When someone sends you an e-mail declaring that a piece they wrote will “make you squirm”, it had better deliver the goods. Mike Petrilli, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, usually does. But the results of his latest polemic didn’t exactly match the promise. In fact, it merely made me wonder what he was thinking when he wrote it.

In his latest piece on Fordham’s Flypaper site, Petrilli took aim at fellow reformers complaining about Diane Ravitch’s latest claptrap (and the modestly successful response from Bloomberg’s Jonathan Alter), essentially embracing her argument that the school reform movement unrealistically expects poor children to be fully proficient in reading, math and science. Attempting to set himself as some sort of George Schultz of school reform (and, in the process, touting that Kissinger-esque blob for weakening accountability that Fordham calls “Reform Realism”), Petrilli declares that reformers should set out for lesser, more, umm, realistic goals for improving student achievement (and, by the way, ditch the No Child Left Behind Act’s goal of full proficiency among all students).

Your editor won’t spend much time dissecting Petrilli’s policymaking scenario (which, given how politicians actually craft laws and regulations on a day-to-day basis, is somewhat unrealistic) because that’s not the issue in and of itself. Actually, the fact that I’m thinking about anything related to one of Ravitch’s thinly-researched rants that deserve no serious consideration actually annoys me. In fact, I’m a tad ashamed that the woman is once again mentioned on these pages (even if a mere mention does guarantee at least an additional 2,000 unique readers). There are far more serious foes of school reform — even the integration one-note that is Richard Kahlenberg and Pedro Noguera — who are more deserving of consideration, who actually try to appeal in some way to the best instincts among those who work within American public education (even if their approaches essentially defend the indefensible).

The real issue is the disconnect in thinking between some Beltway reformers engaged in the policy and think tank arena, and those who work on the ground who actually make things happen. (By the way, I don’t mean to slight the policy players; policy and action are both critical to overhauling American public education.) Among some policy players, there is an over-dependence on playing the equivalent of what is known in baseball as small ball, aiming for incremental, modest improvements instead of swinging for the fences. From where they sit, such strategies play to the Bismarckian view that politics is merely the art of the possible.

But such thinking ignores the reality it is grand aspirations and goals, not small-ball percentages, which inspire people to work toward making the world around them better. And it actually works in achieving what would seem to be the insurmountable. It is the grand ideal that all men, no matter their race, creed or color, should be treated equally, that inspired both the great experiment that is America, and the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King and others this past century. And this is particularly true when it comes to addressing the abysmal conditions of American public education. In fact, those grand aspirations are the reasons why the school reform movement has succeeded in winning the day so far.

So school reformers should aspire to 100 percent proficiency. So should every teacher, principal and superintendent. Anything less than that ultimate goal should be in the mind unacceptable, and drive all of us to develop a wide variety of solutions that will get us inches and miles towards giving every child the education they deserve. This doesn’t mean ditching full proficiency; it does mean achieving the ultimate goal using measurable benchmarks and constantly adjusting tactics and strategy in the process.

This isn’t to say Petrilli’s piece isn’t somewhat worthwhile. The school reform movement does suffer from occasional overabundance of exuberance. Far too many reformers tout their one silver bullet when they need to accept the reality that it will take numerous solutions to address the nation’s education crisis. There are far too many instances of touting moderate successes as the one answer, without actually being willing to accept that the solution isn’t perfect and should be made better. This is why reformers must continually call each other out and moderate those worst tendencies, demand measurable evidence of short- and long-term success, and expect course corrections when needed. For that part, Petrilli does deserve praise.

At the same time, this exuberance is far preferable to the useless pessimism and  stubborn desire to keep the status quo that Ravitch now embodies. One can already surmise that Ravitch has low expectations for other people’s children; her entire act is as much about her own subscription to the Poverty Myth of Education and the belief that poor children can’t succeed in school or life, as it is as about trying to be the Camille Paglia of education. One wishes that she would just say that poor kids aren’t worth the trouble and be done with it; it would  be short, sweet and actually, readable. Amoral, wrong and damning of the lives of children, clearly, but still more readable than the screeds she writes these days.

