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.

There is a large body of research demonstrating the connection between family income and educational achievement.  The connection is strong.  It underlies the transformation of this country into one increasingly characterized by a lack of socioeconomic mobility. But simply pointing to the fact that family income predicts educational achievement does not tell us why this is the case.  More bathrooms at home do not seem to have an obvious connection with learning readiness.  [Insert bathroom joke here.]

But there are some places where the connection between family income and educational achievement seems weak or non-existent.  For example, here are some estimates of 2010 high school graduation rates for male Black and male White students for the state of Maine as compared to those for the nation as a whole:

The gap, nationally, between male black and white graduation rates is about 24 percent.  To put that another way, the white rate is half again as high as the black rate.  But in Maine, the gap is 4 percent. Hardly noticeable.  And the graduation rate for black males in Maine is much higher than the national average for white males.

Here are Census figures comparing family incomes:

Maine is a poor state.  These Census figures show that the white families of Maine are poorer than the national average for white families and that black families are considerably poorer—living right on the poverty line.

And yet the sons of black families do very well in school.  Why is this?  What can we learn from this outlier?

Here’s a theory:  There are too few black students in Maine to concentrate in inferior schools.  They attend the same schools as their white peers, have the same teachers, and must meet the same expectations.  They are not herded into “drop-out factories” and expected to fail.

If that theory is correct, the experience of black students living in poverty in Maine points to a way out of our continuing education — and socioeconomic — crisis.  All students deserve the opportunity to learn in good schools.  Given that opportunity, they do learn and are able to build a foundation for a better life.

46

Percentage of learning disabled students aged 16-21 exiting special education in 2009-2010 who graduated with a diploma, according to Dropout Nation‘s analysis of U.S. Department of Education data — or a mere 256,000 American children. That’s lower than the nation’s overall four-year graduation rate of 70 percent.

21

The percentage of 16-to-21 year olds leaving special ed for regular education programs. While 31 percent of kids with speech impediments transferred into regular ed, a mere 6 percent of students labeled with either a specific learning disability, emotional disturbance, or hearing impairment, and just 2 percent of those labeled mentally retarded did so.

26

The percentage of 14- and 15-year-old special ed students exiting for regular education. While 67 percent of 14- and 15-year-olds with speech and language impediments transferred to regular ed, only 25 percent of kids labeled as having specific learning disabilities and an abysmal 13 percent of those labeled as being emotionally disturbed did so. And only 3 percent of 14 and 15 year olds with hearing impairments transferred into regular ed.

32

Percentage of 16-to-21 year olds labeled mentally retarded exiting special education with a high school diploma.

46

Percentage of students labeled with a speech or language impairment aged 16-to-21 leaving special ed with a diploma.

51

Percentage of 16-to-21 year olds labeled as having a specific learning disability who graduated with a diploma.

57

Percentage of 16-to-21 year olds with a hearing impairment leaving special ed with a high school diploma.

31

Percentage of 16-to-21 year olds labeled emotionally disturbed exiting special education with a high school diploma.

Special education is one of the academic ghettos of American public education — and one of the most pernicious. While the number of students relegated to special ed has declined slightly in recent years, the number of kids labeled increased by 63 percent between 1976 and 2006. And with boys making up two out of every three students in special ed, far too many of our sons — regardless of race, ethnicity, or class — are being diagnosed with learning disabilities when they really need intensive reading remediation and school environments in which they can thrive.

Thanks to abysmal reading instruction, the lack of strong reading interventions in the early grades, and the unwillingness of American public education to deal with kids who are either struggling or considered troublesome, far too many kids are sent to special ed. And thanks to the low expectations for these kids — including those who have real hearing and speech impairments who can succeed in regular environments — they get even lower quality instruction and curricula.  As the following numbers show, special education equals being condemned to academic failure. This form of educational neglect and malpractice must stop.

