One would think education traditionalists would be as slightly relieved by the deal New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo forced the state’s education department to strike with the American Federation of Teachers’ state affiliate as school reformers are (slightly irrationally) exuberant. While Value-Added analysis of student test score growth over time culled from the state’s standardized tests would account for at least a fifth — and as much as 40 percent — of the overall evaluation, the overall evaluation will still be largely based on classroom observations that are generally less accurate in reflecting their performance than student surveys. Considering that districts can still base half of the test portion of evaluations from third-party instruments (instead of from state tests, as Cuomo had wanted), teacher evaluations will still remain less useful than they could be in rewarding high-quality teaching and helping teachers improve performance. From where your editor sits, the deal is just a slight change for the better, either for good-to-great teachers or for our children. For reformers, it’s a cosmetic victory, and for education traditionalists, it’s far less of a defeat than they could have otherwise expected.

But for once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch, who seems more than willing to debase whatever reputation she has left as a polemicist in order to defend failed thinking (and collect speaking fees), the Empire State deal is still far too much to bear.

In the Education Week blog she co-writes with the equally intellectually challenged Deborah Meier, Ravitch proclaims that the deal harkens “a dark day for New York” because the new evaluation system will actually go a little further in measuring teacher performance based on the ability to improve student achievement (and thus, requiring instructors to be accountable for their work in improving student success). From where Ravitch sits, the new evaluation system is also “draconian”, forces teachers to be ”graded on a curve” and puts them into the awkward position of “competing with all other teachers.” because teachers who do well on the classroom observation component of the evaluation may still be rated ineffective if student performance isn’t improved on their watch. Ravitch is also offended that Cuomo and state legislators dare to weigh into the discussions and, in her mind, “impose an untested scheme on educators”.

But Ravitch reserves her greatest scorn for the weight given to Value-Added test score data in the evaluations. She declares that the decision to allow objective data to account for nearly half of the overall teacher rating is just “purely arbitrary” for which there is “no research… no evidence whatsoever”. As far as Ravitch is concerned, teachers now have to deal with an evaluation based in part on what she considers to be “inaccurate” data that will have “negative consequences”. What could those horrific outcomes possibly be? Ravitch doesn’t say.

Ravitch conveniently ignores last month’s report from the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching initiative, which actually suggests that Value-Added data should account for more than half of an overall evaluation because they are far more accurate in measuring teacher quality than classroom observations. She also fails to admit MET’s finding that the reliability of even the best-structured classroom observation — including the Classroom Assessment Scoring System developed by teacher training firm Teachstone – was less than half of a standard deviation in math and a fifth of a standard deviation in reading; that’s far lower than the reliability of the Tripod student perception survey developed by Harvard’s Ronald Ferguson and Cambridge Education (which accurately determined teacher performance by two-thirds of a standard deviation). The fact that Value-Added has withstood scrutiny as being useful in measuring teacher performance is also left out of her argument; so is the reality that classroom observations have been proven over and over again to be ineffective as tools in evaluating the ability of teachers to help students learn.

Ravitch also fails to realize that the deal struck is actually not that much different from the state law passed two years ago (for which the AFT lobbied largely as a defensive measure); save for the option of using state test score data for the 40 percent of the evaluation based on teacher impact on student achievement, the plan has hardly changed. Her derision of politicians weighing in on how teachers are evaluated and compensated also shows that she has no grasp of how things work in a democratic republic. Last I checked, education is mostly government run and financed. This means that legislators and governors elected by taxpayers — including parents who are compelled by law to leave their children in the care of teachers and administrators — are supposed to have a hand in structuring how districts operate and even how districts are evaluated. This is especially true when one considers that districts are considered by law arms of state governments, who are in most states, constitutionally required to provide education to its citizens.

If anything, one of the reasons why politicians are teaming up with school reformers to overhaul American public education is because  we have left education to “experts” in the classroom, administrative, and ed school ranks for far too long. What their expertise has wrought includes such practices as the overuse of suspensions and expulsions, the overdiagnosis of learning disabilities (especially among young black men, whose reading deficiencies are often diagnosed as being special ed problems), that manifestation of early 20th century racialism (and belief that minorities and immigrant are incapable of learning) that is ability tracking and the comprehensive high school model, and a system of recruiting, training, compensating and evaluating teachers that has proven ineffective in providing high-quality instruction to our children. And these failures come at a high costs to everyone, both in terms of human lives lost into poverty and prison, and billions of taxpayer dollars wastefully spent on practices that don’t work (including $7 billion a year on salary increases for teachers attaining master’s degrees that have no correlation to student achievement).

Certainly one can argue convincingly that our children would be better served if traditional districts were dismantled and we moved to a Hollywood Model of Education in which schools are operated by teachers, charter school operators, community groups, churches, and even families. One may even argue (less convincingly) that government should be out of the education business altogether. But so long as education is a government-controlled system, legislators and governors (along with families) should play more- active and thoughtful roles in shaping teaching, curricula, and other school operations.

