One of Dropout Nation‘s constant bits of advice to President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan over the past two years has been to open up the Race to the Top school reform initiative to participation by school districts, charter schools, and community groups. Back in 2010, this site noted that allowing for such participation would “place pressure on states participating in the competition to embrace bolder reforms” and “ force school districts to seriously change their own practices and restructure their relationships with teachers unions”.

So it is good to see that the Obama administration is finally embracing most of our suggestion with the launch of its fourth round of Race to the Top later today. This round doesn’t do all that we suggest. Districts are neither allowed to become enterprise zones of sorts that can allow them to ditch collective bargaining arrangements, nor required to expand school choice (either through abandoning Zip Code education policies such as zoned schooling or by authorizing charters or voucherizing funds) or embrace Parent Trigger provisions that would allow families to take control of schools. But it does allow traditional districts, charter school operators, and American Indian and Alaska Native tribes to possibly gain federal money may finally push school operators on the ground — especially districts — to embrace systemic reform the way earlier rounds of the competitive grant program have made it easier for states such as California and New York to expand charter schools, require the use of student test data in teacher evaluations, and enact measures such as Parent Trigger laws.

One of the least-discussed aspects of advancing reform is the array of political challenges faced by those districts who do embrace the effort. Thanks to state laws that force districts to bargain with National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates, and the considerable political heft that the two unions bring to bear in the form of  lobbying and $TK million in campaign donations to state legislators, reform-minded districts are often outmanned and outgunned at the state level. While districts under control of mayors such as New York City and Chicago can count on the considerable political heft of municipal chief executives (and in the case of the Big Apple, the wallet of Mayor Michael Bloomberg) to beat back traditionalists in Albany and Springfield, districts with traditional school board governance structures often have few tools at their disposal against NEA and AFT locals with waning-but-still-more considerable political influence in statehouse corridors.

The now-stillborn school reform effort undertaken by the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, flourished under reform-minded California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (whose state board backed charter school chain Green Dot’s successful move to force the district into a corner) and a state legislature that was seeking a share of Race to the Top dollars. Now that the NEA and AFT can count on Schwarzenegger’s successor (and once-and-future governor) Jerry Brown and the state legislature to be at their proverbial beck-and-call (and the AFT now assured of a majority on L.A. Unified’s board), Supt. John Deasy has had to roll back efforts to expand choice and has had to hope on lawsuits by reformers to give him the edge in revamping the district’s woeful teacher evaluation system. Even the presence of a reform-minded governor and legislature doesn’t ensure that districts pushing to overhaul their operations won’t struggle with entrenched traditionalist constituencies opposed to any change — especially if the state still requires the district to reach consensus with the union. This can be easily seen in Buffalo, N.Y., where the AFT local has consistently opposed the district’s effort to implement the new state evaluation system championed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. These are just the reform-oriented districts. Traditional districts unwilling to change any aspect of their operations will only do the bare minimum unless there is some benefit (either in the form of money or flexibility) to doing so.

In expanding Race to the Top to include districts, the Obama administration has given reform-minded districts another tool for beating back opposition to more-stringent teacher evaluations and other efforts. As reform-minded governors of both parties could use the federal presence (both in the form of Race or the No Child Left Behind Act) to sustain their efforts, so can counterparts in school districts in their face-offs with NEA and AFT locals. Race’s requirement that school operators use student data in evaluating teachers and leaders, for example, will help superintendents in their contract negotiations. By supporting the efforts of reform-minded districts, the Obama administration can also force those in suburbia that have largely resisted reform to begin taking steps toward transforming their own operations. And in requiring evaluations for principals and other school leaders, the Obama administration is taking a strong stance on requiring the key adult players in schools to be held accountable for nurturing the genius and talents of children in their care. As pointed out in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on school leadership, principals and superintendents foster cultures of low expectations not only make it difficult for high-quality teachers and leaders to do their jobs, their neglect and malpractice gives license to laggards and the criminally abusive in schools to do the same.

By allowing charter school operators considered districts under state law to play in Race to the Top, the Obama administration is also signaling that the old-school definition of public education embraced unthinkingly by education traditionalists is out the door. As I noted earlier this month, there is nothing in state constitutions that spell out exactly what public education must look like or whether it should be provided in the form of traditional districts. It is time for traditionalists to stop the sophistry and accept that the best way to provide high-quality education to all children is by offering a wide array of opportunities through various means.

