When we think of black filmmakers, our thoughts turn to Tyler Perry, photographer-turned-director Gordon Parks, or even to Melvin Van Peebles. But long before Van Peebles even thought of directing a film, there was Oscar Micheaux, who successfully dramatized the lives of African Americans in the early part of the 20th century — and challenged the bigoted thinking of D.W. Griffith and Jim Crow segregationists in the American South with his 1920 classic, Within Our Gates — without any form of support from Hollywood’s studio system. For school reformers, Micheaux’s iconoclasm, entrepreneurial spirit and forceful dedication offers some lessons on the kind of driving forces we need to reform American public education.

At the time Micheaux started producing films, Hollywood had little use for African Americans and gave even less attention to the black experience. Save for the occasional Spanish-American War soldier, images of blacks were relegated to crude, bigoted stereotypes of being chicken thieves, maids and slaves supporting their Antebellum masters against northern denigration of their way of life. Those images became even nastier in 1915 when Griffith adapted notorious (and now-forgotten) preacher-turned-race propagandist Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, Hollywood’s first blockbuster film. The sellout crowds, along with the tacit endorsement of the film by President Woodrow Wilson, helped fuel a period of violent bigotry that included the revival and growth of the Klu Klux Klan as a major political force even in Midwestern and Eastern states such as Indiana and New York.

Stepping in to combat these stereotypes and American bigotry was Micheaux. He was an unlikely filmmaker. The fifth of 13 kids in a farming family who were adherents of Booker T. Washington’s economic empowerment vision for advancing civil rights, Micheaux was sent out early to make his own way. As a teen, his dad sent him into the nearby town of Metropolis, Ill., to market and sell the family’s vegetable harvest. By 16, he had moved to Chicago, where he would work in stock yards, steel mills and as a railroad porter. With a couple of thousand dollars in savings, Micheaux took his money and informal education about what it took to make things happen to tiny Dallas, South Dakota, where he became a homesteader and began writing stories about life as a black man in the western frontier for the Chicago Defender and other publications. From there, he became a best-selling author and book publisher, writing and printing books that portrayed the efforts of  Black Americans to overcome official and de-facto bigotry and attaining economic success.

Micheaux wasn’t the first to realize that offering black film goers a respite from the worst America offered at the time could be both profitable and powerful in overcoming bigotry. Just as Micheaux’s first novel went to press in 1913, another writer, William Foster, had started his own studio and movie theater, followed by Luther J. Pollard four years later.  Micheaux didn’t recognize that he had the capability to get into the film business until two brothers in the film business, George and Noble Johnson, approached Micheaux about adapting his first novel for the screen. Driven by the belief that he should control the means of production for (and the resulting profits from) his own work, Micheaux successfully raised funds from local farmers to start his own studio. His first film, The Homesteader, would become praised as one of the best films about African-American life and became a beacon of pride for blacks tired of white racism.

By 1920, Micheaux stepped up his game and set out to challenge the very assumptions that far too many Americans without a (detectable) drop of melanin  — especially Griffith and a now-near-dying Wilson — had blacks when he produced. The result of that work, Within Our Gates, was decried by whites at the time for its brutal portrayal of lynching — which took the lives of at least 4,743 blacks between 1882 and 1968 — and the terrorism of hard-working blacks by whites. It was such an affront to some that is was banned from some theaters; few versions remain available today. But for African-Americans, the film made clear the terror they felt after race riots in cities such as Chicago the year before — and served as a harbinger of the racial violence to come, especially the race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the destruction of Rosewood, Fla.

What Micheaux did was marry his passion for improving the lives of African-Americans with his entrepreneurial drive and business savvy. He saw what he was doing as both a moral cause — the uplift of Black America from the ravages of discrimination — and economic self-empowerment for himself and the people around him. From his studio in Chicago, he produced more than 44 films, many of which would feature complex characters that portrayed every aspect of black life and interactions with their white counterparts. As Tyler Perry would do eight decades later, Micheaux’s films particularly appealed to middle class blacks, which both guaranteed profits and build and sustain an economic class that turned segregation on its head to form insurance companies, retailers and other forms of commerce.

