Photo courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor

A few folks may have had some hopes that when Benjamin Todd Jealous announced last month that the NAACP would unveil its first education advocacy agenda since the height of the Civil Rights Movement five decades ago. The fact that the work was being funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also offered some possibility that the grand dame of old-school civil rights groups would offer a school reform agenda that would actually meet the educational and civil rights challenges facing Black America today.

But as I noted last month, part of the NAACP’s agenda focused on cutting criminal justice spending, which would actually do little to solve the underlying cause of high levels of imprisonment — the low quality of education in America’s schools (and the racial, ethnic, gender and economic achievement gaps that they help foster). And now, Jealous and company once again are wading in on the wrong issue in education: The fractious battle over  school zoning policy in Wake County, N.C.

For the past year, the majority on the board of the 167-school district have been pushing to return to zoned schooling, essentially eliminating the array of magnet schools and other options created as part of a three decade-long desegregation effort. The NAACP’s local branch, along with ivory tower integrationists such as Richard Kahlenberg (who has touted Wake County as an example of the academic success that can come from integration) have essentially accused the board of trying to return back to the racial segregation of the past.

This tenuous argument would only hold if the current school attendance arrangement was anything close to the wide-ranging intra-district choice ivory tower civil rights activists proclaimed it to be. In reality, fewer than a fifth of students attending them; most Wake County students were attending schools within five miles of their own homes. Only 33 of the district’s schools (less than 20 percent of the district’s schools) are magnets, which meant that the offerings were always more limited than national perception.

The bigger problem lies at the fatal conceit of the view of the NAACP and its allies in the ivory tower: That economic and racial desegregation will lead to improvements in student achievement. This hasn’t borne itself for the most part, and it definitely hasn’t in Wake County. Even as Wake County was paraded around by the Kahlenberg crowd as an exemplar of how integration improves student achievement, the district itself admitted there were still wide achievement gaps along race and economic lines.

In a a 2007 report, the district noted that the math performance of black and Latino middle graders was behind that of their white and Asian peers. Fifty five percent of Latino male middle-schoolers and 45 percent of their black males counterparts had math scores below Levels III and IV of the state’s standardized tests. Despite the abysmal performance. the district still promoted 95 percent of its students; just 4.5 percent of all students (and only 8.5 percent of black and Latino students)  were  held back.

Of course, Jealous and the Kahlenberg crowd would argue that integration is critical to improving educational opportunity for all kids — and that it is true to the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement of five decades ago. But what both sides fail to understand is that desegregation was pursued mostly as a last resort; blacks wouldn’t achieve it immediately through the fiscal means (equal funding of schools) simply because of the opposition of Jim Crow segregationist-controlled school boards and legislatures. The idea that blacks would gain a better education (and greater entree into society) by merely rubbing shoulders with white kids and attending their schools was only a secondary thought.

What NAACP’s leadership doesn’t fully seem to understand — despite Jealous’ own response last month to the complaints of ivy tower civil rights guru Richard Kahlenberg to the contrary — is that desegregation alone will not address achievement gaps or improve the quality of education for poor black and Latino kids. Desegregation efforts in the 1960s and 1970s did help middle class blacks gain greater access to society; but they, like their white middle class schoolmates,  were already guaranteed some level of it. But for poor blacks or Latinos (and even for poor whites), desegregation merely guaranteed that the instruction and curricula they would receive would be just as desultory in diverse classrooms as they were in segregated ones. Until there is an overhaul of instruction, curriculum and state laws and teacher contracts that essentially lead to poor schools getting low-quality teachers, integration will remain what Charles Ogletree called a false promise. (By the way, the NAACP’s other efforts on the school reform front do include sensible ideas as increasing the school day.)

This doesn’t mean that Wake County’s efforts to go back to zoned schools makes sense; as discussed on last week on Dropout Nation, restricting school choice is antithetical to ensuring that education is the civil right it is supposed to be. At the same time, the NAACP has picked the wrong education battleground. It should have chose better. This isn’t to say that schools shouldn’t be economically or racially diverse — it’s certainly a worthy goal — but it hasn’t worked in giving all children the high-quality instruction and curricula they need to write their own stories. Integration has to be secondary to systemic school reform.

While others are focused on the silly argument over whether Joel Klein’s successor as New York City’s schools chancellor, Cathleen Black, is qualified to run a school district (Dropout Nation’s answer is yes), our Contributing Editor, Steve Peha, is still thinking about what he considers the failed promise of the other superstar among reform-mineded current and former school chieftains, former D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. He offers some more thoughts today as part of the  series Still Waiting in D.C.:

So far, we don’t know if Mayor-Elect Vincent Gray’s interim chancellor, Kaya Henderson, is a dainty scamperer. If she turns out that way, we’ll know what Mr. Gray’s campaign against Michelle Rhee was about: Bring in the bruiser to knock things around, knock her around, and then send her packing, while Dr. Caspar Milquetoast takes the credit for ushering in a new era of consensus-driven leadership—and the coinage of yet another oxymoron. This group leadership thing never makes any sense to me: even a young lad in grammar school, I knew that “leader” was a singular noun. But rules we teach in one part of education are often contradicted in other parts of education.

