35

The percentage of all eighth-graders in the United States scoring Below Basic on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That is lower than the 37 percent of all eighth-graders who were scientifically illiterate in 2009.

32

The percentage of all young men in eighth-grade scoring Below Basic on NAEP science in 2011. That is a three point decline from the number of scientifically-illiterate young men in 2009. Thirty-five percent of eighth-grade young men scored at proficient or advanced in science, a mere one point increase over 2009.

37

The percentage of young women in eighth-grade scoring Below Basic in science in 2011. That is a mere one-point decline from the number of scientifically-illiterate young women in 2009. Only 28 percent of young women scored Proficient or Advanced in science, just a one percent increase over 2009.

63

The percentage of young black eighth-graders who were scientifically illiterate in 2011 according to the 2011 NAEP; it is a four percent decline over 2009. But still, young black eighth-graders trail every racial and ethnic group; only 10 percent of young black students scored at Proficient on NAEP Science 2011, a two percent increase, still trailing every peer group. The average black student also had the lowest average scale score on NAEP science, scoring only 129 points on the exam, versus 137 points for the average Latino peer, 141 for the average Native American peer, 160 points for the average Asian student, and 162 for the average white student.

52

The percentage of Latino eighth-graders who were scientifically illiterate in 2011 , a five percent decline over 2009; it is the largest decline in science illiteracy among all racial and ethnic group. Sixteen percent of Latino students scored at Proficient on NAEP Science 2011, a four percent increase over the same period two years ago; it is the largest increase in science proficiency levels for any racial group (followed by American Indian and Alaska Native peers, whose percentage increased from 17 percent in 2009 to 20 percent in 2011).

68

The percentage of black eighth-grade boys eligible for free- and reduced-priced lunch scoring Below Basic on NAEP Science in 2011, a five percent decline over 2009. Fifty-four percent of Latino male counterparts scored Below Basic on the science portion of the national exam in 2011, also a five point decline. Both groups had the largest decline in science illiteracy in the two-year period; but still, two out of every three young black men and one out of every two young Latino men were scientifically illiterate. (One out of every three young white men in eighth-grade from poor households — and two out of every five Asian male counterparts — struggled with scientific literacy.) Meanwhile the percentage of young Asian and Native American males who were scientifically illiterate had increased in that same period.

8

The percentage decline in the number of black and Latino eighth-grade boys not eligible for free- and reduced-priced lunch scoring Below Basic on NAEP Science between 2009 and 2011, the largest decline in scientific illiteracy among all groups. The percentage of young American Indian and Alaska Native men who were functionally illiterate declined by seven percent during that same period. Still, one out of every two middle class young black men — and one out of every three of their Latino and Native American counterparts — struggled with science literacy in 2011, while one out of every eight of white and Asian peers were scientifically illiterate.

7

The percentage decline in the number of American Indian and Alaska Native eighth-grade young women eligible for free- and reduced lunch scoring Below Basic on NAEP Science between 2009 and 2011, the largest decline among all groups; the decline for black, white, and Latino eighth-grade women from poor backgrounds was five percent in that same period. Still, three out of every five young Native American women, three out of every four young black women, two out of every three young Latino women, and two out of every five young white women from poor households were scientifically illiterate in 2011.

10

The percentage decline in the number of young Latina eighth-graders from middle-class homes who scored Below Basic on NAEP Science between 2009 and 2011, the largest decline among all groups. The decline in scientific illiteracy among young black women eighth-graders declined by only three percent in that same period. Still, two out of every five Latina students and one out of every two young black women couldn’t handle even basic scientific concepts.

Science, technology, engineering, and medicine are among the most-important fields in the increasingly knowledge-based global economy. Yet far too many American students — including young women, Native Americans, and black and Latino children — are struggling to master such facts as which atoms make up a molecule of water. Even worse, while there are programs such as Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program and FIRST Robotics that are immersing kids in physics and building technology, we have far too few teachers equipped to teach science, and expose far too few young black and Latino kids to strong, college-preparatory courses that can challenge them and build up their science knowledge. And because of the low quality of reading and math instruction in the early grades, far too many kids are ill-prepared to handle the abstractions that come with understanding astronomy and other aspects of science.

This state of affairs is intolerable. It is why we must push harder to transform American public education. When one out of every three of our kids are scientifically illiterate, the nation’s economic and social future is at risk.

Dropout Nation’s raw analysis of NAEP Science 2011 data is available for you to peruse. 

Contrasts in Leadership: Plenty can be learned from the weak work of Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley on school choice, and the strong efforts of Bobby Jindal in Louisiana on more ambitious reform efforts.

If you want to understand why gubernatorial leadership matters in overhauling American public education — and why school reformers must mobilize politically in order to gain traction for their efforts — consider the profiles in courage -(or lack thereof) of Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal in advancing their respective school choice and systemic reform plans.

Earlier this year, Bentley proposed a law that would allow for the existence of 50 public charter schools — and he knew he faced an arduous task. The Iron State remains one of seven states that don’t allow for any real form of school choice thanks to muscle-flexing of education traditionalists such as the National Education Association’s Iron State affiliate and school districts that are often the biggest and most politically-influential employers in the state. Back in 2010, Bentley’s predecessor, Bob Riley, with leverage courtesy of the Obama administration in the form of the Race to the Top competitive grant initiative, pushed hard and unsuccessfully for passage of his charter school plan against a then Democrat-controlled legislature fully under the thrall of the state’s educational status quo.

So Bentley knew he was going to have a tough time even with a Republican-controlled legislature in place. And he did, thanks to vitriol from NEA and school district officials, along with the religious- and immigrant-baiting rhetoric (especially the fear-mongering about possible presence of successful charter school operator Harmony, with its ties to Turkey’s Gulen Movement, coming into the state to run charters that education traditionalist groups such as NEA beneficiary Leonie Haimson’s Parents Across America have also begun to embrace). But instead of fighting hard, Bentley jas seemed to have all but abandoned his own school reform effort. The legislation itself, which aimed to only allow 50 charters to be authorized, showed early on that Bentley lacked a profile in courage. Save for a trip to visit a charter in New Orleans and an occasional word or two, Bentley has been missing in action on advancing the charter school bill. No wonder why the proposed bill is on the legislative version of life support.

Meanwhile in Louisiana, Jindal offered an even more ambitious collection of reforms. This included expanding the state’s voucher plan from serving just 3,000 children in New Orleans to as many as 300,000 kids statewide stuck in dropout factories and failure mills; and a teacher quality reform package that would effectively end near-lifetime employment for laggard instructors. And the challenges Jindal faced were just as tough. Bayou State districts, which nearly succeeded in ending the original voucher program some years ago, were even more opposed to the expansion plan. Meanwhile NEA and AFT affiliates were even more vocal in lobbying against Jindal’s teacher quality reforms, even staging protests at the state capital in Baton Rouge to make their point.