What Ravitch defends is continuing a system in which laggard instruction and those who serve it up remain unaccountable and hidden from view. She defends incompetent and mediocre teachers keeping their jobs at the expense of better-performing colleagues whose success in helping students deserves public recognition and financial reward. Ravitch basically wants education to remain a preserve of anti-intellectualism in which sophisticated use of data in helping students and teachers is verboten. And, ultimately, while Ravitch may care about the futures of children, the ideas, practices, and policies she defends do little more than condemn their lives to economic and social despair.

This is one of the latest examples of Ravitch offering arguments in defense of education traditionalist thinking has more bombast and mawkish thinking than scholastic rigor and intellectual depth. Last week, she attempted to weigh in on Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s efforts to reform that city’s failing traditional district with claptrap that merely defends the kind of atrocious and indefensible poverty myth-making that deserves to be tossed into the ashbin of history. Last month, Ravitch declared California Gov. Jerry Brown was a “visionary” for his efforts to stem the slow efforts in reforming the state’s woeful schools under predecessor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his general unwillingness to actually take responsibility for the failing districts (and their effects on children) under his watch.

But this is nothing new. For much of Ravitch’s career — especially after her criticisms of multiculturalism moved her into the public intellectual spotlight — she has been more of an enfant terrible than anything else. These days, she is more interested in being the Camille Paglia of education traditionalists without either the latter’s intellectual curiosity, scholastic rigor, or skillfulness in bombast. So she spends more time offering straw-men arguments and faulty interpretations of research that thoughtful criticism and intelligent analysis. All in all, Ravitch doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously on any level — and her thinking doesn’t merit more than the passing consideration on the way to more serious thinking.

Certainly your editor will hear from Ravitch’s erstwhile supporters and her friends among otherwise-sensible conservatives in the school reform movement, who will proclaim that I’m once again taking potshots at her intellectual reputation. After all, the former adore her defense of their indefensible worldview while the latter, for reasons I don’t ever want to fathom are more concerned with their personal friendships with her than with calling out her sophistry (and fulfilling their own mission as reformers). But facts are what they are. And Ravitch discredits herself with every new word from her pen.

There is almost nothing good to say about the Obama administration’s decision; to allow 10 of 11 states to evade the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. It’s just that simple. It is as if President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan decided to toss away their legacies as school reformers — and more importantly, the goal of helping all kids succeed in school and life.

The fact that the administration allowed nine states, including Indiana and Florida, to ditch racial, ethnic, and economic subgroup categories and replace them with a super-subgroup that commingles poor and minority students into one, Obama and Duncan simply declared that states and districts no longer have to concern themselves with either accounting for their academic achievement or for their economic success. While Indiana, in particular, declares that it will continue to monitor AYP, the reality is that it is essentially abandoned since, unless a lawsuit or congressional action forces the administration to abandon the waiver effort, the states receiving the waiver won’t have to give it much attention.

Even worse, allowing the states to engage in this super-subgroup subterfuge — along with ditching AYP altogether — essentially makes it difficult or parents and others who need clear, accurate data for making decisions; for researchers in particular, the administration’s decision hinders their ability to learn how schools are serving children. For parents — especially black, Latino, and Asian families who are joining the middle class for the first time and moving into suburbia — the importance of knowing how schools actually handle students worst-served by American public education (including low expectations) is critical to doing all they can to keep their youngsters out of the economic and social abyss. Researchers also lose out because they no longer have comparable data across states that they can use in understanding how districts and schools are serving children.

Meanwhile the administration failed to use the process to deal critically with one of the most-persistent symptoms of the nation’s education crisis: The high levels of academic failure among young black, white, Latino, Asian, and American Indian men. Just two states, Massachusetts and Minnesota, will account for gender in their accountability systems, following along the lines of the suggestions made by Richard Whitmire and I last year. Considering the extent of the problem — including the fact that young men account for two out of every three students aged 5 to 21 relegated to special ed ghettos, and that young male high-school seniors of all races from college-educated households read a grade level behind their female peers–  the fact that the U.S. Department of Education didn’t even demand states to address it in any meaningful way is shameful.

To say that the Obama-Duncan waiver gambit is a rolling back of accountability is an understatement. While not as bad as House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline’s proposals (which essentially amount to going back to the lax conditions of the pre-No Child era), the waiver approach allows for states to merely focus on failure mills and dropout factories. This means mediocre suburban schools will not be held accountable for improving achievement among poor and minority students — or even improving teaching and curricula for the rest of their students.