No matter what happens, while Rhee’s work will survive for years to come, the end of her short tenure troubles me for several reasons. I discussed some of them last month. Here are more:

I had hoped she would become a model of a new kind of big city school leader. At such a young age when she was hired, she could have served her city for decades, ushering in dramatic change while also preserving stability.

I had hoped that Rhee would validate Teach For America’s real promise — that of putting new people into the field of education for long and highly influential careers — would be validated at the highest level. (Perhaps it has been and I just don’t feel it.)

I had hoped that D.C’.s schools would one day become the best urban schools in our nation. In some respects, this is selfishness on my part. I’m just embarrassed that my nation’s capital city treats its citizens so poorly at times.

I had hoped that a replicable model of school governance and successful reform might emerge. Sadly, Rhee leaves nothing replicable behind, least of all her approach to school leadership.

Clearly, I didn’t get what I wanted out of this deal. Sadly, I have no one to insult, threaten, or belittle as a result. For that, there’s plenty of culpability go around. I will admit that Rhee is to me still something of an enigma, a Sphinx-like riddle I can’t puzzle out. How someone so committed to the welfare of children would leave those kids behind after an election result that did not go in her favor.

I’m sad this didn’t work out. I’m frustrated, too, as I’m sure are many D.C. residents, that such a promising opportunity ended so poorly for everyone.

As with much of her moves, Michelle Rhee’s long-expected departure from her job as D.C. Public Schools chancellor captured plenty of attention, with focus on her new Facebook page and whether her successor will continue her reform efforts. But does Rhee’s resignation serve the kids of D.C., who are in need of a high-quality education?

But Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Steve Peha has his own thoughts. In this latest installment of Still Waiting in D.C., Peha argues that Rhee should have stayed put and did the work needed to ensure every child in . While one can argue with this position — I would argue that the political realities (no matter what incoming Mayor Vincent Gray says) dictated that Rhee would be forced out within the year and reform would not continue — Peha’s argument merits consideration.

“My goal is to continue to be able to serve the children of this nation,” said outgoing D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michele Rhee — as she resigned.

Why not continue to serve the children in D.C?

Had anyone fired her? Had any of her reforms been undone? Actually, presumed mayoral successor Vincent Gray said Rhee’s reforms would continue.

So why does Ms. Rhee think serving the children of our nation’s capitol is incompatible with serving the children of our nation?

Very rarely does a district leader walk out during the middle of a school year. Even those who are “fired” or simply “not renewed” typically serve out their term, or at least the current school year. A dedicated school leader can get a lot done, even in a lame duck year. But only if he or she is truly dedicated.

By resigning, Ms. Rhee is once again showing us the true complexity of heroic leadership in education reform. As D.C.’s school “Superman”, she has used her formidable powers to do great things. But with other places around the country in need of help, and with what Ms. Rhee perceives as a negative referendum on her work, she seems all too eager to head off to greener pastures.

There are only four problems with this.

First, there are no greener pastures. This is a mistake we all make in our lives we confuse ourselves with our situation. Would some places be more hospitable to Rhee than others? Perhaps. Will she run into the same criticisms and roadblocks? Probably. So why not do what we tell our own kids to do and learn to solve problems where we are instead of simply running away from them.

Second, it isn’t clear that Gray’s victory over Fenty was a referendum on Rhee. After all, Gray has met with her since the primary and has said her reforms would not be over-turned. Maybe the people of D.C. just wanted a new mayor. Perhaps, had the election been a vote on Rhee versus no Rhee, the tally would have been different. No one told her to leave, at least that we know of. And yet, off she goes, right in the middle of a school year.

Third, Rhee got a lot done in three years. Even serving just one more could make a big difference to D.C.’s kids given her talent and drive. And with this the first year of her historic pay-for-performance contract negotiated this summer with the American Federation of Teachers’ D.C. local, I would have thought she’d be at least a little curious to see how things turned out.

Fourth, it is extremely rare for even the most despised school leader to leave at the beginning of a new school year. Even in situations where a district knows a leader will not return in the fall, the most likely scenario is that he or she will serve out the year for the sake of preserving continuity if nothing else. Losing Rhee in October hurts D.C. more than losing her in June.

Now, it could be argued that her continued presence in D.C. would be a distraction. But only if she chose to make it one. Since Gray has said publicly that what she started will be continued, who better to continue it?

Pre-emptive resignation has become commonplace in public and professional life. People do it all the time, like Sarah Palin, for example, and the reasons are probably as varied as those resigning. But one consistent theme rings true in most cases: people who resign before their work is done, or before they are asked to leave, are resigning to serve their own needs and not the needs of those they swore to serve when they accepted the position.