Yet Jindal stood strong against the state’s educational ancien regime, going so far as to call out the executive director of the NEA affiliate for declaring that poor and minority families are too incompetent to make smart school choices. And Jindal’s aggressive stance, along with the strong lobbying of Parent Power and school reform groups, proved to be successful. By April, Jindal’s entire reform package passed into law with bipartisan support, angering education traditionalists across the nation hoping for a much-needed victory in a reform-oriented state.

Certainly the fact that Louisiana already has robust forms of school choice in place — including the entire city of New Orleans in which 80 percent of students attend charter schools — gives Jindal an advantage that Bentley doesn’t have. But Bentley really doesn’t have much of an excuse. After all, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is successfully withstanding pressure from teachers’ union bosses in his own efforts on overhauling teacher evaluations, while Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber successfully passed a law that puts him directly in charge of education policy in the dual role of state superintendent. More importantly, Bentley hasn’t even used the advantage of having majority Republican control to get anything done; this is opposed to the success California’s former Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had in getting  a series of reforms — including the nation’s first Parent Trigger law and tying together student performance data to teacher performance data — passed by a Democrat-controlled legislature during his last two lame duck years in office.

What does matter is leadership, the willingness to stand up and strongly push for policies and ideals, especially amid hostile opposition from those who benefit fiscally, politically, and ideologically from the status quo remaining ante. The reality is that Bentley isn’t much of a leader on systemic reform, while Jindal most-certainly is. Which is why school reformers must work hard on the ground to elect governors who will stand up and be counted to help our kids get high-quality schools fit for their futures.

One of the realities in American public education today is that reformers must work hard at the state level in order to transform our failed systems. Given that state constitutions put governors and legislatures in charge of providing public education to children, and that districts are merely tools of state governments, this has always been true. But since the 1960s, the  successful lobbying efforts by NEA and AFT affiliates to force districts into collective bargaining arrangements that have helped render them servile to union demands, and the passage of property tax relief efforts such as California’s Proposition 13, have greatly expanded the state role in shaping education. The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, along with the Race to the Top initiative and President Barack Obama’s senseless No Child waiver gambit have merely signaled this reality.

With state governments effectively in charge of shaping education, the role of governors in education have grown even more prominent. Certainly not all governors have direct authority over state education departments; in fact, only 12 states allow for the governor to appoint chief state school officers, while 33 states grant governors the power to appoint the majority or all of the members of state boards of education. But power over education doesn’t simply rest on actually overseeing state school boards and agencies. Through their roles overseeing state budgets (all but seven have line-item veto power over fiscal spending plans), their critical role in promoting economic and social development, and the bully pulpits they control as state chief executives, governors can do plenty to shape education policy and advance systemic reform.

Indiana's Daniels (sitting alongside state schools superintendent Tony Bennett and state higher education commissioner Teresa Lubbers) has been a profile of courage on school reform.

If anything, one of the most-important lessons from the states where school reform has gained the most-traction is that strong leaders serving as governors can advance reform even if the governance structures aren’t necessarily in their favor.

Outgoing Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, for example, has no line-item veto power over budgets (and in fact, must gain approval for fiscal adjustments from state legislators on a budget committee he technically co-chairs) , and save for appointing the state board of education and half the members on the Hoosier State’s education roundtable, doesn’t directly oversee education. Yet this hasn’t stopped Daniels from advancing reform. From teaming up with state Supt. Tony Bennett on a series of teacher quality reforms, to successfully convincing legislators to launch what is currently the nation’s largest school voucher program (until Louisiana’s new program gears up), Daniels has shaken off his initial reluctance to take on school reform to become the kind of leader needed in a state chief executive.

Daniels’ counterpart in Michigan, Rick Snyder, is also technically hindered by a governance structure that effectively gives him little control over education policymaking; the state superintendent is appointed not by Snyder, but by an elected school board upon whose board the governor sits as a mere ex-officio member. But in the last two years, Snyder successfully passed a law that expands his ability to appoint emergency financial managers over fiscally faltering school districts (along with other municipal governments), pushed successfully for a teacher quality reform plan, and successfully advocated for a law expanding charter schools (including virtual charter school operations) throughout the state. This hasn’t exactly come without some political damage — notably with an ally, state Rep. Paul Scott, losing his seat in a successful recall driven by the NEA affiliate there. But Snyder has managed to get plenty done in just two years in a governance structure that doesn’t favor gubernatorial intervention.

Then there is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who does have a stronger role in controlling education with his ability to appoint the Garden State’s education commissioner, but must work with a Democrat-controlled legislature — and an NEA affiliate that has long-sustained the party’s political coffers. But thanks in part to his hard-charging persona, the realization among voters that the Garden State must wrangle with $58 billion in retiree healthcare liabilities for teachers and other civil servants, and the support of a cadre of centrist Democrat school reformers such as state assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver and her patron, state Sen. George Norcross, Christie has been able to pass some modest changes in teacher compensation, is pushing for expansion of school choice, and has started a much-necessary conversation about overhauling teacher evaluations.

What all three have in common is a willingness to use their considerable reserves of political support to advance reform, even when education traditionalists and their fellow-travelers seem to have public opinion on their side. They used their bully pulpits effectively, framing the need for expanding choice and overhauling teacher quality in the context of the economic and fiscal challenges facing their respective states. Each are willing to suffer temporary political setbacks, even when conventional wisdom (and the maxim of politics being the art of the possible) dictates that they should take a proverbial few slices instead of grabbing the entire loaf. All three are not necessarily accommodationalist by nature; it helps that they aren’t necessarily trying to stay in office just to hold power, which usually leads most politicians to agree to compromises that do little to advance their vision.  And from their offices, they successfully built coalitions for reform, rallying school reformers, business and civic organizations, and grassroots activists on the ground.

These important traits are typical with strong and effective leaders, regardless of the issues they undertake in the political and social arena. But as seen in the case of Daniels, Snyder, and Christie (and clear in the successful work of these are traits that are especially important in reforming American public education. After all, the penchant for false collaboration that achieves little for the futures of children is endemic within education traditionalist circles; there’s no incentive for those in those circles who may realize that traditional public education policies and practices no longer works for taxpayers, families, or children to support any changes that will anger friends and allies. More importantly, strong leadership isn’t about trying to deal with just the challenges of today, but advancing a vision that will position communities and states for the changes that are coming. And this especially true in an increasingly global economic age in which what you know is more important than what you do with your hands.

