their kids succeed, and lead to parents being criminalized for fighting hard for the futures of their kids. Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel, who, along with the California chapter of Democrats for Education Reform, the Black Alliance for Educational Options, and the newly-formed Ohio Parents Union led by Kelley Williams-Bolar, had teamed up to advocate on Annette’s and Samuel’s behalf, has said that regardless of the outcome, she is requesting the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to investigate Beach Park’s handling of Annette and Samuel. From where she sits, Beach Park is just one more example of the kind of punitive actions districts are taking against families for doing what’s right for their kids. Writes Samuel: “we have work to do because I am sure more cases will surface.”

Which is why now, more than ever, we must overhaul school finance systems in order to allow families to send their child to any high-quality school, regardless of where it is located or whether it is traditional public, charter, private, or virtual.

If you want to fully understand why we must overhaul school funding in order to allow children to get a high-quality education, consider the case of Annette Callahan, a Waukegan, Il., mother who now faces the possibility of being brought up on charges by the Beach Park school district for what can only laughingly be called stealing education — even though her children live part time in the district with her ex-husband.

A divorced mother of five who, along with her ex-husband, Samuel, has gotten three of her children through high school and into college, Annette became incensed with the quality of education for her two remaining twin school-aged children, Hannah and Josiah. She learned that their state standardized tests showed the kids falling behind in reading and math — even as teachers continued to pass the kids along from one grade to another and, in fact, put on the honor roll of the elementary school in which they attended. The fact that Josiah was also being bullied in school — including a head injury at the end of the year — also also incensed her. Yet, according to Annette, Waukegan school leaders refused to address those issues in any meaningful way. By the 2009-2010 school year, Annette says that the Waukegan district banned her and Samuel from escorting Hannah and Josiah to their classes.

So Annette and Samuel did what parents who loves their children would do: She worked together with her ex-husband — who shares joint custody with her — to enroll her kids into the nearby Beach Park district in which he lived. While Hannah and Josiah would stay over for a night or two when Samuel wasn’t working his overnight job, the kids would spend their time with Annette in Waukegan during the rest of the week. It worked. Annette and teachers at the Beach Park School, Howe Elementary, worked together to improve her children’s achievement; she did her part by making the kids spend even more time on their studies. By the end of the 2010-2011 school year, Callahan’s kids made gains in their studies and test scores. Says Samuel in a press conference held this morning: “They have been successful there.” (Dropout Nation has an audio copy of the press conference call available for download and listening; you can also listen below.)

But since November, Annette and her ex-husband have been fighting with Beach Park’s bureaucrats, which are accusing her and her husband of “falsifying residency” because, despite the fact that the husband lives in the district and has both kids named on his apartment lease, the fact that the kids spend more time with her makes them not residents of the district. While Annette and Samuel made clear that the children were on the lease and that they shared joint custody, the district and its investigator have decided that the kids need to get out of the district. Tonight, Annette will petition her case before the Beach Park district’s board, one month after it issued a demand for her to remove Josiah and Hannah from the school without first giving her a chance to plead her case. She is also demanding Beach Park to release the evidence it gathered through its investigator that led to the district’s determination. Says Annette: “I am not a lawyer, but I know that the residency of the parent does matter. And my husband lives in the district… there is no 24-hour requirement.” (A call by Dropout Nation to Beach Park superintendent Robert DiVirgilio, has not yet been returned.)

Dropout Nation is supportive of Annette’s efforts to keep her kids in Beach Park schools. You can offer your support, either by reaching DiVirgilio at (847) 599-5070 or at rdivirgilio@bpd3.org.

As with the cases of Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar (who was convicted last year of “stealing education”), and others facing similar charges as Tanya McDowell and grandmother Marie Menard in Connecticut, Annette and Samuel are fighting hard to provide their children with the high-quality schools and safe learning environments they need to succeed in life. And, like these and other parents, Annette and Samuel shouldn’t have to struggle so hard in the first place. No family should have to be shackled to dropout factories, failure mills, and warehouses of mediocrity. They should have the ability to escape those failure factories and attend any high quality school available to them.

At the heart of this problem are the Zip Code Education policies — including zoned schooling within district and restrictions on school choice supported by education traditionalists — that restrict the ability of all families to choose high-quality schools of any kind for their kids. While poor and minority families suffer the most by being shackled to failure mills in their neighborhoods, middle class families (especially those who are minority or the first in their generation to achieve such status) suffer almost equally as badly, often restricted to warehouses of mediocrity whose shiny new buildings hide laggard instruction and low expectations for poor white, black and Latino kids.

