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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Certainly, no one should think tomorrow’s hearings on the Harkin-Enzi plan for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act will sway the direction that Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee will take in the coming weeks. The real work (or damage) was done last month during the committee’s markup session on the plan. At the same time, the hearing — prompted by the delay tactics of Kentucky Republican Rand Paul — was at least supposed to be an opportunity for voices to be heard on the evisceration of No Child’s accountability provisions and whether other matters should be brought to bear in the legislation — including the importance of providing parents with the tools they need to take their rightful roles as lead decision-makers in education. That many not happen either.

At this moment, the list of folks testifying before the committee tomorrow include Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, school superintendents such as Terry Grier of the Houston district in Texas, a Teach Plus fellow working in the Memphis-Shelby County district in Tennessee, and a school principal from Kentucky. But none of the grassroots players who have been at the heart of the Parent Power movement — from Gwen Samuel of the Connecticut Parents Union (whose work with the State of Black CT Alliance led to the passage of the Nutmeg State’s Parent Trigger law), to former California state senator Gloria Romero (who led the passage of the nation’s first Parent Trigger law), to even Kevin Chavous of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (which has been successful in expanding charter schools and school voucher programs in states such as Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Indiana) — are on the list.

Perhaps HELP Chairman Tom Harkin and ranking Republican member Mike Enzi forgot to include these activists, as House education committee chairman John Kline did two months ago. Or they just couldn’t allot time for at least one of them to talk. Whatever the reason, Harkin and Enzi are missing an opportunity to foster a real discussion about an area in which federal education policy can help encourage and expand.

While No Child has had a family engagement component since 2001, the vehicle through which this happens — state- and district-level parent information resource centers — have been of limited success. One reason: Districts loathe meeting the required set-aside of one percent of Title 1 dollars for family engagement efforts required under the law. Another reason lies with the fact that a good number of PIRCS have not followed the strategies for engagement advocated by National PTA, the Harvard Family Research Project, and other organizations in this space.

Meanwhile other aspects of No Child that were intended to expand family engagement, Parent Power, and school choice have not worked out as plan. One provision, which requires districts to allow families to move their kids out of failing schools has long been wrecked by the intransigence of districts (which often failed to inform families of their choices in a timely manner) and the reality that most failure mills are part of districts that are failing altogether (and have few high-quality options in the first place).

The Harkin-Enzi plan does require states and school districts to develop family engagement plans and requires all those involved to follow the recommendations for family engagement developed by PTA for its National Standards for Family-School Partnerships. The plan also requires states to develop more-comprehensive school report cards, providing families more information they can use in school decisions. But Harkin-Enzi abolishes the school choice provisions instead of requiring districts and states to either issue vouchers to families so they can escape failure mills; the plan doesn’t even incorporate the smart suggestions from Richard Kahlenberg and the Century Foundation to allow for inter-district choice options. And ultimately, there is no provision in the plan that requires states to enact Parent Trigger laws that would allow families to overhaul the failure factories in their own communities, either in the form of petitions (as used in California) or through the slightly-less powerful committee format required in Connecticut.

Given the lack of real effort on this front, Harkin and Enzi could at least  used the hearing as an opportunity to open up this conversation and even consider adding such provisions on the Senate floor whenever the law finally is brought before the full body. Hopefully, by the end of today, their staffs will put at least Parent Power activist on the testimony list. If it doesn’t happen, the silence of these voices will speak volumes — and not in a good way.

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Last week’s Dropout Nation report on the possible lawsuit being brought on behalf of seven families by Barnes & Thornburg over the Los Angeles Unified School District’s teacher evaluations has turned from a letter to reality. Today, the families filed for declaratory relief, asking California’s superior court to bar the district from striking a new collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of Teachers’ City of Angels local that doesn’t provide for the use of student test data in future teacher evaluations. The lawsuit is also asking the court to put an injunction on related legal action between the district and the AFT that is before the state’s Public Employees Relations Board.

As Dropout Nation reported Friday, the demands are based on the Parent Power activists’ interpretation of the state’s Stull Act, which governs teacher evaluations. As Barnes & Thornburg partners Kyle Kirwan and Scott Witlin argue in the brief (and in an earlier demand letter to the district), the Stull Act required L.A. Unified to use data from the state’s “criterion reference test” in evaluating teachers. But it hasn’t done so. Witlin also argues that L.A. Unified has also failed to provide its teachers provide meaningful and specific feedback on performance as required under Stull, and help laggard teachers improve their instruction. In essence, the district hasn’t followed the law for the last 40 years.

The assertions follow along the lines of a report released earlier this year by the National Council on Teacher Quality based on a study it conducted for the United Way’s City of Angels operation and a group of civil rights groups earlier this year. According to the study, just 40 percent of veteran teachers and 70 percent of new hires were evaluated by the district during the 2009-2010 school year. 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. For example, California moved two years ago to allow student test data to be tied into teacher performance as part of the development of the now-kiboshed CALTIDES data systems. And, as Los Angeles Times reporter Howard Blume reported yesterday, L.A. Unified Superintendent John Deasy thinks that the Stull Act allows the district much leeway in structuring performance management.

The parents are being helped out by EdVoice, a Sacramento, Calif., outfit whose board includes school reformer Eli Broad. Certainly, education traditionalists will argue that this is some nefarious plot by big-moneyed folks. But one must keep in mind that AFT and its L.A. affiliate are big-money players themselves. Earlier this year, the AFT tossed $10,000 to fund the Save Our Schools rally, which touted itself as a grassroots effort; it, along with the NEA, financed half of the rally’s budget.

Whatever happens, the lawsuit serves as another example of parents pushing to reform American public education by any means necessary. The Connecticut Parents Union, for example, has helped Marie Menard, file suit against the Stratford school district after it charged her with what can laughingly be called stealing education for allowing her daughter to claim her home as a residence for her two grandchildren in order to avoid sending them to failure mills. The very idea that we continue to restrict children from getting a high-quality education by where they live — and perpetuate Zip Code education — is absolutely senseless. It’s time for more parents to take to the courts, the ballot boxes, and to the streets for their kids.

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