An even greater possibility for reform lies in the move by the Obama administration to allow American Indian and Alaska Native tribes, which have long complained about being left out of these efforts, to participate in Race to the Top so long as they operate schools under the purview of the federal Bureau of Indian Education or through their tribal education department in partnership with districts. Certainly the fact that Native groups are  an important (and increasingly activist) political constituency for the administration played a part in the decision, as did President Obama’s signing of Executive Order 13592 (which requires the Department of Education, the Department of Interior and other agencies to collaborate on improving education for Native students). But the move may now mean that tribes and Native education advocates may become strong players in the reform arena. This is an area ripe with opportunities for reformers to help all children succeed. The schools run and overseen by BIE have been one of the ghettos of American public education, with a longstanding history of perpetuating abuse and malpractice (educational and otherwise).  The current director of the agency, Keith Moore, has made it clear that its schools must embrace the use of data in structuring instruction and operations, while tribes such as the Navajo Nation are asking tough questions about how schools on reservations and outside of them serving children from their communities are being managed. And with other efforts coming into place such as the Department of Education’s pilot competitive grant program to develop partnerships between tribal education departments and state education agencies, and the partnerships that are developing between tribes and traditional districts, tribal participation in Race to the Top could lead to helping the most-neglected of our poor and minority children.

Obama and Duncan deserve praise for pushing for the concept of competitive grants in spurring reform, and for making the strong case for ditching the old formula-based approach to doling out federal education dollars (even if some congressional Republicans such as California’s Duncan Hunter put themselves in the odd position of ignoring Ronald Reagan’s legacy by effectively pushing for maintaining the status quo). And with this round of Race to the Top, the Obama administration may spur even more reform right at schoolhouse doors.

Photo courtesy of the Times-Union

It is nice to see the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s announcement this past Saturday that it is supporting the state recognition of gay marriages. While I may not be a fan of gay marriage from a religious perspective, the Founding Documents make it quite clear that governments have no right to restrict gay men and women from the same privilege of civil marriage (and the accompanying benefits) given to heterosexuals such as myself. So the NAACP is perfectly right to demand that all Americans gain the same civil liberties they have earned from birth and by naturalization as citizens of our nation.

At the same time, it is difficult to take the NAACP seriously on this or any issue because it continues to be on the wrong side of the most-important civil rights and economic issue facing Black America today and this nation as a whole: The need to overhaul American public education so that all children — especially kids from poor, minority, and even gay households — get the high-quality education they need and deserve.

Even as NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous and the rest of the organization’s leadership has found time to weigh in on other issues, the old-school civil rights group still hasn’t released the education agenda it promised to release back in 2010 during Jealous’ appearance at an American Enterprise Institute confab. It did push an effort to increase school funding by diverting dollars from the nation’s criminal justice system without consider ing that the nation spends far less on prison construction alone (a mere $1.5 billion in the 2006-2007 fiscal year) than on building schools ($63 billion, including lavish high school football stadiums) — and, more importantly, that the nation spends $228 billion on courts and prisons badly because it spends $562 billion on schools abysmally.

Beyond offering that mishmash of a proposal, the NAACP has remained silent on systemic reform. Save for a few NAACP branches  (including its affiliate in Connecticut, have stepped up in the discussions over Gov. Dan Malloy’s school reform effort, and advocated on behalf of Bridgeport mother Tanya McDowell, who will serve five years for trying to provide her child with a high-quality school), the nation’s oldest civil rights group offers nothing substantial on addressing issues such as ending Zip Code Education policies, expanding school choice, addressing childhood illiteracy, and revamping how teachers are recruited, trained, paid, and evaluated (especially when it comes to bringing more black men into the teaching profession). Meanwhile it has ceded ground to Parent Power groups such as the Connecticut Parents Union and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, old-school civil rights organizations as the United Negro College Fund and 100 Black Men, and players such as Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Dr. Steve Perry, who are doing the work  for which the NAACP was once known.

What it has done since Jealous’ appearance is continue embracing an education traditionalist platform that actually puts the association in the position of aiding and abetting the damage to black children that it is supposed to defend. The organization rolled out a school-to-prison It has passed a resolution effectively declaring its opposition to the very existence of charter schools. Its New York chapter teamed up with the American Federation of Teachers’ Big Apple affiliate (from which it picked up $16,200 in contributions during the union’s 2010-2011 fiscal year) to wage an unsuccessful and embarrassing lawsuit to shut down charters that serve black children. Its New York chapter boss, Hazel Dukes, essentially declared that black families who seek out the opportunity for high-quality education by choosing charters were “doing the business of slave masters”, while her counterpart in Mississippi proclaimed this year that the charters would merely “create and maintain a permanent situation of second-class citizens.” The antics even extended to the local level in places such as Chapel Hill, N.C., where the local NAACP branch opposed the launch of a charter school named for Howard Lee, a former state education board chairman who was the first black man elected to head a predominantly white southern city since Reconstruction.