What perpetuates this problem is the hemming and hawing among states about taking over the full funding role that they need to undertake in order to make choice and other reforms a reality. Thanks to decades of battles over equal funding of schools and efforts at property tax relief, states now provide the plurality of all school dollars, accounting for 48 percent of all school revenues nationwide. Illinois is an exception, with the state providing 30 percent of school funding overall; but state dollars account for 41 percent of Beach Park’s school dollars and 38 percent of Waukegan’s funds. States could easily pave the way for choice by replacing all local funding with state dollars, essentially turning the dollars into vouchers that follow every child to whatever school, public, private or parochial, they so choose.

Yet governors and legislators — especially school reform-minded officials — haven’t fully embraced moving towards full state funding, even though it isn’t that hard to do politically. the fiscal difficulties of increasing state income taxes in order to reduce local property taxes (the usual way states have used to take over education funding), along with the challenges of dealing with ever-increasing Medicaid costs, and the opposition of teachers’ unions and districts to such a takeover, are the underlying reasons. But all of those could be overcome. But because state leaders aren’t willing to do so, this stalemate allows districts can justify opposition to school choice; after all, they can oppose school choice because they still collect local property tax dollars and parents outside their boundaries don’t provide those funds (even though they are financing the same schools through their state income taxes). At the same time, the districts can even deny choice to the children they are supposed to serve by continuing zoned school policies.

Meanwhile this unwillingness to overhaul school financing perpetuates one of the tenets of the Poverty Myth of Education held so deeply by so many education traditionalists: That poor and minorities don’t share the same interest in providing their children with a high quality education as they do, and won’t do whatever it takes to help their kids succeed. This racialist and condescending notion never considers the reality that for these families, simply moving from one zip code to another can be economically impossible — and given that districts often arbitrarily change their zoning policies, even moving residences doesn’t guarantee high-quality school options.

More importantly, this thinking ignores the empirical evidence that poor and minority families desire high quality education. Minorities and parents in high-poverty districts, for example, were more likely than middle-class parents to request a teacher for their child based on how teachers improved student achievement, according to a 2005 study by University of Michigan researcher Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren of Brigham Young University. Some 420,000 children are waiting for seats in the nation’s charter schools, the nation’s most-prominent form of choice; minorities make up 30 percent of enrollment in the nation’s dwindling collection of Catholic diocesan schools.

There is no reason why Annette and Samuel, who have already shepherded three children through American public education into college and career — and merely want to help their youngest children achieve the same –  should have to fight so hard to give Josiah and Hannah a high-quality education. It is high time to end Zip Code Education that wrongly criminalize the fight to provide every child what they deserve.

The two decades-long emergence of the school choice movement, along with the data provided thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act’s Adequate Yearly Progress provisions, has helped foster a Parent Power movement that is demanding school districts and state government to end Zip Code Education policies that have condemned far too many children — including those from poor and minority backgrounds — to poverty and prison. And this year, with Parents Unions coming to being in states such as Illinois, along with other Parent Power and school reform groups taking more aggressive political action, expect more battles with education traditionalists over the future of American public education.

On this Voices of the Dropout Nation, new Contributing Editor Gwen Samuel issues a call to action to families to take their rightful lead role in education decisionmaking. Read, consider, and take action. 

This is the year of the “Push Back” Parent, the time to push back  against and change the laws that deny our children access to equitable high quality educational opportunities! This includes school residency laws and zip code education education policies.

Horace Mann once wrote that education is the “great equalizer of the conditions of men” and “the balance-wheel of the social machinery”. But today, our kids are educationally in trouble. All across the country, the fact is, too many students are dropping out. Those who do graduate are not leaving high school and college with the skill sets that they need to become productive citizens, engaged community leaders, and participants in a trained and qualified workforce. Needless to say, this has serious impacts on our state’s economy. That means their future is in jeopardy thus continuing to put our state & country’s economy in “crisis” And we, as parents, can no longer stand it.

Our kids don’t vote nor do they make the educational decisions that impact their lives. But we, the parents do. And it is time to push for our kids and against laws and policies that will deny them quality education.

This “push back” starts with parents and community registering to vote, making sure we hold each other accountable to get to the voting polls in November. There are no more excuses for not voting because you cannot claim that you do not care about what happens to you, your children, your family, and the most-vulnerable.

As parents, we are the only blocks of people with no real legal ability to make educational decisions that impact our children’s overall well being in public schools! But collectively, we the parents have the power to change that! We actually have the power to reform or  shut down low performing schools.  We really do! Remember, our children make up the majority population within America’s public schools…

This is not radical talk. It is real talk! Some may not want to hear it. But they must listen. We must protect our children. And who will do that if we do not?

We must vote. We must educate our neighbors. The Connecticut Parents Union is doing this in our state this year, conducting voter education classes, registration drives, and legislative advocacy training. We, and our fellow Parent Power activists are here to help families in other states do the same.

As Malcolm X once said, when people understand the problems that confront them and their causes, they can take action. It is time for all of us as parents to push back for our children.