At the same time, the fact that all but one of the states were approved for waivers raises questions as to whether the administration is more concerned about offsetting its well-deserved reputation for expanding regulations (and federal overreach) in other arenas. After all, Obama can now go on the re-election trail and claim that he is providing states flexibility to engage in their own reform efforts — even though No Child (and moves by federal officials in both the president’s administration and that of predecessor George W. Bush) allowed states to develop their own ways of meeting federal proficiency and accountability goals. Especially in light of Duncan’s own decision allow Virginia to set its proficiency targets retroactively (along with the gamesmanship predecessor Rod Paige allowed states in meeting No Child’s Highly Qualified Teacher provision, and the four decades of profligate and unaccounted spending of federal subsidies before the passage of No Child 11 years ago), one can say that the federal government has allowed states and districts to game the system for far too long.

(By the way: The reality of the gamesmanship also proves that arguments that No Child is too inflexible — one advanced by education traditionalists and by some reformers like Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is mere hogwash.)

The administration also hasn’t covered itself in glory through its rhetoric. Within the past year, Duncan has gone around insisting that No Child is broken, offering up estimates that as many as 90 percent of schools would be found failing under the law and that its aspirational 100 percent proficiency provision was wrongly labeling otherwise high-performing schools. Reformers such as Charlie Barone of Democrats For Education Reform and Andy Rotherham, and the Center on Education Policy’s latest report on No Child have proven that Duncan’s estimates were nothing but smoke.

Obama and Duncan essentially made a play for winning re-election without considering any of the consequences, either to children or to the president’s own reputation and re-election prospects.

Given that otherwise strong and laudable efforts in education reform — including Race to the Top — are the ones that have generally been applauded across political lines, Obama’s move to gut No Child will hurt his prospects for re-election among those reformers who have argued strongly against the move. They aren’t likely to vote for any of the Republican presidential aspirants. But they will likely stay home in November. And given the failure of Obama’s stimulus efforts in overcoming the current economic malaise and the ire over the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the president can’t afford to lose any voter support — either among reformers in the civil rights and centrist Democrat camps or among Republican reformers otherwise lukewarm about their party’s potential standard-bearers. The fact that the waiver process has not been transparent, along with complaints among movement conservatives and conservative reformers that the administration’s requirement that waiver states take steps toward a national curricula, guarantees that more Republicans and independents will come out to the polls on Election Day to vote Obama out.

Meanwhile there is the question of whether the Obama administration can even offer waivers in the first place. While the U.S. Department of Education The department can allow some adjustments that remain in the spirit of the law (even if not necessarily in the letter of it), and has done so in the past. For example, two states — Arkansas and North Carolina — were granted waivers that allowed them to use test score growth over time as part of their school accountability efforts. But the Obama waiver plan allows states to evade accountability and ignore federal law, while the college- and career-ready standards requirements set by the administration as a condition for getting the waivers (which in the minds of many conservatives essentially endorses Common Core State Standards already enacted in 46 states and D.C.) could be considered a violation of federal law banning the Department of Education from crafting national curricula.

Ultimately, as Dropout Nation has pointed out ad nauseam within past nine months, the Obama administration’s No Child waiver gambit weakens the decade of strong reform efforts which the law has helped usher. It has also undermined Obama’sotherwise strong and commendable record as School Reformer-in-Chief. And for kids, especially those from poor and minority households for whom American public education has relegated educational neglect and malpractice the most, they will suffer the most from the consequences of Obama’s and Duncan’s faulty action.

For the past few months, Republican presidential nominees have sparred over everything picayune and otherwise. The percentage of income paid in taxes by front-runner Mitt Romney. The sexual peccadilloes of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (and those of now-ousted candidate Herman Cain). Even whether former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum is enough of a movement conservative — even with him walking the talk against abortion. And even with Romney’s win last night in Florida’s GOP primary, the sparring (and the rising and declining fortunes of each) will continue until the nominee finally gives his acceptance speech six months from now.

Yet the candidates have largely been silent on education, probably the biggest long-term issue facing our nation’s economy and social fabric. While President Obama, for better or worse, has built up his credentials as School Reformer-in-Chief, the GOP candidates have done little more that proclaim that students should take over the clean-up work of school custodians and make vague declarations that the No Child Left Behind Act is some sort of federal overreach (even as Romney backed the law and even said kind words about U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan before he stood against it). Certainly the rebellion among movement conservatives against the excesses of former President George W. Bush’s tenure (and his legacy, on education, as the Democrats’ favorite Republican) is one reason for this reticence. But in the process, Republicans are essentially conceding to Obama on this front and hurting their own odds of a general election victory. And considering that high-quality education is a key long-term solution to keeping future generations off welfare rolls (and, in the process, keeping government small), the Republicans are also failing to address a critical policy issue.

Here are three education policy declarations Romney, Gingrich or Santorum should make once one of them wins the nomination:

Admit the Need for a Federal Role in Holding States Accountable: The Republican nominee can immediately use Obama’s No Child waiver gambit as an opportunity to hammer the president on education. He can play on arguments advanced by conservative reformers that allowing states to evade enforcing the law’s Adequate Yearly Progress provisions violate the U.S. Constitution by stepping on Congressional law-making authority. He may want to trod Obama’s path if he succeeds in ousting him — and actually attempt a similar waiver gambit once in office. But this is politics, and that’s usually how it rolls.

