It’s amazing how pieces you wrote months or even years ago take on lives of their own. Yesterday, it was a piece I wrote in August on how education can serve as the long-term solution for pernicious poverty. After more than two months of sitting around Dropout Nation getting relatively scant attention, the Nation‘s resident spokeswoman for education traditionalists, Dana Goldstein, noticed that the piece mentioned her review of Steve Brill‘s Class Warfare. And she was none too happy about it.

Now, folks, Goldstein is right about this: I mistakenly thought that she cited the Coleman Report in her review. After all, when your editor realizes he’s wrong, he admits it. (It will be mentioned in future reprintings.) But Goldstein’s assertion that the research consistently shows that teacher quality accounts for at most, just 15-to-20 percent of student achievement fails the test.

Forget by the way that two of the four studies Goldstein cites don’t assert that neighborhood and family characteristics matter more.  One study she cites, co-written in 1998 by Value-Added godfather Eric Hanushek, John F. Kain and Stephen Rivkin, notes that while teacher quality may account for at least 7.8 percent of student gains, those numbers could easily be underestimated largely because of grade variation in teacher quality, errors that may be inherent in the tests used at the time, and the problems of using lower-bound estimates. Brian Rowan, Richard Correnti, and Robert J. Miller of the University of Pennsylvania make similar arguments in another study she cites. Essentially, it is quite likely the impact of teacher quality is understated instead of being overstated. And Spyros Konstantopoulos of Northwestern University pointed out in his 2005 meta-analysis, teacher quality may have a much-larger impact on student achievement in areas such as mathematics and science, largely because those are subjects more-likely to be learned by students in school than at home.

Ultimately, Goldstein dances around the general consensus that teacher quality (along with the role of families), is the most-critical factor in student achievement, especially within schools. If one wants to go with the argument that schools account for just 40 percent of student achievement, then teacher quality would still be the single-biggest factor in their success or failure, accounting for as much as half (if not more) of variations. If one argues that schools account for half of variation in student achievement, then likely teacher quality looms even larger. And if you divide up the socioeconomic factors along such lines as race, income, and everything else, teacher quality (along with families) would still likely be the biggest single slice of the student achievement pie. Given that research and the development of efforts such as the KIPP chain of charter schools have shown so  that high-quality teaching (along with strong family engagement) have stronger pulls on student success in school than socioeconomic conditions, the family and community factors aren’t necessarily as important as Goldstein declares. Poverty isn’t destiny.

This doesn’t mean that teacher quality is the only matter that must be dealt with in school reform. Good-to-great teachers still need rigorous college preparatory curricula (along with the underlying standards) in order to effectively instruct students. Schools still need strong, savvy, innovative and  principals to help build cultures of genius in which the potential of kids can be nurtured. Families still need the data and information in order to make smart decisions and be the lead players in schools that they should be. And there are practices, such as year-round school schedules, after-school programs, and extended school days, that, along with overhauling instruction and curricula, can help poor kids get high-quality learning (as well as help their parents with their child care needs). But understating the importance of teacher quality — which, despite her protest, is what Goldstein attempts to do with some finesse — essentially lets American public education off the hook for serving up educational neglect and malpractice to its poorest kids. And it is senseless to support the development of meaningful career ladders (as Goldstein rightfully does), without addressing the impact of traditional system of teacher compensation that rewards teachers for seat time instead of improving student achievement (and makes it difficult to initiate such reforms in the first place).

If one takes another look at Goldstein’s review of Class Struggle, some other flaws in her overall argument — that poverty is such a “crushing influence over children’s lives” that teachers and schools are incapable of helping  kids get on the path to success in life — also appear.

For example, Goldstein uses a  2008 Harvard University study on the benefits of school nutrition programs to argue that hunger is strongly correlated to student achievement. The problem is that Goldstein’s declaration is based on what can best be called the public health version of eyewitness testimony: Largely based on subjective observations without objective evidence, and thus, absolutely unreliable. The Harvard review of nutrition research she mentions, for example, bases its conclusions on a series of other studies such as two by a team led by nutritionist Ronald Kleinman which based its results on surveys of observations by parents and school administrators, or grades given by teachers, both of which are subjected to strong biases and aren’t empirical in nature.

This isn’t to say that nutrition can’t be an important factor in student achievement; as I’ve noted, the National School Lunch Program is one of the country’s most successful anti-poverty programs because it ties education and empowerment, two of three areas in which government can actually help alleviate poverty for the long haul. I have no problem with expanding school nutrition programs in order to help kids get three square meals each day. But the evidence she cites doesn’t prove her point.

Then she argues that school reformers should be embracing wrap-around concepts such as those pioneered by the Harlem Children’s Zone that have “realistic assessment of the whole child—not just a child’s test scores”. As a fan of Geoffrey Canada, the Harlem Children’s Zone, and the efforts being undertaken as part of the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative, I definitely think they are one of the many silver bullets for spurring systemic reform and helping all kids succeed. But, as the Brookings Institution pointed out last year in its (rather flawed) study of Harlem Children’s Zone’s results, there are other school reform efforts such as those of KIPP that are doing as good or better at improving student performance without embracing such a holistic approach; even if you dismiss the study (as I generally do), there isn’t enough evidence to show that this approach is better than any of the others being pursued today.