Given the lack of access to Hollywood’s studio system — in which emerging, well-capitalized, publicly-traded giants such as Loews controlled both production (through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) and the movie theaters in which films were shown –  Micheaux learned quickly how to be savvy in marketing, operations, and production. He timed the premiere of his first film to the arrival of black soldiers returning home after fighting in the First World War. Films such as Body and Soul and God’s Step Children were often one-set affairs, condensing action and drama to a single take. To make films interesting in spite of their poor lighting, he had to develop new editing techniques. One was the cross-cutting, the concept of alternating the action in one scene with that in another. Film goers watching Within Our Gates got to watch the attempted assault of a young woman interspersed with a lynching, getting Micheaux’s message and the accompanying dramatic effect. And while Micheaux could depend on well-trained actors such as Evelyn Preer and Harlem’s Lafayette Players, he also had to another approach with which Perry would be familiar: Taking amateurs off the street and putting them in films, letting them learn on the fly, becoming confident, well-trained actors on the screen. For Body and Soul, Micheaux gave the lead role to an athlete and lawyer who left the legal field to perform on stage. That actor would be the legendary Paul Robeson.

All this savvy allowed Micheaux’s company to survive the Great Depression even as most black studios and many Hollywood outfits either went out of business or were folded into better-financed outfits. It also helped him leave a proud legacy that helped change the world. By the time Micheaux died in 1951, he had managed to advance the slow integration of blacks in mainstream American entertainment and life. The success he had in catering to black audiences led whites (including the legendary John Houseman) to bring more blacks into mainstream theater and movie roles. Micheaux’s work would help pave the way for Dorothy Dandridge to become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood during the pre-Civil Rights Movement era, which in turn, paved the way for Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby and other actors. Without Micheaux, there would be no Van Peebles or Gordon Parks, no Spike Lee or Tyler Perry. Even Oprah Winfrey, who has become as well-known for her business savvy (even bringing in her talent agent and manager in house in order to avoid giving them a cut of her earnings) as for her now-defunct TV show, has used Micheaux as a model for her work.

One can say that Micheaux accomplished as much for Black America as Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. And in some ways, he may done even more, especially for financial and social entrepreneurs regardless of their race or class. He proved that it was possible for anyone to be entrepreneurial, achieve greatness and even change communities and the world around them even if they don’t immediately have access to resources.

And the same steps Micheaux brought to bear in his day must be used by school reformers today.

It will take a collection of men and women with entrepreneurial drive, operational savvy and passion for overhauling education so that all children can succeed in order to take on the challenges of transforming a system that has poorly served so many kids for far too long.After all, reform efforts are wasted if they fail because of bad strategic, tactical and operational decisions. It will also take strong rhetorical and polemical engagement with education traditionalists — many of which are ready to engage in name-calling, sophistry and crude propaganda — in order to win the day. This means being thoughtful and forceful, willing to challenge one’s own assumptions and strongly poke holes in myths, and even using media smartly in advancing support for school choice, teacher quality reforms and Parent Power.

Reformers must also be as savvy with economic, social and political resources as Micheaux had to be in his time. This means embracing what former Urban League president Hugh Price called the impromptu leaders, men and women who don’t come out of Teach For America, may have never been in Education Pioneers and, perhaps, may not even have had an interest in education until they dealt with experiences involving their own kin. This is especially critical. If not for Virginia Walden Ford, D.C. would still be a Superfund site of American public education; without a Gwen Samuel, there wouldn’t be talk about reform in Connecticut and Parent Power movements spouting throughout the country.

For school reformers, it means looking outside the box, looking for hires outside of the TFA alumni circles and putting those who are passionate about and committed to reform into their ranks. It also means working with grassroots organizations and churches, who want to improve their communities and realize that education is at the center of that renewal. And for charter school operators and other school turnaround players, it means putting parents at the head of education decisionmaking and governance. This includes putting parents and families on the boards and advisory councils of charters, and embracing the concept of allowing parents to plan out individualized education plans.

This savvy use of resources extends to the possibilities that can come with digital learning and DIY education. For reformers and families, in particular, DIY education and digital learning offers the possibility of providing high-quality instruction and curriculum that can be tailored to every child’s learning needs and, at the same time, provide those opportunities to all children no matter their racial or economic background. Even teaming up with bookseller giant Barnes & Noble to provide classes and textbooks through a $249 Nook Color (which can then be donated to poor parents in exchange for their commitment to creating classes and tutoring efforts in their neighborhoods) would be an incredible thing to do.