And the occasionally irrational exuberance among some reformers is also preferable to the low ambitions that seem to be expressed by Petrilli in this piece and by some of his fellow Beltway players. Our children deserve far more than small thinking.

Yesterday, New York Times’ Sam Dillon decided to tread the same ground your editor covered two years ago (and others have done since). And as one would expect, Diane Ravitch and other defenders of the very obsolete practices and low expectations thinking that have contributed to the nation’s education crisis, offered the report as an example of the nefariousness of the school reform movement. After all, according to their simple-minded, class envy-driven, anti-intellectual view, a wealthy entrepreneur can’t both have a healthy interest in improving the world in which he lives and an equally sensible self-interest in leaving his mark on it. You know, what all adults seek to do in life.

Yet Ravitch and her gang fail to consider the organizations that are subsidizing their own defense of the status quo (a point that Dillon manages to ignore in his piece). Start with the National Education Association, which devoted $248 million of union dues this past decade on political campaigns, making it the biggest player in American politics. The union has also spent millions on building and sustaining alliances that aid and abet its aims; this includes $1.9 million to the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (which certifies ed schools) between the 2005-2006 and 2009-2010 fiscal years, and $1.6 million to the Economic Policy Institute (which always seems to produce reports that neatly dovetail with NEA positions) within the past six years. There are also organizations allied with status quo thinking such as the Ford Foundation and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which command both dollars and vast memberships.

Then there’s the American Federation of Teachers, whose president, Randi Weingarten (the subject of my profile this month in The American Spectator) is one of the foremost advocates on behalf of the status quo. From here appearances on shows such as The Colbert Report to profiles in Newsweek, Weingarten is the nation’s best-known union leader and most-prominent education traditionalist, almost as high-profile as Gates himself. And thanks to that profile and her position as head of the nation’s second-largest teachers union (including a foundation that is devoting millions to funding their own initiatives), she is just as influential as Gates (if not more so).

Essentially, both sides of the debate are basking in resources, financial and otherwise. and using them accordingly. One can say that status quo defenders control even more dollars; after all, they are in control of school districts and university schools of education, the institutions through which most of the $500 billion in taxpayer funds devoted to education flow. The NEA and the AFT, in particular, have long-influenced those dollars thanks to state laws and collective bargaining agreements that structure how dollars (in the form of teachers and their compensation packages) are directed to classrooms. Through their defense of seniority- and degree-based pay scales, they have created a teacher compensation system in which teachers are paid for simply lasting years instead of for improving student achievement, under which high-quality teachers aren’t rewarded for doing good-to-great work, that provide near-lifetime employment to the worst teachers, and perpetuate seniority-based assignment rules that, along with the lack of rigorous evaluations based on objective student achievement data, all but ensures that poor and minority children are taught by laggard teachers. They have been unwilling to embrace any real reform of teacher recruiting, training and compensation, allowing for the profession to become mired in mediocrity and failure at the expense of both good-to-great teachers who manage to emerge from the muck, and children who don’t get to choose who teaches them.

The NEA, the AFT and its allies also perpetuate practices and ideologies — including the Poverty Myth in Education — that have essentially allowed far too many educators to write off poor and minority children as being unworthy of a good education. They have consistently opposed any form of real school choice that allows children, no matter their station in life or their condition of birth, to escape dropout factories and failure mills. They have defended a system in which a child’s zip code determines the quality of their education — and can wreck their futures (and even land parents unwilling to accept this in the criminal justice system). And their unwillingness to address issues such as the crisis of low educational achievement among young males of all races — a subject of this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast – shows exactly where they stand on school reform.

I’m not going to say that education traditionalists don’t care about children. They think they do and I believe them. But what they defend, all in all, is a failed, negative and enslaving vision of American public education under which 150 children an hour drop out into poverty and prison. Worse, they defend the system by tying up taxpayer dollars in a status quo that was built for a different age in which education didn’t equal better quality of life, not for a time in which what you know is more important than what you can do with your hands. One can understand supporting such a system back at the height of the industrial age. One can even understand their self-interest in protecting that which has given them comfortable livings and influence. But in 2011, at a time in which the economy demands a better-educated populace, continuing to support an outdated model of education is not only intellectually indefensible, but absolutely amoral and immoral, unjustifiable by any religion or worldview — and they do so in order to protect their privileges, their influence and their incomes. Weingarten and other status quo defenders cannot justify condemning the lives of millions of children.