In short, the small ball-weak kneed approach to advancing systemic reform at the heart of Bentley’s efforts in Alabama, as well as those of counterparts such as Virginia’s Bob McDonnell, just won’t do. Nor will the head-in-the-sand obstinate opposition to reform represented by Schwarzenegger’s successor (and predecessor), Jerry Brown (and that of outgoing Washington State governor Christine Gregoire) will do either. This doesn’t mean that a governor will always win passage of a reform (something that Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy is learning all too well) and it doesn’t mean being popular. But it does mean that strong gubernatorial leadership matters, especially in building long-term support for sytsemic reform. Which means that school reformers must put more strong leaders in office by playing more-prominent roles in the political realm.

It starts by backing gubernatorial candidates regardless of party affiliation who will fight hard for systemic reform. This means a centrist Democrat in Washington State should be backing the Republican nominee presumptive, Rob McKenna, whose school reform bonafides are far more substantial than Jay Inslee, the likely Democrat standardbearer. Reformers must do a better job of building coalitions of support on the ground. This includes rallying the 51 million single parents, grandparents, and immigrant families, especially in urban communities, who are more than ready to support their efforts, as well as building support with churches and community groups (and playing upon their need for dollars the same way education traditionalists have done for decades). More bodies on the ground equals greater support for governors willing to risk political capital on reform (and more pressure on legislators who always keep count of which constituents may damage their political futures). Finally, reformers must go out there and play the political game as fiercely as NEA and AFT affiliates with vastly more experience in the game. This means running ad campaigns during legislative sessions, providing support to reform-minded politicians on Election Day, and making those who oppose choice and Parent Power pay for not voting the right way on legislative floors.

School reformers and their allies in governor’s mansions can learn plenty from Bentley and Jindal about what not to do (and what should be done) in advancing reform. And these lessons are critical for helping all of our kids get the education they need for successful adult lives.

As Dropout Nation noted in these week’s Podcast, the nation’s special education ghettos are way-stations for kids many adults in schools and districts consider unreachable. At the same time, special ed programs serve as one of the ways American public education rations what traditionalists consider to be quality education. Another form of rationing comes in the form of gifted-and-talented classes which serve those students gatekeepers into those programs (using faulty I.Q. tests such as the Stanford-Ninety, along with their own judgement) consider worthy of what is presumed to be high-quality teaching and comprehensive, college-preparatory instruction. The fact that recent data suggest that those programs rarely do well by these students makes their value seem questionable. More importantly, gifted-and-talented programs are ineffective in reaching and serving those poor and minority kids who may be quite capable of doing the work.

Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Michael Holzman takes a look at federal data and wonders why so few black and Latino children are in gifted-and-talented programs. Read, consider, and offer your own thoughts.

Who is gifted and talented in the Atlanta metro area? This is a more-important question than you may think.

The school systems of Atlanta and the five-county core of the Atlanta metro area (Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett) enroll nearly 400,000 students. Half of the area’s students are black; 21,000 are Asian; just over 90,000 are white, non-Hispanic and just under 90,000 are Hispanic.

A total of 50,000 students in the Atlanta area are enrolled in programs for the gifted and talented according to data recently released by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.  The distribution of those students, by race and ethnicity looks like this:

Between a quarter and a third of Asian and white students are placed in gifted and talented programs.  Atlanta area school systems identify just seven percent of black students and just five percent of Hispanic students as gifted and talented.

Students in gifted and talented programs presumably have access to specialized educational resources.  Presumably that is helpful to them.

What can one say?  That the Atlanta metro school systems actually believe that white, non-Hispanic and Asian students are four times as likely to be gifted and talented as black and Hispanic students?  If not, perhaps they should look again.  There might be some more gifted black and Hispanic students around there somewhere.

Unless, of course, gifted education programs in the Atlanta area are a means for school segregation by another name.

Photo courtesy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer

18

The percentage of Cleveland students labeled as learning disabled under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This is five percentage points higher than the 13 percent national average.

10

The percentage of Solon students labeled as special ed cases, three points lower than the national average.

20

The percentage of white students in Cleveland labeled as special ed cases, the highest percentage among all students regardless of race or ethnicity. Nineteen percent of black students, 18 percent of Latino students, 14 percent of American Indian students, and five percent of Asian students were placed by the Cleveland district on proverbial short buses.

Two to one

The ratio of young men to young women warehoused in Cleveland’s special ed programs. Young men make up 66 percent of the city’s special ed population, just a point lower than the national average.

70

The percentage of young men who make up Solon’s special ed population, three points higher than the national average. Young men outnumber young women by a three-to-one ratio.

25

The percentage of young white men in Cleveland labeled as special ed cases under Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the highest percentage of men of any racial or ethnic group considered learning disabled. Just six percent of their white female peers are considered special ed cases. Meanwhile 24 percent of young black men, 23 percent of young Latino and American Indian men, and six percent of young Asian men are labeled special ed cases. Only 13 percent of Latino women, 12 percent of young black women, six percent of American Indian women, and no Asian women are labeled learning disabled.

20

The percentage of young Latino men attending Solon schools labeled learning disabled, the highest percentage among all young men regardless of race in the district. None of their female peers were labeled as special ed cases. Nineteen-point-seven percent of young black men in Solon, along with 14 percent of young white men, were labeled learning disabled; while only 11 percent of young black women and six percent of young white women were considered special ed cases. Among Asians, four percent of young men and three percent of their young women peers were labeled learning disabled.

42

Percentage of Cleveland special ed students labeled with a specific learning disability. More students are placed into this vague catch-all category than in any other. Twenty percent of students are labeled as having being mentally retarded or having some other form of “intellectual disability” while another 12 percent are considered emotionally disturbed.

43

Percentage of Solon special ed students labeled as having a specific learning disability, the largest learning disability category. Seven percent of students are considered emotionally disturbed, while another six percent each  are considered having some form of intellectual disability or having “multiple disabilities”; few students nationally are diagnosed as being in the latter condition.

41

The percentage of Cleveland special ed students who spend less than 40 percent of their school day outside of regular classrooms. Twenty-four percent of special ed students labeled with a “specific learning disability” spend less than 40 percent of their day in regular classroom settings.

14

The percentage of Solon special ed students who spend less than 40 percent of their school day outside of regular classrooms. Every student with a specific learning disability, for example, spends more than 40 percent of the school day away from regular classroom activities.

One wouldn’t think that the notoriously dysfunctional Cleveland school district and its tony suburban counterpart in nearby Solon would have all that much in common. After all, the former, one of the worst-performing districts in the Midwest (and nation) after Detroit, may end up going through another overhaul being launched by the city’s mayor, Frank Jackson, while Solon was ranked as by NPR StateImpact as one of the Buckeye State’s “Deluxe Suburban” traditional operations. Yet when it comes to special education, both Cleveland and Solon put plenty of kids — especially young men — on proverbial short buses. More importantly, few of the kids labeled as special ed, especially young black men, have the kind of real cognitive and physical disabilities that would warrant such labeling in the first place. (And even those kids, especially kids with low incidence disabilities such as blindness, deserve a high-quality education.) One would dare say if both districts engaged in intensive early reading remediation, improved the quality of reading instruction and curricula, and used response to intervention techniques, there would be fewer students labeled special ed cases. Just 61 percent of districts use response to intervention techniques in one form or another, according to Education Week.