And finally, reformers must embrace their work as a moral force for lifting up communities the same way Micheaux did with his films. As Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone told education philanthropist Katherine Bradley when she began her school reform efforts a decade ago, it is critical to overhaul the schools at the center of the lives of children and their communities. Embracing Micheaux’s stubbornly positive and positively stubborn vision will lead to better schools and better lives for all children, and help our poorest kids avoid the brutality of poverty in their adulthoods.

Now, more than ever, especially as education traditionalists find themselves on the wrong side of history, we need to cultivate more Oscar Micheauxs for the reform of American public education, and embrace the savvy approaches he took to advancing social opportunities for Black America.

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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss how to use data and overhaul traditional school practices in order to foster successful school turnarounds. With more than $4 billion being spent on school turnarounds, it is critical to use student test performance and improve the quality of school leadership in order to fix failure mills and mediocre schools.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player, smartphone, Nook Color or Kindle.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software and Google Reader.

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A chasm of difference exists between classroom teaching and school leadership. Leading kids isn’t easy but it’s far, far, far from the challenge of leading teachers.

For one thing, kids come to school expecting to be changed. Learning changes them; they know that. And they’ve been through the routine of change so many times that change has become routine. Teachers don’t even have to tell kids they need to do things differently; kids know that almost every day they will do something differently than they did the day before.

By contrast, teachers often develop the expectation that they will never have to do things differently. And the way we treat them – boxing them into required curricula, required assessments, and a million other requirements – communicates every day that we expect them to do the same thing over and over, year after year. For teachers, change, when it comes, is almost always scary. And no one really wants to scare teachers, least of all a principal who used to be a teacher himself

Yet almost all principals were teachers. That’s why they entered education as a career. Even as principals, many still think of themselves as teachers first and leaders… never.

As Principal Smith thanks me for my time, and says we’ll meet again tomorrow after school (probably to repeat the same uncomfortable experience), I know that we’ll be stuck in this loop indefinitely. We’ll meet several more times. I will form a plan based on the data and commit to executing it for him. But he will not approve it. Instead, forced by time and the rules of reform, he’ll make the least aggressive commitments he can make in his official School Improvement Plan, goals he knows his school will not meet, plans he knows that he and his staff will be able to execute.

Is he being dishonest? Not at all. He’s paired the plan down to the smallest amounts of change acceptable. And he’s picked a few things to do that, at best, will get him those small amounts of change. But once the plan is approved, he’ll go back to doing what he feels most comfortable doing. And guiding his teachers through change, even modest change, is not what he feels most comfortable doing.

At the end of the year, I will leave, having worked hard but accomplished little, many of my ideas still mulling around in Principal Smith’s brilliant analytical mind—until they simply fade away as summer vacation begins.

Principal Smith and I both like and respect each other, but we know we’ll never work together again. He’ll likely recommend me to other principals in the district. But my work with them will reach a similar stalemate as most of Principal Smith’s colleagues are not that different from Principal Smith.

Most were good teachers; some were even great. But they were tapped for leadership positions and given roles to which they were not naturally suited and have had difficulty adjusting to. The changes wrought by a decade of school reform have made that adjustment even harder.

The Only Way Out is Up

The best way out for a Peter Principal is, of course, up. The most conscientious, those who probably could be effective building leaders, often find themselves promoted to the district office where, once again, many of their natural traits and tendencies render them less than fully effective.

Reform requires leadership. Districts tap their best leaders at lower positions to take on leadership roles at higher positions. But each rung of the ladder requires different competencies, and the better someone is at one level, the worse they may be at another, at least at the beginning, and in many cases forever. We have to solve that problem in order for any and all reforms to work.

The solution to the problem is to keep people where they are most effective. We might call this a “talent-in-place” approach. But in order to do this, we have to give talented people some place to grow that isn’t a different job. We also have to pay them more.

This is easier than it sounds. Look at the natural growth that occurs for most career teachers: student teacher, new teacher, teacher, mid-career teacher, master teacher, instructional coach (teacher of teachers), instructional specialist (mastery of subject or technique), and so on. There’s a career trajectory here. To make this trajectory real, we have to trade the traditional “step and lane” system for a competency-based rank system similar to what we see in other public sector professions. We can have meaningful career choices for great teachers that keep them growing within their greatness – and within their classrooms as well.

[My Dropout Nation colleague, RiShawn Biddle, argues that there needs to wider options than that, allowing teachers with entrepreneurial drive and leadership ability to move into school leadership jobs. He also argues that the solution for these problems starts with how we recruit and select aspiring teachers in the first place.]