Finally, she argues that the solution for helping kids emerge from poverty lies not so much with reforming schools, but with developing and expanding anti-poverty programs. For more than a century, America has poured billions into anti-poverty efforts, from the mother’s pensions of the Progressive Era to most of the Great Society programs of the 1960s. Yet they have largely been failures. If anything, many of the anti-poverty programs (including welfare) has helped foster what Leon Dash would call the pestilences of gang warfare, drug dealing and unwed motherhood that have plagued Black America and Latino communities.

As I noted in my commentary last September, there are several reasons why they have been failures. For one, short-term anti-poverty efforts ameliorate the problems, but don’t stem those issues for the long haul. After all the food stamps and WIC checks, the families still remain poor. They remain dependent on welfare systems, their condescending administrators, and the corrupt politicians who use those regimes to bolster their political machines. More importantly, anti-poverty programs just don’t address the real issues of low educational attainment that is at the heart of the economic segregation that perpetuates poverty, especially in an age in which what you know is more important than what you can do with your hands. Education equals empowerment, and a high-quality education is what the children of these dropouts need in order to move out of poverty for the long haul.

Certainly schools cannot solve ameliorate short-term aspects of poverty. This is why the school lunch program and Earned Income Tax Credits are important in helping families become empowered and help their kids get the education they need for long-term success. Nor can reformers ignore the social ills that kids do have to deal with when they are not in school. It is why Dropout Nation argues strongly for reformers to team up with grassroots organizations and community outfits that address those issues on a daily basis — and why I put a strong focus on the nation’s failing juvenile justice and foster care systems. But anti-poverty programs won’t be enough. There are some issues, such as out-of-wedlock marriage, that aren’t necessarily matters of poverty in the first place; governments cannot make people get married.

More importantly, anti-poverty programs cannot solve the long-term consequences of the nation’s education crisis, which is the driving force behind the growing gaps in income between poor and more-affluent families. Contrary to what Goldstein or her fellow-travelers may think, the problems poor families face when dealing with American publication aren’t ones of poverty. Their problems lie with practices — including zoned schooling, ability tracking, the gate-keeping of Advanced Placement and other college-preparatory programs, and the restrictions on school choice –  that limit their ability to help their kids get the high-quality education that they need. The condescension of many principals and teachers toward low-income families is especially alienating. And they are tired, tired, tired of just being told that schools can’t provide their kids with high-quality education until every other social ill is fixed.

This is why Parent Power activists such as Gwen Samuel of the Connecticut Parents Union are challenging the institutions in their communities to do better. The schools at the center of the lives of their children should serve them far better than they do. And it would be nice if Goldstein would spend some of her considerable talent taking aim at the systemic problems within American public education that frustrates these families instead of blowing the hot squalid air of excuses that damn poor kids with low expectations.

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The percentage of American fourth-graders reading Below Basic — or functionally illiterate — on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal test of student and school achievement. That is a six-point decline from 2002, but no change from the 2009 exams. Meanwhile, 24 percent of eighth-graders reading Below Basic in 2011, a one-point decline from 2002.

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The percentage of all young male fourth-graders who were functionally illiterate in 2011, a three point decline from 2002, but barely a drop from 2009. Just 31 percent of young male fourth-graders read at Proficient and Advanced levels, a three percent uptick from nine years ago. Meanwhile, 29 percent of young female fourth-grade classmates read Below Basic in 2011, a four point decline from nine years ago; 36 percent of young female fourth-graders read at Proficient and Advanced levels, a two percent uptick over that time period.

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The percentage of all young male eighth-graders reading Below Basic in 2011, a one-point decline from 2002. Just 29 percent of young men heading into high school read at Proficient and Advanced levels, a one point increase over the same period nine years ago. Meanwhile, one out of every five female eighth-graders were functionally illiterate in 2011, virtually unchanged from 2002; the percentage of young female eighth-graders reading at Proficient and Advanced levels barely budged, from 38 percent in 2002 to 39 percent in 2011.

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The percentage of black fourth-grade students reading Below Basic in 2011, a mere one-point drop from 2009, but a nine point decline from 2002. That is a faster drop than the three point decline in white fourth-graders reading Below Basic (from 25 percent in 2002 to 22 percent in 2011) and the seven-point decline in Latino fourth-graders reading Below Basic (from 56 percent to 49 percent over the same period). Meanwhile, the percentage of American Indian fourth-graders reading Below Basic increased from 49 percent to 53 percent over the past nine years.

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The percentage of Latino eighth-graders reading Below Basic in 2011, a seven-point drop from levels in 2002. That’s a faster decline than the four-point drop for African American counterparts (from 45 percent in 2002 to 41 percent in 2001) and for whites (from 16 percent to 15 percent in the same period). The percentage of American Indian eighth-graders who were functionally illiterate declined by two points between 2002 and 2011, from 39 percent to 37 percent.

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The percentage of fourth-graders eligible for free- and-reduced lunch reading Below Basic in 2011. That is a six-point decline from the levels of functional illiteracy in 2002. Eighteen percent of fourth-graders not eligible for free- and reduced-lunch plans were functionally illiterate, a five-point decline from the same period in 2002.