One of the major themes of this year has been the emergence of parents coming together and launching their own grassroots efforts at reforming American public education. From the work of Gwen Samuel and the Connecticut Parents Union in battling Zip Code Education policies, to the formation of parents unions in Texas, Buffalo, N.Y., and Ohio, to the lawsuit filed by parents of children attending L.A. Unified’s failure mills over teacher evaluations, this growing Parent Power movement has succeeded in passing Parent Trigger laws that allow families to overhaul schools in their own neighborhoods and have become such a challenge to education traditionalists that they have even gotten the attention  of the American Federation of Teachers. And their efforts have been too loud and forceful for either traditionalists or Beltway-oriented school reformers to ignore.

In this Best of Dropout Nation from last December, Editor RiShawn Biddle takes a look at one of the moments that garnered attention for Parent Power, the effort by parents in Compton, Calif.’s McKinley Elementary School and Parent Revolution to oust the school district from control of one of the city’s failure mills. Read, consider, and take action.

When it comes to the role of parents at the education decision-making table, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, school districts and folks such as Diane Ravitch think parents should be like kids: Barely seen and definitely not heard. If you don’t believe it, consider the reaction by the Compton Unified School District, the AFT’s local affiliate and such commentators as Valerie Strauss and Larry Ferlazzo to the move by parents at McKinley Elementary School to make use of California’s  Parent Trigger law and oust the district from management of the school.  From where the status quo folks stand, the McKinley parents exercising Parent Trigger are either dupes for nefarious charter school operators and evil, money-hungry foes of public education such as Ben Austin; or the parents are evil for daring to toss out decades of abysmal school management and classroom instruction. In their minds, it’s simply not possible for parents to actually be able to make their own choices.

Yet evidence abounds that when parents are highly-informed about the quality of education in their schools, driven to kick mediocrity and abysmal education to the curb, and given the tools to help their kids, they will certainly do so. Minorities and parents in high-poverty districts, for example, were more likely than middle-class parents to request a teacher for their child based on how teachers improved student achievement, according to a 2005 study by University of Michigan researcher Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren of Brigham Young University. The growth of the charter school movement, the continuing presence of Catholic schools, the growth of online and alternative education options such as Sylvan and Kaplan, and the work of such organizations as the State of Black CT Alliance in rallying support for school reform, are also signs that parents should be given their rightful places as kings and lead decision-makers in education.

Despite the evidence, the Ravitches and Ferlazzos  maintain an attitude that parents should stay at the kid’s table when it comes to actually making school decisions. And it isn’t limited to Parent Trigger. Whether one is in a middle class suburb or in a big city, the attitude is generally the same: Parents should stick to field trips, homework and taking blame when test scores and graduation rates are revealed to be abysmal or mediocre.

This is especially so in urban districts, where poor and minority parents — many of whom have suffered in the same dropout factories and failure mills their kids are now educationally imprisoned — are shunted aside as so much garbage. More often than not, many teachers look down at these parents as being their inferiors instead of treating parents as equals. The experience of Virginia Walden Ford, who launched the school reform movement in Washington, D.C., is echoed in a study by Sage Colleges professors Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg, who noted that urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.”

Certainly this attitude among the status quo is manifested in other ways: The opposition to charter schools among the Gary Orfield-Richard Kahlenberg crowd (most recently expressed in a Miller-McCune interview with Erica Frankenburg and Gary Miron) on the ground that they foster resegregation; Miron in particular, ignores the reality that parents seek charter schools as high-quality options by declaring that “parents choose based on race and social class”. Then there is the embrace of the Ruby Payne-promulgated poverty myth — that poor parents are simply incapable of playing strong roles in education — among teachers and administrators. The low regard for even middle class parents among teachers, who label these families as “Burger King Parents” and “The Grass is Always Greener” for daring to demand more on behalf of their kids.

Certainly the reality that the players within the status quo — teachers union bosses, ed school professors, school administrators and even many teachers — don’t want to give up their power and autonomy is one reason for this opposition to parent power. The other reason lies with their conceit (one they share with some school reformers) that experts should actually make education decisions. After all, an ed school professor and a teacher with an array of grad degrees should have more knowledge about what kids should learn (and how it should happen) than some parent. Yet, as we have seen over the past 150 years — from the comprehensive high school model (created because of the misguided belief that immigrants and African Americans were incapable of mastering college prep work) to the array of new math theories that have fallen flat and even the traditional system of teacher compensation — the experts aren’t so good at this thing called education. Combined with other problems among status quo circles — including the rampant anti-intellectualism, willful ignorance of economics and unwillingness to consider the developments in sectors outside of K-12 — and this conceited view of parents turns from mere condescension to outright hostility.