We desperately need our best teachers to stay in the classroom. We also need our best principals to stay in their buildings. What we definitely do not need are any more top teachers becoming average principals, competent curriculum specialists, so-so assessment directors, and over-loaded compliance officers parceling out formulaic federal funding.

Neither do we need great building leaders leaving for cushier district office jobs. We need a competency-based career path approach for principals, too—something that’s just a little more sophisticated the traditional “principal or vice principal” paradigm.

Dig In or Peter Out

Almost all of the people I work with at the building and district levels started in education as teachers, and we’re pretty darned good at what they did. Had they stayed in the classroom all these years, they probably would have become master practitioners. But they got promoted, and many simply petered out in terms of their effectiveness and their commitment to work as hard for the people they managed as they did for the kids they taught.

Solving the “talent” problem in schools requires making the best use of the talent we already have. We don’t need ex-Fortune 500 CEOs and former members of The Joint Chiefs of Staff; we don’t need Superman or Wonder Woman to swoop in and save the day. What we need is career-track specialization.

At the very least we need to professionalize teaching and school leadership in order to grow and keep the next generation of ultra-talented educators applying their talents, over many years, to the same roles, but at different levels, within the system. Just as many doctors continue to doctor throughout their careers, lawyers lawyer, and accountants account, great teachers must continue to teach and great principals must continue to lead. The key is to create new paths for growth—paths that include increased autonomy, compensation, and respect—that will inspire growth-oriented people to get better and better at what they do best.

“Talent-in-Place” models are the only models that make sense during a time of reform. Taking our most talented people and moving them into roles where most will end up being competent at best, dilutes the talent pool in two places simultaneously: the place we took them from and the place we dragged them to. The net effect is a double loss we can’t afford.

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Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century-Fox and Gracie Productions

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. It is the age of evaluation, it is the age of indecision. It is the epoch of reform, it is the epoch of intransigence. And for middle school Principal Smith and me, at the end of this school day, it is a time to look at student achievement data and formulate a school improvement plan.

Thirty minutes into working with Principal Smith, I notice that our normally friendly session is getting a little tense. There are only two of us in the room, and I’m enjoying myself because school-wide strategy is my favorite kind of work. But Principal Smith, who is often wiped out by day’s end, is looking more and more wiped out by the numbers we’re sifting through. Even though I’m in the room at his request; even though I can already see clear patterns in the data and straightforward solutions to raise student achieve; even though I am fully committed to carrying any amount of Principal Smith’s load in this process; he seems unwilling to share the burden. The test score data, and the necessary change it implies, is weighing him down.

The more we analyze the data, the more excited I get, and the less excited he gets. I love change; he loves stability. I love to discover the patterns that inspire me to conceive bold solutions to big problems; he seems more comfortable with analysis, as if a murky indeterminacy relieves him—at least momentarily—from the pressure of strategic planning and serious decision making.

It is the best of times for me, it is the worst of times for him. I want to plan and do; he wants to sit and think.

Fifteen years ago, Principal Smith was one of his district’s best math teachers and I was a technology entrepreneur. I’m sure Principal Smith was a better classroom teacher than I was a tech CEO. He won a “Teacher of the Year Award” and was beloved by all. I never won a thing and barely kept my tiny ventures moving forward and my small teams paid until my last company was acquired and I left the business world to begin learning about school. But after starting and running three companies, I’m probably as comfortable leading adults through change via data-driven decision making as he is teaching the Pythagorean Theorem.

The problem, I realize in this moment, as Principal Smith shuts down the meeting half an hour early, is that we’re not in a high school math classroom, and that the work we have before us is more suited to my personality than to his. This isn’t about brains, talent, drive, or intent; he’s a more talented educator and we both have the same good intentions and reasonable smarts. Principal Smith is a good principal; he and I like each other and work well together. But there is a difference between being a talented teacher, an instructor of children, and being a talented leader of adults. When math teacher Smith became Principal Smith, he seemed perfect for the job, and the job seemed perfect for him. He loved it and felt good about his ability to manage a school.

But now, it’s time to lead a school.

Lead, Follow, or Stay Stuck Where We Are

Moving talented teachers into positions of school leadership was was a problem even before the standards-and-accountability began and the emergence of the use of data in education was brought to fore in 2001 with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. But then, the issue of school leadership was never as important as it is now.