Cleveland and Solon aren’t alone. Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act and the efforts of President George W. Bush on improving literacy and keeping more students out of special ed, the percentage of America’s students labeled as learning disabled has declined slightly in the past few years. Still 13 percent of all students are still placed into special education ghettos that all but assure that they have slim chances of graduating high school, completing college, and participating productively in the nation’s economy and society. It is time to stop warehousing kids we deem incapable of learning — and clear out one of the ghettos of American public education.

Last week’s release of civil rights data by the U.S. Department of Education was shocking, but not surprising. Far too many black and Latino students were suspended — and based on past research and reporting (including coverage by Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle), it is often than minority students (along with their white peers) are being suspended for issues that have almost nothing to do with violence, drugs, and weapons possession. The reports showing lower numbers of minority students taking on challenging college-preparatory courses — both in comparison to white and Asian peers, as well as to their overall district and school enrollment — was also a reminder that we must transform American public education.

But the Department of Education’s basic data on college prep learning for each district — which focuses on proportionality of course participation compared to overall district enrollment — doesn’t fully reveal the extent of the problem. One has to dig deeper in the data, looking at the percentage of middle school and secondary education by race and ethnicity to which low expectations for children — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — and the legacy of the comprehensive high school model (and the concept of ability tracking that helped spawn it) is hurting the futures of far too many young minds.

In this analysis, Dropout Nation takes a look at two equally sized districts: Philadelphia (a majority-minority system which serves some of the nation’s poorest students serving 51,370 high schoolers and 22,839 middle school students in 2009) and Fairfax County (Va) — a mostly-white system with 59,680 high school students and 24,129 seventh- and eighth-graders enrolled which has gained a reputation for both being high-performing and serving well children living in one of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs. While the districts serve different communities, they share one thing in common: A poor job of helping all kids succeed in school and in life.

15

The percentage of Latino high school students in Philadelphia taking Advanced Placement courses in math in 2009, slightly lower than the 18 percent of black students taking such courses.  Thirty-four percent of white students, and 52 percent of Asian students took A.P. math.

1.7

The percentage of black high school students in Fairfax County who took  AP math in 2009; only the 1.6 percent rate for Latino students is lower. Eight percent of white students and 12 percent of Asian students took AP math in Fairfax.

Three

The percentage of black students in Philly who took A.P. science. That’s lower than the 7 percent of Latino students, 22 percent of white students, and 39 percent of Asian students who took college-prep science courses.

Two

The percentage of Latino students in Fairfax who were taking A.P. science; only 2.4 percent of black students took those courses. Meanwhile 12.5 percent of Asian students and eight percent of white students took A.P. science.

15

The percentage of Philly’s Latino students who took at least one A.P. course. Eighteen percent of black students, 34 percent of white students, and 52 percent of Asian students in the City of Brotherly Love took at least one A.P. course.

Ten

The percentage of Fairfax’s Latino students who took at least one A.P. course. Twelve percent of black students, 32 percent of white students, and 35 percent of white students took at least one A.P. course.

Three-tenths of One Percent

The percentage of Philadelphia’s Latino students who took a calculus course. That’s lower than the equally abysmal nine-tenths of one percent of black students in the district studying that important math course. The numbers are also terribly low for other students in the district: Just three percent of white students and five percent of Asian students took calculus in 2009. By the way: Philly only provides 29 calculus courses throughout the entire district.

0

The percentage of Fairfax County black high schoolers who took calculus. Only five Latino students (out of 10,970 enrolled in high school), five-tenths of one percent of white students, and two percent of Asian students took calculus. Fairfax only provides 15 calculus courses.

Three

The percentage of Latino students in Philly who took physics in 2009; 4.5 percent of black students took physics. Meanwhile eight percent of white students and 13 percent of Asian students took physics courses. The Philadelphia district only staffs 59 physics classes.

16

The percentage of Latino students took physics in Fairfax County; 16.6 percent of black students took physics. Meanwhile 18 percent of white and Asian students took physics.

44

The percentage of black middle-school students in Philadelphia who took Algebra 1. Forty-five percent of Latino students, 46 percent of white students, and 51 percent of Asian students took the course. Enrollment numbers for middle-school students are culled from the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data because Civil Rights Data doesn’t include a breakdown of enrollment for middle-schoolers.

19

The percentage of Latino middle-schoolers who took Algebra 1. Just 23 percent of African-American students, 40 percent of white students, and 43 percent of Latino students took the course.

One of the dirty secrets in the battle over the reform of American public education is that so many of the issues that lead to kids failing in the classroom (and eventually, outside of it) can be easily identified long before it is too late. Thanks in part to the No Child Left Behind Act, the emergence of standardized and formative testing, and the early efforts of school reformers to improve data, researchers such as Balfanz can clearly identify when students fall off the path to high school and higher ed graduation. As Balfanz points out, 43 percent of potential dropouts can be identified by sixth grade, meaning that schools and districts can intensely intervene and help these kids before they reach high school. And while the conversations about dropouts tend to stem around the immediate issues that trigger students to finally drop out such as teen pregnancy, the reality is that the path to departing school before graduation is one that usually starts in elementary grades.

We now know that a sixth grader missing 36 or more days of school during the year has less than a one-in-five chance of graduating on time, and the same is true or a peer with discipline issues, while those students missing 18 days will also struggle to graduate. The data indicates that the students are struggling in their academic studies and have started tuning out of school; after all, no child wants to admit that they are illiterate or innumerate. Meanwhile the likelihood of a sixth-grade student with a failing grade in English graduating is even lower — just a one in eight shot. Essentially, these are signs that the kids have not mastered the basic skills needed to tackle harder reading and math subjects such as word problems. More importantly, those problems also manifest in tandem with truancy and other signs of dropping out. A sixth-grader missing 36 days of school, a failing mark for discipline, and failing math and English grades, will only have a one-in-10 shot of graduating on time.

Then there are indicators that come into view before sixth grade. For example, there is data on early childhood illiteracy, which can be measured through third and fourth grade reading tests. Twenty-three percent of third-graders who were functionally illiterate failed to graduate on time nine years later, according to an analysis of Peabody Individual Achievement Test Reading Recognition subtest data by the Annie E. Casey Foundation; one in six third grade students failing to read at proficient levels overall didn’t graduate on time nine years down the line. The data is culled from sample reports on some 4,000 students from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 — and thus not the best or most-reliable indicator of student achievement. But it does show the importance of identifying functional illiteracy during the first four years a child is attending school — and immediately providing struggling students intensive reading remediation before they reach fourth grade.

