Observations on what is happening in school reform today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Dropout Nation has discussed, the problems in teaching boys how to read is the key underlying factor behind the growing achievement gap between boys and girls — and why there is as much as a two-to-one ratio between women and men on college campuses. Other countries, including Australia, have begun addressing this crisis in their own countries. But in the U.S., far too many Sara Meads and others continue to ignore the matter or argue that it isn’t a real issue — to the nation’s detriment.

Watch the following video on boys and reading by Gretchen Pinard, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, and consider what school reformers must do to address this achievement gap. Listen to the Dropout Nation Podcast on boys and reading. And think about how you can help get our boys reading.

Photo courtesy of the New York Daily News

With  old-school civil rights groups complaining about President Barack Obama’s embrace of the school reform movement — and its commitment to improving the quality of education for all children — listen to this Dropout Nation Podcast from February on why their approach to educational equity doesn’t work. The only way educational equity will actually be achieved for every child is by addressing how public education is structured — including giving parents their proper place as kings at the education decision-making table, and improving the quality of curricula in every school. Not only does this commentary apply to these groups, but to fellow-travelers such as the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player or smartphone.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

(Click on the headline to watch the video)

Certainly Michelle Rhee knows how to stir up controversy — especially when it comes to her efforts as chancellor of D.C. Public Schools to improve the district’s abysmal quality of teaching and curricula. Her decision to dismiss 241 teachers rated as ineffective by the district’s year-old IMPACT system (which uses student test score data as part of evaluations) is going to be contested by the district’s dysfunctional American Federation of Teachers local and will play its part in the election battle between her patron, Mayor Adrian Fenty and rival (and Rhee foe) Vincent Gray. Rhee’s bedside manner isn’t exactly lovely. But she deserves much praise for her Churchillian commitment to seriously overhauling a school system once called the Superfund Site of American public education and for slowly revamping an obsolete regime of teacher compensation that is terrible for children and high-quality teachers alike.

In this clip from her 2008 testimony before the House Education and Labor Committee, Rhee not only explains why improving teacher quality is important, but why we can no longer count on integration and the noble desire to improve education for all children to address racial-, ethnic- and gender-based achievement gaps. Improving education for all children not only requires dedication to the idea that all children can learn and deserve the best education. It also means restructuring a system that has long damned itself (and kids) to low expectations. Also, watch this Dropout Nation video on how Rhee’s teacher czar, Jason Kamras, is working to improve teacher quality and the challenges he faces in doing so.

As part of a further discussion about the importance of Beltway school reformers to embrace the grassroots, here is a rewind of a February Dropout Nation Podcast on the subject. Inside-the-Beltway policymaking, important as it is, will mean nothing for improving the educational destinies of children if school reformers don’t reach out to urban groups such as the Black Star Project and activists working in suburban and rural communities.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

President Barack Obama may not be a fan of school voucher programs — and has allowed D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program to go out of business. But his Race to the Top school reform competition has fostered new discussion about — and efforts to — launch and expand these forms of school choice for the poorest children. One state in particular is New Jersey, where Gov. Chris Christie and a coalition of urban leaders, centrist and idiosyncratic liberal Democrats, and conservatives are battling the National Education Association’s state affiliate to develop a statewide voucher plan. Among the supporters is Rev. Reginald Jackson, the pastor at St. Matthew A.M.E. Church, who has also been front-and-center on tenure reform and other school reform issues.

Watch Jackson’s impassioned explanation about why the poorest children and their families — especially those in our urban communities — need tools for improving their educational and economic destinies. If you oppose vouchers, think about why you do — and then consider how can you deny the poorest of our children the choices for brighter futures availed even to their middle class schoolmates.

An army of families are ready to overhaul public education. Will Beltway school reformers join them and get their hands dirty?

And no, I don’t mean the occasional trip to observe a high-achieving charter school or even to watch Geoffrey Canada and Steve Barr do their respective work at the grassroots level. Save for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (which does authorize charter schools in Ohio) and some work by the Education Trust, school reformers in the Beltway generally stay out of the grassroots game. In the process, they aren’t serving themselves — or our children and families — as well as they should.

As I discussed in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, there are 51 million households — single mothers, grandparents caring for kids, and immigrant families — ready to be rallied around improving American public education. While many of these parents live in the nation’s big cities, they are also in rural communities and in suburbia (where the standards and accountability measures in the No Child Left Behind Act have shown clearly that many of the schools there aren’ bastions of high quality instruction and curricula). Most of these families are dissatisfied with the quality of education their children are offered and are dismayed by the unwillingness by many within traditional public education to treat them as the leading partners in education decision-making. As seen with the tremendous growth of charter schools within urban communities and even in films such as The Lottery, these families will support school reform with their feet and with their voices.