As Dropout Nation readers know, one of the consequences of the nation’s education crisis can be seen in the shortages of high-skilled workers for blue-collar jobs. With Baby Boomers working in sectors such as railroad transportation heading into retirement, companies are now competing against one another for the small numbers of workers with strong math and science skills, including those who spent the past few years in the high-skilled areas of the nation’s armed forces.

An example of this was exemplified last week when the Wall Street Journal reported on railway giant Union Pacific’s struggles to hire diesel electricians (who earn as much as $61,000 a year for keeping train engines running smoothly), and installation technicians (who earn as much as $68,0000 just for handling the  cables and microwave relays used to monitor the coming and going of trains). It took the company 10 hiring rounds just to hire 24 diesel electricians; just a fifth of the 58 initial applicants had the skills at aptitude needed for the installation technician jobs Union Pacific was seeking to fill.

Certainly the harsh realities of working on railroads deters some from even trying out for jobs. But Union Pacific’s struggles to hire skilled workers isn’t isolated. As more Baby Boomers head into retirement, companies are struggling to fill such positions as welders and machinists, high-skilled blue-collar jobs that provide the kind of incomes that lift poor kids from poverty into the middle class. And these are positions that no longer involve simply standing on an assembly line. Factory workers will need to be able to understand trigonometric equations in order to ensure that products are shaped properly and fit together upon assembly — and think through abstract concepts in order to work on their own on the factory floor.

But companies are having trouble filling those jobs largely because there aren’t enough young men and women with the science and math skills needed for success. Forty percent of all high school seniors  scored Below Basic on the science portion of the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress; 27 percent of the nation’s eighth-graders — including half of all black students and a fifth of white students — were mathematically illiterate according to NAEP’s 2011 exam.

The problem is particularly acute for poor children, especially those whose parents never graduated themselves. Sixty-two percent of high school seniors whose parents didn’t graduate from high school were scientifically illiterate; 59 percent of eighth-graders who were on free-and-reduced lunch plans were mathematically illiterate. As a result, children from poor households have also shot of taking on the kind of high-paying jobs, blue-collar or white-collar that can actually help them emerge into the middle class.

Some, including Ronald Ferguson and Robert Schwartz of Harvard in their wrongheaded Pathways to Prosperity report, would argue that this calls for new vocational high schools similar to those of earlier generations. But the reality is that sending kids on a vocational track doesn’t make sense. For one, most teens don’t know what career paths they want to be on until they reach their 20s; as the High Tech High chain of charter schools has found, only three in 10 kids who choose such a track even work in that field for one day.

More importantly, the kind of high-level math and science skills they need for success in blue-collar fields are also needed for white-collar jobs; in short, a kid attending a tech school or apprenticeship after graduating from K-12 will need the same kind of college-level skills as a counterpart going to a traditional college. In short, whether you are a marketing executive working with statistics, or a machine tools foreman on the shop floor, you will need the same math skills to do the work.

If anything, the solution isn’t to go back to the kind of ability tracking — and low expectations for poor and minority kids — that has helped foster the nation’s education crisis. It is to provide every child a rigorous college-preparatory education that allows them to be prepared to choose any form of higher education — be it traditional college, technical school, or apprenticeships — and, ultimately, any career path.  But college preparatory teaching need not be simply working on algebraic equations in classrooms. As seen with the Minddrive program in Kansas City, Mo., in which students learn the uses of 3D modeling, trigonometry, and electrical engineering in designing and building cars, it is also important to help all kids see the connections between the trigonometry and calculus work they do in classrooms and the real world activities upon which math and science concepts are built.

Meanwhile we must also improve math and science education at the early grades. Not only does this mean improving how we train elementary school teachers, it means changing how they work. As Dropout Nation has noted, value-added data is now revealing that teachers who strong in teaching math may not be capable of teaching reading and vice versa. Developing new ways of instruction — including even putting together teams of top-notch math teachers to help struggling math students succeed — is key. So is improving math instruction before kids get into first grade. As a study of 177 kids followed from kindergarten into high school by a University of Missouri team led by David Geary has shown, kids need to understand numbers and quantity in order to progress successfully in other math studies.