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The percentage of eighth-graders eligible for free- and reduced lunch who were functionally illiterate in 2011. That is a three-point decline from levels in 2002. Fourteen percent of eighth-graders not eligible for free- and reduced-lunch were functionally illiterate, a two-point decline from the same period nine years ago.

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The percentage of fourth-grade suburbanites who are functionally illiterate in 2011, the same levels as it was in 2007, when the U.S. Department of Education began breaking NAEP data by location of school and district. Thirty-nine percent of fourth-graders attending urban schools scored Below Basic in 2011, a one point drop from the levels four years ago; while the percentage of rural fourth-graders who were functionally illiterate declined from 31 percent in 2007 to 29 percent in 2011. Thirty-six percent of fourth-grade town students read Below Basic in 2011, a two-point increase from 2007.

The 2011 NAEP results offer some important stories on the successes of efforts to reform American public education — and at the same time, point to need for continuing this systemic overall. The good news is that fewer poor and minority children are functionally illiterate. The results show that the No Child Left Behind Act has been an imperfect, yet important first step in fostering systemic reform. The law brought accountability to American public education, forced revelations of inflated graduation rates, and showed the poor performance of suburban districts in improving student achievement for all kids (including those from poor and minority backgrounds).

The NAEP data also points out the reality that focusing on stemming achievement gaps is a smart strategy in systemically overhauling American public education. Not only does it help children served abysmally by American public education to get higher-quality teaching and curricula, it helps all children get the schools they deserve.

It is especially amazing to consider the successes of the most-aggressive school reform states and even those who have pushed for strong reforms in reading curricula and instruction. Just 29 percent of Florida’s students read Below Basic on the 2011 NAEP, an 11 percent decline from nine years ago; 38 percent of its free- and reduced lunch students read Below Basic in 2011 versus 51 percent nine year ago. This success, though slowed, was sustained even as the Sunshine State’s efforts weakened slightly under Charlie Crist, who succeeded the more-aggressive Jeb Bush. In Alabama, where the state sustained aggressive reading instruction and curriculum reform (even as it failed to overhaul teacher quality and expand school choice), 33 percent of students read Below Basic, a 15 percent decline from nine years ago; the percentage of poor fourth-graders who were functionally illiterate declined by 16 percent in that same period, from 61 percent to 45 percent.

At the same time, no matter how you look at it, one out of every two black, Latino, and American Indiana fourth-graders — an one out of every five white and Asian students in the same grade — are unable to read at levels needed for future success. When one looks at the high levels of illiteracy among young men — which account for most of the high levels of illiteracy in each racial and income category — it is clear that far too many young men and women are not getting the instruction and curricula they need to succeed in school and in life. And the stubborn resistance of suburban districts to reform must be overcome in order all of the students in those schools to get what they deserve.

So we must continue to overhaul how we recruit, train, evaluate, and reward teachers; develop stronger, more-entrepreneurial school leaders; expand the number of high-quality school options for all kids; provide all kids with rigorous college preparatory curricula; make parents the lead decision-makers in education and given them the tools they need to make smart decisions for their kids; and build cultures of genius in which the potential of all kids can be nurtured. We must also expand accountability, holding all the players in education accountable for doing right by our kids, no matter who they are or where they live. The steps being taken by the Obama administration and congressional leaders to eviscerate No Child’s accountability measures are absolutely senseless. And we need even more achievement gap mania than ever.

The NAEP results are the next starting point for pushing harder and faster for systemic reform. After all, we have only one chance, every day, to help our children make their ambitions real.

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One-point-two million fourth-graders in 2009 – 33 percent of the nation’s students in that grade that year — were likely functionally illiterate. They were not reading at grade level, were struggling in other subjects that depend on reading such as math. And they are unlikely to ever graduate from high school eight years later. Another 948,193 students were likely reading at just basic levels; while they weren’t struggling as mightily as their functionally illiterate peers, they are barely at the academic Mendoza line, barely getting by.

Depending on their racial or ethnic background, whether their families are poor or wealthy, the zip code in which they lived at the time, or even if they are a boy or a girl, there are a lot of American fourth-graders who are not getting the education they need for success in school in life. Altogether, the majority of the nation’s fourth-graders were — and two years later — still are either on the path to dropping out or just graduating with a high school diploma in an age in which some form of higher education is necessary for attaining high-paying jobs as lawyers, accountants, elevator installers, and welders. Those who manage to find high-quality teachers (or, if they are in one of the few parts of the nation in which they can seek out high-quality alternatives to mediocre and failing traditional public schools) may be able to escape this path to economic and social despair. But for most of these kids — and for the millions of children in other grades — this is not likely at all.

These reality is why there is nothing wrong with what Rick Hess and others has deemed “achievement gap mania”. If anything, we need more of it than ever.

As Dropout Nation readers know by now, Hess has prompted a heated month-long discussion about whether school reformers should continue their focus on stemming achievement gaps as part of systemically reforming American public education. While Hess has certainly had some folks defending his positions, more evidence and commentary clearly shows that Hess’ argument is off-base. George W. Bush Institute scholar Matthew Ladner challenges much of Hess’ argument yesterday in his own analysis of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ 2003 and 2009 exams.

As I’ve said in previous pieces, Hess has done a poor job of proving his argument that there are negative (and terrible) consequences that come out of focusing on stemming achievement gaps. Nor has he proven that the focus of reformers on stemming those gaps have has starved other topics of policymaking and philanthropic resources. As someone who has worked in — and with — a number of education-focused organizations, I can easily attest that there is just as much focus on such matters as school nutrition and bullying as on the problems of at-risk children.