And that is the difference between them and the school reformer that Gates is funding out of his own pocket. What school reformers have imperfectly, yet successfully, articulated is a vision of education that allows for every young man and woman to achieve their potential; that argues that schools and those who work within them are missionaries for social change that can help address and alleviate poverty; and offers a positive view of what can be done through providing a high-quality education to every child. It is a vision that offers solutions based on data and practice, and accepts that if a practice doesn’t work, it should be ditched for another.  And it uses the evidence that teacher quality and family engagement are greater determinants of academic success than socioeconomic background to advocate for remaking a profession into one that deserves the same respect as doctors, and giving parents the power they need to make great choices for the futures of their children.

This vision is winning the day not because of money; as with so many movements, school reformers were working the trenches, often with little money, before it attracted funding Gates and other big-named donors. The vision is winning because it is both a positive vision and one that has been better-advocated through strategic and tactical savvy. The NEA, the AFT and other defenders can develop new campaigns and protests, and raise ever more dollars, but none of that will hide the reality that what they offer is failure for children, failure for families, failure for communities and failure for a nation — all at a time in which falling down and dropping out is no longer a sustainable option.

Instead of conspiracy theories and class envy, education traditionalists need to take a look within.

Why are school reformers succeeding in winning the policy battle for overhauling American public education while defenders of traditional public education practices failing? There are those who argue it is about the triumph of high-profile media plays and money over the rightfulness of ideas. But is that really so?

It isn’t as if status quo defenders lack high-profile forums from which to articulate their views. There’s Richard Rothstein at the Economic Policy Institute, Washington Post columnist Valerie Strauss (whose lending of pages to every crackpot opinion borders on the promiscuous), Pedro Noguera writing for The Nation, and once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch’s appearances on The Daily Show and in The Wall Street Journal. Nor do they lack for money: The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers generate $622 million a year in dues alone — and devote enough of it to political campaigning to become among the biggest players in local, state and national politics. That influence is amplified by other influential public sector unions such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and grassroots groups with whom they generally share common cause.

And it isn’t as if school reformers can claim that they have everyone outside of traditional education circles on their side. They haven’t won over suburban congressional Republicans such as House Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline, movement conservatives such as Victor Davis Hanson, hard-core progressives like Dana Goldstein and even suburban parents. And even in the big cities that are the epicenters of reform efforts, reformers haven’t exactly won unanimous support.

Yet defenders of traditional public education are not winning the high ground. Why? As Dropout Nation has argued, the anti-intellectualism rampant among ed school professors, school superintendents and other traditionalists is part of the problem. (Yesterday, Contributing Editor Steve Peha offered his own explanations.) But these are not the only reasons. School reformers are winning the day because they have the clear moral argument for reform. What status quo defenders are backing is a vision of American public education that in practice, has been a failure for children, families, taxpayers and even teachers alike.

Of course, the Bill Gates money argument is seductive. After all, it is one that actually casts defenders of traditional public education as crusaders against plutocrats who simply want to bash teachers, end public education and abandon democracy. The fact that so much of the work of school reformers actually involves improving the work that traditional public schools are supposed to do (from the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with school districts in Memphis and Hillsborough County, Fla., to Teach For America and The New Teacher Project) proves lie to that view.

The other part of the argument — that the message of reform is only succeeding because of money — is even more preposterous. Money does make it easier to publish papers, fund think tanks that share the same viewpoints, and start new initiatives that share one’s message. But if money was that powerful, generations of wealthy people and philanthropies would have captured the high ground long ago in their respective spheres of work. If anything, as proven seen by the Ford Foundation’s ill-fated efforts at urban renewal and school reform in the 1960s — including the laudable proto-Parent Power effort in New York City’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville community — fell apart and led to the first federal regulations on nonprofit activity, the presence of money can actually do more harm and good.