As my Dropout Nation colleague, RiShawn Biddle, notes, NCLB didn’t so much expand federal education policy, but formalized the role of states in shaping education policy and emphasized the importance of changing curriculum, instruction, and assessment as the primary means of improving student achievement. At the same time, NCLB also made the school the fundamental “unit of reform”, and in so doing made our nation’s 100,000 school principals the most important players in the game, and the “principalship” the prime point of leverage for reform in education. But the law didn’t offer much that might help principals become change agents. Nor did it provide increased capacity for new school leaders from within education or without.

For the last few years, Principal Smith has been tasked with raising test scores, improving teacher evaluations, making smarter hires and harder fires, implementing new and more aggressive programs, becoming an instructional leader in subjects he’s never even taught, and staying on top of AYP. He gave up being a leader of children in order to be a manager of adults. He has discovered that this is a very different thing. He’s competent but no longer excellent. A once-great teacher is now a merely good principal. His results as a principal have nothing to do with how hard he works, how smart he is, how much he cares, or who he brings in for help.

Even though Principal Smith has me, and I have solutions I can implement for him, he’s simply not comfortable leading his people through significant change. So the ideas are worthless because they will never be used. In fact, the better my ideas are, the less likely Principal Smith is to feel good about them because he knows that the quality of the change initiative itself will be a source of significant anxiety for his staff. Better a weak plan than a strong one. A weak plan is less threatening, and therefore more willingly adopted, because it’s more likely to fail and to be abandoned.

Principal Smith was a great classroom teacher, and he still is. He could lead even the least interested kids through algebra and geometry. But he has come to dread leading his staff through anything other than their perfunctory staff meetings—and he has even cut those down to one a month.

He has tried every angle to motivate himself and his teachers. Nothing has worked and everything has felt unnatural to him. Leadership—of adults—feels unnatural to him. In some ways, his own astounding success as a teacher gets in his way. He knew he never wanted his principals to lead him anywhere. “Academic freedom” was always sacred to him and he appreciated the latitude he was always given. It’s hard for him to make others do things he wouldn’t want to be made to do himself.

In the last few years, the pressure to create change has gotten stronger and Principal Smith has gotten weaker—at least where his desire for leadership is concerned. He remains a responsible manager of his school. But his stomach doesn’t feel right when he has to have serious talks with his staff about school performance. He’d probably head back to the classroom, but he also can’t stomach the thought of teaching in a test-driven reform climate. In any case, after several years with a principal’s salary, and the lovely house he was able to afford because of it, he can’t take the pay cut.

As the famed management thinker Lawrence Peter would say, Principal Smith reached the limits of his competence; he has become The Peter Principal. Relative to the challenge of leading a school through data-driven change, his low appetite for change, once buoyed by optimism, is beginning to peter out, too.

The opening coming up next year at the district office for an assessment director is looking better and better. He doesn’t mind at all looking at data and organizing data. He just doesn’t like having to do anything about data. The new job would be comfortable. The pay would be comparable. If he could get out of the pressure cooker he’s in now, maybe he could learn to like dealing with student achievement data and federal compliance guidelines. He’d probably get the job, too. He’s well liked. He’s good with numbers. And he’s learned how to make charts and graphs of data of going nowhere. But then, maybe he’s on a career path to nowhere.

He still loves the kids. He still loves math. And he’s finally willing to admit that working in the classroom was where he was always meant to be. Too bad he won’t be going back.

A Double Penalty

Principal Smith’s district lost a great math teacher, gained an average principal, and is well on its way to having a disinterested assessment director. Having tapped an obvious leader for a mid-management role, Principal Smith’s school district made the classic mistake so many organizations make. And as education is being transformed, it is a mistake whose consequences are dramatically amplified.

To get an idea of how crucial this is, consider this: At Principal Smith’s school, his lowest test scores are on the 10th grad math test. If he were teacher Algebra and Geometry, instead of just worrying about it as he does now, he would be affecting one third of the school’s test-taking population in math. If his scores were 20-30 points higher than the other two Grade 9/10 math teachers, (a reasonable difference between average teachers and a top teacher), he alone could directly raise the passing mark for his entire building dramatically. This is a feat he cannot even come close to achieving as principal even if he spends most of his time coaching his math teachers, something he also isn’t that good at because, again, he values teacher autonomy so highly as a result of the autonomy he was once granted.