It is said that one cannot serve two masters. And that is probably as true in this case as it is in most. Rather than choosing to serve the children of D.C., Rhee chose to serve herself by resigning early so she can have a little time off to perhaps write a book, get ready for her Oprah appearance, or tour the country with screenings of “Waiting for Superman”.

This sheds yet more light, I think, on the nature of heroic education reform. I think we can expect, as time goes by and more heroes step up to the plate, that if they don’t like what the opposing pitcher is throwing, or how the ump is calling the balls and strikes, that they’ll step out of the batters box and move on to play somewhere else. This is their right, of course, but I think it also sets a bad precedent, one that the notion of “Waiting for Superman” only exacerbates.

It takes many years to turn a school system around. Rhee was just beginning her fourth. She had made some progress. But her best years were probably yet to come. D.C., and to a certain extent our entire nation, as “waiting” for her to be an unqualified success. But reaching this result would likely have taken at least another 3-5 years, maybe more. But today’s heroic reformers have many opportunities, so why stick around any longer than they want to?

Because it’s the right thing to do.

In a nation that is “Waiting for Superman”, the clock gets reset every time Superman jets off for another destination. The very inertia that Ms. Rhee was successful in breaking through easily sets in once again while DC waits for the next Superman to come along—even if Mr. Gray adopts a stay the course strategy.

If you’ve been around education reform for much of the last 15 years or so, you’re probably familiar with the “hurry up and wait” feeling of it all. One of the reasons we probably aren’t getting much traction is that it’s hard to get traction when things change so rapidly. Big city school leaders rarely stay long enough to finish the jobs they start. Each new “hero” hired is hailed as the latest savior. Naturally, the expectant public waits for miracles, signs of the divine, Lazarus-like district programs rising from the dead.

And then Superman or Jesus Christ or whoever it is ships off with some odd statement about not wanting to be a dead salmon or having done what I came here to do or wanting to spend more time with family or, ironically, wanting to stop serving the children of one part of our nation so she can move on to serve the children in another part of our nation.

But what about the children Ms. Rhee was already serving? Why should they have to wait for the next hero to show up and save the day?

Start the music. Get the chairs. I think a new ed reform game has just begun.

Heroic leadership is looking less and less heroic all the time. The recent big city school leader manifesto was little more than a publicity stunt propped up by tepid ideas and bland promises. If this is the kind of reform they plan to make manifest, I think we’re all going to be a little disappointed.

Heroes, for all their luster, seem to tarnish pretty easily in this business. And then they like to take their ball and go home. Knowing that big change in big city districts requires a big commitment of time, they role in guns-a-blazin’ but then seem to roll out, for one reason or another, before the work is done and time is up.

Starts are so much easier than finishes. Clean slates require no erasures. And who can resist that new school district smell?

What I’m beginning to wonder is whether we need heroes at all. Maybe what we need are mentors instead. Seth Godin, marketing-maven-turned-new-economy-thought-leader, and best-selling author of Linchpin, had an interesting take on the difference between the mentors and heroes in his blog today:

“Mentors provide bespoke guidance. They take a personal interest in you. It’s customized, rare, and expensive. Heroes live their lives in public, broadcasting their model to anyone who cares to look.”

The word “mentor” comes from The Odyssey. When Odysseus left for The Trojan War, he realized that he would need someone to guide his young son Telemachus as he grew up. The person he chose was his friend Mentor.

In effect, Mentor served as a surrogate father to Telemachus, and because Odysseus took a little longer to get home than anyone thought, Mentor ended up caring for Telemachus form boyhood through to manhood.

This kind of long term commitment is probably what most school districts require. It takes thirteen years for kindergartners to become graduates, and so we might contend that a decade or more of mentoring is required to break free of old inertia, to break old boundaries that establish a new order, and to break through old expectations to new and higher levels of sustainable success.

Heroes, as Godin notes, are not cut out for this kind of service. Their very nature as public figures and their way of “broadcasting their model to anyone who cares to look”, means that being looked at is often on their minds. Mentor wasn’t managing a career when he took on his responsibility for an old friend, he wasn’t establishing a new model of fathering for war-going parents, or setting up a chain of franchised childcare centers. He was raising a human being.

Michele Rhee is part of that new and very rare breed of ed reform heroes broadcasting her model for all to see. Heroes are good. After all, Achilles and Odysseus both get much more ink in Homer than Mentor. But maybe it’s mentors that we really need in the big chair, people willing to stick it out until the job is done.

Mentors do the quiet work, the patient work, the hard work, the work that people don’t make documentaries about. But it’s also the important work of nurturing the next generation. And that’s what schools need most, isn’t it? People willing to stick it out until the work is done. People willing to serve the needs of children rather than serving themselves.

When Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his bid for a second term, few cared to speculate about his future in politics  (some would say he doesn’t deserve one). But the future of the reform of D.C. Public Schools — once the Superfund Site of American public education — and its chancellor, Michelle Rhee, on the other hand, has been of great interest. Given the gains the district had made during her tenure (including the implementation of a true merit pay system and the IMPACT performance evaluation system), how would Fenty’s successor (and ardent Rhee foe), Vincent Gray, tinker (and, quite likely, mess up) what Rhee wrought.

Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Steve Peha gleans some lessons from (and offers his thoughts on) the Rhee era in a five-part series that will run over the next couple of weeks — and what school reformers should (or shouldn’t do) when it comes to undertaking overhauls of traditional school districts. I disagree with some of his arguments (I would say that Rhee behaved admirably, for the most part, given that she was taking over one of the nation’s most-dysfunctional school systems; she also needed to take up a high profile in order to survive in a job that is often plagued by turnover and political intrigue; and the race issues in D.C. would bedevil any reform effort). At the same time, one has to give Peha’s arguments much in the way of consideration:

I wrote previously that the biggest lessons we would learn from D.C. Public School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s tenure would not emerge until long after she had left. That may still be true. But in the wake of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s re-election loss, I think we may learned three important things already:

1. When adults act like children they don’t act in the best interests of children.

Chancellor Rhee wasn’t always on her best behavior. She said some childish things, took actions that could be interpreted as spiteful, and seemed to actually enjoy making people angry. I’ve read leadership books from Dale Carengie to Stephen Covey but I’ve never seen “immaturity” listed as a winning strategy.

Then, too, Rhee’s detractors seemed to delight in the umbrage they took in her unfortunate behavior. It was as if being offended by Ms. Rhee became a popular local parlor game. People who took this tack took their eye off the ball. The point wasn’t was Rhee’s lack of respect; the point was whether or not she was improving DC schools. It seems to me that she was, that this is primarily what made people dislike her, and that using someone’s success against them isn’t particularly mature either—especially when the lives of children are involved.

2. “Mayoral control” may be the newest oxymoron in education reform.

Mayor Fenty ceded control of the DC schools the moment he hired Ms. Rhee. Perhaps this was his intention. If it wasn’t, it seems odd that he did so little to school her up on DC politics or to help her tone down her discourse. If Fenty did exert mayoral control, perhaps it came in the form of agreement with the methods and the madness of his Chancellor. Either way, it doesn’t seem like the DC schools have been under mayoral control during Ms. Rhee’s tenure.

One might think reflexively that for big city school districts, mayoral control is an obviously superior form of governance. But its inherent instability is a problem. Most change initiatives in school systems need more time than most mayors are given. If mayoral control means anything at all it means that with each new mayor, a new kind of control asserts itself. The logic is straight-line-simple: Rhee is tied to Fenty, Fenty loses to Gray, DC has to start over. Mayoral control may curb the excessive factionalism and tortoise-like pace of the traditional school board approach but what it gives up in directness is easily taken away at the ballot box. Continuity suffers because if either the Chancellor or the Mayor changes, the pace of progress changes, too.

In reality, even the strongest and most able mayors may have little control over their schools. For one thing, they spend a lot of time trying to control other things. For another, they never know if they’ll be around long enough for the small amount of control they do exert on schools to make a difference. The Rhee-Fenty phenomenon, and the problems DC will have sorting it out in the near future, may finally show us that mayor control isn’t much better than what we had before, and that yet a new form of school governance is needed.

3. “Waiting for Superman” is a good title for a movie but a poor strategy for improving schools.

When Ms. Rhee arrived, it seemed to many around the nation that DC had been waiting a long time for someone to come along and kick things into gear. Ms. Rhee was a celebrity of sorts from the moment Mayor Fenty hired her. She represented youth, energy, and a new way doing business in big city schools. She was a symbol of hope for a city that seemed to have little and a nation that wanted to believe she could beat the odds and develop a model the rest of us could follow. In the end, even her immense skill and power were not strong enough to counter the Kryptonite of a deeply offended electorate.

Some of Rhee’s detractors contend that most of what has improved during her watch is the result of her predecessor’s efforts. No way to sort out that counter-factual. Which is precisely why it’s such a strong argument for the anti-Rhee crowd. Does DC really want to turn the clock back to Janey? Having been “not rehired” in Newark, he’s available. Regardless, there’s little point in trying to disaggregate the accomplishments of a past school leader from those of a current school leader who will likely be leaving soon.

So D.C. will be waiting once again. Waiting until Mr. Gray is elected. Waiting until he fires Ms. Rhee or she quits. Waiting until a replacement is named. Waiting until Rhee’s replacement arrives. Waiting until the new Chancellor figures out what to do next. In the meantime, will inertia take hold once again? And if so, will the next Superman be up to the task of battling the forces of evil—or even just good old-fashioned entropy?

Better, I think, to give up on this “superman complex” we all seem to have. Better, too, to stop waiting for someone else to fix the problems in our schools. Education is a massive web of infinitely interlinked and seemingly intractable complexities. This isn’t a job for Superman. It’s a job for everyman—and everywoman. It’s a job for all of us.