What the NAACP has done is more than just refuse to be a much-needed public policy voice and activist on behalf of transforming a failed system — and refused to be allies with school reformers, black and otherwise.  It has alienated black families, particularly those in urban communities often served by failure factories, have seen how past solutions such as racial and socioeconomic integration have done little more than deny them high-quality schools in their own communities without helping schoolmates and kids succeed, and understand that AFT and National Education Association affiliates are far more-interested in keeping the status quo ante for their benefit. By adhering to the thinking of aging members who have a vested interest in maintaining failed ideas about how schools should serve black children, the NAACP has also lost opportunities to lure a new generation of African-Americans who realize that education is the most-important key to achieving social and economic equality.

Ultimately, the NAACP has effectively agreed to support policies and practices that condemn far too many of our black children it is supposed to defend to poverty and prison. This includes Zip Code Education policies such as zoned schooling and restrictions on the expansions of charters and school choice which effectively promote the very segregation it has long opposed. But it isn’t just about African-American childrens. For Latino, Asian, poor whites, and even those from gay households regardless of color or class, the NAACP has decided through its activities that those kids also don’t matter. It is better to collect NEA and AFT checks, and the outdated notion of integration as school reform that neither addresses the underlying systemic issues that lead to our children getting low-quality education (and was only supported by an earlier generation of civil rights leaders because it was the only way to get what they thought was high-quality education to black children of the time in an age in which Jim Crow-dominated school bards would never pour resources into schools in black neighborhoods). With one out of every two young black men dropping out of school and into poverty and prison — and too many black kids overdiagnosed as special ed caes and condemned to life’s short buses — the NAACP’s stance is shameful and morally untenable.

So it is good to see the NAACP get it right on one issue. Perhaps it will finally embraces systemic reform before it’s too late.

When Both Sides Are Right, Hess v. Emerson Division: Contrary to what the inestimable Robin Lake would declare, there are a few absolutes in life. Birth, death, taxes, and the existence of God are four of them (and yes, dear atheists, you will know He exists when you’re in one of life’s foxholes). But there are also times when two sides can have equally correct points. And this can be seen in one of the inside-the-tent battles for which reformers are renowned: The argument between Fordham Institute’s Adam Emerson and American Enterprise Institute education czar Rick Hess over the former’s scolding of the Zachary, La., school district, which reversed its decision to participate in the expansion of the Bayou State’s voucher program advanced by Gov. Bobby Jindal (and take in a mere 30 students into its classrooms, increasing the enrollment I’d 5235 kids by less than one percent).

Emerson took aim at Zachary and the families who successfully lobbied the district’s board to bail out of the plan for wanting to ” to keep their investment exclusive” at the expense of poor and minority kids who, until recently, had no choice but to attend. Emerson also noted that the district also seemed to forget its own past efforts to help kids in need of high-quality education — including 300 children displaced from their home districts within the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Ever playing the contrarian (yes, I wrote it again), Hess took Emerson to task for showing “gooey-minded, self-righteous disrespect” to Zachary’s families and school leaders, who, in Hess’ mind, are only rightfully looking out for their own self-interests. Hess also takes it up a notch (and insults Parent Power groups to boot) by saying that Emerson failed to offer the kind of “ideas and fresh thinking ” considerate for which Fordham is supposed to be known. (Update: Emerson has responded to Hess.)

As anyone who reads Dropout Nation knows by now, I’m no split-the-baby kind of guy. But in this case, both Emerson and Hess have it right.

Emerson is proper and right to scold the district’s leadership  and the parents for refusing to open the doors. (Emerson, by the way, also pointed out, as I have, that reformers must constantly advocate in communities in order to gain support on the ground, something Hess fails to note in his critique.) I know Hess likes to think he’s above all that. But moral scolding — and reminding people to live up to their obligations as members of civic society and children of God– is what school reformers (including Hess) are supposed do. Given that the state would have given Zachary the full per-pupil dollars (including the equivalent of the local dollars that would have otherwise been borne by the district)  — and that it had originally agreed to participate in the program in the first place — the excuses given by the district for turning their back on these kids is just inexcusable. More importantly, districts are merely recognized as arms of state governments as defined under those constitutions (as well as by the federal government through the No Child Left Behind Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hunter v. Pittsburgh ruling) and thus have no ability for independent action outside of what state governments decide. Zachary is essentially preventing Louisiana from fulfilling its constitutional mandate to provide all children with a high-quality education.