But the Republican nominee will have to do more. He must make clear that school reform is a national economic and social priority. This means confronting the mistaken notion among movement conservatives (and conservative reformers who once supported No Child before standing against it) that No Child has been some form of federal overreach. (Whether or not the feds should be funding education at all is a different discussion.) It also means articulating that No Child simply recognized the reality that states, not school districts, are in charge of providing education, and that they should be held accountable for making sure that districts do their jobs in providing high-quality teaching and curricula to the kids in their care.

What the Republican nominee would be saying is this: If the federal government is going to subsidize education, then it shouldn’t just give it away, something that the feds allowed for 37 years before No Child’s passage a decade ago. States taking federal taxpayer dollars should accept the strings that are attached to them — or don’t take the cash at all. It’s a simple fact of life, no different than what the rest of us have do in the real world when we accept money from other, whether we borrow money from a bank, receive a grant from a foundation, or take a loan from our parents.

The nominee should then declare as president, he will make this declaration: that if states don’t want to be subject to accountability for how their spending of those subsidies improve student achievement, then they shouldn’t take the money. Such a move would force governors and legislators to have some long, hard, and honest conversations about the abysmally inefficient ways school dollars are spent throughout American public education — including the $7 billion spent annually on helping teachers get master’s degree when there is no evidence that such credentials improve student achievement. Given the $1.1 trillion in pension deficits and retired teacher healthcare costs that will burden taxpayers for the next few decades, it’s a conversation worth having.

Meanwhile the Republican can also strike a blow for the GOP legacy in education by declaring that No Child has largely worked in spurring reforms that have helped lead to at least 217,432 fewer fourth-graders being functionally illiterate (and thus being on the path to poverty and prison) in 2011 than in 2002 — and spurring the first wave of systemic reforms upon which we are building now. Such a move could undermine Obama’s own claim to the mantle of being the nation’s leading school reform advocate at the federal level — and also slightly rehabilitate predecessor Bush in the process.

No matter what happens, defending AYP and accountability is still a winner. The Republican nominee actually argue a conservative principle — that federal money shouldn’t be just doled out without condition — that resonates with independents. And if the position forces states to stop taking federal dollars, it can mean reductions in federal spending. All in all, taxpayers and families win.

Parent Power and School Choice Must Be Key Elements of Federal Education Policy: One of the Obama administration’s failings on the school reform front has been its rather mixed embrace of school choice and Parent Power. Certainly the administration has pushed hard for the expansion of charter schools and has made it part of its agenda. But as with other centrist and liberal Democrats, it opposes school vouchers and voucher-like tax credit programs largely because think that allowing families to use those dollars to attend parochial schools violates the U.S. Constitution’s separation between church and state, think lowly of vouchers as a school reform strategy, and argue that their party has never historically supported them. Meanwhile it has been unwilling to embrace Parent Trigger laws such as those passed in California, Connecticut, Texas, and Mississippi that would allow families to actually shape the quality of education their kids receive in the schools that serve them. The fact that the otherwise voluble Duncan has been reticent in using his bully pulpit on behalf of Parent Trigger laws being proposed in Arizona, Indiana, and Florida says plenty — and it is not flattering.

For a Republican presidential aspirant, Obama’s lack of presence on Parent Power is an opportunity to score points in several ways. Supporting current efforts to pass Parent Trigger laws would essentially be advocacy for expanding school choice. At the same time, it would also serve as an opportunity to please the Heritage Foundation crowd that argues for local control of schools; parent trigger laws can be seen as the best form of local control because the decisions are moved away from school bureaucracies to the very families who send their kids to the schools. And it encourages systemic reform from the ground up, playing upon the language that congressional Republicans such as House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline have used in justifying their efforts to kibosh No Child (even as Kline himself has pushed to increase federal special ed subsidies).

Meanwhile the Republican nominee can voice his support for expanding choice by backing state efforts happening in key states such as Florida. He can also declare that future federal funding will only go to states that allow for the creation and expansion of voucher programs, bring down barriers to charter school expansion (while also improving quality), pass Parent Trigger measures, and allow for the growth of online learning efforts that can allow families and the rest of civil society to start schools on their own. This move, by the way, would also be seen as being fiscally conservative.

All Federal Education Dollars Should Be Doled Out As Competitive Grants: The most-essential aspect of Obama’s Race to the Top effort has been its underlying principle that the federal government should move away from the traditional program-centered approach to funding schools. All that has resulted from it is the exacerbation of the nation’s education crisis — including the double digit increases in number of capable young men condemned to special ed ghettos, to the compliance approach that has hindered providing easily-understandable school data to families and teachers so they can make smart decisions and improve teaching.