Thanks to tools such as the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (or DIBELS) test, struggling students can be identified even before they reach first grade. There are also ways to help these students get on the right path before it is too late. Given that 40 percent of all kindergarten students can only learn to read if they are specifically taught syllables, words, letter sounds and spelling — and that boys, in particular, struggle because the area of their brains in which language and literacy is developed lags behind that of their female schoolmates, identifying these students and using new ways to help them improve their reading before fifth grade would keep them on the path to graduation. It would also help prevent the disciplinary issues that begin to crop up among students struggling with functional illiteracy by third grade (and help reduce the overuse of suspensions and expulsions that exacerbate the education and dropout crises).

Some districts are actually putting together their own early warning systems, albeit still on a small scale. New York City has taken some steps courtesy of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Interagency Task Force on Truancy, Chronic Absenteeism, and Student Engagement; but that effort so far targets just a smattering of the one million students who attend the nation’s largest district. A few other cities, notably the Diplomas Now project, which is working in Chicago and Philadelphia, are also developing early warning systems. States such as Indiana and Colorado have also done plenty of work on the early warning system front. But most traditional districts do little to identify children on the path to dropping out (much less offer any sort of intensive remediation or help dropouts return to high school and get on the path to college), while many states have done equally as little.

One reason lies with the problem of scale inherent in the traditional district model. Size can have many benefits, but not in improving the quality of education for students. As seen with the Los Angeles Unified School District, which evaluated just 40 percent of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s veteran teachers and 70 percent of new hires (who attain near-lifetime employment, and thus are far too difficult to dismiss, after two years on the job) during the 2009-2010 school year, districts already struggle in simply handling the human capital functions critical to improving student achievement. The fact that traditional districts struggle in the area of developing and managing data systems — with some systems storing data on FileMaker and Excel spreadsheets — also makes the development of early warning systems difficult to put together.

States haven’t helped in this regard. While statewide school data systems are becoming more robust, just three of them — Arkansas, Texas, and Florida — meet at least eight of the ten standards set by the Data Quality Campaign for being longitudinal and useful; and even those three states don’t provide access to data in a timely manner. Few states collect attendance data in any meaningful way, essentially providing little information on whether kids are attending school at all. Just 12 states collect attendance data daily (which students are actually in school), according to Balfanz’s Everyone Graduates Center, while a mere 11 states collect enrollment, attendance, and discipline data daily.

The fact that so much of school data remains compliance-oriented instead of being oriented toward accountability and usefulness in solving problems, is also an issue. That the measures aren’t useful also plays a part. Most states, for example, calculate attendance by dividing the total number of days missed by students by the total number of days they are supposed to attend (usually 180 days multiplied by enrollment); this hides the levels of truancy plaguing a school because it includes all unexcused absences, not just the set number of days under which a student is considered by law to be truant. So far, only California, Indiana, and Georgia provide breakdowns of levels of chronic truancy – and even those measures can be flawed because each of the states has their own definition of chronic truancy.

The federal government has proven helpful in the past in setting some standard for data through No Child’s Adequate Yearly Progress measures. But thanks to the Obama administration’s effort to allow states to waive the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, that progress may be lost.. All but two of the 10 states granted waivers in the first go-round essentially ditched subgroup accountability by placing all poor and minority students into a super-subgroup that takes them off the radar, while other aspects of the waiver effort allow those states to let merely mediocre schools off the hook for student failure — and at the same time,  denying reform-minded teachers and school leaders the data they need to make smart decisions.

Then there are the cultural realities within traditional districts. An early warning system involves using data in order to make decisions, and extensive collaboration within schools in order to put students back on the path to success; and thanks to No Child and other reforms, more teachers and school leaders are becoming savvy in using data. Yet there are still too many school leaders and teachers who don’t have the sophistication (or the desire to use data) needed to use do so properly; the fact that many school leaders still aren’t using Value-Added data in structuring teams of teachers who can address student needs (when they have that information available) makes clear the trouble of using early warning systems.

As for collaboration? Teaching remains largely an autonomous effort — and many veteran teachers like it that way; few instructors want to work together with colleagues in teams, much less working with guidance counselors and others on helping at-risk students succeed. This lack of teamwork has consequences. As Dropout Nation  noted in its podcast profile of Harlem Link Charter School founder Steve Evangelista — who learned that a student he once taught as a teacher landed in New York City’s infamous Rykers Island jail — a struggling student loses contact with the one teacher that may have reached him, and further disengages from school. It also means that a teacher taking on a student with a long history of academic failure doesn’t know the particular issues facing that child and will have difficulty in getting her on the path to success.

Finally, there is the reality that far too many in education have low expectations for poor and minority kids. As Smith College professor Tina Wildhagen presented in her Teachers College report on the role of teacher expectations in student grading, African-American high school seniors were more-likely to get lower grades than their scores on 10th-grade math and reading standardized tests. From where some teachers and school leaders may sit, developing early warning systems to help struggling students would take time away from attending to those kids they deem worthy of their time and effort.

Certainly these challenges make developing early warning systems difficult. But it doesn’t make them impossible. There are charter schools and traditional districts and schools that are using data proactively in turning around the performance of struggling students. More importantly, developing systems to identify struggling students will not only help kids succeed, it can even help taxpayers save money in the long run — especially in stemming the number of dropouts on unemployment lines. And from a moral perspective, it is the right thing to do. There’s no way we can knowingly allow so many young men and women to continue into poverty and despair when we can identify their issues early on.

One critical step in making early warning systems more common starts at the state level with the development of more-robust longitudinal data systems that are geared in part toward identifying struggling students. Districts may need to join together on developing such systems in order to yield cost savings; this would be one of the few times that scale actually makes sense. This is also an area in which the private sector could do plenty of good; after all, companies can develop those early warning systems and then market them to the districts that need them. Because it makes far more sense to help kids succeed long before they reach third grade, formative diagnostic and summative standardized tests must be given as early as first grade just for diagnostic purposes.

The Obama administration could also take key steps towards this goal by ending its No Child waiver gambit — which will do far more harm to children than either the president or U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan realize — and actually move to expand accountability and data; this includes developing a uniform chronic truancy rate of ten days of unexcused absence similar to what is already in place in Indiana. Expanding the Race to the Top initiative to include reform-minded districts that focus on developing early warning systems as part of their efforts would also help.