Being great at something usually means a person is naturally well-suited to it in some way. People who are so well-suited to one thing, are often ill-suited to others, especially if those other things require a very different set of social and emotional competencies, or what we might generally refer to as personality traits. For Principal Smith, his naturally patient, thoughtful, and analytical approach to teaching was perfect for both his subject and his students. Just by being himself, he provided extraordinary stability and consistency for his students at a time in their lives when they really needed it.

But change cycles, characterized by rapid iteration, were never his style.

Mr. Smith was a patient and disciplined teacher, a master of mathematics, and an articulate presenter with a likeable low-key demeanor perfectly matched to helping teens ease their way into serious college-track calculating. His moves were always well-reasoned and predictable. He followed his curriculum, not in a slavish way, but in a way that both he and his kids always knew where they were and what was coming up next. Change proceeded incrementally and, after his first couple of years, he could predict when and how change happened in his classroom, and how to make it happen even for his least interested students.

Mr.Smith’s personality formed the foundation of his success as a teacher. But in an age in which principals must also be strong leaders, his strongest traits and most valued habits of mind have become his Achilles Heel. He is risk-averse and often gets mired in analysis paralysis. Because school data never seems to add up as easily as math data, he never really trusts his numbers. And if a mathematician can’t trust his numbers, how can he trust himself?

Tomorrow: Peha discusses what steps must be taken to improve both school leadership and teaching.

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This Thursday and Friday, Dropout Nation takes a look at why defenders of traditional public education struggle against the intellectual, moral and political forces behind the nation’s school reform movement. Today, Contributing Editor Steve Peha — who straddles the fence between both sides — wonders why status quo defenders can’t offer their own compelling vision. Tomorrow, Editor and Publisher RiShawn Biddle will offer a few answers. Read, consider and offer your own thoughts.

People ask me a lot of questions about education. These days, people are asking, “What’s Bill Gates up to?” I think they want me to say, “No good!” But I don’t. Instead, I say something like this: “Bill Gates is doing the same thing he’s always done—trying to make the world a better place.” People hate this answer, but I believe it’s true.

Bill Gates is a smart man. Two things make him even smarter: he doesn’t worry about making mistakes and he doesn’t care what people think when he does. If it seems he’s playing a big part in the present evolution of American education, it’s probably because he doesn’t waste time fretting about the future or pouting about the past.

Perhaps it is precisely because of these qualities that so many people believe that he must have a hidden agenda—some intricate plot to realize a grand hegemonic dream of controlling American education from a Windows-based smartphone. But I think most of us mischaracterize him, his motivations, and his foundation. In the process, we miss an opportunity to be just as intelligent and influential.

What Would You Do?

What if you had big dollars, an agile mind, and a sincere desire to change your country’s education system? My hunch is that you’d study a lot, listen to experts you liked, speak and write about your ideas, and use your money and reputation to realize your vision of the way you think things should be. That’s certainly what I’d do; I think that’s what most people would do. And that’s exactly what Bill Gates is doing.

Furthermore, if you had created one of the largest and most successful businesses in the world, you’d probably apply many of the same business principles you’d been so successful with to education.

And because education is not a business, you might make some mistakes.

Your mistakes (along with your determination and efficient disregard of criticism) might make people nervous; they might think you were arrogant, narcissistic, or just uncaring. Such is the case with the way many people in education feel about Bill Gates. Many of us are nervous because he wields great power and influence, and because, in our opinion, he doesn’t always make good decisions.

No one in education, however, has a perfect batting average. So what it comes down to is how many times one gets up to the plate. Bill Gates gets up to the plate very often. His detractors, by contrast, are rarely even on the field, preferring instead to heckle from the stands.

Is it possible that one of the most successful entrepreneurs in American history might have a little more confidence in his own judgment than many of the rest of us do? Might that cause him to back a bad idea once in a while? Or to make inaccurate statements in important speeches? Or to fund dubious ideas simply because he can afford a trial and error approach? Like all entrepreneurs, Bill Gates often takes questionable but well-calculated risks. But this is hardly the stuff of Darth Vader.

Who Ya Gonna Trust?

Many people do not trust Bill Gates. They think he’s up to something. And they’re right—he’s up to changing American education. But to say he’s “up to” it is merely to say he’s got the courage to take strong positions and to back them up with strong actions.

Some of us may be losing sleep over this, but I can assure you that Bill Gates is not. Unlike many of us who wear ourselves out with worry, I imagine that Bill Gates bounds out of bed each morning bright-eyed and battle-ready.