This year’s primary election returns turned out to be early returns for DC schools, too. A mayor’s term will end and soon a term of great change in DC schools may also come to a close. I wonder if, when all those people were voting, they thought about the cost of losing a year or two of momentum in their schools. Or perhaps that’s exactly why they voted the way they did. The votes have been cast and counted in Fenty’s race, but in Rhee’s case, perhaps we have only the early returns. It’s easy to understand the implications of a lame duck mayor, but what will it mean to have a lame duck Chancellor, too?

What if every school was a charter school? Or a private school? It should happen in the Big Easy -- and elsewhere. (Photo courtesy of colorlines.com)

As much as defenders of traditional public education complain about additional funding and efforts to expand charter schools, the vast amount of attention and funding in school reform is focused on overhauling traditional school districts. reforming traditional school districts. From the $3.5 billion in funding from the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program to much of the funding for Race to the Top, the real action remains in saving a model of providing public education that have proven to be inefficient, allows opponents of reform to stubbornly resist any change and captured by political and regulatory structures that benefit the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers over the kids that are supposed to be educated.

But what if the traditional school district model was abandoned altogether? This could be a possibility in New Orleans, where the state-controlled Recovery School District — which took over schools once ran by the woeful Orleans Parish school district after Hurricane Katrina — is putting itself out of business. What could happen in the next few years could serve as the first step in developing a form of what I call the Hollywood Model — essentially getting rid of school district bureaucracies and allowing individual schools to operate akin to Hollywood producers, actually handling actual classroom instruction.

The official plan, according to Louisiana’s school superintendent, Paul Pastorek is to allow the 33 schools to go back under the Orleans Parish school district (which ran most schools in the Big Easy until Katrina) or choose to be under the watchful eye of the state. But there is a catch: New Orleans Parish can only gain oversight over the soon-to-be-former Recovery district schools if they govern in a “21st century manner”, that is, the district will only serve in an oversight role similar to what the state would do instead of operating schools. The Recovery District schools, on the other hand, will operate on their own. Essentially, the Orleans Parish wouldn’t be able to go back to its old ways, poorly managing schools, tolerating internal corruption and failing students and taxpayers alike.

It isn’t that Orleans Parish would be in any position to do any more damage or take on operation of these schools. The district, once a sprawling bureaucracy of 103 schools, now operates just seven; given that it authorizes and regulates seven charter schools on its own, it doesn’t have the capacity to oversee the Recovery District schools. So it is more than likely that the schools will end up becoming charters and fall under state oversight.

NOLA is already several steps in the midst of the Hollywood model. After all, public charter schools (which operate independently of any central district) enroll 57 percent of all students and account for 75 percent of all schools in the Big Easy. Converting another 33 traditional schools into charters wouldn’t exactly put a strain on the system. But it would force Louisiana officials to consider its own capacity for regulating so many schools from Baton Rouge. The biggest obstacle in abandoning the school district model remains the reality that most state education agencies are ill-equipped to manage their own operations, much less provide wide oversight over tens and hundreds (much less thousands) of individual schools. The lack of strong governance is one complaint lodged against the Recovery District by those New Orleans residents who remain skeptical of a school choice model of education.

For the schools themselves, the question is how to provide those very services — transportation, school lunches and building maintenance — that would otherwise be provided by a central district — especially since Orleans Parish (which would otherwise handle those functions under my original thesis) wouldn’t be able to do so. Once possibility: Groups of schools teaming up and contracting out those services to outside vendors, something that think tanks such as the Reason Foundation (with help from Deloitte Consulting’s Bill Eggers) have floated in discussing how to improve traditional district operations. Another is to bring in more charter school operators such as the Knowledge is Power Program and Green Dot Public Schools; but that would also lead to complaints that public education is becoming a private business (even though education has always been as much a business as a means of building the minds of people).

What happens in New Orleans may actually reshape what happens in federal policy. The Obama could abandon the emphasis on school turnarounds — which like those in the private sector, succeed only a fifth of the time (at best) — and focus on developing new structures for educational governance and foster charters, vouchers and other kinds of schools. The administration could even take some Title I funding and actually put it into efforts that will elevate families to their proper roles as kings and lead decision-makers in education.

Ultimately, what will happen in New Orleans with the end of the Recovery District will be interesting to watch. After all, we already know that the traditional public school district is obsolete and not worth preserving as a model for educating our children. Now, we must replace it with a model that works for all children.

Five years ago, amid all the talk about charter and vouchers, I had proposed a reform of how we structure public education that departed from the concept of school districts and school boards. Calling it the Hollywood Model, it is based on how the entertainment is structured: Major studios handle financing and distribution; independent producers handle the actual movie-making; and post-production houses handle the ancillaries. In education, a district would no longer be in the business of actually educating students, but handle such matters as distributing funds and providing transportation services to an array of independent community, charter, private and parochial schools (along with solo tutoring by independent teachers) that actually handled academic instruction. Other outfits would handle such matters as special education services and afterschool programs, freeing up schools to focus on what they should do best.