Ditching the traditional district model — and embracing the Hollywood Model of Education — would also help. But that is a long-term goal. Until then, districts will exist, and so we must do more to push districts to embrace the early warning system approach. One way lies with overhauling school funding itself; besides essentially taking over school funding and turning those dollars into vouchers that follow each student, states can also reward or punish district by the number of students they help improve achievement and turn around performance. This would encourage districts to use data in more-efficient ways.  Those districts that are already making moves in this regard need to do more to encourage leaders on the ground in identifying student learning issues and in restructuring how teachers work (especially in the elementary grades, in which instructors are jack of all trades and specialists in none). Collaborative teams would certainly allow for teachers to focus on particular student needs, meaning that they will have to learn how to use data in more-sophisticated ways.

Finally, we must address the cultures of low expectations that make some teachers and leaders unwilling to actually help the students in their care reach potential. It means a whole revamp of how we recruit, train, evaluate and compensate teachers. Addressing those issues would do plenty toward giving our children the kinds of instructors and principals who make fixing the broken windows around them the top priority.

One of the biggest barriers to reforming American public education is the soft bigotry of low expectations for our children — especially those from poor and minority households — among many education traditionalists working in classrooms, districts, ed schools, and other outfits. These so-called teachers, school leaders, and others essentially think little of our children (and even less of their families and communities), even as their own capacity for improving student achievement and nurturing young minds is lacking. So they use theories, including the Poverty Myth of Education (either in the “poverty is an inescapable force” rhetoric of Diane Ravitch and her ilk, or the collection of reprehensible stereotypes about incapable poor parents offered up by Ruby Payne and the infamously faulty and skewed Hart-Risley study) as excuses for their failures.

But when data and evidence makes mincemeat of Poverty Mythmaking won’t sustain their views, then education traditionalists will embrace another school of thought: The Personal Responsibility Myth that ascribes academic failure to single motherhood, the lack of two-family homes, a lack of values, and the stereotypes of certain minorities — particularly young black men — as wastrels, drug dealers and worse. After all, it’s easier to declare that the kids and the homes from which they come are somehow defective instead of admitting the impact of educational neglect and malpractice.

So it wasn’t exactly surprising when Phi Delta Kappan, one of the foremost magazines on the education traditionalist front, allowed Milwaukee Center for Independence Vice President Tracey Sparrow and her sister, Abby (a teacher in D.C.) to indulge in such fantastic thinking — this time, about the young black men who, along with other young men from different racial and economic backgrounds, suffer the most from the nation’s education crisis — in six full-color pages. Focusing on a group of young black men they seemingly pulled out of  central casting, the Sparrows culled such quotes as “[young black men] don’t take stuff seriously because we want to smoke, do alcohol, and steal”, and are too influenced by rap music.  The Sparrows also found time to play blame-the-families, pulling quotes such as “Black parents give up on their kids and let them do whatever.”

From where the Sparrows sit, their interviews “reveal that the young men interviewed are clear that the challenge of educating black males is much bigger than the schoolhouse.” And ultimately, schools can do nothing to provide these young men the tools they need for success. What the Sparrows (and Phi Delta Kappan, by association) have actually have shown is that traditionalists would rather believe stereotypes and fantasies that make them feel good about their failed vision of education.

For one, the profiles themselves would not stand the legendary Leon Dash’s sniff test; after all, his famed Washington Post profiles were gleaned after months and years of interviews, asking the same questions (and gathering string from other interviews) to finally pierce through the stories people tell the facts instead of the yarns they think (and know) their interviewers want to hear. The fact that the Sparrows didn’t even cite anything in the way of statistics — and declared that they “did not approach this as a rigorous academic study” –  makes clear that they weren’t exactly looking to do more than aid the comfortable in classrooms at the expense of the children whose futures they are supposed to nurture.

The Sparrows also fail to acknowledge that American public education is academically neglecting kids — especially young men of all backgrounds. This is clear from the fact that one out of every two young American Indian men in ninth grade — kids who mostly live outside of big cities — will drop out by senior year in high school, as will one out of every two young Latino men. The fact that young men from middle-class households who, in theory, have strong moral values and be exposed to good parenting, are also struggling in reading and other aspects of academics should also give pause. One out of every five young white male high school seniors from college-educated households were functionally illiterate according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress. So were 42 percent of young black male eighth-graders whose parents were college-educated as well as three out of every ten of their American Indian peers according to NAEP’s 2011 exams.

When one looks at the low level of academic performance of American students against the rest of the world — including the fact that white students were outperformed by peers in 16 other nations on the most-recent PISA exam, and that our country has a lower level of proficient students than 22 other nations — then it is clear that the problem isn’t the perceived engagement of families in student learning.

If fact, the reality is that there are plenty of families, regardless of their race or economic background, be they single mothers or blended households, who are pushing hard not only to just be engaged in education, but to actually take power in schools. There’s the work of parents unions in Connecticut and Texas to enact Parent Trigger laws and take control of failing schools, as well as the grassroots efforts of Buffalo ReformEd in the biggest city in western New York State, and the evangelistic efforts of Parent Revolution in California. Then there are the efforts of parents in Adelanto, Calif., who are working to take control of Desert Trails Elementary School from a district that has been promoting academic failure for far too long. And then there are the families who are exercising school choice, either by using school voucher plans or sending their kids to public charter schools in their communities. These and other parents are finally coming to the realization that the myth that any school can serve their child is no longer true (and chances are that it was never so) — and are no longer willing to tolerate teachers and school leaders who consider them to be afterthoughts, nuisances, and troublemakers be cause they demand power.

Meanwhile the Sparrows (and by association, Phi Delta Kappen) fails to address the abysmal teaching, subpar curricula, and cultures of mediocrity and deficiency within American public education that is at the heart of why so many children from all households have been condemned to economic and social despair.

We know that 40 percent of all children enter school with reading problems regardless of what families do at home. This is especially true for young men, because the areas of their brains in which language and literacy is developed lags behind that of their female schoolmates. Yet most traditional districts fail to offer any form of intensive reading remediation that can help these kids catch up and stay on track. At the same time, the nation’s university schools of education continue to poorly train teachers in reading instruction; just one in five ed schools in Illinois surveyed by the National Council on Teacher Quality in one study adequately trained their students in reading instruction. The consequence are dire. As Reid Lyon determined in 1997, most black boys landed in special education because they struggled in reading. And as Stanford University Researchers Deborah Stipek and Sarah Miles determined in a 2006 study, low literacy levels in first grade are strong predictors of aggression and other school discipline problems two grades down the line.

Then there is the fact that traditional districts deny rigorous college-preparatory curricula to poor and minority students. As former National Math and Science Initiative president Tom Luce noted last year, even with the growth in students taking A.P. courses, far too many black and Latino students are shied away from them. This happens despite the fact that A.P. participation increases their likelihood of kids graduating from high school and completing college. In Atlanta, for example, just 7 percent of black students were taking AP courses during the 2005-2006 school year, while 31 percent of their white high school peers took those courses. Meanwhile district bureaucracies do little to inform parents of these opportunities for rigorous learning and fight those who are aware of them.