Yet the rise of the modern school reform movement — and the emergence of charter schools, school choice and Parent Trigger — has all but assured that parents will be playing a stronger role in education. The underlying infrastructure for exercising decision-making — easy access to useful information through guides, organizations or Web sites; actual mechanisms for exercising choice that exist outside of home purchases — is just coming into existence. Many parents are just beginning to realize that the old concept of education — that the school can educate every child without active engagement of families that goes beyond homework and field trips — has gone by the wayside. But as I wrote at this same time last year, the school reform movement (like the development of cellphones and other consumer goods) is fostering choice. And choice begets choice; once parents are exposed to having real power and engagement in school decisionmaking, they will not want the so-called experts — including NEA and AFT bosses and the Ravitches of the world — in their way.

What McKinley represents is a response to the status quo: How dare you argue that families can’t think for themselves! How dare you limit our kids only to the proverbial sky! And by the way: Work with us or get out of the way! You’re either part of a better future or just boulders to be pushed aside.

The hostility against parents among education’s status quo is essentially anti-children. What these experts are tacitly arguing is that the educational, economic and social destinies of kids — especially our poorest children — don’t matter a wit. It’s time for parents to shunt these folks aside and take the power that is rightfully theirs.

Photo courtesy of Miller-McCune

It’s hard to blame anyone who doesn’t have a full view of the pernicious consequences of Zip Code Education policies on perpetuating the nation’s education crisis for arguing, as Natalie Hopkinson, the founding editor of online magazine The Root, does in Monday’s New York Times op-ed, against school choice. Complaining about the closing of middle schools in her community in the Northwest section of Washington, D.C., Hopkinson blames the state of affairs on the expansion of charter schools and other choice efforts. From where she sits, expansion of school choice (along with the reform efforts of former D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty and his chancellor, Michelle Rhee) have led to “a cynical game” in which “some will keep winning” while poor and middle class families “will lose”.

Of course, Hopkinson’s piece proved to be the kind of clip that education traditionalists — who do know better — use to argue that expanding school choice is not worth doing. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, in a debate on Twitter between herself, CNN commentator (and Capital Prep Magnet School principal) Dr. Steve Perry, and yours truly, declared that the piece was “heartbreaking”, she latter declared that Hopkinson’s piece proved “the terrible effects of closing rather then fixing schools”.

But to those who know better, Hopkinson’s argument doesn’t even ring true. It is spectacularly flawed and shortsighted — especially given that Hopkinson is a reporter, and thus has the kind of skills most parents don’t have to  get a full sense of what is really happening in both the District and throughout the nation.

For one, the example she offers of the shiny new middle school in the city’s Rock Creek section of town that her child can’t attend isn’t a consequence of school choice. That is a result of zoned schooling policies — Zip Code Education rules — that restrict families from accessing high-quality options within traditional districts. (More on this later in the piece.) Certainly, this is an issue that current Mayor Vincent Gray and his schools czar, Kaya Henderson could easily address if they so choose (as predecessors Fenty and Rhee could have also done) by transforming D.C. Public Schools into an intra-district choice system in which any child can attend any school they want.

The second problem? That she links the shutdowns of traditional schools to the expansion of charters without considering that D.C.’s school enrollment had been in free-fall for decades. Enrollment at McKinley Technical High School, for example, declined from 2,400 students to around 500 by the time it was originally shut down in 1997 (it was re-opened in 2004). In fact, enrollment in the District’s traditional school system declined from 124,939 in the 1959-1960 school year to 80,450 in 2004-5005, just before the first charter schools were opened; enrollment declined by 6 percent between 1986-1987 and 2004-2005. In short, school closings were already likely to happen because the traditional district had been losing students to the suburban districts across from the Potomac.

Meanwhile Hopkinson acts as if the schools that were closed in her neighborhood were worthy of any child’s future, much less her own. This isn’t the case. Before Fenty took control of D.C. Public Schools and brought in Rhee to start its overhaul, the school system had the dubious position of being the Superfund Site (and proverbial toxic waste dump) of American public education. D.C. Public Schools’ fourth- and eighth-graders ranked last in reading and math on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress, while two out of every five high school freshmen who were part of the district’s Class of 2005 dropped out before graduation. Only nine out of every 100 high school freshmen were likely to graduate from both high school and college. This status was likely true even back in the city’s Jim Crow era, when black students were segregated from white students and thus, couldn’t access what was at the time could be considered a high-quality education — and definitely true after the suburban flight of middle class whites and blacks into the Virginia and Maryland suburbs during the 1960s and 1970s.

The abysmal quality of D.C.’s traditional public schools — and the inability of poor and minority parents to get their kids the high-quality education they deserved — is why Virginia Walden Ford launched the District’s initial Parent Power movement to provide families high-quality school choices, including the move to allow for creation of charter schools in 1995 and the launch of the D.C. Opportunity voucher program six years later. These efforts, along with several failed reorganizations of D.C. Public Schools under its then-independent school board and a federally-appointed panel, forced the overhaul of D.C. Public Schools that began four years ago when then-mayor Fenty took control of the district and brought in Rhee to oversee those initial steps. This is an effort Gray, has admirably kept in place to the displeasure of the American Federation of Teachers’ local that backed his successful campaign against Fenty in order to stem them in the first place.