But the biggest problem with Hess’ argument is this underlying assumption: That the problem of achievement gaps are limited only to poor kids of minority backgrounds attending schools in urban cities. This isn’t even close to reality. The fact that out of every four fourth-graders in a suburban school read Below Basic proficiency all but proves lie to assumptions of the contrary. The experiences of middle class black and Latino families in suburbia, who, along with white middle-class households whose kids suffer from autism, must often fight with principals and teachers to get their kids high-quality instruction and curricula, also attests to this fact. And don’t forget,  districts in rural communities — including areas of states perceived to be mostly-urban such as California and New York — account for one out of every five of the nation’s dropout factories.

Then there are the achievement gaps between young men and their female peers, which defy the perception of the achievement gap as just a race and economic problem. Just 66 percent of all young male high school freshmen graduate four years later versus 73 percent of their female peers. Forty-one percent of Asian fourth-grade boys eligible for free-or-reduced lunch were functionally illiterate vs. only 29 percent of their female peers; meanwhile 33 percent of young Latino male high school seniors from college-educated households read Below Basic on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, versus 24 percent of their sisters. Simply put, our schools condemn far too many illiterate young men to special education ghettos, suspend far too many young men — generally at twice the rate of their female peers — and put them on the path to dropping out.

Hess’ argument ignores the reality that, for the most part, American public education serves up mediocrity to many of the kids it serves — and abject malpractice to its poorest children, to black and Latino kids regardless of their levels of wealth, to children in foster care, and to the young men and women its teachers and administrators relegate to the academic ghettos of special education. This week, University of Houston researchers Sai Bui, Steven Craig and Scott Imberman offered one more example in their Education Next report on lack of progress among top-performing students attending gifted-and-talented classes. The low quality of teaching and curricula is not only endemic in classes for kids considered too black, too Latino, too poor (and thus, in the minds of those who serve as gatekeepers to gifted and talented courses) too incapable of taking what are supposed to be rigorous courses even in districts in which they make up the majority of enrollment, it is likely to be a problem for students who get into them. After all, those courses aren’t necessarily cordon solitaires from the systemic problems within K-12 education.

What Hess has proven are these undeniable facts: That our nation’s ed schools fail miserably in recruiting and training aspiring teachers. That school leadership generally remains more ideal than reality at nearly all levels of our districts. That there are folks in education who aren’t innovative in their use of curricula, instruction, or information (and lack sophistication in using data). That the lack of strong performance management and evaluation (along with tenure laws and seniority privileges that protect laggard teachers at the expense of children) have helped foster dysfunctional cultures in which there are no incentives to embrace new approaches to helping kids succeed. And that all our kids, regardless of who they are or where they come from, are not getting the instruction, curricula, and school cultures worthy of them.

Hess is right that the conversation about achievement gaps tends to be far too focused on the abject failures of big-city districts — and has allowed education traditionalists in suburbia to argue against reform. As Dropout Nation has consistently shown since its founding, the systemic problems within American public education that help foster and exacerbate achievement gaps extend beyond Detroit, Indianapolis and Los Angeles Unified. Reformers need to consistently remind Americans that the achievement gap is not just a problem of poor kids in the ‘hood.

But the solution isn’t to move away from focusing on stemming achievement gaps. In fact, it is impossible to solve the nation’s education crisis without it.

As a matter of simple mathematics, doing so makes sense. Young men make up three out of every five high school students who drop out every hour of every day; they also make up more than half of all students. Black and Latino students make up the majority of enrollment in western and southern states, the regions which account for 57 percent of the nation’s student population.

The achievement gap focus is also fiscally sensible. One of the biggest problems in American public education is that we spend $594 billion without any strategic focus whatsoever. We continually fund a system that, as Hess himself pointed out earlier this week at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s confab on student achievement, wasn’t built to provide them with high-quality learning. Even the No Child Left Behind Act’s laudable goal of forcing states and districts to focus on improving the achievement of poor and minority kids only touches a smattering of the dollars spent. Far more children would be helped if most of the $63 billion spent wastefully on school construction was focused instead on intensive reading remediation and expanding school choice.

As Ladner rightly pointed out yesterday, focusing on achievement gaps as a strategy for systemic reform is also absolutely and fundamentally the American thing to do. As a nation, we believe in providing all children with an equal opportunity to get the education they need so they can choose their own economic and social destinies. When the chances of a child getting high-quality instruction is as haphazard now as it was when my grandmother was attending school during the Great Depression, it insults the very idea of our nation as the shining city upon the hill. And we cannot compete in an increasingly global economy when one-third of our citizens can’t read while another quarter barely comprehend what’s written in The Huffington Post.

Finally, it is our moral and civic obligation. Whether you are a Methodist, a Humanist, a Buddhist, or a Benjamin Franklin-styled Deist, we should all be outraged that our tax dollars sustain a system in which 1.2 million children a year are condemned to poverty and system before they even have a chance to determine their own paths in life.  We should work furiously, unapologetically, to ensure that every child to have a good-to-great school at the center of their lives — and should shame anyone who defends practices that keep this from happening.