We will need everyone, including Corporate America, to push for these reforms and to expand the array of high-quality school options so that kids can get the math and science education they need for success. But, as I noted in today’s American Spectator review of Dr. Steve Perry’s Push Has Come to Shove, parents will also need to play a major role in demanding schools to improve early math (and reading) curricula, and providing intensive interventions for those kids who, no matter what their parents may do, may be struggling and on the path to academic and economic failure. Our economy and society can’t succeed if companies can’t fill jobs and kids aren’t educated to qualify for them.

Dropout Nation has offered its own reasons for why states should take full control of school funding instead of just funding 48 percent of the spend. The fact that school districts can continue to use their dependence on property tax dollars to oppose reforms — especially school choice and Parent Power — is one reason. But as Contributing Editor Michael Holzman points out, continuing to derive school funding from property tax dollars contributes to the ineffectiveness of American public education.

A good example of American Exceptionalism is the way that schools are funded here.  In most other developed countries, schools are funded from general taxation. Much of the financial support for American schools, in contrast, is derived from local property taxes. This means that the amount of support available per student is not equalized, as in some countries, or “challenged-based,” as in Britain, for example, but is based on the local tax rate and the value of the property subject to school taxes.  This results in wide variations between districts.

Take Connecticut, one of the states with the widest variations in both support for education and educational outcomes.  The Bridgeport school district had approximately $2,500 to spend on each student from local sources.  The Westport school district had $18,500.

Another is Florida. Five districts have local revenue under $2,000 per student.  Five districts have revenue over $10,000 per student.

One way to look at this is that some people pay much higher school taxes than others.  (Although, paradoxically, the actual tax rates in some poorer areas are higher than in wealthier areas near-by.)  Another way to look at it is that some children go to much less well-supported schools than others.

Neither seems either effective or fair, does it?

Photo courtesy of the Black Children's Institute of Tennessee

This week, Dropout Nation introduces its latest contributor. Michael Holzman, a Research Consultant for the Schott Foundation for Public Education, has helped shed light on the impact of low teacher quality and systemic academic failure on the educational and economic prospects of young black men. Through his research, Holzman and Schott have done plenty to show in numbers the depths of the nation’s dropout crisis and the impact on young black men. Along with Robert Balfanz, Jay P. Greene and Christopher Swanson, Holzman is one of the leading figures in revealing the nation’s educational decay.

In this piece, Holzman analyzes the results from the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress and reminds us that we must do more to help all children succeed in school and in life.

The results from the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have shown that there has been little change from the achievement gaps recorded in 2009. On the other hand, there has been some progress this century. These charts show the changes in the gap between the average NAEP scale scores of Black and White fourth- and eighth-grade students in American public schools:

In fourth-grade reading, the gap has declined from 34 points to 24 points, and declined from 30 points to 25 in math. The White, non-Hispanic/Hispanic gaps and changes were virtually identical.) In eighth-grade reading,  the gap has declined from 27 to 24 points, while declining from 40 to 31 points in math.

This is good news. But at this rate it will take 30 years to close the gap among fourth-graders in all grades — and eight graders in mathematics. And it will take 80 years to close the gap among 8th-graders in reading.

Does anyone think that is good enough? It is not good enough to accomplish the goals President Barack Obama has for increasing the number of college graduates by 2020.  It is particularly troubling that the gap in reading is virtually identical in fourth and eighth grade while achievement gaps increase as kids move from elementary to middle school.

What is to be done? Through its Opportunity to Learn Campaign, the Schott Foundation wants to ensure that all kids have access to high-quality early childhood education and a challenging curriculum.  The NAEP outcomes show that these key factors are not yet in place. We would have all children arrive at kindergarten ready to learn their letters and numbers. We would have all middle school students challenged with courses that will put them on the road to graduating on time, ready for college and career. And we know it can be done.