Half a decade later, amid all the debate over the possible impact of President Obama’s I3 reform effort, folks such as Rick Hess and Mike Petrilli are coming close to my conclusion: A radical departure from the school district concept is necessary. From where Hess sits in particular, neither most school reformers nor defenders of the status quo are having a much-needed conversation about how the very governance and delivery structure of American public education must be radically transformed altogether; I3n in particular, will do little more than support well-worn (and already-subsidized) efforts such as the controversial Success for All.

This isn’t an inconsiderable issue. One of the biggest challenges to school reform is structural. In California, for example, the byzantine array of state agencies and boards that govern the K-12 and higher education systems — a legacy of the Progressive Era of the 20th Century — complicates even efforts to develop a fully-longitudinal data system. While other states don’t have educational structures that are as monumentally cumbersome, they still have the basic school-district-state board-state education department-teacher licensing structure — and face the same bureaucratic and special interest challenges. Although a few states (Florida and Indiana, to name two) have succeeded in overcoming structure to make reforms a reality, this has happened only because of the hard work of school reformers both within and outside the system. And in any case, none have been able to fully overhaul how public education does its most-important job: Educating children so they can fulfill their educational, economic and social destinies.

But at this moment, not even Hess, Petrilli (or Petrilli’s boss, Fordham Institute President Checker Finn), offer a workable solution. Fordham, in particular, has argued for eliminating local school boards — which are often an obstacle to reform (and in other cases, are rarely unified enough to lead an overhaul) — and it is a seductive solution. But currently, this means moving local school governance up to state education departments. Given their abysmal record in taking over local schools and whole districts — and their overall lack of capacity to do this work — it may be unworkable. Allowing third parties to handle governance — a feature of charter schools in Indiana, Ohio and New York, in particular — may work. But as Fordham notes in its own experience, this isn’t easy to do. Ultimately, both approaches are just nibbles around the edges, not true overhauls. Nor does it help foster other changes needed to improve the quality of education — including expanding the array of compensation needed to recruit high-quality talent into teaching.

This is why the Hollywood Model must be part of the school reform conversation. A 19th century system isn’t going to get the job done in 2010.

Observations on what is happening in school reform today:

Fizzled Out of Touch: Last week, the NAACP and other groups pronounced that they were coming out with a grand manifesto challenging the Obama administration’s school reform efforts. Folks such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson of the Rainbow/PUSH coalition were to show up and complain about how the administration’s approach to education was failing the very poor students it was supposed to help — even though their own prescriptions were little more than overheated old-school concepts that have never worked in the past 40 years. But by Monday, two of the groups — including one run by charter school supporter Al Sharpton — declined to participate in the grand attack. The manifesto (which did have some laudable goals) was trashed by all but the most-stubbornly pro-status quo of pundits. And by Thursday, some of the players were declaring that they were behind Obama while the administration — including the president and  U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan –  took turns slapping around the groups over policy.

Certainly the Obama administration did a successful behind-the-scenes effort of diffusing the old-school civil rights tirade. The lack of support for the manifesto from the National Council of La Raza and other Latino civil rights outfits also weakened their efforts. But it was more than that.

Within Black America, there is a lot of disagreement between old-school civil rights players — who continue to see integration, busing and equity lawsuits as the cure for achievement gaps between blacks and whites — and the younger generation of African-Americans, who understand that more-systemic reforms (including breaking ranks with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers) is critical to black economic and social advancement. This generational and attitudinal divide (which has only become louder in the past couple of years) has resulted in many of the groups becoming irrelevant in the school reform conversation — and the discussion about improving the lives of African-Americans overall.

The NAACP, in particular, can no longer claim to be representative of all African-Americans — especially on education. It has spent most of the past two decades dealing with internal discord and overcoming its creakiness. Over the past two weeks, it has seen its stature fall further as it rushed to judgment over Shirley Sherrod and spent more time on racist elements within the Tea Party movement than on considering Duncan’s demand for them to join the school reform movement. As more blacks — especially celebrities such as John Legend and Fantasia — have become more-supportive of charters and the Race to the Top initiative, they are finding other organizations and methods to wield influence and mobilize like-minded colleagues (of all races) towards their own concerns. They have cut the NAACP out of their considerations.

Meanwhile other old-school civil rights groups are rife with constituencies who are charter school supporters — and in fact, started their own schools; integration-minded constituents can rile up anger all they want, but the groups can’t afford to alienate school reformers within their own groups without endangering their own pockets. When it comes to Obama — the nation’s first black president — the groups must also be careful, especially since some of its leading members (such as Jackson) were none too fond of him back when he was a U.S. Senator (and in some cases, didn’t even back him during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination against Hillary Clinton).

For these groups to remain relevant, they must adapt the school reform agenda, as the United Negro College Fund has done under Michael Lomax (who sits on the board of the Education Equality Project); the 100 Black Men is another example; , it cofounded the Eagle Academy Foundation, which operates two boys-only charters in New York City. If they don’t, they will face more than another Chicago-style tongue-lashing from the Commander-in-Chief.