If anything, philanthropists are generally terrible at using their money to influence social change. As I noted two years ago in my report on the Gates Foundation’s school reform efforts, the most-successful education reformers have either tended to focus their work outside of the $600 billion industrial complex that is American public education, or, as in the case of Sears, Roebuck czar Julius Rosenwald (who built schools for black children in the segregated South), on aspects of education that traditionalists of the time prefer to ignore. Outside of education, donors such as George Soros and longtime foundations such as the Lilly Endowment have hardly achieved anything worth celebrating.

On the hand, the most successful and influential social and political movements of the past four centuries — including the American Revolution, Gandhi’s push to free India from British colonial domination, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s — had little money behind them. Martin Luther King didn’t exactly live lavishly and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference didn’t have vast coffers. Mahatma Gandhi was battling against the most-powerful nation on the planet. Same is true for the Founding Fathers, whose individual personal wealth paled in comparison to Great Britain’s treasury.

What all of these successful movements have in common is pure moral force: Indignation about a crisis that actually hurts real human beings in ways that neither Christian nor Humanist can ethically defend, and the conviction that nothing will be right in the world for anyone until the crisis is reversed. The Founding Fathers were offended they and their peers could be taxed and governed without any right to protest, demand redress and shape how laws impacted their lives. Gandhi was angry that one nation could colonize another and relegate its people to indentured servitude. And civil rights leaders were enraged that Black Americans were still de facto slaves in a nation they helped build with their own hands.

This moral force, in turn, fosters grassroots activists and thinkers whose ideas and actions are shaped by their dedication and their indignation. It builds communities of civic agitation. It transforms storekeepers, mothers and journalists into impromptu leaders demanding change. It inspires collegians to reach beyond their beer goggles to make the world better. It creates networks of social entrepreneurs who start new programs and organizations. And finally, it attracts the support of philanthropists and others who share common moral cause with the builders of the movement.

The money and the accompanying media always come last. The French only came in to aid the Founding Fathers only after the decisive victory over the British at Saratoga. International support for India’s quest for independence came long after Gandhi’s return home to the subcontinent. The cameras filming protests in Selma and Montgomery came long after decades of court cases, protests and demands for the end of lynching. And in the case of the school reform movement, the Gates Foundation came two decades politicians such as Lamar Alexander, chambers of commerce, school leaders such as Howard Fuller, and parent activists like Virginia Walden Ford, began demanding an overhaul to a system that works for far too few of our children.

What defenders of the status quo seem not to understand is that for many school reformers, transforming education is as much a moral imperative as it is an intellectual pursuit and even an economic livelihood. In fact, for many, the moral reasons for school reform matter more than the money. Which is also why traditionalists struggle to offer a coherent counter-argument. It’s easy to question the motives of a Bill Gates or a Whitney Tilson, or worse, paint them as greedy profiteers (when, in all honesty, neither are making a profit off of any of this). But the Teach For America alumni working in a classroom or running a tutoring program is another matter entirely. Same is true for the mother who is also a school choice activist, or any of the parents demanding their proper seats at the head of the table of education decision-making.

(By the way: The pursuit of money or self-interest isn’t, in itself, evil at all. The profit motive has been as much a force for good in the world — think free trade that helps spur the development of middle class conditions in developing nations, or modern medicine — as the moral pursuit. And when one considers the millions of women denied freedom thanks to Islamic Fundamentalism and the millions more slaughtered during religious wars, moral crusades can also be as damaging to humankind as profiteering. And money is an important external motivator — a reason why everyone, including teachers and think tankers, work hard each and every day. )

These men and women are indignant about the reality that 150 young men and women drop out every hour into poverty and prison. They are distressed that millions more languish in school ill-prepared for an increasingly knowledge-based economy in which even high-paying blue collar jobs require strong math and science skills. They are outraged that millions of good-to-great teachers aren’t rewarded for their work while millions of mediocre-to-abysmal colleagues continue collecting paychecks. They are incensed that families — especially those from poor white and minority households — are treated shabbily by teachers and administrators who mistaken condescension for consideration. And they are mad, plain mad, that it can be as haphazard to get high-quality curricula and instruction now as it was during the Great Depression eight decades ago.