A version of this piece is available at Schott’s Opportunity to Learn blog.

As an outlet focused solely on covering the reform of American public education, Dropout Nation rarely ventures into discussing other issues. But the indictment of former Pennsylvania State University defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky for allegedly molesting eight young at-risk young men — and revelations that his legendary former boss, Joe Paterno, and other university leaders, essentially ignored this criminal behavior — offers another reminder of how poorly we treat our most-vulnerable children. And our moral obligation to do better by these kids in every way.

If even if a 10th of the allegations are true (and the more-skeptical among us suspects what we don’t know is even worse), there is nothing in this scandal that shouldn’t disgust any man or woman. The fact that Sandusky has likely took advantage of his prime positions as a legendary college football assistant coach and upstanding member of the community to behave in a predatory, abusive, pedophilic manner. The apparently craven unwillingness of Paterno, former athletic director Tim Curley, former vice president Gary Schultz, and now-ousted university president Graham Spanier to report at least one allegation of molestation to the State College police or Centre County sheriff’s office nine years ago, which could have prevented more abuse. The possible complicity of the Second Mile, the organization which Sandusky had founded, in allowing him to continue his allegedly predatory behavior. The evidence that one high school where Sandusky was a volunteer allowed him to meet alone, unsupervised, with Second Mile participants attending classes there, even when some found his behavior to be :controlling” and “needy”. The mishandling of the entire revelations by Penn State until just hours ago, when the university’s board sacked Paterno and Spanier for what can be at best be called conduct unbecoming of leaders of men. And the continued willingness of some Penn State students and alum to defend what can only be kindly called the indefensible.

Sandusky is, of course, innocent until proven guilty. And innocent men have been wrongly accused, even convicted, of crimes. All that said, there are numerous lessons that come from this scandal. That loyalty is more immediate and valuable to many people than morality. That institutional and personal power, kept unchecked, corrupts absolutely. That when organizations fire bad actors, they do so for business reasons and not for the good of society. And that those who we consider to be “good” people are far too willing to let evil take hold wherever it chooses to go.

But the most-important lesson from the Penn State scandal is one that Dropout Nation readers know all too well: We treat our poorest, most-vulnerable children as if they are unworthy of our love and compassion.

Our juvenile justice systems subject far too many kids to abuse and denial of due process. Back in March, former Luzerne County (Pa.) Court of Common Pleas judge Mark Ciavarella was convicted last month on racketeering and bribery charges connected to the convictions of more than 2,500 juvenile offenders. For seven years, Ciavarella and his partner in crime, former presiding judge Michael Conahan, helped funnel $1.3 million a year in taxpayer dollars to cronies operating two private jails by tossing alleged youth offenders — many of whom were first-time offenders charged with misdemeanors such as spraying graffiti, writing prank notes, and truancy — into those jails. In exchange for condemning the lives of these kids — often by handing down guilty verdicts less than two minutes and essentially denying the kids the right to lawyers to boot– the judges collected $2.6 million in what can only be called filthy lucre.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that one out of every three kids held in 13 juvenile jails and prisons were sexually abused by guards, other employees, or fellow inmates. This included 37 percent of kids imprisoned at Maryland’s Backbone Mountain Youth Center, and Indiana’s Pendleton juvenile prison. Nationally, 12 percent of all juvenile prisoners reported molestation and other forms of sexual abuse.

Five years ago in Indianapolis, the city’s juvenile court system was rocked by scandal after allegations surfaced that nine employees at the juvenile jail were sexually abusing youth offenders. The news came after revelations of rampant overcrowding. Prosecutors couldn’t sustain those charges in court. But your editor would reveal that alleged juvenile offenders were often denied attorneys and, in some cases, were being falsely convicted of crimes. For example, one 16-year-old was convicted by one juvenile court magistrate for allegedly molesting her three year-old son and photographing the action; the conviction was overturned after appellate judges found that the photo used to justify the conviction actually showed the young woman kissing her child’s belly. Another 16-year-old was held in juvenile jail for 70 days — 69 days longer than allowed under Indiana state law — without so much as a trial.