Then there is the fact that Hopkinson’s argument doesn’t square with the reality that D.C. residents can easily access high-quality middle schools (traditional, charter or otherwise) within their own areas. If you live on the Northwest side of town near the Shaw metro (and not so far away from Rock Creek Park), you can avoid sending your child to the zoned district school, Alice Deal Middle (which is in its second year of official status as being in improvement) or the bottom basement Shaw Middle School (where as many as three out of every four kids don’t exceed the District’s reading and math standards). Instead, you can enroll him in Howard University Middle School, one of the Center City Public Charter School branches — a former Catholic school converted into a charter just a few years ago — a Community Academy charter school, or  even one of KIPP’s charter schools. All of those choices are just minutes away from the Shaw metro, and, unlike Alice Deal, don’t require a (still easy) 16 minute commute.

This is also true if you live in the District’s southeast section, including Anacostia. This area, by the way, has long been poorly served by D.C.’s traditional public school system.  Instead of attending any of the traditional district middle schools, a parent can send their kid to a KIPP, another Center City charter (in Congress Heights), or one of the Achievement Prep academies. If you want to drive your kid (or if your child wants to get up and catch Metro’s buses and subways early enough) you can also send your kid to any charter school in the city. If your family qualifies, your child may even get a voucher from the recently-revived D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program and attend any of the city’s parochial and private schools; the Catholic schools, in particular, are not only affordable within the voucher, but have proven consistently to offer high-quality teaching and curricula.

Certainly the options are nowhere as extensive or robust as they should be. D.C. Public Schools is still undergoing systemic reform. The fact that parents have to wait on lotteries instead of simply enrolling their child into a charter school points to the need for the District to do all it can within reason to authorize more high-quality charters and bring in top-notch charter school operators such as Green Dot and Rocketship into communities. It also points to the need to expand the D.C. Opportunity voucher program, which only serves 1,615 of the District’s poorest children.

At the same time, the reality is that D.C. families  have greater opportunities to provide their kids with high-quality education than they did when Virginia Walden Ford lived in the district back in the 1990s. With 37 percent of students attending the District’s charter schools — and Gray and Henderson continuing the reforms started by Fenty and Rhee four years ago — these opportunities are continuing to expand. And now, thanks to the D.C. Public Charter School Board’s move today to launch a new school data system, families will now have more-comprehensive information on the quality of charter schools; this allows them to avoid those charters that don’t deserve to exist and pick those that do — and ultimately, help them make smart choices for their kids.

But at least Hopkinson and her fellow D.C. residents have opportunities to escape the worst American public education offers. Unfortunately for poor and middle class families — especially minority households — throughout the rest of the country (including the supposedly tony Virginia and Maryland suburbs outside of D.C.) — there are almost no choices at all. And, as seen in the cases of Stratford, Conn., grandmother Marie Menard, Bridgeport’s Tanya McDowell, and Kelley Williams-Bolar in Akron, Ohio — all of whom have either been indicted or convicted of what can only laughingly be called stealing education — poor and minority families have to fight hard, harder than they ever should, just to help their kids get good-to-great teachers and rigorous, high-quality, curricula.

Contrary to Hopkinson’s assertions, the problem lies not with school choice. It is the lack of choice that relegates families to schools that aren’t worthy of their children’s futures. Thanks to Zip Code Education policies such as zoned schooling (along with restrictions on expansion of school choice that are supported by the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and suburban districts), families throughout this nation are denied opportunities to help their kids succeed in school and in life.

The perniciousness of Zip Code Education can easily be seen when one looks at the vibrancy of high-quality choices for everyone (including poor families) in an aspect of life in which the stakes are incredibly low: The restaurant sector. A poor family in Dropout Nation‘s home base of Alexandria, Va., may not be able to afford to eat at Bonefish Grill, the high-end Vermillion, or even the tony French restaurant Bastille (where a four-course meal can start at $55 for each diner). But they can enjoy a high-quality meal at a Red Lobster or (one of my favorite spots), Shooter McGee’s. And if they save enough money, they can also dine at Bonefish, Vermillion, or even Bastille without any restriction.

This is not true in American public education. Because of the Zip Code Education policies that predominate today, poor families are restricted to failure mills in their neighborhoods, while middle class families (especially those who are minority or the first in their generation to achieve such status) are often restricted to warehouses of mediocrity whose shiny new buildings hide laggard instruction and low expectations for poor white, black and Latino kids. As University of Michigan Associate Professor Karyn Lacey noted in Blue-Chip Black, her sociological study of middle-class black families in the suburbs 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 throughout this country, these families are often 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 that allow them to take community college courses that they can use for getting ready for the rigors of higher education.