By giving in to families that opposed allowing kids to transfer into the district, Zachary also allowed them to indulge their own bigotry toward poor and minority children who they likely fear will sully the classrooms of this precious district’s schools. Hess may want to think class (and to a lesser extent, race) don’t play a part in these discussions, but anyone who has spent time on sites such as DC Urban Moms know that there are plenty of middle class folks who express their low expectations view of other people’s children through the comfort that anonymity provides. Certainly school reformers can’t force everyone to think highly of their fellow men and women. But they can, and should, hold all adults accountable for their roles in denying kids opportunities to get the teaching and curricula they deserve.

At the same time, Hess is right in pointing out that reformers need to do more than play the role of moral scolds. This is especially true when one keeps in mind that local property tax dollars still account for, on average, 44 percent of all school funding (and 39 percent  in the case of the Bayou State), and often more in suburban districts. It would make sense for states to replace local property tax funding with state dollars, thus allowing for the expansion of all forms of choice by turning the dollars into vouchers that follow every child to whatever school, public, private or parochial, they so choose. This in turn would stop districts from arguing that reforms will cost them in terms of local tax dollars as their justification. But districts can justify opposition to charters and all choice — as well as perpetuate the myth of local control — because they   are still dependent on local property tax dollars.

Then there is also the reality that these families have, as far as they are concerned, exercised choice by buying a home in a district that is home to what they perceive to be high-quality schools (regardless of evidence to the contrary); from where they sit, poor people who want choice should go ahead and buy themselves homes too. This financial consideration, along with the emotional ties to the school buildings in the community, and the common desire among all for a school for their kids right in the neighborhood, and socioeconomic bigotry, explains why some families want to keep what they think is the good stuff all to themselves. Suburban district leaders have proven skillful at playing upon both the property tax dollars and the emotional concerns of the families that fund them in order to keep charter schools out of their boundaries and stop other school choice measures, even as they show contempt to these families (especially first-generation middle class households from minority backgrounds) in their own day-to-day dealings with them.

What reformers must do is both be the conscience of men and women who should know better (and, for the sake of their own enlightened self-interest, make sure that both other people’s children and their own can get a high-quality education) and offer solutions that lead more people to live up to their moral obligations (as well as expand opportunities for good-to-great teaching). Demanding better from middle-class families is important. But it is also important for reformers to also scold governors and state legislators for allowing situations such as Zachary to happen; this includes demanding full state funding of education (and effectively voucherizing those dollars so that they follow children to any school their families choose).

At the same time, reformers need to offer other ways of advancing reform that go beyond scolding. One way would be to team up with real estate developers to create “educational villages” in which families can send their children to school in the daytime, drop them off for babysitting at a child care center in the afternoon, and take them to the park on weekends. Such a concept would appeal both to households regardless of race or class alike. As I noted four years ago in an American Spectator column, such an idea would not only expand choice, it would also help advance systemic reform.

Integration Isn’t Worth Anything If Kids Can’t Read: Education Sector’s Sarah Rosenberg finds it “worrisome” that school choice — especially charter schools — lead to “increasing self-selection into segregated schools”. Why? From where she sits, this stratification (which is what it is since families make the choice instead of governments) denies kids the “firs opportunity to have significant contact with children from different backgrounds”, and “we risk starting with an achievement gap and ending with a divided nation”.

Forget for a moment all the studies and other evidence that choice – especially charters and private schools — may actually do as good or better job of helping kids become thoughtful citizens than traditional district counterparts — or the fact that reality that traditional district schools have historically been vehicles for forcing kids and families to adopt a Unitarian-tinged civic religion that disavows diversity. The fact of the matter is that Rosenberg sees this stratification and its underlying causes in the wrong way.