They don’t need Bill Gates to show them that. They don’t need to watch Waiting for ‘Superman’ either. You can see the failures of American public education every day on street corners, in prisons and on unemployment lines. A generation of men and women are left out of the economic mainstream because the low quality of education they received no longer works in a knowledge-based economy — and another generation is being left behind now because they never got a good-quality education in the first place. This is not all the fault of traditional public education; the quality of education in the main was suited well for an old school industrial age that has dissipated into the ether. But there is no reason why our schools have continually failed generations of poor and minority children, nor is there an excuse for refusing to overhaul how schools  operate in order to educate the kids coming through the corridors now.

For these reformers, it isn’t enough to be mad. They want to take action. It doesn’t mean that they agree with one another on all formulas for reform. In fact, they often spar and parry over what school choice should look like, how to hold players in education accountable for student achievement, even over whether the NEA and AFT should even have a role in education decision-making. But they all agree on this: American public education as it currently exists is mediocre at best and abysmal for least of us — and that nibbles around the edges are no longer enough. In an age in which data is transforming how we work in the world, there is no reason why its disruptive power cannot be used for improving how recruit teachers, evaluate schools, and educate kids. And, to paraphrase Joel Klein, the world will conspire against us if we do not make public education fit for all of our children.

This isn’t to say that defenders of traditional public education aren’t concerned about any of this. Nor can anyone say that they don’t care (or think they care) for the lives and futures of children. It is that the solutions they offer — much of which are nothing more than rehashed versions of every formula tossed around since the advent of the comprehensive high school — haven’t worked. It is that they would rather tinker around the edges than confront their allies — including the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers — about how they continue to protect low-quality and incompetent teachers. They chastise the quality of school leadership and yet fail to realize how the practices they defend — from instruction focused on useless pedagogical theory, to reverse-seniority layoff policies — contribute to the problem. Their dogmatic belief that poverty is the root cause of educational underachievement is a cop-out in an age in which there are great examples of schools, traditional, charter and private, who are helping kids reach brighter futures.

What they defend is an amoral system that chews up children — especially young black, white and Latino men — and spits them out into the street. What they support is a system that bases the quality of education on zip code — and does all it can to keep it that way. What they back is a public education system that is no longer fiscally sustainable in its current form — and spending plenty of money for little benefit to children or taxpayers alike. And what they favor is a vision of public education that is impoverished, impotent and ill-fit for the future.

So how can you expect to win the day with something like that?

How to help local reporters tie together school board hearings and No Child reauthorization debates? That's the question Brookings should be answering.

One could say that the Brookings Institution’s latest survey on public attitudes about education news reporting offers, well, something. At least we now know that 76 percent of residents surveyed by the think tank in the Northeastern states were more-interested in getting news about student academic performance than their counterparts in the rest of the country. Or that education reform was just 4.7 percent of all national news coverage on education surveyed. Or that we know that 60 percent of parents and those who don’t have children get their news from the local paper — and that between 38 percent and 40 percent of those surveyed felt that they didn’t get enough news coverage on education issues. At least editors and media executives have some sense of what could be the focus of their energies.

But as with the other reports on education reporting Brookings has developed on behalf of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it spends more time complaining about the “lack of coverage on essential education issues” than offering anything substantive or useful for reporters at any level of coverage to consider.

It focuses on shaming national media outlets, even though the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NPR, The American Spectator, the Los Angeles Times and yes, Dropout Nation have stepped up over the past few years with tremendous, critically-acclaimed (if not always perfect) coverage of the battles over reforming American public education. The report doesn’t bother to suggest any solutions such as that these outlets move to data-driven coverage of education issues as done by the L.A. Times last year in its series on teacher quality in Los Angeles Unified elementary schools, or that editors could bolster coverage of education even more by considering the role it plays in other national issues such as foreign trade, the nation’s current (and long-term) economic woes, national defense and immigration. This is understandable. It is just a survey. But Brookings  is using the survey as a jumping off point for its media analysis. And it could have used the survey as a jumping off point for a much-deeper discussion about education news coverage than what it offered.