The solution isn’t to stop focusing on achievement gaps, but to expand that conversation, explaining how helping our kids served the least by American public education also helps all children and their families. You know, self interest. All children are helped when we overhaul how we recruit, train, and reward teachers, and when we replace laggard instructors with dedicated, high-quality teachers. Every child, be they in Detroit or in Grosse Pointe, benefits from high-quality school choices. And the fewer dropouts on the unemployment line, the more money will go into the pockets of those of us who pay nearly half of the nation’s taxes (and shoulder the burdens of a welfare state).

Such an expansive conversation would do more further school reform than a misguided misinterpretation of problems stemming from the nation’s education crisis.

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To get a sense of what is likely going to happen to many of the 3.2 million teachers employed in America’s classrooms who don’t teach core subjects such as reading, math, science, history and foreign language, consider the experience of a corporate lawyer who just spent a few days teaching business law at a high school in the D.C. suburb of Loudoun County.

Volunteering as part of a nonprofit that instructs teens on the ins and outs of the nation’s legal system, this lawyer spent time teaching a class of students about that lovely thing called torts and lawsuits. During those sessions, she finds herself getting into a lively Socratic discussion with her students, many of whom may not know about such terms as liable but definitely know about the spate of suits over statements made on Facebook and Twitter.  The kids are engaged, interested, and want to learn more. Theoretically, she is supposed to jointly teach with a full-time instructor who also handles high school electives in computer science and the golf team. But, in all honesty, the teacher can barely tell the difference between a summary judgment and a jury verdict, and barely considers his students — most of them Latino and black — capable of learning about any aspect of civics. In fact, instead of using the engaging course options offered by the nonprofit that would further immerse kids in learning — the teacher hands out worksheets on vocabulary terms.

At the end of her work, the young corporate lawyer figures out a few things — and that’s beyond realizing that the high school’s principal brought in the program in order to essentially keep this tenured and expensive laggard from doing any further damage to her students. The first? She enjoys every aspect of teaching, but she doesn’t want to give up her six-figure job to go full-time into a profession in which the lucrative benefits package doesn’t come into place for at least 20 years. The second? That she would do it on a contract basis, focusing on just business law electives, once she reaches her fifties and the kids are out of college. In fact, she would do it for just a small annual sum and without any need for either retirement benefits or healthcare coverage. Third: That her parents, both in their sixties, comfortably retired and still looking for new challenges, would love to teach kids and would do so on a contract basis themselves. Her father, a former school principal who plays in his own band, could definitely teach music as he did when he first came into education five decades ago; while her mother, a former chief nurse practitioner, could definitely take on such electives as health and sex education the same way she has been teaching young girls (including at the local church) for years.

Then she wonders: Why don’t districts just contract with these aspiring teachers? The kids could get high-quality learning in these electives from subject-matter experts who care about kids. Even better, school districts can get this expertise and save millions annually spent on salaries and benefits for teachers working on electives that contribute to student learning, but whose value can’t really be measured (because there are no tests for these areas), and, to be honest, the teachers are not exactly experts with up-to-date knowledge. Why not hire professional musicians as contract music instructors working for several local schools in a district? Or contracting with an auto body shop to teach students about the ins and outs of modern automobiles?

This young corporate lawyer has stumbled onto one of the realities that school reformers and education traditionalists will eventually have to confront: That current- and long-term fiscal realities, along with the need to provide our children with high-quality teachers in core subjects, makes it untenable to keep many of the majority of teachers dedicated solely to elective courses and subjects that may not be at the heart of improving student learning. The fact that many of these teachers aren’t exactly subject-matter experts or have knowledge that is out of date also means that students aren’t getting what the learning they deserve while taxpayers are bearing fiscal burdens that may not make sense. So it is time to develop new solutions that will help our kids get enriched learning experiences while also saving money. In many cases, this may mean replacing full-time teachers in elective courses with contractors and part-timers from the millions of aspiring teachers of middle age who already have the subject-matter competency and experience with children to do the job.

President Barack Obama played up the prospect of teacher layoffs earlier this month as part of his efforts to pass his $450 billion American Jobs Act stimulus plan, 30 percent of which is slated toward supposedly keeping The fact that districts do as much as they can to avoid teacher layoffs, along with the ineffectiveness of Obama’s previous teachers’ union bailout plans, and the estimated 24,000 teachers that will be added to payrolls (according to U.S. Department of Education estimates) means that few teachers will lose their jobs in the next year.

But fewer teachers will be kept in classrooms over the next decade. Why? Start with the $137 billion in state budget shortfalls over the next two fiscal years. After years of increasing education spending, states are now reducing their subsidies, forcing districts to pare their own budgets. Districts have been able to find cuts in other areas (including trimming custodial staffs) and even hold off on raises. But eventually there will be teacher layoffs.

Then there are the long-term issues. With $1.4 trillion in teachers’ pension deficits and unfunded retiree healthcare costs, states can no longer afford to simply increase the number of teachers. The fact that fringe benefits have increased from 28 cents for every dollar of teacher salary to 32 cents is proving costly to districts. Moving away from defined-benefit pensions is one key step toward reducing these burdens, as will require teachers to contribute more to their benefits. But it won’t be enough. Headcounts will have to be cut.