Grassroots-focused school reformers such as Barr, Canada and Phillip Jackson, along with charter school outfits such as Green Dot and KIPP (the subject of a Washington Post editorial today) and Teach For America, have managed to further the reach of some elements of school reform among these households. But for school reform movement to sustain its solutions, more of them must be on the ground working with what former Urban League president Hugh Price would call these impromptu activists. Yet the Beltway-based reformers — the ones most-associated with school reform — aren’t getting their hands dirty on the ground where it counts.

In some sense, this is understandable. Developing and rallying groups around public policy is their specialty — and they have largely succeeded in winning over Capitol Hill policymakers and White House officials. But it’s not the only reason. As evidenced by the Brookings Institution’s less-than-thoughtful study on the effectiveness of the Harlem Children’s Zone, far too many reformers ignore the importance of working with families on child development and other issues. For many within the Beltway education reform community, policymaking is rather easy work; it can be painful (in terms of policy development, building alliances and hashing out compromises), but easy to do because it doesn’t require getting the hands dirty on the ground.

As Barr would point out, working with communities and families is difficult work. It requires lots of listening to concerns, providing lots of resources (including precious time), and moving quickly on the dime (think tanks aren’t known for lightning speed in getting anything done). Add in the messiness of families — many of which are struggling with a litany of other issues — and suddenly, this grassroots activity work gets rather, well, unglamorous.

But Beltway school reformers forget that policy is meaningless without successful implementation. This includes winning the hearts and minds of parents and community players — who are given more attention by the status quo even as they also rip their children off educationally and economically. It also involves working with grassroots activists and even churches, who have the networks to make in-roads. The reformers have already seen this through the work of the charter school movement, which has managed to even win over such folks as the Rev. Floyd Flake and Al Sharpton. Imagine if they rallied those same groups around teacher quality reforms, Common Core curricula and other prescriptions for reforming schools?

When coalesced around important goals, networks within communities can accomplish plenty and successfully challenge the status quo. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s exemplified that on one level; so did the array of networks assembled by Booker T. Washington at the end of the 19th century. Then there are the networks that exist within communities of interests such as the modern conservative movement and the environmental movement of the past decade. A committed group of people working together can accomplish plenty. This is critical for school reformers in the Beltway to understand.

Certainly the school reform movement has weakened the hand of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. Maintaining that upper hand, however, will require the very assets the NEA and AFT have in spades: Bodies on the ground. While the NEA and AFT are struggling internally — especially as younger generations of teachers agitate for the end of traditional teacher compensation systems — they still have member loyalty (for now). This means that the unions can rally their rank-and-file members to serve as lobbyists at the state and local levels.

The political campaigning of groups such as Democrats for Education Reform is laudable. So is the effort to lobby and work on policymaking at the state level (an approach that, until now, was only successfully embraced by Achieve Inc.). But it isn’t enough.  To counter the manpower advantage held by defenders of traditional public education such as the NEA and AFT, school reformers — especially Beltway-based players — need to be working the community centers, church pews, and the extensive local networks.

There are 51 million families waiting to join forces with Beltway reformers. Now it’s time for the wonks to get off K Street and join them.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss the importance of rallying single parents, grandparents and immigrant families for reform of American public education. For school reformers, these families are hungry for ways to improve the quality of education for their children. All they need is for reformers to actually come to the ground and help them turn policy into reality.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

Contrary to popular notions, we don’t need supermen to end the dropout crisis. What is needed is dedicated, caring men and women willing to put  their talents and skills to work to improve the quality of teaching, curricula, school choice and school leadership. One such person is Edward Tom, a former Sax Fifth Avenue buyer who went into teaching and became principal of the  Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics. His work is chronicled by Christopher Wong in the documentary Whatever It Takes.

Check out the trailer, which gives a snippet of the hard work Tom and his teachers put in to make educational achievement a reality. Understand that none of this will be easy, failures will happen along the way, but ambitious effort executed with passion and thoughtfulness can lead to success for every child.

Steven Evangelista with Eva Moskowitz. Photo courtesy of GothamSchools.org

For those who read the New York Times report on the use of Facebook by students to praise their teachers — or Bijan Sabat’s own thoughts on the matter — listen to this Dropout Nation Podcast on Harlem Link Charter School co-founder Steven Evangelista and how his rediscovery of one of his former students — and where the kid landed — is forcing him to look at one of the biggest challenges to stemming the nation’s dropout crisis.

In an age in which Facebook and Twitter can help friends and family deepen connection, why isn’t American public education using technology and social media — including school data systems — to broaden the crucial bond between teacher and student (especially a student who needs those bonds to stay on the path to graduation) long after the child leaves the classroom. Unfortunately, the same rules that hinder the development of school data system — a matter about which I discussed in A Byte At the Apple also complicate this work.

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