Still Not Fessing Up Save for the back-and-forth between Andy Rotherham and Michael Petrilli, inside-the-Beltway education sparring tends to be done politely in dry language (and more viciously during drinking sessions). But on Thursday, the Center for American Progress’ presentation of its report on the low quality of teacher training programs brought out a battle royal between the American Association  of Colleges for Teacher Education — the leading trade group for the nation’s ed schools — and the leading critical of ed school training of teachers (and, nearly everything else about how teachers are recruited, retained and paid), the National Council on Teacher Quality.

After NCTQ boss Kate Walsh tore into ed schools for lacking rigor in their teacher training curricula — especially in special education — and state teacher certification agencies for their cozy ties to those schools and their parent universities, AACTE’s Jane West accused Walsh of making “sweeping statements” that were “off the mark”, as well as attacked its underlying methodology for evaluating ed schools (especially in Texas, the site of NCTQ’s latest ode to teacher quality failure). West then went on to praise the quality of special ed teacher training — and went on a tirade about the school reform movement’s failures to address special ed overall.

So as not to give the impression that Dr. West fully ignored the problems of ed school training, she did admit that there are issues. But she largely laid their causes at the feet of state legislatures (for laws that are restrictive about teacher data), school districts (for their unwillingness to share that information because of fears of violating FERPA), and the lack of political will to shut down poor-performing programs. But there are problems with those excuses. Ed Crowe, the author of the CAP study, reminded West that other professions — including medicine and nursing — took strong efforts to improve training and certification long-before state regulators got into the game. Besides, as Crowe said, “political will isn’t a gift”, groups gain it as a result of doing the hard work to gain consensus (or steamroll opponents).

By the way, don’t forget that AACTE is a huge recipient of funds from the National Education Association — the most-fervent obstacle to teacher quality reforms — including the use of student test data in teacher evaluations (which AACTE members would also use in their own evaluations). This includes $252,262 in 2008-2009 alone.

Meanwhile, Dr. West seems to forget that NCTQ’s research stands up to scrutiny — especially when one considers the evaluations of ed schools by others. This includes CAP — whose report is blistering in its criticism of ed schools — and Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College, who noted that 54 percent of teachers are trained at schools with low admissions requirements. These issues have become more embarrassing as alternative teacher training outfits such as Teach For America have emerged as the high-quality teacher training regimes of choice for school districts. As Walsh — who wants ed schools to actually turn around their performance — noted: “Most superintendents are eager to hire [Teach For America's] bright young talents.”

What ed schools fail to realize is that it is their very desultory quality of training that has helped sustain the nation’s educational crisis. They are also the reason why teaching isn’t highly respected as a profession (even though teachers are highly beloved as individuals). By keeping their collective heads in the sand, ed schools are merely aiding their own slide into irrelevance and worse.

Given that Teach For America (along with The New Teacher Project) trains just 7,000 of the 200,000 or so new teachers who come into American public education every year, ed schools must stop the rhetorical shuck-and-jive. Or else they will end up being replaced by the alternatives.

Standing in the Shadows of Fail: Detroit lived up to its reputation as the place where common sense — and care for the futures of children — goes to die. Despite the efforts of Mayor Dave Bing and even U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan, the city council voted 6-to-3 to not place upon the ballot a referendum that would have placed Motown’s atrocious school district under mayoral control. Why? Some, including onetime acting mayor and former city council president Ken Cockrel, declared there was no public demand for it.

Now, one apparently hasn’t been reading the local papers, or looking outside. But this doesn’t matter. From day one, seven of the nine council members were opposed to mayoral control. The current city council president declared it publicly. Old-school groups (who form the base for these members) were opposed to it, as were the school board (which hasn’t had control of the district since it fell under state receivership last year). They essentially opposed reform in spite of decades of evidence that the public school system is the new Superfund Site of American public education.

So let’s be clear about this: Once again, Detroit’s city council behaves irresponsibly towards its citizens — especially its children — because its majority has lost site of what matters most: The children who must attend this atrocity of a school system. For these politicians, the discussion about mayoral control is just another game. But for the kids and their families, it’s a lot more than that. It’s their educational, economic and social destinies at stake. Perhaps the parents should exercise their power and send their children to any of the new charter schools being opened in the city in the coming years. And while they are at it, vote out the city council once and for all.

As I have opined numerous times here and elsewhere, one of Race to the Top’s biggest flaws is that it isn’t ambitious enough. There aren’t enough players in education competing for the $3.4 billion in remaining funding; it is only a nudge toward reform not a truly bold step; and it doesn’t take advantage of the clever competition approach that has succeeded so far in getting states to take on the reforms they should have been pursuing in the first place.