This reality should be enough to convince the Republican nominee to go further than Obama and call for nearly all dollars — including Title I (and excepting those fund tied to education for American Indian students) — to be doled out in through a competitive grant model. Doing so allows Republicans to strike a blow for smaller, efficient, and more accountable government. States, after all, would only get money if they actually propose and follow-through on efforts.

In the process, Republicans can also dust off a concept that the party has long embraced — that of enterprise zones — by allowing for districts implementing innovative reforms to be exempted from state laws that render them servile to NEA and AFT affiliates.

Certainly movement conservatives would rather see the nominee push to end all federal education subsidies. One can reasonably see why it makes sense. But few Republicans in Congress would stand for it; after all, the districts in their own backyards, especially those in suburbia, are as unwilling to let go of Title I dollars as big city counterparts. And given that school reform is critical to the nation’s long-term fiscal, economic, and social health, maintaining the federal role just makes sense.

It’s high time that Republican presidential candidates do more than just hem and haw on education reform. They owe more that vague statements to the families, taxpayers, and children they want to serve in while in the White House.

One would think a school reformer would applaud the letter sent yesterday to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan by House Education and the Workforce Committee Ranking Democrat George Miller and Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chairman Tom Harkin demanding that the Obama administration’s No Child waiver gambit doesn’t allow states to dismiss their obligations to poor and minority children by essentially eliminating subgroup accountability as set up through the No Child Left Behind Act’s Adequate Yearly Progress provisions. One would also think the average reformer would also give some thoughtful consideration to the letter sent earlier this week by groups such as the Education Trust lambasting House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline for proposing to essentially allow states to ditch accountability altogether.

But Thomas B. Fordham Institute Executive Vice President Mike Petrilli is none too happy with any of them. In his latest commentary, Petrilli lambastes them for supposedly favoring “flexibility” in federal education policy, but are demanding that subgroup accountability remains intact. From where he sits, there’s no way his fellow reformers can be supportive of flexibility and still demand states to maintain AYP as is. In the process, Petrilli seems to be more concerned with allowing states to do as they please than with the core principle of helping all children succeed in school and in life that is at the heart of the school reform movement.

The first problem with Petrilli’s argument starts with his declaration that all Beltway reformers think No Child “went too far”. Neither former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings nor Sandy Kress (who crafted No Child in the first place) or Andy Rotherham would agree. Same is true for the EdTrust,  the Black Alliance for Educational Options, and the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, just to name three prominent groups. If anything, there is a rather vocal group of reformers who argue that No Child hasn’t gone far enough in addressing the systemic problems plaguing American public education — and, by extension, plenty of disagreement over how much flexibility there should be in federal education policy (or even if there should be any flexibility at all).

The second problem with Petrilli’s argument is his underlying theory, shared by far too many of my conservative and libertarian fellow-travelers these days, that No Child is too inflexible. Certainly the legacy elements of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act upon which No Child is based is certainly far too compliance-oriented. For example, the supplement-not-supplant rules, which essentially lead school districts to use Title 1 dollars in providing field trips instead of developing innovative instruction and reading remediation programs, is one aspect of the law that needs to be ditched altogether. But when one looks at the aspects of No Child charged with spurring systemic reform — including the Highly-Qualified Teacher provisions and even AYP itself — one can easily say that states and school districts have been given too much flexibility (and thus, ability to game the system).

Contrary to what some want to argue, No Child has always been more of a symbolic expansion of the federal role in education — and the acknowledgement that the nation has an education crisis — than a real one.  The expansion of the federal role in education — one which has existed since the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Act in 1862 — came with the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958 and the enactment of the original Elementary and Secondary Act seven years later. Even with the passage of No Child, the feds still account for a mere nine percent of the $591 billion spent annually on schools. From the federal perspective, what the law did was finally demand states and districts to show results for those dollars given after four decades of receiving billions with only compliance strings attached. This signaled the  federal government’s slow move from a compliance mentality to a results orientation (as well as made it clear that solving the education crisis is a national priority).

What No Child really did was signal the reality that states, not school districts, control the direction of education. Given that school districts, as local governments, are merely tools of state control, this has always been implied. But since the 1960s, the passage of state laws forcing districts to bargain with teachers’ unions, along with school funding lawsuits, property tax reforms, and the advent of the standards and accountability contingent of the school reform movement (of which Fordham is — or was — a leading light), has led states to take a more prominent role in shaping education. No Child demands states to account  for how schools are improving the performance of poor and minority children, and hold districts accountable for success or failure. But it also gives plenty of leeway to states when it comes to interpreting how to meet certain requirements, like the one assuring that all teachers be “highly qualified” for instruction, and  allows them to develop their own solutions in order to achieve them.