Most of the time, most of us tend to trust the people we think are a lot like us. On many issues in education, I trust people like Anthony Cody and Richard Rothstein. Both of these men—Mr. Cody an educator; Mr. Rothstein a policy analyst—have published very successful disagreements with Bill Gates. They’re also not billionaires (as far as I know), so they’re a little easier for me to relate to.

But if they were billionaires would they be doing anything different than using their resources to promote their ideas about education to change it to fit the way they think it should be? And if one of them suddenly hit the PowerBall would it make sense for me to switch my allegiance to under-funded underdogs just because wealthy people sometimes make me nervous? [Addendum: During the editing process, a couple of paragraphs were inelegantly summed up in an earlier version of this piece for space considerations, stating that Mr. Cody was already advocating his ideas with other people's money. This unfairly puts him in the same category as Rothstein, who, as an employee of a think tank, is doing so. Dropout Nation regrets that inelegant summation, which didn't fully reflect Steve's thoughts.]

Mr. Cody and Mr. Rothstein are people I admire greatly. I like to think that if most Americans understood what they had to say, and heard them say it regularly, their thought-leadership would drive the national dialog. In the game of ideas, both of these men—and many other sharp folks—easily beat Bill Gates in the game of edulogic.

While his detractors play their game from the grandstand, he plays the real game—up at bat taking his cuts at wicked sliders and fastballs so fast they make Stephen Strasburg look like a little leaguer. The best his critics can hope for is that he strikes out. But he’s smart enough to remember that even a .300 hitter can make the Hall of Fame. He also knows that heavy hitters who swing for the fences strike out a little more often than those who focus on singles and sacrifices.

The Secret Recipe

The secret recipe for serious change in America has always been more or less the same: well-articulated ideas backed by money brought to bear on important problems through constant exertions of power and influence. Bill Gates knows this recipe well. To many of the rest of us, it’s something of a mystery. Even if we do understand it, it still feels wrong somehow—like an injustice, or an affront to democracy, or sometimes merely distasteful. Much as I consider myself a passionate advocate for education reform, Bill Gates’ approach feels uncomfortable to me.

Fortunately, the secret recipe is not a secret. Anyone who has studied even a small amount of our nation’s history and politics knows it by heart. For good or ill, it’s simply the way we do things in America.

So why don’t the folks who are so concerned about Bill Gates use the same secret recipe he does? Why don’t they do the money, power, and influence thing? The Gates Foundation doesn’t really spend very much on education each year—only a few hundred million dollars. That’s nowhere near the largest part of their portfolio.

There are many people on, shall we say, the “progressive” side of life, who are just as smart and just as interested in education as Bill Gates. While perhaps not as individually wealthy, a group of these people could easily pony up the same kind of cash the Bill & Gates Foundation does for school reform. So why can’t we get George Soros involved? Or Arianna Huffington? Al Gore’s made a buck or two in the last decade or so, and I think his progressive bona fides are still intact.

And why does Bill Gates automatically get Bono on his side? Why didn’t we call him first? (Or at least get The Edge.) Did we forget to buy enough U2 albums? Or did we merely forget that one the world’s most enduringly popular rock stars is smart as a whip, socially aware, and probably committed to some of the same things we are? Sometimes I think that part of our problem is that our side doesn’t know how to use a Rolodex.

What about Spielberg? Beatty? Penn? Clooney? These guys have big hearts, big bank accounts, and progressive outlooks. Or how about John and Teresa Heinz-Kerry? Russell Simmons and Magic Johnson would surely have plenty to offer. There’s Jobs, Woz, Ellison, and the whole Silicon Valley crew. Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy could certainly be doing something more powerful than Curriki, and George Lucas could make a huge impact if he morphed Edutopia into something focused on defining high quality teaching.

Why can’t we pull folks like these together around our vision of a better education for every child?

For that matter, why is Michelle Rhee the only person beating the bushes for a billion dollars this year? She seems no more popular in many education circles than Bill Gates. Her record in education has certainly been less than perfect, and she’s said and written things far worse than any influential philanthropist. If she can find a million fans and raise a billion dollars, why can’t we?

Don’t think we’ve got the cash? Wrong. Teachers union dues, for example, amount to a far greater financial influence than that of Bill Gates; it’s just that unions don’t get very much for the money they spend because they tend to spend it on the wrong things. Instead of being angry with The Gates Foundation, why not create a foundation to counter its work in some constructive way that adds value to the national dialog?