Unlike in a market situation, no family regardless of their income can purchase their way into a high-quality traditional public school (when one is available) unless they choose to then engage in the expensive effort of buying a new home in a different community. Since districts often arbitrarily change their zoning policies, even moving residences doesn’t guarantee that you will get into one of the few high-quality traditional schools for which you made such a move. Nor do intra-district choice as currently structured — in the form of magnet schools that are really set up to meet federal desegregation orders — do the job because there are quotas on the number of students from each race, ethnicity, and economic background who can get in (and more often, depend on the political clout of families — and the poor have little of it).

If you are a middle-class black or Latino family who, say, wants to also make sure your child attends a school in which your kids get high-quality education and still get the exposure they need to their own race and ethnicity to help build self-pride, you may even have to go so far as pay out of pocket for private schools — even when you are paying $5,000 or more every year to support traditional public schools that your children won’t attend. Same is true for white middle-class families who realize that their children are being placed on the general academic track that doesn’t provide them the college-preparatory learning they need to succeed in college and career. And for poor families, if they can scrounge up the cash, they may be able to send their kid to one of the few Catholic schools that may still be open in their communities. Otherwise, they are completely out of luck.

Contrary to Hopkinson’s myopic, flawed piece — and the disingenuous assertions of Weingarten and other education traditionalists — the lack of widely-available school choice is what is truly heartbreaking. When we tell four out of every five children that they must stay in schools that fail their futures, this is not only a tragedy, it is morally and intellectually reprehensible. And it is especially heartbreaking that poor families have wider choices in restaurants than in high-quality schools that can nurture the proverbial soft heads of their young geniuses.

We need more high-quality choices for our kids so they can have brighter futures in an increasingly knowledge-based economy in which what you know is more important than what you can do with your hands. And that’s plain and simple.

Note: There are folks who argue that school choice can take away from efforts at systemically reforming traditional public schools. This isn’t so. If anything, it will take numerous solutions — including overhauling how teachers are trained and compensated within traditional districts, along with expanding school choice — in order to help all kids succeed in school and in life. We have to get away from the deficit mentality that is often a feature of discussions about reform.

From the conviction of Akron, Ohio, mother Kelley Williams-Bolar earlier this year, to the arrest of homeless mother Tanya McDowell of Bridgeport, Conn., the ridiculous concept of “stealing education” and the school residency laws and other Zip Code Education policies that perpetuate this problem, has become one of the biggest topics of discussion in the battle to reform American public education. And as with so much of traditional public education, the zoned schooling policies and other aspects of Zip Code Education perpetuate perverse actions that lead to the denial of high-quality education to children and their families (who pay thousands of dollars annually in taxes into a system that doesn’t allow for real choices) engaging in actions that they shouldn’t have to do in the first place.

In this Voices of the Dropout Nation, Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel explains why we must end Zip Code Education policies that turn law-abiding parents into criminals just so that they can help their kids succeed in school and in life. Read, consider, and take action.

As we all know, school districts have now resorted to arresting parents, the primary caregivers of their children, for the “theft of a free education” because they are willing to do all that they can — even place their kids in districts outside of their own cities — to help them get the best education possible, and in the case of homeless families, just to make sure that their kids stay in school. This year alone, we have seen parents such as Tanya McDowell of Norwalk, Conn., Akron, Ohio, mother Kelley Williams-Bolar, and Marie Menard, a grandmother in Stratford, Conn., arrested for stealing education.

Arresting these families doesn’t address the educational challenges facing our nation.

These parents are “stealing education” because their kids aren’t getting the learning they deserve. The fact still remains that too many students in this country are not graduating from high school and college with the skill-sets they need to become productive citizens, engaged community leaders, and participants in a trained and qualified workforce. The fact remains that far too many schools are dangerous for kids, either because of bullying, crime, and structural damage.

Think about it as a parent? Would you send your child to a school that systematically did not enforce bully prevention policies? Would you send your child to a school that chronically failed to meet school goals in core subjects like reading, math and writing? Would you send your child to a school that you know had crumbling walls, unsafe levels of mold and asbestos? Would you send your child to a school that had no books, technology, or even arts education? And would you send your child to a school that had over 500 children and one part-time nurse?

Many of us, as parents, will answer no to these questions, yet we send our children to some of these types of schools with these types of conditions everyday because school districts limit our choices based on our zip code. And, unfortunately, for those parents that answer no to these questions and choose to use another address of a friend or family member to ensure the safety and educational well being of their child, they may face criminal charges and prosecution.

For those that say, “I have choice”, how much choice do you really have? You put your child’s name in a lottery and cross your fingers and hope you get chosen.  Is that really choice? To know my child’s access to a great school depends on chance seems like torture to me. And for those who have to pay out of their pockets for choice? You shouldn’t have to pay beyond what you put into public schools as taxpayers so you can give your kids a quality education.

Today, we have made it impossible for parents to provide their kids with better schools. In many states across the country, school district residency laws are written to arrest and convict parents or guardians of children that choose to send their child to a school that may do a better job at meeting their child’s academic and life needs, regardless of zip code.