Meanwhile there is no way to dance around the  general consensus that schools account for at least 40 percent of student achievement and that teacher quality accounts for as much as half (if not more) of student success. If one argues that schools account for half of variation in student achievement, then likely teacher quality looms even larger. That’s even before one considers that researchers admit that their own research may understate importance of schools (and teachers).

What Personal Responsibility mythmakers such as the Sparrows (and  their counterparts among the Poverty Myth crowd) are unwilling to do is acknowledge that American public education often does little more than chew up the futures of young black men and toss their lives out into the garbage like cleaned-off chicken bones. They are unwilling to admit the systemic problems why this happens: Low-quality instruction; mediocre curricula; abysmal recruiting and training of teachers and school leaders; Zip Code Education policies that deny high-quality educational choice to children and the families that love them; overdiagnosis of illiterate children (especially young men) as being learning disabled; school cultures that treat families as afterthoughts and nuisances; and a system of low expectations (including social promotion and a belief that only some kids deserve high-quality education). And they would rather conjure up fantasies of young men led astray by hip-hop music and wayward parents than address the cancerous beliefs they hold.

In the process, they essentially declare that these young men and women are mere throwaways whose lives are not worth saving, and that pursuing systemic reform is not worth doing. All in all, their beliefs are absolutely amoral and inhumane. And absolutely unacceptable.

Certainly good parenting and strong family structures can’t be helpful in improving educational outcomes. In fact, taking responsibility for shaping how schools serve children is at the heart of Parent Power and school choice. But at the same time, Personal Responsibility mythmakers and other education traditionalists are simply advocating stereotypes of young men and women that absolve them of their responsibility for perpetuating a system that fails far too many of our children. The kind of mythmaking that the Sparrows and Phi Delta Kappan has engaged in should not be tolerated. Simply put, they deserve our collective scorn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As we head into 2012, it is time to reaffirm our most-important task for helping our kids succeed in school in life: Overhauling a failed, amoral system of education that almost guarantees that a third of all children will end up illiterate, on the path to dropping out of school, and ill-equipped to achieve their potential.

Certainly, Dropout Nation readers, we have gone through all the statistics and will continue to do so again. But as former National PTA CEO Byron V. Garrett once noted, the data only confirms what we already know. For all the arguments of educational traditionalists that the problem lies with poverty, the successes of schools in this country (and even entire nations around the world) in educating children from poor and minority households proves that argument an absolute falsehood — and those who continue that argument should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. This reality also proves lie to the argument that poor and minority children– including poor whites — are incapable of handling rigorous college-preparatory education.

For me, transforming American public education is personal. Way personal. Next year, my four year-old nephew who will head into the nation’s elementary and secondary schools. I am not going to stand for any system that neglects him. In a few years, my one year-old niece will heading into American public education. I will not stand for any system that degrades her. I have second cousins who are now heading into middle school. I am outraged at what our public schools do to children like them. And in a few years, I will be a father. , I will not stand for any system that all but ensures that my son or daughter has at least a one-in-three chance of becoming mired in academic, economic or social despair.

But this isn’t just about my children — and it shouldn’t just be about your kin. Every child in our schools, especially those stuck in dropout factories and failure mills, should have every opportunity to succeed in school and in life. They may not share my skin tone or yours. They may not be black or white. They may not even live in my neighborhood or on your block. But these kids are my children — and they are yours too. And they look like you when you were young, the way they look like me when I was six.

As the legendary Barry White noted in a song he wrote four decades ago, the people of tomorrow who will preserve our nation’s economy and society are the children of today. We aren’t doing well by them. Not at all. American public education has never likely been all that well-functioning. But this didn’t matter in an age in which one can earn a decent living — and for a period between 1945 and 1980, sustain a middle-class life — with ones own hands. We live in an increasingly knowledge-based economy in which what one does with their mind is more important than what can be done with one’s fingers. It is shameful that black, Latino, poor Asian, poor white, and young men regardless of race are almost guaranteed shoddy teaching, abysmal curricula, subpar school leadership, and cultures of mediocrity and failure that will not nurture your genius. And even worse, in most parts of the nation, Zip Code Education policies have ensured that their families cannot get them out of Titanic schools that do little for them.

Both John Winthrop, and later, Ronald Reagan, would talk about our nation being a shining city on a hill upon which the eyes of the world shall rest. More importantly, they both noted that because of this status, we cannot deal falsely with either God or fail to meet our obligation at the hill’s summit. How can we live up to this exalted status if half of our children enter into adulthood uneducated? How can we be children of God when we deal falsely with him on a matter that deals with the most-vulnerable of His creations? And how can any of us be moral people, regardless of our creed or worldview, if this crisis of low educational achievement continues to exist? In fact, if this crisis continues, America will eventually land into the ashbin of the past.

Certainly we are making some strides in overhauling American public education. But those who defend keeping this shameful system as is will not stop opposing any effort to transform it. For them, it is about comforting their ideological visions, their pocketbooks, and their allies and friends. This isn’t to say that these folks don’t care about children. What I will say is that they don’t care enough to provide all of our kids with high-quality schools at the center of their lives that can equip them to seek out brighter futures. Their defense of failed and amoral practices ensure that high-quality teaching and rigorous curricula remain as haphazard now as it was when my grandmother was growing up in the Great Depression. And for that, they deserve our constant scorn and strong, strident, factual criticism.

So it is important for all of us, especially those reformers in the Beltway, as well as Parent Power activists and social entrepreneurs at the grassroots and institutional levels, to keep driving. This means unapologetically articulating why a Model T system of education is absolutely unacceptable, offering solutions that can address myriad ills, and battling rhetorically, on the streets, in statehouses, and during election campaigns. And ultimately, remind everyone that high-quality education can help transform lives and communities. For the long run, it is the only solution for advancing our society, our economy, and the lives of every child, regardless of the color of their skin or their station in life.

We need a revolution, not an evolution, in American public education. Our children deserve nothing less.

Last week’s critique of Rick Hess’ and Mike Petrilli’s Washington Post piece decrying “achievement gap mania” and its alleged impacts on top-performing students certainly garnered some responses. Many agreed with my arguments, while others accused me of being irresponsible for possibly suggesting (although I haven’t done so) that there are no trade-offs for focusing on improving education for at-risk students (including those who actually may be deserving of being called “gifted and talented”, but are struggling with literacy) over those Hess and Petrilli considered to be the “ablest”.

This isn’t shocking. After all, one of the problems in the battle over reforming American public education is that both education traditionalists and many reformers take a deficit approach to solving the nation’s education crisis, arguing that focusing on one solution is feasible. This thinking, based in part on a misinterpretation of economic and political theories, is off-target because the nation’s education crisis is so complex that the overhaul will require myriad solutions. Certainly one can’t provide the same level of resources to all solutions. But, as I pointed out in last week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, solving the crisis must be done in a holistic way that recognizes the interconnectedness of both problems and solutions.