There is no mystery about Bill Gates (or Michelle Rhee); there is nothing untoward that he is “up to”. He’s trying to do exactly the same thing we’re trying to do; he’s just mastered the game. The mystery is why we’re not stepping up to challenge him on the same playing field. Those of us who disagree with him may feel anxious and frustrated. We may impute sinister motives. But that doesn’t rock the vote as MTV likes to put it.

What we need is not more carping about Bill Gates, or Michelle Rhee, or TFA, or KIPP, or any of the other powerful and prominent entities with whom we may be uncomfortable. What we need are entities just as powerful making a different case for improving education in America—the case we believe in—by marshaling the same type of resources and influence.

In the end, the question isn’t, “What’s Bill Gates up to?” He’s just changing education in a way that matches his worldview using the strategies that work best in our culture. The real question is, “What are the rest of us up to? If what’s holding us back is some awkward sense that people just shouldn’t play this way, or that large scale education problems should be worked out differently than we work out every other kind of problem here in America, then we’ve got something much bigger to worry about than what Bill Gates is up to.

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For those of us who cover the nation’s education crisis, it is easy to joke about the ranting and raving of some defenders of traditional public education, who have what they consider to be clever names for charter schools and impugn the motivations of reformers with wealth (even as they defend teachers unions who bring in $622 million every year through dues collected forcibly from teachers who may or many not even support their aims). But those cat calls are nothing compared to the nasty and condescending comments about children and their parents that comes out of the mouths of teachers and school leaders each and every day in forums private and public. Their words, along with the actions that reinforce their statements, do far more damage to the lives of kids than any jokes about charter school naming rituals.

The latest example of this comes courtesy of Charles Epps, the superintendent of the woeful Jersey City school district, who declared on Wednesday that the young women attending the traditional public schools there were “our worst enemy” in his (abysmal) effort to improve education in the district and prevent school crime. He also declared that many of the kids in his district are “dirty, nasty, bad” and praised volunteers for sullying their hands with them. Yeah. This came from a school superintendent who apparently flunk P.R. 101. Of course, he has since apologized for his remarks. How nice.

To declare that Epps deserves censure is an understatement. His lowly record of failure in running Jersey City’s schools should have led New Jersey state officials and the school board to remove him a long time ago. His crass, hurtful attitude about the very kids for whom he is supposed to care pretty much shows that he shouldn’t be allowed in a school building, much less given the top job of running the district. Epps doesn’t deserve his paycheck. One can even say that it is underlying disdain for the very kids in his district that is a critical reason why he is such an abject failure as a school leader: If you don’t care for kids, you cannot do the hard work of transforming the quality of instruction, curricula and leadership that is needed to give kids cultures of genius in which to succeed.

The sad part is that Epps isn’t alone among teaches and school leaders in his words, attitudes and deeds. Within the past month, teachers in three different states were suspended for their hurtful actions towards kids in their care (including labeling one classroom of kids as being “future criminals”). We also know that these attitudes — which help foster cultures of low expectations in dropout factories, failure mills and mediocrity warehouses — are manifested every day. As I noted in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, there are kids every day who are told that they will never achieve, are too feeble to learn, and are damned with misconceptions that poverty is destiny — even as the data shows that the problems lie with adults who have bought into myths of what kids of certain races and economic backgrounds can do. These are also the same officials who regard parents — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — as afterthoughts and worse.

Even worse is that these conditions are aided and abetted by defenders of traditional public education practices, who argue that the problems of American public education cannot be solved until poverty is eradicated and parents and other reformers are kept out of schools. They defend near-lifetime employment in the form of tenure and weak rules on evaluating teachers and principals that help keep Epps and other so-called educators in their jobs. They oppose efforts to actually determine whether aspiring teachers are fit for the classroom, both in terms of their subject-matter competence and their empathy for children in their care. And, as seen in Jersey City, where the pastors at the event at which Epps spoke seemed to nod approvingly at his statements, they stand idly by as the most-abusive of teachers and leaders continue their malpractice. This is not only damaging to kids and their families; high-quality teachers and leaders who educate the kids as if they are their very own also end up struggling against the bilge of indifference and neglect that they should never have to deal with in the first place. Every one of their colleagues should be as empathetic and caring to kids as they are; these good-to-great teachers deserve better than the likes of Epps and his ilk.

American public education needs a housecleaning. And it should start with getting rid of the Charles Epps whose educational abuse, neglect and malpractice should have never been defended in the first place.

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