The survey does even less for local reporters and editorialists — especially those working on the education beat. After all, neither the survey nor the other reports on education news coverage put out by Brookings has fully dealt with the reality that for most education beat reporters, discussions about the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act are secondary to daily coverage of school board hearings, school bus safety and local budget cuts. Save for such moments as when a mayor runs his own slate for school board (or tries to take over the district), or when a dropout factory is put into turnaround as required by No Child, the reporters don’t get to touch on national or even state education policy discussions. Why? For one the demand from editors is strictly local; a reporter has to go out of his way to localize national topics — and do so while covering the bread-and-butter. The other reason is a matter of capacity; a beat reporter at a local weekly such as the Dunwoody Crier (one of the first places where I cut my proverbial teeth in the reporting game) doesn’t have the experience and hasn’t gotten any training on education issues.

Offer local reporters a few resources, and help them get over the typical reporter’s fear of numbers and analysis, and they can do a better job of tying national discussions and the role of policy in shaping school decisions into their reporting. Work with reporters and writers who generally don’t cover education such as a Dave Weigel of Slate or the folks at Politico and you can expand the range of coverage of education. Encourage more data-driven reporting and you will see more Jason Songs writing the kind of tough, analytical stories needed on the education beat.

Essentially, this report is a wasted opportunity for Brookings (and, by extension, the Gates Foundation) to elevate education news coverage. But it doesn’t have to remain that way. Here’s a few steps Brookings and Gates could actually take in getting the kind of national and local education news coverage they deem important:

• Publish a series of white papers on issues related to important issues in school reform and how they relate to local issues. Particularly for local reporters, such information is helpful in digging deep into the policy discussions that school districts try to avoid dealing with in their own operations.
• Develop reports that focus on the intersection between education and other national issues: This publication and its editor has done so from the very beginning. So has the Hechinger Institute, for which I have written a report. It isn’t that hard for an organization with the capacity of Brookings to do so in a tutorial form.
• Conduct a series of seminars and Webinars on how reporters can use data in analyzing school and teacher performance. The Webinar format can be particularly appealing, especially since budget cuts have made it prohibitive for local reporters to take trips to Nashville or to the Beltway for a few days on the corporate dime.
• Launch a network of regional education news services: These operations can serve as models of how to make national education issues local.

These steps would be more helpful than another round of surveys and reports. And there’s no reason why Brookings can’t make this a reality. Brookings has done great work on other areas of education policy and discussions. It can — and should — do better in analyzing and improving the quality of education news.

Chances are that Arne Duncan doesn’t mind appearances at the NBA All-Star Weekend and getting shout-outs from celebrities such as LeBron James. But the U.S. Secretary of Education faces some daunting challenges over the next two years in keeping President Barack Obama’s school reform agenda. He must make headway in spite of such hotspots as the sparring in Congress and among education players over the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, and questions about getting new funding for such initiatives as Race to the Top and I3. Then there’s that pesky debate over abolishing collective bargaining that puts centrist Democrats such as Duncan on the hot seat just as their own initiatives would also weaken the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. All as the President is gearing up for a re-election campaign that will require all activist hands on deck, including two of the biggest players in Democratic party politics.

In this interview Duncan held with Dropout Nation and other media and policy players this morning, he discussed the U.S. Department of Education’s efforts to help states realize that there is flexibility in Title 1 funding and offered thoughts on Wisconsin and other major education issues. (Michelle McNeil of EdWeek has a roundup of the pow-wow.) More from the session, including about standardized testing and No Child — including comments from Carmel Martin, Duncan’s point-person on reauthorization– will be forthcoming this evening.

You have been critical of efforts in Wisconsin and elsewhere to abolish collective bargaining. How does efforts to abolish collective bargaining go against fostering collaboration?

You need budget concessions on wages and benefits [in Wisconsin]. As you know, the [NEA's Wisconsin affiliate] said they would make them… You have a union that is making moves toward the kinds of reforms we want. The president of the union even had push-back internally…You had a union that had been historically more intransigent, but was moving. You don’t want to hit them with a hammer… I think collective bargaining can and will be a tool for improving student achievement.

But isn’t ending collective bargaining critical to forcing the NEA, the AFT and their respective presidents, Dennis Van Roekel and Randi Weingarten to actually make concessions and embrace reform? Especially given the presence of Baby Boomers who want those benefits.

The leadership is changing. We have to get there faster. But you see union leaders such as Randi saying it should be easier to dismiss teachers, you’ve never heard that. You are hearing things that you’ve never heard before.