For one, Rosenberg fails to realize that there is little diversity or integration of any kind in most traditional districts; this of course, is a function of Zip Code Education policies such as zoned schooling, and the reality that districts only serve geographic areas (which, especially in big cities, tend to also be socioeconomically homogeneous). Nor does she consider the fact that state laws establishing charters (which often restrict the location of charters and even the kind of students they can serve), and the fact that suburban districts don’t charters in their boundaries (and do plenty to keep them out)  play a much larger role than self-selection in determining the homogeneousness of enrollments. Rosenberg also fails to realize that the problems with low-quality education have almost nothing to do with lack of diversity and far more to do with the low quality of the nation’s teaching corps and the practices (shaped by state laws and collective bargaining agreements) that subject poor and minority children to substandard schools; even in socioeconomically diverse schools, ability-tracking and policies that keep black and Latino kids out of college-preparatory courses ensure that education is separate and unequal.

What Rosenberg also doesn’t understand is that black and Latino families have already experienced integration in the form of forced busing and, like Harvard professor (and onetime integration advocate) Charles Ogletree, realize that it is little more than a “false promise,” that led to districts not providing high-quality teaching and curricula in the communities they live; and they have a right to make that point, since, after all, they are taxpayers whose dollars are siphoned off by districts in the form of taxes at the local, state, and federal levels. Like American Indians (which had their own experience with ‘integration’ in the form of boarding schools), black and Latino families feel that integration denied them chances to interact with successful role models who looked like them — and they want their kids to be able to experience this. The racial pride is why historically black colleges and universities remain prominent players in higher education and why charter schools named after civil rights leaders such as Cesar Chavez are common throughout the sector. For black and Latino children, in particular, who, unlike their white counterparts, are exposed to different races even before they go to school, what may matter more is to know that people who look like them can be just as successful and valuable in society as those of a lighter skin tone.

Ultimately, for these families, the opportunities to send their kids to an all-black or Latino charter school in which kids are getting the preparation they need for success in life is far more important to them that the diversity Rosenberg (and traditionalists of the integrationist mode such as Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg) seek out as some form of school reform. Or, as I declared to Gary Orfield two years ago, black and Latino families don’t care what Rosenberg thinks.

Few traditional districts have been as reform-minded as New York City under the mayoral control of Michael Bloomberg. From shutting down more than 100 failure mills and dropout factories, to allowing principals to keep laggard teachers from working in their schools, the mayor and his array of chancellors (including the legendary Joel Klein) have succeeded in turning the district around from being a Superfund Site of American public education. Although the Big Apple still struggles in providing all children (especially young black men)  in every corner of the city with a high-quality education, the district has reduced the percentage of functionally-illiterate fourth graders (as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress)  from 53 percent in 2003 to 39 percent in 2011, and improved graduation rates and has shown a willingness to not be servile to the American Federation of Teachers local that had long held the city under its proverbial thumb.

So the announcement this morning by current schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott that he would institute a series of teacher performance management policies if the AFT affiliate doesn’t agree to allow the district to use New York State’s new teacher evaluation system was definitely not surprising. But it was once again heartening to see a school leader move to advance reform and be willing to take a union far too concerned with defending the interests of even the worst-performing of its members at the expense of children.

Certainly the intransigence of AFT’ New York City local President Michael Mulgrew, whose opposition to using the Empire State’s new evaluation system is as much driven by is desire to succeed predecessor Randi Weingarten as head of the national union as by the opposition of the Baby Boomers who are a dwindling minority of rank-and-file members, is driving Walcott’s latest move. Within the past month, the AFT launched its third lawsuit against the city to stop the shutdown of failure mills (this time, without the help of the union’s fellow-travelers at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s New York State branch), this time all but admitting that the goal is to keep rank-and-file members (including those who probably should have left city employ years ago) on the job. The union has also taken to the airwaves and newspapers, paying for ads proclaiming that Walcott’s boss, Bloomberg, still “doesn’t get” that it doesn’t appreciate his efforts (and also reminding state legislators in Albany and those aspiring to succeed Bloomberg as mayor that they better not think of following his example).

But in declaring that the district would remove teachers who failed to improve student achievement for two consecutive years (and offering to buy out their continuing contracts), Walcott is making clear that Mulgrew and the AFT are merely avoiding discussion about one of the biggest challenges facing the Big Apple as it embarks on a second wave of reforms: Overhauling how it hires, compensates, rewards, and manages the performance of its teachers. Although the first round of reforms have helped improve student achievement in the city, New York City will need to take more-aggressive steps in this second step. Providing all kids in the city with strong, comprehensive college-preparatory curricula (an area which Walcott and his predecessors have tended to ignore) would certainly help, as would expanding charters, shutting down more failure mills, and allowing families to take over those schools they want to save through Parent Trigger laws. But none of this — even rolling out Core Knowledge’s strong reading curriculum — would accomplish little until the city takes stronger steps to remove laggard teachers and replace them with those who make the grade.