If 1.6 million Baby Boomer teachers actually retire, as Denise Forte of the U.S. Department of Education predicts, then that will make some of those headcount decisions easy. Districts will simply have to whittle down by attrition, hiring fewer teachers to replace those heading into retirement. But given the personal financial difficulties — from mortgages under water to college bills for their kids — that some teachers in that age range could be facing, don’t count on it. And given that previous claims of mass retirements have not come to fruition, no one can count on attrition alone.

Then there is the most-important reason why we need fewer teachers: There are far too many laggards in our classrooms who are poorly-serving our kids. While middle-class families and teachers’ unions have been fans of class size reduction efforts that have led to more teachers working in classrooms with fewer kids, the initiatives have proven to be ineffective in improving student achievement. If anything, the addition of more teachers may actually dilute quality because ed schools — which were doing a poor job of training teachers before the advent of class size reductions — are sacrificing quality for quantity, doing an even worse job of weeding out the chaff from the wheat. Kids may be better off with larger classes taught by high-quality teachers.

There will be layoffs. The question is what this will look like. Elementary school teachers, who make up 1.7 million of our teachers, will likely be safe. As I discussed earlier this month, there could likely be more specialization, which means there will be just as many elementary school teachers working in the next decade as there are now. More importantly, a high-quality elementary education will ensure that kids will make it through the middle school years and high school toward graduation. Cutting elementary school teachers doesn’t make sense.

As for those working in the middle and high school ranks? A different story. If laws requiring reverse-seniority (or last in-first out) layoffs are reversed in the coming years, then districts can eliminate costly laggard teachers in reading, math, science and history regardless of their experience. Thanks to more-rigorous teacher evaluations coming into place such as the IMPACT system in D.C., this work becomes easier for districts to do. But given that the core courses (along with foreign languages and special education) account for only 33 percent of the 1.1 million teachers working in our nation’s high schools (and likely, a similar percentage of middle-school teachers), the teachers working in subjects that are either considered electives or non-core subjects such as music will also face the axe.

One could just make subject every school course to testing. But that won’t fly with many parents or even some school reformers. Why? Some believe that subjecting these courses to tests would ruin the enriching experiences that students may gain from them; while they are willing to subject students and teachers in core subjects to testing, they think the music teacher, the shop class instructor, and the art teacher should not have to deal with that stuff. Then there is the cost of testing those subjects themselves, which may be prohibitive financially and politically compared to the gains that can be reaped. Certainly there should be testing for foreign language proficiency; this makes sense in an age in which learning Mandarin or Spanish can be critical to lifelong success in an increasingly global economy. But one can imagine the cultural and political debates over what should be covered in a music appreciation exam.

What cannot be measured will not matter, or at least, not matter enough to employ a full-time teacher to hold that job. Since tests won’t be administered for these electives, those teachers cannot be evaluated in any meaningful way. Certainly, principals can evaluate for observable aspects of teaching, but not for the most-important and unobservable matter of student achievement. More importantly, since outcomes can be measured, American public education will be required to rely on outputs such as teacher credentials that do not correlate with student achievement. If depending solely on credentialing doesn’t make sense for measuring the performance of teachers in core subjects, it won’t make sense for those in electives either.

This leads to a predictable result: Fewer teachers in health, music, art, and other subjects. And it should. The salary and benefits are too costly. But this doesn’t have to mean the end of electives. After all, music and art are critical in building the background knowledge children need to be fully literate. One can also justify the existence of health and sex education courses. Then there are the vocational courses, which have, for most of the past 80 years, been way stations for students that American public education deemed incapable of college preparatory learning. The reality that blue-collar workers need the same high-level reading, math and science skills that white-collar counterparts must have makes vocational ed less necessary. But it is a good thing for kids to learn about woodworking; it can offer an outlet for kids for self-expression as well as learn a skill they can use at any point in life (think about having to put together a cabinet or fix shelving). Vocational courses can also offer new, relevant ways for kids to learn the college preparatory math and science lessons that they are being taught in traditional classrooms.

But this doesn’t mean continuing to keep hundreds of thousands of teachers in electives on full-time payrolls. One possibility starts with the millions of middle-aged professionals — including lawyers, nurses, blue-collar welders, auto shop owners and professional musicians — who are ready, willing and able to take on teaching those subjects at least on a part-time or contractual basis. One can imagine a district putting together a team of professional musicians who can teach at several schools throughout the school year, or even working with a technical university to provide weekly shop electives to interested students. I can easily imagine my mother-in-law, a social worker who now sits on Arkansas’ minority health commission, teaching health classes at a local high school — or my own mother teaching information technology classes to high schoolers in the Atlanta suburb in which she lives.

Best of all, these mid-career and Baby Boomer professionals, many of whom already demonstrated experience and have their retirement benefits already squared away, won’t need pensions, 401-K plans, or even much in the way of salary. And as Martin Haberman has noted, teachers coming into the profession late in life also have the practical skills needed to manage classrooms, command the respect of students, and get their job done with little supervision.

This not only creates an opportunity for schools (in terms of high-quality instruction at a cost savings) and students (who get relevant, up-to-date instruction with real professionals in those fields), but even for ed schools and alternative certification groups who can offer short courses on teaching method, cultural competency and other aspects of teaching. And it doesn’t need to take four years to get the needed certification. One can imagine a year-long clinical-based teacher training that gets aspiring teachers into the field within three months of passing tests that show subject competency, entrepreneurial drive and caring for children.