This puts every parent, including those who are poor, into untenable positions. They can choose to deny children access to a great education by continuing to enroll them in seriously low performing schools, try to find enough money to move to a more affluent neighborhood (good luck with that ) or face possible jail time or probation for using another address, in another zip code, just to get a chance at a good education. Wow. These are terrible — and unnecessary — options.

We need to aggressively transform how we fund education.

First, parents, guardians of children, community leaders and social justice advocates must collectively work together and abolish unconstitutional school residency laws in all states. This means bringing lawsuits that show that zip code education violates the U.S. constitution’s equal protection clause and similar clauses in state constitutions throughout the nation. The Connecticut Parents Union has filed suit earlier this year on behalf of Menard based on this line of argument as well as the fact that the Stratford school district embarked on filing heavy-handed criminal charges in violation of the state’s own rules for due process in stealing education cases. (This was also the problem in the Tanya McDowell case.)

Second? Parents, voters and tax payers must work together and collectively hold state and federal government accountable in holding local school districts accountable for better academic outcomes because a large portion of the funds that most local school districts receive come from the state and federal government. These federal and state dollars come from we the people who are also taxpayers, parents and voters.

Third: Parents and taxpayers need to advocate for per pupil funding to be attached to each child (money follows the child). This would help expand options and ensure that taxpayers in one district are not paying for kids living in another.

And finally, parents and taxpayers must work together and demand options. Our country is founded on consumer choice and parents should have the right to choose a good school for their child regardless of where they live.

Parents should not be forced to become criminals in order to help their kids get the schools they deserve.

One of the primary themes of Dropout Nation is that systemic reform of American public education can’t happen without parents taking their rightful roles as lead decision-makers in schools and learning. Over the past couple of years, we have seen more parents like Gwen Samuel and Kelley Williams-Bolar stepping up and demanding the ability to overhaul the schools in their own neighborhoods, challenge zip code education policies, and push for more-expanded school choice opportunities that allow their kids to escape the worst public education offers. The expansion of digital learning, along with creations such as the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire, can also allow for families and communities to band together and form do-it-yourself schools. And despite the criticisms of education traditionalists (and the occasional reformer still stuck in the expertise mindset), more parents are realizing that the experts don’t really know what to do.

In this Best of Dropout Nation from 2009, Editor RiShawn Biddle discusses the importance of putting parents in their rightful roles leading schools. Read, consider, and take action.

If Calif. State Sen. Gloria Romero succeeds in allowing  parents in the state to to replace administrators and teachers at their schools (or convert the schools into charters), it will be an amazing step. Same is true if discussions in New Jersey about expanding its inter-district choice program come to pass. And the  federal Race to the Top initiative could provide even more options to parents — especially those stuck with sending their children to the worst urban school systems.

At the same time, these events offer an opportunity to consider what education policy — and America’s education system itself — should look like in the next half-century. And the answer is: Similar to the markets for consumer products everyone enjoys.

Few sectors in the American public or private sector are as dominated by experts, technocrats and lobbyists as education. From the development and approval of curricula to the kind of schools children can attend, the decisions are based, much consideration is given to what some adults want, how some adults want to be paid, national economic and social priorities, and occasionally, what children actually need. Every now and then, what children and their parents want does come into play. But this a rare event.

But imagine if children (and to be honest, their parents) actually could choose the kind of schools they want to attend, select the curricula that they will learn, even whether they will attend a neighborhood school or a manicured campus in suburbia? It would be difficult to figure out the direction of education at that point; after all, parents use schools as much for social-climbing and instilling their own values as they do for providing the most-rigorous education possible for their children. But it would be interesting: Perhaps “education villages” — where hipsters-turned-parents and single mothers can stay in the city and still gain the best of suburbia — would spring up in the heart of Atlanta. Or children otherwise deemed troublemakers in the traditional public school settings of today will learn in classes where the instructional day is compacted for more efficiency (and thus, less time for having to sit in class wasting time as likely to happen for students in Chicago).

These thoughts come as the Wall Street Journal presents its chart on the 25 largest companies in the world at the end of this decade. As pointed out by William Easterly (who spends his time criticizing foreign aid), only eight of the top 25 companies at the end of the 1990s kept their places by the near-end of 2009. Only six tech firms made up the top 25 versus 13 at the end of the 1990s; the tech firms on the list range from old-school software crossing into videogames and consumer wares (Microsoft) to handy cloud computing and search (Google), to a company that managed to switch gears and helped complete the personal technology revolution began by the Sony Walkman (Apple Computer).

Certainly, many of the companies knocked off the list had merged into other companies or went bust altogether; others just seen declines or stagnation in their market value. But mergers and market value losses represent a reality that these companies didn’t cater to their consumer markets. Notes Easterly: “Creative destruction is one of the triumphs of the market. The consumer is king: in 2009… The radical uncertainty of how to please consumers is an argument FOR free markets.”