This was made clear by the city last year when results from the teacher performance management pilot it undertook revealed that 18 percent of teachers evaluated were deemed ineffective in the classroom. Based on the efforts that Washington, D.C., has undertaken with its pathbreaking IMPACT program, one can expect New York City to dismiss five percent of its teaching corps. For the AFT, which is dependent on having as many rank-and-file members in classrooms (and paying dues) to sustain its $205 million-a-year operation, more-stringent teacher evaluations equals lost dollars. And it will fight to oppose more-robust evaluations (and the use of objective student test score data in them) even if it means battling with insurgents representing younger teachers such as Educators4Excellence (which is demanding more-objective evaluations of teachers and the school leaders who supervise them), and, perhaps, even opposing the (slightly) more-moderate line now being taken by Weingarten at the national level.

Walcott has essentially forced the AFT into a rhetorical (and tactical) corner. If the union continues to oppose using the new evaluation system, it puts itself in the awkward position of talking out of both sides of its mouth. It can’t continue declaring that it wants teaching to become more-professionalized and then oppose efforts by New York City and the Empire State to do just that. On the tactical end, if Walcott goes ahead and begins dismissing teachers and buying them out, the union will then have to play by his ground rules (or accept an even worse deal) once it relents and strikes a bargain (and it will).

But for New York City taxpayers, Walcott’s moves would not only help improve the schools for which they pay a pretty penny, it would also get rid of laggards who collect sweet perks in exchange for riding the proverbial pine (and keeping out of classrooms). Currently, the city pays $100 million annually to keep 800 laggards out of classrooms (some of whom were not teaching since the days of the infamous rubber rooms); buying those teachers out would be better from both a fiscal and teacher quality perspective. For the city’s high-quality teachers, Walcott is effectively stating that they should be able to teach in schools with professionals who are their equals and not deal with those who don’t deserve tenure. And for Big Apple kids, Walcott’s declaration (and that of his boss) that low quality teachers shouldn’t be allowed to continue educational malpractice is an important stand for ensuring that all kids get the good and great teachers they deserve. All in all, not a bad move at all.

Your editor used to say that once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch discredits herself with every book, column, and tweet. This isn’t true anymore. Not only does she expose her intellectual disingenuousness through Twitter, her op-eds, and the Bridging Differences column in Education Week she shares with the equally retrograde Deborah Meier, Ravitch even has her own eponymous blog from which to cast straw men and ignore inconvenient facts about the nation’s education crisis.

On Monday, in her attempt to dismiss the concerns of those rightfully ringing alarm about the science results from the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (and the increasing evidence of the low quality of science instruction and curricula) , Ravitch attempted to argue that there is in fact slow and steady improvement in how we are educating our children. Certainly Ravitch ignores the growing evidence of the nation’s education crisis (including low graduation rates in urban districts), and she fails to acknowledge that American public education still isn’t providing kids with all of what they need to be successful once they graduate high school (as seen with the high levels of college freshmen in remediation classes). But she is right that there are fewer numbers of children struggling with illiteracy and innumeracy. While Ravitch makes the wrong step of using NAEP data from 1992 (which doesn’t include data from states that didn’t begin voluntarily participating in NAEP until 1998 and were fully required to do so in 2002, and thus incomplete), Dropout Nation notes that the percentage of all fourth-graders reading Below Basic proficiency declined from 39 percent in 2002 to 33 percent in 2011, making it likely that 217,432 fewer fourth-graders were functionally illiterate — and likely to drop out — in 2011 than nearly a decade earlier. Far too many kids are still condemned to poverty and prison. But we are making some progress in helping more of them stay in school and on the path to better lives.

But in the process of arguing that fewer students were doing poorly than two decades ago, Ravitch failed to acknowledge the critical reason why this has happened: The very reform efforts — including the standards and accountability initiatives embraced a decade ago in the No Child Left Behind Act — that former school reform dilletante now opposes so fiercely. This isn’t shocking; after all, Ravitch has a penchant for ignoring the facts (and even rewriting history) when it suits her. And in this case, any fellow traditionalist can understand why.