What are the five steps President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan should undertake in future rounds? Here are some thoughts:

• Allow school districts, charter school networks and grassroots organizations to compete in future rounds: Obama and Duncan have already said they want to allow districts to apply for Race to the Top funding. They should. Expanding the pool of Race to the Top applicants to include school districts—including reform-minded systems such as New York City and Los Angeles Unified—would force school districts to seriously change their own practices and restructure their relationships with teachers unions. Allowing districts, along with charter school organizations such as KIPP, grassroots activists and even PTAs, would also place pressure on states participating in the competition to embrace bolder reforms.
• Increase the rewards for embracing reform: Temporary funding isn’t enough. School districts must also gain additional rewards from participating and winning funding. One possible reward: Allowing winning districts to become enterprise zones of sorts, freeing them from state laws governing collective bargaining agreements and teacher dismissals.
• Parental engagement must factor into the equation: The fact that California’s Parent Trigger law, along with the expansion of charter schools, is the only tool for parental engagement emerging from Race to the Top is shameful. For the next round, the Department of Education should require applicants to enact policies and laws that place parents in their proper place as consumers and kings in education decision-making.
• Use Race funding to scale up alternative teacher training programs: Teach For America and other alternative training programs have proven they can do as good job — and particularly, with TFA, even better — than university schools of education. But there aren’t enough of them to improve the quality of school district teacher corps. Encouraging districts and charter schools to work more-closely with alternative programs (and also focus on boosting the number of men and minorities in the teaching ranks)
• Forget consensus: Contrary to proclamations from Jon Schnur and others, consensus among stakeholders is critical element of winning Race to the Top funding. It shouldn’t be. True leadership often involves breaking with those groups that refuse to move away from a crippling status quo. More importantly, school districts and state education leaders must take a more-assertive stance in their relationships with teachers unions, revamping an oft-servile relationship that yields little for students, schools and even individual teachers. Rewarding states such as Florida for taking aggressive reform measures — even if the state needs work on other elements of its application — is crucial to making Race to the Top a truly bold reform measure.

At this moment, Race to the Top is more of a nudge toward school reform that a bold leap. Considering the dropout crisis — and that 1.2 million children drop out every year into poverty and prison — nudges aren’t enough.

A book a day keeps kids on good math progress. Photo courtesy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

If you want to understand the underlying reason why 150 high school students drop out every hour, simply consider the math performance of Atlanta Public Schools’ 4th-graders on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress and their likely performance as 8th graders four years later.

Back in 2005, 43 percent of Atlanta 4th-graders performed Below Basic on the math portion of the NAEP, with students averaging a scale score of  221, seven points below the average for their peers in other large cities (and 16 points below the average for all public school students nationwide). While just four percent of white 4th-graders scored Below Basic, 49 percent of black students scored Below Basic. Sixty-six percent of learning disabled students and 34 of regular classroom students also scored Below Basic.

Four years later, the students — now 8th graders — have gotten taller. Their academic performance, on the other hand, hasn’t gotten better. Fifty-four percent of 8th graders scored Below Basic on NAEP — a full 12 percentage points increase over the past four years; the average scale score of 259 was better than the scores four years ago, but it still trailed the average of 271 for their peers in other large cities and 282 for all public school students). The academic failure is even more pronounced: Eighty-four percent of learning-disabled students and 51 percent of regular classroom students scored Below Basic on the assessment.

Certainly the low quality of math instruction is a major problem for Atlanta students. So are the standards under which they are taught; back in 2005, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute complained that Georgia’s math standards placed “too much emphasis on calculator use and manipulatives throughout” (although middle-school algebra and geometry was considered grade appropriate).

But the biggest problem may be the simplest: The kids can’t read.

There has long been evidence that the stronger one’s reading comprehension, the more likely they are able to handle the rigors of math. A team led by University of Arizona researcher Carole R. Beale, for example, determined that the math performance of English Language Learners progressed as their reading proficiency increased. This is especially true as students reach latter grades, as simple math computations give way to word problems and abstract math concepts such as algebra and trigonometry. If an 8th-grader struggles to read a passage in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, then  figuring out the answer to “This year, your brother Jack will be 2 years from being twice as old as your sister Jen” will be a gargantuan challenge.

This is evidently true in the case of Atlanta students. Fifty-nine percent of Atlanta 4th-graders scored Below Basic on the 2005 NAEP. Low reading proficiency may also explain why so many Atlanta students are labeled learning disabled in the first place. Poor reading skills can be mistaken for developmental delays, landing students into special ed classes where the chances of improving academically go to die.

Intensive reading remediation is probably the key solution for improving math skills in the long run. Bolstering reading instruction, especially at the early grades, is crucial. A community effort to read to kids (especially in poor neighborhoods home to dropout factories) would help too. The better a child reads, the better he will do in math. And vice versa.

The good news — if you can call it that — is that just 37 percent of Atlanta 4th-graders taking the 2009 NAEP scored Below Basic. It’s time for Atlanta Public Schools to get going on the intensive reading remediation these kids need.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I offer a few reasons — and statistics — for why American public education must be reformed. Far too many children are either dropping out or leaving school unprepared for life in the real world. The numbers may shock you — and hopefully, will spur you into action.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network and Zune Marketplace.