If you talk to good young teachers, they aren’t as interested in pensions. They want more pay. Give them a 401K plan and they will be happy. You have the Baby Boomers going into retirement. You have the new teachers who are coming in… I think [change] is happening.

But what about the reality that teachers unions have so many ways of advocating on their own behalf? In most school districts and even in states, there are few countering forces against unions, few ways for any sort of realistic collaboration.

Let’s have this conversation about parent engagement, countervailing pressures. We need that. We need the business community engaged.

No one’s talking about school boards. No one’s talking about superintendents. Everyone needs to move.

I’m not about collaboration for collaboration’s sake. Collaboration around the status quo, I’m not about that. I’m not about kumbaya. It’s about doing things to get better results for kids.”

So unions make concessions on teacher compensation and benefits right now? What if they push to roll things back when the fiscal conditions get better?

“Sometimes, when you cross the Rubicon on these issues, we crossed it… I think people are working in different ways. The countervailing pressure [against returning to the past] is that we need to get better results educationally. I think people are facing more pressure.

One of those pressures is fiscal. And in some cases, states are cutting funds for early childhood education initiatives. In your mind, is this smart cost-cutting?

I know these times are hard. But I don’t think that’s the smart way to cut. Kids are entering kindergarten without opportunity to succeed. If we want to close achievement gaps, we have to start at two and three, not four and five.

There’s the matter of class sizes, which is a particular concern for middle-class parents. Considering that fiscal belt-tightening inevitably will involve fewer teachers and increases class sizes, how can school districts reconcile this with parents?

Class size has been a sacred cow. We have to [put it on the table]. I have two kids. Given the choice between giving them a great teacher working with 28 kids or a mediocre teacher with 23, I’ll take the 28. Why not give the great teacher with 28 kids, $20,000, $25,000 more and give the rest [of the savings] to the district? Parents haven’t been given the choice. We need to have that conversation. Why don’t we have that conversation?

With some question about whether the No Child Left Behind Act will be reauthorized, there has been talk about providing school districts with waivers so they can avoid the penalties from the provision that all kids must be proficient in reading and math by 2014. What is the Department of Education’s roadmap on that?

Our focus is on getting it reauthorized… We are doing our job in passing that bill.

But what about the matter of getting congressional Republicans such as House Education and the Workforce Committee John Kline [who opposes No Child's accountability provisions] to move on reauthorization or even talk about what should be part of the reauthorized law?

No one’s saying ‘we won’t engage, we won’t talk’. Frankly the talks have been better than I expected.

Then there is Race to the Top, which will likely get less funding than in the past couple of years. For the states that competed for the program and didn’t get funding, are they really winners?

When you have 41 states adopting standards, they are winners… Forty-one states have reform plans. There are six districts in California that are working to implement these plans. We’re doing calls with these states and with funders so that they can implement those plans.

Are Congressional Republicans Serious About School Reform?: Let’s start with this reality: The reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind is unlikely to happen this year. Forget the disagreement among congressional Republicans and their Senate and House Democrat counterparts over accountability and other aspects of the law (and even about whether it will be handled as one large document or in piecemeal). As Daniela Garcia, who advises congressional Republicans on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, admitted last week at the Education Industry Association’s legislative pow-wow, the committee hasn’t even begun fully considering the matter of reauthorization. With 12 new Republican members — many of whom are more concerned about reversing the Healthcare Reform law — on the committee, it will be months before they are well-versed enough to discuss No Child in a meaningful way.

But based on Garcia’s remarks, one thing is clear: Don’t expect much of anything serious out of the congressional Republicans on the committee when it comes to addressing federal education policy and No Child reauthorization. For all the talk about scaling back the federal role in education, they are currently consumed by the sort of simplistic, sometimes contradictory thinking that limits their ability to either advance their goal or deal seriously with the problems facing American public education.