After all, Ravitch would have to acknowledge that the modern school reform movement, which began with southern governors and chambers of commerce at the end of the 1970s and began to gain traction in 1983 with the Reagan Administration’s publication of A Nation at Risk, has actually done plenty of good in advancing college-preparatory standards, pushing for the end of near-lifetime employment for even the worst-performing teachers, instigating the expansion of school choice and the development of charter schools, and articulating that traditionalist thinking Ravitch now defends is morally, intellectually, socially, and economically unacceptable.  More importantly, Ravitch would have to also admit that No Child spurred a round of reforms — including the efforts of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the chancellors who served under him since the mayor took control of the Big Apple’s school district — are making progress. And in the process, Ravitch would have to admit that a new wave of reforms, building upon those spurred in the previous three decades, will further render moot the practices, policies, and soft bigotry of low expectations from which she now profits.

So, of course, Ravitch would dance around the role of systemic reform efforts in helping more young men and women stay on the path to economic and social success. She’d have to admit to her intellectual and moral charlatanism — and stop debasing her legacy.

As you know by now, Dropout Nation has largely praised President Barack Obama’s school reform efforts. Certainly his administration’s No Child waiver gambit has been an abject disappointment and a stain on the record on the president and that of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. But this is balanced off against the administration’s Race to the Top initiative, which has given reform-minded governors another tool in their efforts against education traditionalists in their respective states, and its unofficial push for Common Core standards in reading and math (another step in helping all kids get strong, comprehensive college-preparatory curricula).

So we can appreciate why Democrats for Education Reform, the activist group cofounded by Teach For America backer Whitney Tilson, issued a report this week explaining why their peers should rally behind Obama’s re-election. For the most part, the polemic makes some good points on the president’s behalf, especially in making clear his steadfast willingness to buck the will of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, which still wield considerable clout within Democratic Party circles. Yet DFER overstates the impact of Obama’s efforts on gubernatorial activity, fails to acknowledge that much of the success of Obama’a efforts so far has to do with predecessor George W. Bush”s steadfast use of policy and the bully pulpit, and in the process, reject the bipartisanship along party lines that has proven to be important in advancing reform.

Certainly Race to the Top has helped governors even in the most traditionalist-entrenched states such as California advance such reforms as Parent Trigger laws and requiring the use of student test score data in teacher evaluations; so has the administration’s tacit and controversial support of implementing Common Core, which, contrary to what opponents of the standards declare, are far superior to those that had been in place in all but Massachusetts and Hawaii (when it comes to eighth-grade math). Yet the administration’s efforts haven’t been all that helpful in all cases. Early results from the School Improvement Grant program touted by Obama and Duncan, for example, proves out arguments made by yours truly and others against the program.  SIG’s overall focus of the program on individual school turnarounds ignores decades of evidence that such efforts rarely work. The fact that the turnarounds are overseen by the very districts that managed the schools into academic failure in the first place makes success anything but likely; the fact that SIG doesn’t address other underlying issues — including the array of state laws and collective bargaining agreements that have helped even the lowest-performing teachers keep their jobs — also makes SIG a less-than-useful tool for governors and school leaders.

Even the success of Race to the Top remains in many ways an open question. As governors such as Hawaii’s Neil Abercrombie have learned, federal policy doesn’t necessarily help out when you’re dealing with NEA and AFT affiliates, and other education traditionalists who still wield tremendous clout through their political donations and other state laws that still render districts (in the case of the Aloha State, an entire agency charged with running schools) servile to their demands. As the civil rights movement of the 1960s learned all too well, governors and reformers still have to do the tough work of rallying grassroots and legislative support (as well as develop needed governmental infrastructure and talent) to successfully implement their proposals. One way this can happen is by allowing reform-minded districts to participate in Race to the Top competitions, something that Dropout Nation suggested that the Obama administration should have done after its first round three years ago; only now has Obama and Duncan embraced this idea.