America public education aids and abets the abuse with zero-tolerance policies and the overuse of harsh school discipline. Truancy accounted for 38 percent of all status (or illegal only because the child is a minor) cases filed in juvenile court in 2007; they accounted for just 30 percent of all status cases twelve years earlier (schools account for three-quarters of those referrals). In fact, the number of status cases has increased by 31 percent between 1995 and 2007, with courts hearing 35,300 more cases in 2007 than twelve years ago.

Our child welfare and foster care systems are no more humane. Each year, 26,000 kids age out of foster care, often never having either returned to their families or placed into a permanent home where they can get love and care. Even before they leave the system, they have been subject to abuse and neglect by the parents who are supposed to love them, by institutions that are supposed to protect them, and public education systems that subject them to the worst they can offer.

As National Public Radio revealed last month in its system on the negative impact of foster care systems, American Indiana kids in South Dakota made up 53 percent of all foster care wards, even though they make up just 13 percent of the state’s children. All but 10 percent of them were placed in foster homes that were run by non-natives, violating federal law originally passed to stop decades of abuse against Indian kids in what were euphemistically called non-reservation boarding schools. The apparent crony capitalism — this, in the form of Children’s Home Society, which reportedly collected more than $50 million in mostly no-bid contracts over seven years from South Dakota’s child welfare system (and was once-run by the state’s current governor, Dennis Daugaard) — makes one wonder how many Native American children were taken from their families in order to generate income. Given that the federal government found 31 other states in violation of federal law six years ago — and disproportionate rates of American Indian kids being seized from families — the problem is more-widespread than anyone realizes.

American public education exacerbates the problem. Just 20 percent of 13-year-old foster care kids attending Chicago’s public schools in 1998 graduated on time five years later, according to a 2004 study by Chapin Hall, lower than the 52 percent five-year graduation rate for all Chicago students based on eighth grade enrollment used by Dropout Nation. These kids are more-likely to be diagnosed as special ed cases: Twenty-six percent of the foster kids attending school in the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2005-2006 were labeled as special ed cases, double the already abysmal 11 percent rate for all L.A. Unified students and 13 percent of all children nationwide that year. In Chicago, 45 percent of sixth-to-eighth grade students in foster care were diagnosed with learning disabilities, three times the rate of the overall student population. Kids in foster care are also more-likely to be subjected to the harshest school discipline, especially when they have also been labeled  learning disabled. In L.A. Unified, the out-of-school suspension rate for foster care students is 12 percent, higher than the eight percent for all students. The fact that foster kids don’t have families who can fight for improving their education means that they often get the worst American public education offers.

The simple reality is that the Penn State scandal, as isolated as it may seem, is just another example of the clear, constant debasement of kids who deserve much better. From dropout factories that toss 1.2 million kids into poverty and prison, to juvenile justice systems that are anything but, the systems we put in place to serve our children are unworthy of them. Some will argue that this scandal has nothing to do with the reform of American public education. That is short-sighted thinking. Our schools are the clearest representation of what we stand for as Americans and as moral human beings. More importantly, it intersects (and in many cases, sustains the troubles) of many of the systems that we have put in place for helping our kids when life hits them with its worst.

Government-run systems, in general, are terrible at dealing with the social ills that can only be solved by strong families and civic society. But we can make sure that those systems don’t make the lives of our kids any harder than they need to be. Reforming all of these systems, including our schools, is the least we owe to all of our children. And every school reformer and education traditionalist should be dedicated to that most important moral goal.

If all of us, especially those who believe in the Creator, want to consider ourselves moral people, then we need to do better by every child, no matter who they are or where they live.