At this moment, American public education is undergoing its own peculiar form of creative destruction, as education reformers and a smattering of parents — armed with data, research and political power — are forcing defenders of the status quo (teachers unions, schools of education, and school districts) to accept the need for effective change. As Fordham’s Checker Finn points out, reformers are slowly being forced to admit that their longstanding conceits also need updating (and more often than not, ditching altogether).

Yet, as I’ve pointed out over and over, the reformers must also rid themselves of their faith in expertise. They must begin to embrace the grassroots and, more importantly, accept that children and their parents must have more than just a seat at the table of decisionmaking. They must be the decisionmakers, period, and anything less just won’t do.Why? Because the nature of the reforms being proposed, promoted and legislated — all of which  involves choice, consequences and accountability — requires active participation from parents, and therefore, their support.

Choice begets choice; this is true when it comes to cellphone plans and this is also happening in education. The advent of Milwaukee’s school voucher plan in the early 1990s didn’t foster widespread development of vouchers. But the program, along with the charter school movement, has spurred the interest among parents in the kind of choice initiatives being considered in these states (and may likely become reality in the Los Angeles Unified School District). Once parents are exposed to having real power and engagement in school decisionmaking, they will not want the traditional expert-driven approach. This is a good thing.

Now, I’m not advocating for an education system that is fully free market in orientation. The reality is that the underlying infrastructure for such choice — easy access to useful information through guides, organizations or Web sites; actual mechanisms for exercising choice that exist outside of home purchases — is only coming into existence. Parents are just beginning to realize that the old concept of education — that the school can educate every child without active engagement of families that goes beyond homework and field trips — has gone by the wayside; they will make mistakes along the way.

Poor parents, in particular, need guidance; yet the current public education system treats them as even bigger nuisances than the middle-class families (who can exercise enough influence to just be merely ignored) and wealthier households (who ditch the public school system altogether). Assuring equality of opportunity in education, no matter one’s income, should not only be of paramount importance, it would be a more-effective form of economic policy than stimulus plans and tax cuts combined; the evidence largely clear that dropouts cannot be contributors to economic and social life.

But giving parents power, choices, options, advice and information should be the governing credo of education reform for the next half-century. It can be done.

Back in January, Akron, Ohio, mother Kelley Williams-Bolar became the poster child for ending zip code education and expanding school choice when she was convicted of what can only laughingly be called stealing education. Williams-Bolar would end up spending 10 days in jail for placing her two daughters in the relatively high-performing (and, more important to her, safe) Copley-Fairlawn school district (where few of the black students drop out) instead of keeping them in the woeful, more-dangerous Akron district (whose Balfanz rate for young black men and women, respectively, is 62 percent and 76 percent) in which her family resided. The conviction  jump-started the much-needed discussion over expanding inter-district public school choice and forced a new discussion about ending zip code education practices that condemn poor and minority children to the worst American public education offers (and keeps middle-class families from improving their own options).

Ten months later, Williams-Bolar is taking her place alongside parents such as Gwen Samuel, Matt Prewett and Hanya Boulos to launch the nation’s fifth parents union. The Ohio Parents Union is still in its infancy, and according to Williams-Bolar in an e-mail to Dropout Nation, still working with families to map out a full agenda. But Williams-Bolar’s new group is already getting help from the Samuel and the Connecticut Parents Union; Samuel has already introduced Williams-Bolar to the growing network of Parent Power activists and to Whitney Tilson, whose e-mails reach into the core of the overall school reform movement. It will be interesting to see if Terry Ryan and the folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (which was originally based in the Buckeye State and is a major charter school authorizer there) will team up with the new  group on the kind of on-the-ground efforts for which Dropout Nation has advocated (and Fordham’s research czar, Mike Petrilli, acknowledged was necessary).

There will be plenty for Williams-Bolar to tackle. Forget moving to make the Buckeye State take full responsibility for education funding (and thus transforming school dollars into a voucher-like system in which kids can attend any school within the state). The efforts to overhaul how teachers in the state are recruited, trained, and compensated — especially in light of last week’s defeat of the collective bargaining ban — means that school reformers will have to be more-aggressive and savvy in their efforts. Parent Power groups such as Williams-Bolars could immediately strike a blow for families by following the course of parents in L.A. who are suing the school district there in order to force the use of student test data in teacher evaluations.

Another would be to require more-accurate school data that shows the performance and safety of schools in their communities. Right now, Ohio’s school data system is barely useful for families in any meaningful way. And pushing Ohio to enact a Parent Trigger law similar to those in California, Connecticut and Texas would go a long way in helping parents overhaul the very schools whose failures are at the epicenter of decaying communities.

Williams-Bolar can now help families like hers avoid the fate that befell her. And we need more parents like her taking power.