Focusing on stemming achievement gaps is the most-sensible way addressing the crisis. Why, for one, it is the approach that will lead to the proverbial tide that raises all boats, especially since the problems of low-quality instruction and curricula are not limited to the millions of children — including the 33 percent of fourth-graders — who are likely to drop out in the next eight years. As I pointed out last week, even students who are doing well in school are denied all that they need for their success. Rationing high-quality education and damning some kids to low expectations, as Hess and Petrilli, are suggesting, just won’t work.

The reality is that we already ration education and, in the process, damn poor and minority kids with low expectations. This can be seen in one example Hess and Petrilli cite in their piece: That just 14 percent of teachers instructing Advanced Placement courses felt that the 60 percent growth in students taking the test between 2003 and 2008 stemmed from talented students able to do the work. As Ulrich Boser of the Center for American Progress points out in a response to Petrilli and Hess, passing rates declined by just four percent even as more students took A.P. courses. Given that there has been no steep drop in passing rates, it is actually likely that these kids were quite capable of doing the work “despite what their teachers seem to think.”

Boser’s point hits upon the reality that the ability of kids to get the rigorous, college-preparatory curricula they often depends on they are perceived by the teachers and guidance counselors who serve as gatekeepers for such programs (along with the  relationships their parents have with the gatekeepers). As a result, far too many kids — especially kids who never get the chance to exercise their academic potential.

As former National Math and Science Initiative president Tom Luce noted earlier this year, even with the growth in students taking A.P. courses, far too many black and Latino students are shied away from them. This happens despite the fact that A.P. participation increases their likelihood of kids graduating from high school and completing college. In Atlanta, for example, just 7 percent of black students were taking AP courses during the 2005-2006 school year, while 31 percent of their white high school peers took those courses. In Loudoun County, Virginia, a mere 14 percent of black students took AP courses, versus 31 percent of their white peers. As with gifted-and-talented programs in the early grades, poor and minority kids are often denied these opportunities, forcing those parents who are aware of them to fight hard against district bureaucracies that insist that only some kids can learn.

This gatekeeper problem is especially pernicious given that we really don’t know if a five-year-old “gifted and talented” student would actually qualify as being gifted and talented down the road — or even at that period of time, depending on the test. This can be seen in the efforts by parents to prep their kids for IQ tests used for admission by some private schools for their own gifted-and-talented programs. As University of Iowa psychologist David Lohman and Katrina Korb (now of the University of Jos in Nigeria) pointed out in a 2006 report, just 45 percent of first-graders who scored higher than 130 points on the Stanford-Binet test used by many to determine cognitive ability would have scored at that level on other IQ exams; most first-graders considered gifted in first grade don’t keep that label two years later. And, according to Lohman, only 25 percent of four year-olds scoring 130 on the Stanford-Binet will do so as 17-year-olds.

The fact that cognitive ability is dynamic and not a constant is certainly one reason why so many students labeled “gifted and talented” don’t necessarily stay that way. Especially for children in the preschool and early elementary grade levels, cognitive ability is as much influenced by the quality of learning environment (especially in school) as it is on natural growth over time. The fact that talent is as much forged by challenge (academically and otherwise) as it is by any innate ability is also part of the reason; after all, it explains why so many once-struggling students such as Fedex Office founder Paul Orfalea (a dyslexic) turn out to be successful (one would say, far more more successful) than the A-students who did well in the classroom. Ultimately, it is far more important to provide all children with high-quality education and help all of them address their particular learning needs — from reading remediation to providing them with additional outside learning opportunities — than to segment and label based on labile abilities.

But in any case, the fact that so many students considered top-performing in the early grades don’t stay that way leads to these three conclusions.

The first: That gifted-and-talented courses are not even close to the high quality that Hess and Petrilli proclaim them to be. The study conducted by the Northwest Evaluation Association on behalf of Fordham hints to that possibility; while the recent study co-authored by Sai Bui, Steven Craig and Scott Imberman this past October in Education Next report clearly points to that fact. Considering that most school districts aren’t using Value-Added analysis of student test data in evaluating teachers and identifying their most-talented instructors, there is no way that gifted and talented programs can be cordons solitaire from the low quality of teaching and curricula endemic throughout American public education. And, as the Jack Kent Cook Foundation pointed out in its 2007 report, this state of affairs is especially true in massive urban, suburban, and rural dropout factories.

The second: If we are going to continue the existence of gifted and talented regimens (outside of those of specialized high schools such as New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, which solely use test score results and grades for selecting pupils), there shouldn’t be any gatekeeping over them. The wide swings in the cognitive development of those who would actually be considered “ablest”, along with their own subjective biases, renders the judgement of teachers and guidance counselors too unreliable for the gate-keeping role. Instead, parents should either be able to place their kids into the programs and let the children sink-or-swim based on their performance, or admit students into gifted-and-talented courses based on test score growth over time.

And finally, it’s time to toss the concept of gifted and talented into history’s ashbin. The continued existence of this program, along with special education ghettos, perpetuate one of the underlying culprits of the nation’s education crisis: Ability tracking, or the concept of rationing high-quality teaching and college preparatory curricula based on racialist and condescending early-20th century views that only some kids (namely those from white middle-class households) are capable of mastery. More importantly, they have proven to be ineffective in helping those identified as gifted stay that way over time.

What should be done instead is to provide all children with the high-quality teaching and rigorous college preparatory curricula they need for lifelong success. Doing so still allows for providing intensive reading remediation to those kids struggling in literacy and numeracy, and helping those already performing ahead of their current grade attain the challenging teaching and curricula they need to build mastery. This starts by moving away from the traditional approach of keeping kids in the same grade for a full school year, even when they have proven able to move forward into the next grade. The New York City Department of Education’s School of One initiative has already shown the benefits of allowing kids to move on to the next grade so they can get the challenging curricula they need to build mastery.

Another step lies with expanding school choice. As I note in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, expanding school options allows families to actively shape their children’s learning, expanding learning opportunities for all kids regardless of who they are or where they may live. Enacting Common Core state standards in reading and math, along with improving on those standards and building high-quality curricula around them is also critical to this approach. And finally, we must continue to overhaul how we recruit, train, evaluate, and reward teachers. That last step will allow for all kids, regardless of their talent level, to get the high-quality teaching they need for lifelong success.

It is time to move away from deficit thinking on solving the education crisis and recognize the fact that improving teaching and curricula for the students most ill-served by failed traditional public schools practices will also those students who are only slightly-better served by them. It’s not just about at-risk students or top-performing kids. It is about providing all of them the schooling they deserve.