Thanks to federal education officials in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, states have actually had far too much flexibility and have been allowed to game accountability. States were allowed to spend too much time slowly putting AYP into place (and in some cases, even lowering standards for academic success), then ratcheting things up. This act of gamesmanship — and the willingness of federal officials to allow for it — is one reason why Duncan has been going around this past year proclaiming that as many as 82 percent of schools would be found academically failing. This tolerance of gamesmanship has continued in the Obama administration. Duncan, for example, allowed Montana and Idaho to keep their accountability targets at 2010 levels (and thus breaking their own promises to hold their districts accountable for failure) and allowing Virginia to set its accountability targets retroactively.

When one considers how states were allowed to simply grant Highly-Qualified Teacher status to veteran instructors, and the tacit unwillingness of failing districts to abide by the spirit of No Child’s school choice provisions, one realizes that the real problem is that No Child has allowed for a tad too much flexibility. And yet, even amid all this, as I pointed out in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, the law spurred reforms that have helped lead to at least 217,432 fewer fourth-graders being functionally illiterate (and thus being on the path to poverty and prison) in 2011 than in 2002 — and spurring the first wave of systemic reforms upon which we are building now.

Instead of rolling back No Child’s accountability provisions, we need to expand them. This includes holding the nation’s ed schools to the fire for their poor recruiting and training of aspiring teachers; requiring states to monitor the performance of young men of all socioeconomic backgrounds; and establishing a uniform chronic truancy rate that teachers and principals can use in stemming dropouts. The Obama administration and Congress could easily do this through the reauthorization process, and still revise the supplement-not-supplant rules and other mere compliance aspects of the law that should be repealed.

Meanwhile Petrilli dances around the rather legitimate and substantial issue being raised by Miller, Harkin, and array of school choice activists and civil rights players in the school reform movement: How to ensure that states are holding districts and schools accountable for providing high-quality teaching and curricula to all of their students, including those from poor and minority backgrounds. On this count, the Obama waiver gambit is a gutting of accountability, while Kline’s reauthorization effort is a white flag on federal education policy and strong vigorous systemic reform.

As Center for American Progress scholar Jeremy Ayers pointed out last month in his report on initial waiver applicants, only Massachusetts and Tennessee have submitted proposals with clear goals and worthwhile accountability systems. Other states, including those with otherwise exemplary and aggressive reform-minded governors and school leaders such as Indiana and Florida, have proposed to ditch racial, ethnic, and economic subgroup categories and replace them with a super-subgroup that commingles poor and minority students into one.

Meanwhile the Kline plan, contained in a series of bills including the Student Success Act, doesn’t even require states to still subject the nation’s 5,000 dropout factories and the five percent of schools with wide achievement gaps, something that both the Obama waiver plan and Sen. Harkin’s own less-than-satisfactory plan for reauthorizing No Child had required. Although Kline’s plan does require states to develop accountability systems, it offers little in the way of direction for what those systems should look like and doesn’t even set any form of aspirational goal for proficiency. In short, it’s not worth the paper upon which it is written.

If either the Obama waiver plan allows for these states to do this subgroup lumping, or the Kline plan actually sees the light of day, states and districts would be let off the hook for ensuring a high-quality education for all children. It also makes it more difficult to spur systemic reform — including the implementation of the very Common Core standards in reading and math Petrilli and Fordham has championed over the past two years. As Brookings Institution scholar Russ Whitehurst pointed out right after Obama and Duncan announced the waiver gambit last year, common standards won’t work without common accountability; without accountability, it is almost impossible to hold states, districts, and schools accountable for actually providing high quality curricula.

For parents, in particular, it would mean the loss of information on how children of different racial, ethnic, and income groups are served by districts and schools that is critical to their decision-making. After all, these families — especially black, Latino, and Asian families who are joining the middle class for the first time and moving into suburbia — have learned the hard way that suburban schools can be just as abysmal as the urban dropout factories they fled, and that their kids are often afterthoughts in instruction and curricula. Given their realities, the elimination of subgroup accountability actually does more to hurt their efforts to help their kids get the high-quality education they deserve. It also hurts their ability to exercise school choice effectively and limits their ability to exercise their rightful lead role as decision-makers in education.

Contrary to what Petrilli may think, Harkin, Miller, and others are raising a rather legitimate point, one that strikes at the two core beliefs of the school reform movement itself: That all children, especially kids from poor and minority households long abused by American public education, need and deserve a high-quality education — and that we must do everything possible to make sure they get it. Certainly one can argue for a flexible approach that doesn’t require regulating every step taken to achieve those goals. But when questions of flexibility in federal education policy conflict with those core belief, reformers should be expected to not be too ready to embrace the former at the expense of the latter. Especially when the real issue isn’t flexibility, but the problems education traditionalists have with spotlighting the harsh reality that the practices they defend have contributed to the substandard quality of education throughout this country, regardless of whether you live in New York City or Fairfax County, or whether your child is in a special ed class or in the gifted-and-talented program.