Education traditionalists, of course, don’t want to have this conversation because it means rethinking what a teaching career should look like. For the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, in particular, it also means fewer members upon which they can count for dues that they use to maintain their declining influence. As for school reformers? Far too many have been happy with talk about stretching spending and wringing out needed efficiencies in aspects of education such as transportation and building maintenance. They have also pressed admirably to end the array of practices — from reverse-seniority layoffs to abysmal performance management — that has been one of the causes of the nation’s education crisis. But with teacher salaries and benefits account for 60 percent of current spending, questions about teacher staffing can no longer be bypassed. We owe it to our children and to teachers to honestly think through what staffing can and should look like in the coming decades.

The reality is that there will be fewer teachers in America’s classrooms. Now is the time to discuss what that will look like and how we can ease the transitions that are going to come.

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This week’s This is Dropout Nation report on the continuing problems of America’s ed schools garnered some interesting responses. One of them came from Dimitri Sevastapoulo, a Harris Brown Stevens real estate broker who, before going into that arena, taught in New York City public schools, headed up the high school division of the famed Dalton School in New York City, and presided over the board of the Caedmon School, a private Montessori school that his child attends. He notes that a decade ago, when he tried to go back to New York University to complete his master’s degree in education, he was told that his “credits were stale” and had to begin the whole process of getting that degree again.

What he figured out? Writes Sevastapoulo: “A graduate degree in education is an expensive, worthless piece of paper.” More importantly, he notes that “competence in a serious field of study… accountability and dedication are the key ingredients for good teaching.” His points are on the mark.

Meanwhile Devon Skerritt, who manages the volunteer operations at Harvard’s ed school, takes issue with Dropout Nation‘s surmising that ed schools are probably no longer useful. For Skerritt, the idea of eliminating ed schools leads to the bigger question of “how do we create/support strong scholars’ research in ed?”Certainly, this is an important question. After all, ed schools are generally the centers of research in education. At the same time, however, one must remember that education research, like ed school training, isn’t close to being in tip-top shape. As my former Forbes editor, Seth Lubove, noted a decade in his report on the controversy surrounding the Success for All reading program, the education research field is often so incestuous that a supposed peer reviewer can also have a business relationship with the researcher presenting the data (and not recuse themselves in light of the conflict).  The interpretations by researchers can also be so agenda-driven that even if underlying data is solid, it becomes sullied by association. As a result, education research isn’t as exacting as it is in more-rigorous hard- and social science fields.

Education research is getting better. But ed schools haven’t been the ones driving this. The development of Value-Added Assessment, for example, was driven by William Sanders, first while running the University of Tennessee’s assessment center (which was run independent of the education school), and then, when he worked for privately-held software outfit SAS. The pioneering work of Paul Hill, Paul Peterson, Jonah Rockoff, Michael Podgursky and Marguerite Roza have also happened outside of ed school confines. And when one starts to look at the graduation rate and dropout crisis efforts of Robert Balfanz, Jay P. Greene, Christopher Swanson, and Michael Holzman, it slowly becomes clear that ed schools have lagged far behind in developing pioneering research addressing the underlying issues of the nation’s education crisis.

This isn’t to say that ed schools can’t exist in order to have strong research roles. It’s just that they haven’t actually taken up such work. Far too many ed school professors are either too busy maintaining the status quo within their institutions — or trying to make names for themselves as poor man’s Diane Ravitches — than improving the quality of education research conducted within their respective institutions.

Skerritt also notes, rightfully, that there are some ed schools that are doing fantastic work in training teachers and principals. It may be time to follow the path of Abraham Flexner, whose Carnegie Corp.-funded review of medical schools led to improvements in how doctors are selected into med schools, shut down laggard institutions, and spurred innovation and better training throughout the medical field. Ed schools clearly need the same kind of housecleaning. If they don’t change, they should move aside for better institutions for training the teachers our children need for their success in school and in life.

We will talk more about this issue on Wednesday, when Dropout Nation hosts a special podcast on the future of ed schools featuring Arthur McKee of the National Council on Teacher Quality. He will argue for the existence of ed schools, but also for the full reform of their work in training teachers.

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When it comes to America’s system of training teachers, two things are crystal clear. The first? That America’s university schools of education, which train nearly all of the 200,000 or so teachers who attempt to enter the profession every year, are doing a shoddy job of recruiting aspiring teachers and providing them with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in the classroom. The second: That there is no correlation between the credentials teachers are granted and their ability to improve student achievement over time.

This week, two studies once again confirm both realities. And it is past time to take real action to improve the teacher training pipeline so that our kids get the high-quality education they deserve.

The first bit of latest news comes courtesy of the American Enterprise Institute, which released a study earlier this week on the abysmally high levels of grade inflation among ed school majors. The average ed school student at Indiana University’s ed school on its main campus in Bloomington had a simple grade-point average of 3.66, higher than the g.p.a.’s of students in the university’s other majors; as the study’s author, Cory Koedel notes in another study he conducted this year, math, science and economics majors only average g.p.a.’s of 3.06 , while those taking social science and humanities courses barely average over a 3.0.