Dropout Nation‘s interview with now-House Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline last year hit upon some of this. Garcia’s remarks this past week provide even more clarity. During the EIA confab, Garcia declared that “districts are capable of making good decisions” when it comes to using federal funding and in structuring their operations; from the perspective of the congressional Republicans on the education committee, the goal should be to “incentivize” districts to be more innovative instead of offering “heavy-handed” regulations. But when EIA members — most of whom are tutoring services that work on the ground — noted that the real problem lies not with the law, but with the fact that school districts seem focused on either evading the rules (in some cases, in order to keep federal dollars in their hands), Garcia couldn’t fully offer a compelling counter.

Garcia did say that Kline and others will try to balance accountability with flexibility (which essentially means allowing suburban districts to evade their responsibility to poor and minority children). But she also noted an unwillingness to actually hold districts to the fire. Declared Garcia: “The only power we have is to withhold funding. And nobody’s going to support that. We have to incentivize districts [to do their jobs].”

Meanwhile she noted that Kline’s desire to scale back federal policy stopped when it came to the matter of special education funding. The move by congressional Republicans earlier this month to reduce special ed funding by $500 million particularly irked Kline because “it was a bad signal, given his talk about ‘our failed promise’”. Especially for some of the school districts in Minnesota he represents. Seven percent of all students in the South Washington County district, for example, are labeled special ed cases; this includes 15 percent of the black males attending the school; most have “specific learning disability” which can mean dyslexia or other issues that really don’t require special ed participation. Kline should be asking serious questions about why so many kids in the districts he represents — and in others throughout the nation — are being diagnosed with learning disabilities. But chances are Kline and some of his fellow Republicans will go down a rabbit hole blinded by ideology and ignoring reality.

Consequences, Conclusions and School Reformers: The battles in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states over efforts to abolish collective bargaining rules has divided the school reform movement. Centrist Democrats argue that efforts by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and others have done little more than push the NEA and AFT into a corner, leading them to abandon any effort to nudge themselves toward reform. On the other side, conservative reformers who support ending collective bargaining (and some progressive critics of reform) have chided the centrists for either “keeping quiet” or taking “bizarre” positions against bargaining when the very direction of school reform essentially calls for weakening the two primary teachers unions in the first place.

The reality is a bit nuanced. The NEA and AFT will back away from some reform measures; but as Elena Silva of the Education Sector has pointed out (and it is clear from last week’s move by AFT President Randi Weingarten to float a rather weak teacher dismissal overhaul plan), the two unions will have to eventually move toward reform ideas if they want to survive in the long run. Meanwhile the impact of ending collective bargaining, as Dropout Nation and your editor have noted in the past couple of weeks, only means the weakening of some AFT and NEA influence;  their vast campaign war chests, strong funding sources (including from state and district professional development funds), the opposition to reform among suburban districts and even some parents, and the presence of Baby Boomers in the ranks who want to protect their retirements, means that the unions will continue to wield clout in education policy.

The bigger issue has less to do with the back-and-forth. It’s about ideas and their logical consequences and conclusions.

The fact that centrist and progressive reformers are struggling to nuance their positions on collective bargaining points to a problem all reformers share: The reluctance to accept the full consequences of their ideas. Essentially, if you’re going to argue for more-rigorous teacher evaluations, call for overhauling teacher compensation and even support the abolition of state laws that govern such matters as pay scales, then you are essentially calling for the weakening of NEA and AFT influence. This also means you have to accept the abolition of collective bargaining, which all reformers have pointed out is one of the main reasons why teacher quality reforms die in uteri at the district level.

But this isn’t a problem just for centrist Democrats. Conservative reformers have been critical of the No Child Left Behind Act and other accountability measures in large part because in theory, they expand federal education policy (even though the laws actually fully acknowledge that states are the main architects and overseers). But now, they will have to deal with the presence of congressional Republicans such as John Kline, who (except when it comes to things that matter to his district such as special ed) even want to scale back the federal role even further than they desire. And among all reformers, the arguments for the use of value-added in evaluating teachers is such a wonderful idea until advocates and media outlets such as the Los Angeles Times actually goes out and uses the data to assess the performance of actual live teachers.

It’s easy for reformers in the Beltway to posit ideas and advocate for them. It’s harder to make them reality. And it’s even harder to execute them without there being consequences seen and otherwise. Given this reality, it is critical for the Beltway gangs to either accept the full logical ends of their ideas or just stop talking.