There is honestly little to say about yesterday’s State of the Union address. Although President Barack Obama did make clear that he was staying the course on his school reform efforts, he offered little in the way of specifics. While it may be a tad surprising in one way, it isn’t because education reform has been the one part of his agenda that has garnered largely bipartisan support (witness outgoing Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ praise of the president during his rebuttal). On the other hand, Obama’s short-term economic stimulus efforts and push for healthcare reform are the areas that have been his greatest political weaknesses — and threats to his re-election prospects — so he naturally spent more time on touting proposals such as a “January surprise” federal refinancing of home mortgages that could be a short-term boon for homeowners (even as they remain in debt for decades to come).

But the good news is that Obama is, at least rhetorically, not backing down from systemic reform. His call for removing laggard teachers from the classroom once again reminds the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers that they can no longer count on the Democratic Party for unquestioned support of the traditional teacher compensation system the unions have long defended. So does the possibility that the administration will try to expand the Teacher Incentive Fund, which helps finance performance pay efforts by states and districts. Considering that his fellow congressional and senate Democrats (especially those facing stiff re-election campaigns), still count on NEA and AFT dollars to finance their campaigns, Obama can’t full out call for an end to tenure. But his rhetoric can be used cannily by those rightly pushing to abolish near-lifetime employment policies that harm children and make it difficult to remove laggard teachers. All in all, he is still pushing for teacher quality reforms embraced through Race to the Top and the School Improvement Grant programs.

Obama also briefly discussed one of the symptoms of the nation’s education crisis: The dropout crisis in which 150 teens every hour drop out of school and drop into poverty and prison. His call for states to raise their compulsory school ages from 16 to 18 is, rhetorically sound. Some states have already done this, including Indiana (which made the move after I co-wrote the nation’s first series on how inflated graduation rates hid the extent of the education crisis). But as longtime school reformers such as Rebekah Richards of the American Academy have pointed out, raising compulsory ages will do nothing to keep kids on the path to graduation; the research is also largely contradictory on the value of simply raising compulsory school ages. Just keeping kids in school until age 18 only means that they will just age out of school, still never graduating with a diploma, and still be unprepared for higher ed and career success. States must still address the underlying culprits of laggard instruction, abysmal curricula, and the lack of intensive literacy interventions needed to help kids succeed in school and life.

The bad news is that Obama once again remains silent on Parent Power and school choice. Certainly the administration will continue to push for the expansion of charter schools. But Obama had a chance to directly call out California’s state legislators, who are considering AB 1172, which would allow traditional districts to shutter the expansion of charter schools in the nation’s most-populous state if the bureaucracies deem them a negative fiscal impact. Obama could have used the State of the Union to call for states to take charge of approving charter school openings and taking this role out of the hands of traditional districts (which is essentially akin to letting Red Lobster decide if an Applebee’s can open next door). He could also have also pushed for states to move toward the Hollywood Model of Education and away from the traditional district system.

The president also had an amazing opportunity to advocate for the rightful role of parents as lead decision-makers in education — and failed on that front. His unwillingness to embrace vouchers is particularly galling given that, thanks to his taxpayer-funded salary, he and Michelle can exercise choice and Parent Power by sending their two daughters to one of the nation’s exclusive (if not necessarily top-performing) private schools, and through his exalted status as the nation’s School Reformer-in-Chief. With Parent Trigger laws up for consideration in Indiana, Florida, and  Arizona this year, Obama’s call could have rallied Democrats in those states to step up and support Parent Power. Obama could have also called for states and districts to release value-added teacher data so that parents can know the quality of the teachers who have our kids in their care, something that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has supported; the failure to do so is also rather disappointing.

Then there is Obama’s continued push to weaken his own school reform accomplishments through the administration’s No Child waiver gambit. As I have pointed out ad nauseam in the past year, the effort to essentially gut the No Child Left Behind Act’s accountability provisions is a retreat on the very accountability that has spurred reform. Under the waiver plan, schools that are merely warehouses of mediocrity — including suburban districts that are failing to properly educate poor and minority kids — will largely be left alone, and thus, allowed to subject those kids to educational neglect and malpractice. Certainly the plan requires states to put ambiguous “college and career-ready” curriculum standards — likely Common Core standards in reading and math already done by 45 states so far — in place in exchange for avoiding accountability; but the fact that the administration can’t actually explicitly demand this without running afoul of congressional Republicans and some reformers who essentially declare that doing so oversteps the Department of Education’s authority, means that states can come up with some mishmash, call it college- and career-ready, and then avoid being accountable altogether.

Meanwhile the waiver gambit is a failure in other areas. It doesn’t address the crisis of low educational achievement among young men of all backgrounds, one of the leading symptoms of the education crisis — including requiring gender to be measured as part of subgroup accountability in state systems, something Richard Whitmire and I proposed last year. The waivers may allow for the possibility of states targeting gender for subgroup accountability, but the conditions under which the waivers are being granted don’t require states to take on any additional accounting for the performance of young men or other children whose academic failures are the result of the education crisis. Nor does the waiver plan call for states to expand choice, enact Parent Trigger laws, or a plain, simple measure of chronic truancy that can help teachers and principals work on keeping kids in school. And the fact that the administration’s waiver plan doesn’t even address the need to overhaul ed schools (which train most of the nation’s new teachers) or push for the development of alternative teacher training programs outside of university confines, makes the entire effort unworthy of pursuing.