At the University of Missouri’s ed school, the average student garners a simple g.p.a. of 3.80, nearly a full point higher than a student majoring in math, science and economics. Only psychology ranks as the second-easiest major on its campus — and even an average student in that major is only rewarded a 3.43. In fact, every student received a 4.0 g.p.a. in one out of every five ed school classes they took, a far higher percentage than what students in other majors ever receive. Stated simply, an ed school student has a one-in-five chance of earning an easy “A” regardless of their work product.

Essentially, ed school professors — many of whom have sparse experience in the classroom — are doling out too many high grades far too often, providing students with unrealistic assessments of their ability to perform in the classroom. This isn’t surprising: As former Teachers College president Arthur Levine surmised six years ago, one out of every two teachers in America are trained at schools with low entrance requirements. The results that are seen in our classrooms are even less shocking. As longtime teaching guru Martin Haberman has noted, half of all aspiring teachers never make it into the classroom, while Richard Elmore has pointed out that half of those who did get employed left the profession within five years — and this in spite of the fact that in most states, teachers attain near-lifetime employment within three years.

As for those who remain? Given that one-third of America’s fourth-graders are functionally illiterate — and our best-performing students rank 32nd in the world on the PISA test of international student achievement — the quality of teaching in our schools among those who attain tenure is abysmal. But doesn’t our teacher credentialing system help weed out laggards? Not at all. As Manhattan Institute scholar Marcus Winters and his team point out in a study of Florida teachers also released this week, there is no correlation between credentials — including certification and attaining graduate degrees, the two things education traditionalists tend to tout in their arguments over school reform — and student achievement. This confirms studies that have shown that credentials and experience account for only three-to-five percent of the student performance.

Yet we continue a system of teacher training and certification that all but ensures that low-quality teachers will continue their educational neglect and abuse on our children. As Winters notes, the pedagogical theories taught by ed schools have little positive impact on student achievement (and ultimately, teacher performance). Yet ed schools have not done anything to move from that emphasis to focusing on the things teachers need to have for success — subject-matter competency, entrepreneurial and leadership ability, instructional method, and the ability to analyze and use data in their work. Nor do they screen out ed school candidates for their subject-matter skills and care and empathy for children; the latter of which can be done simply by following Haberman’s suggested method of having an aspiring teacher show how he works with a child who looks different (and has a different socioeconomic background) than them.

Part of the problem lies with the fact that ed schools, like other institutions in traditional public education, are simply too stuck in their ways to change. The other problem is likely to be purely arbitrary. As Michigan Superintendent Mike Flanagan noted last month, far too many ed schools are focused on revenue instead of quality, and that is particularly clear in his state: Two-thirds of the Wolverine State’s 7,500 ed school grads leave the state, either to work in districts in other states, or perhaps to go into other fields. Savvy collegians may have figured out that getting a teaching degree is such easy work that they just go in, grab the degree, and then head into another field. For ed schools, which receive $7 billion annually for teacher training, tightening up standards (and improving teacher quality) could also mean sacrificing revenue.

But it’s not just the ed schools alone that are responsible. The fact that state teacher certification agencies, which oversee ed schools, are often separate from education departments means that ed schools are not well-scrutinized and regulated; the fact that the certification agencies themselves are also stuck in an old-school mindset (and, until recently, have been banned in nearly all states from even allowing for the use of value-added data in certification) is also a problem. The federal government has also neglected its role in this arena, failing to make ed school accountability an element of the No Child Left Behind Act when teaching (and how teachers get into classrooms) is a critical reason for the nation’s academic failure.

Then there are school districts and those who lead them. As Koedel notes in the AEI study, far too many principals are giving too many of their teachers high marks for performance — even when their ratings don’t correlate with actual classroom performance. The fact that many principals themselves aren’t exactly up to snuff in their performance is part of the problem; as Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Steve Peha has also pointed out in his series on school leadership (and I pointed out last week in my piece on the school data) these principals, often drawn from the teaching ranks, are often unsophisticated in areas such as data analysis and incapable of leading adults. As I noted in the 2008 report I co-wrote for the National Council on Teacher Quality, state laws (influenced by the lobbying of teachers’ union affiliates) have made it difficult and expensive for principals and superintendents to dismiss laggard teachers. But the laggard talent in the administrator ranks, along with the cultures they and incompetent teachers perpetuate, also make improving teacher quality a tough problem.

It will take plenty of work to solve the teacher training problem. And it may have to start with the end of ed schools. The fact that alternative teacher training programs such as Teach For America now account for four out of every ten teachers hired since 2005 means that ed schools are starting to lose their monopoly. But remember, many of those programs actually are started by ed schools themselves, which means that there are still plenty of laggard teachers coming into the field. We need more outfits of the likes of TFA, Urban Teacher Residency United, and Teach Plus, who stand outside of the ed school world, and can recruit and quickly train teachers at higher levels of quality and lower cost.

In fact, one can dare argue that there is almost no reason for ed schools to exist. After all, if an alternative teacher training outfit, a school district or even a teacher professional association in the guild mold, can recruit aspiring teachers, weed out the proverbial chaff from the wheat, and get those teacher up to speed during the first two years on the job, then ed schools can go out of business altogether. This is one idea the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation can fund and make a success in quick order. And definitely needs to do so: Our kids deserve better than what they are getting now.

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