Meanwhile DFER’s claim that Obama’s reforms helped “Governors Get Their Groove Back” fails to acknowledge the reality that there was plenty of reform efforts happening at the state level before the president came into office. Under the leadership of governors Frank O’Bannon and Mitch Daniels, Indiana had moved throughout the early part of this century to allow the mayor of Indianapolis to become first city chief executive in the nation to authorize charter schools, moved to overhaul how it calculated graduation rates, launched one of the first dual college credit efforts, and provided what is still now one of the nation’s most-comprehensive and easy-to-use school data systems. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush built upon the efforts of predecessor Lawton Chiles to make the Sunshine State one of the most reform-oriented in the nation — and reduced the number of illiterate children on the path to academic and social failure. In California, Arnold Schwarzenegger spent years pushing for reforms such as increasing the number of years newly-minted teachers had to work before attaining near-lifetime employment, as well as oversaw the expansion of charter schools; it was Schwarzenegger’s state board of education appointees who helped Green Dot founder Steve Barr successfully push the Los Angeles Unified School District into handing over Locke High School for its so far successful overhaul. And in New York State, it was George Pataki who successfully supported putting New York City’s school district under mayoral control, and appointed the reform-minded Board of Regents that has now pushed for another wave of reforms; his successor, the otherwise-disgraced Eliot Spitzer  convinced legislators to enact a law requiring new teachers seeking tenure to prove that they successfully use standardized test scores and other forms of student performance data in shaping their classroom instruction.

One of the key factors driving those reforms — and has helped Obama support new efforts at the state level — was the current president’s predecessor, Bush, who ushered a great leap forward in systemic reform in 2001 with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. Thanks to Bush (and the cadre of Democrats and Republicans in Congress who supported it), No Child advanced federal policy by setting clear national goals for improving student achievement in reading and mathematics; it finally focused attention on using data in measuring teacher quality.  Through its Adequate Yearly Progress measures, the low quality of education across the nation’s public schools — including urban districts and in suburbia — was exposed while it gave researchers the impetus to look at the nation’s high school graduation rates (and present in clear, stark terms the high school dropout crisis). More importantly, No Child fully signaled the primary role of states in education governance. States may be required to improve graduation rates and test scores — including the aspirational goal that all students are proficient in reading, math and science by 2014 — but the federal government allows them to develop their own solutions in order to achieve them.

Simply put, without No Child, the conditions that allow Obama to implement Race to the Top and his other reform efforts would have never existed. If anything, the flexibility that Obama is pushing rightfully (through Race tot the Top) and wrongly (in the No Child waiver gambit) would have never existed. Nor would have the latest round of reforms have ever come into place. And this is something that DFER should have acknowledged.

Meanwhile DFER seems far too unwilling to acknowledge another reality: That it will take bipartisanship to drive systemic reform. This has already proven to be the case in Connecticut (where the Democrat-controlled legislature attempted to eviscerate the reform efforts of their fellow party member, Gov. Dan Malloy, before public pressure forced them to relent), in Mississippi (where Republicans, doing the bidding of the NEA affiliate and school districts there, refused to allow for the existence of charters), in Minnesota (where Democrat Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed a bill passed by the Republican-controlled legislature that would have ended reverse-seniority layoffs that hurt the poorest students and the young, talented teachers that serve them), and in Arizona (where Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed the expansion of a voucher-like tax credit plan). If anything, it is clear that there are elements in both parties who are far more willing to bow to the demands of teachers’ unions and suburban districts opposed to reform than do the right thing by children.

But you wouldn’t know this from DFER’s declaration that “the core of the GOP education agenda revolves around dismantling the Education Department and shifting power back to states”. This broad mishmash of a statement, which focuses solely on the talking points uttered during the Republican presidential campaign and from House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, fails to consider what is actually happening among GOP governors (who have embraced the support they have gotten for reform from the federal level). More importantly, like Andy Rotherham has done, DFER ignores the likelihood that the Republican presidential nominee presumptive, Mitt Romney, is as likely to support the kind of reform efforts Obama is currently pushing. (The fact that DFER fails to acknowledge the damage being wrecked by the president’s waiver gambit, which in many ways is no better than the efforts being pushed by Kline –and one that civil rights groups have articulated ad nauseam — is simply inexcusable.)

Sure, DFER is engaging in the usual political talking points game. But for reformers, such statements matter. Such words (and the unwillingness to acknowledge the importance of bipartisanship) make it more difficult for DFER’s fellow reformers to build broad coalitions for advancing reform, which is especially needed as the next wave of efforts begin tackling suburban districts in earnest. Alienating fellow reformers on the other side of the political aisle is not a strategy for success.

Let’s be clear: DFER plays an important role in advancing reform within Democratic Party circles, and in reminding people that Obama has done a generally good job as school reformer-in-chief.  For that, they deserve thanks — and reform-minded Republicans and conservatives supporting Romney should acknowledge this too. But the organization needs to keep in mind that it must balance its role of supporting reform-minded Democrats within the party with its more-important role of helping all kids succeed in school and in life. Overstating the case for Obama’s re-election doesn’t help its cause.