Those states that are applying for the waivers have already figured this out. As Center for American Progress scholar Jeremy Ayers pointed out last month in his report, only Massachusetts and Tennessee have submitted proposals with clear goals and worthwhile accountability systems; the rest have offered little in the way of specifics. In the process, the clear accountability and progress goals set in No Child will be ditched for 51 different goals that offer no sense of what is actually going on. In short, Obama and Duncan are sabotaging the administration’s own reform efforts, and in the process, as I pointed out in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, the slow but amazing progress that has been made in stemming the education crisis since the law’s passage a decade ago.

Meanwhile Obama isn’t the only one pushing for the dismantling of accountability. House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline has his own plan for reauthorizing No Child — actually a collection of bills — which differs little from Obama’s proposal in spirit (even if it pushes for an a greater rollback of the federal role in fostering school reform); more than 50 groups, including 50CAN and even the NAACP, have issued a letter opposing it. Then there is also the now-comatose plan crafted by Kline’s Senate counterpart, Tom Harkin.

President Obama certainly should get credit for much of his work in spurring systemic reform. But he needs to ditch the No Child waiver gambit — and actually commit to expanding accountability, school choice, and Parent Power — in order to sustain those successes. Our kids deserve a stronger, more-comprehensive push for reforms that can help all of them succeed.

Yesterday, Dropout Nation analyzed how the National Education Association’s Connecticut affiliate was taking a defensive move against school reformers with its two-week commercial buy touting its legislative agenda — and how it reflected the next trend for teachers’ unions in their effort to preserve the privileges from which they derive their declining influence. Today, the American Federation of Teachers’ notoriously bellicose New York City local (whose boss, Michael Mulgrew, is angling to one day succeed predecessor — and current national president — Randi Weingarten) rolled out its own ad buy. Targeting the school reform record of Big Apple Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is now looking to burnish his success in overhauling what was once the toxic waste dump of American public education with a push for a series of new initiatives such as $20,000 bonuses for teachers rated highly-effective on evaluations, the AFT is proclaiming that the mayor still “doesn’t get” that his efforts aren’t appreciated by the union. The commercials compliment a series of full-page ads being placed by the union in the Daily  News that are supposed to be open letters rallying against the mayor’s efforts, including his push to use value-added analysis of student test score data in teacher evaluations.

This campaign isn’t just aimed at Bloomberg and attempting to appeal to Big Apple residents. After all, this will be an election year in the Empire State with Democrats seeking to regain control of the senate from Republicans. More importantly, the AFT is in the midst of a court battle (and related settlement talks) with the New York State Education Department and the state Board of Regents over its effort to allow states to allow for Value-Added analysis of state student test data to account for 40 percent of a teacher’s rating under the new teacher evaluation system. Meanwhile Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who successfully nudged education officials to allow for state test data to play a bigger role in evaluations, is continuing his teacher quality reform efforts (and also keep the $700 million in federal dollars the state received through the Race to the Top initiative). So the AFT’s Big Apple and Empire State affiliates find themselves in a pitched battle to preserve their influence. The AFT local’s ad campaign can be seen as another effort to beat back the efforts of the state’s reform-minded politicians and remind both Democrats and Republicans in Albany that they are dependent on teachers’ union dollars.

Image courtesy of GothamSchools

This play is also likely an attempt to shape the big election facing the Big Apple next year: Who will succeed Bloomberg as mayor, and thus, boss of the nation’s largest — and most reform-minded — school system. With the reformers such as state Board of Regents Chairman Meryl Tisch and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn likely to run for the job — and AFT allies such as city Comptroller John Liu either struggling with political scandals or lack of strong political backers — the AFT must also work hard to reshape the political game on the ground in order to stave off what would likely be another decade of strong reform efforts. Given that the AFT’s string of recent public relations disasters in New York City — including the failed lawsuit it filed along with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to shut down expansion of charter schools — Mulgrew has to garner some sort of victory. Especially if he wants to succeed the (until-recently) more politically-masterful Weingarten.

Certainly the AFT’s New York City local has the cash horde to pull out an even bigger public relations blitz. After all, the local spent $26 million in 2010-2011 on so-called representational activities, political lobbying, and contributions to organization’s such as the NAACP’s New York branch, according to its filing with the U.S. Department of Labor. One can also expect the state affiliate and perhaps, even the national union, to join in. After all, for Weingarten, a victory in her home state and in the Big Apple would also do wonders for the union’s national efforts. Either way, the AFT local’s ad buy just proves again that school reformers will have to go big in the coming battles to come.