Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Michael Holzman, whose report for the Schott Foundation on how New York City’s Zip Code Education policies affect opportunities for poor and minority kids in the Big Apple, offers some new thoughts on data.

New York City’s Department of Education is the largest district in the country, responsible for educating one million students. How it meets that responsibility is of great concern to those children, their parents, the city’s residents and because of the sheer scale, the nation at large. It is, therefore, vital to have accurate, dependable data about the district’s performance.

Earlier this year the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released its long-awaited Civil Rights Data Collection for 2009-2010 from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts.  It is literally a collection:  each of those 7,000 districts submitted data on everything from school enrollment counts to statistics about bullying. This data collection is an important resource for all those interested in the condition of education in this country.  OCR has done an exemplary job of making the data accessible and easy to compare and analyze. (Editor’s Note: Whether or not the data accurately reflects what is going on, especially when it comes to young men of all races, or whether all kids are getting college-preparatory curricula, is a different matter entirely.)

But the data collection as a whole is only as accurate as the data sent in by the individual districts. And the data submitted by New York City is most curious.

For example, New York City reported that none of its 1,530 schools were either charter schools or alternative schools. This despite the fact that New York City is one of the leading players in expanding charters, and has an entire division — District 72 — devoted to educating students in alternative settings such as the Rykers Island jail. It also reported that none of its student received Free and Reduced-Price Lunch, a key measure of levels of poverty. Meanwhile New York City reported that eight-tenths of one percent of the children it serves were students disabilities. Even more odd, the district also reported that less than one percent of its students were classified as having Limited English Proficiency — even though a majority of its students are Latino and Asian.

The data points on suspension and expulsion reported by New York City to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights are even more curious. In 2009-2010, it reported that no students had been expelled. It also reported that none had been referred to law enforcement agencies. And that none of its students had been the subjects of school-related arrests. (Based on news reports and data from the city’s police department itself, this isn’t even close to reality.)

In other words, according to the New York City Department of Education, the district is one of unparalleled wealth among large districts, with no students living in poverty or near it.  The district, according to the data it submitted to the U. S. Department of Education, has completely resisted the charter school movement and has not experimented with alternative schools.  And its very large percentage of children living in homes where English is not spoken have nearly all acquired proficiency in English.

One of the strengths of the Civil Rights Data Collection is that it includes school-by-school data. New York City reports, for example, that:

• Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, with an enrollment of 2,275, had no students eligible for Free and Reduced-Price Lunch.

• Canarsie High School, also in Brooklyn, with an enrollment of 825, also had no students eligible for Free and Reduced-Price Lunch.  It reported an average teacher salary of $411,796.

• DeWitt Clinton High School, in the Bronx, with 63 percent of its 4,435 students listed as Latino reported 3.3 percent as having Limited English Proficiency and none eligible for Free and Reduced-price Lunch.

• Edward R. Murrow High School’s teachers are said to have an average salary of $252,843.

This is quite remarkable information. Perhaps someone in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office should look into it.

One of the most important reasons why we must transform education to continue bending the arc of American history toward progress is that the very definition of poverty is different than in the rest of the world. The Third World poverty of my grandmother’s youth no longer existd in this nation. Yet the poverty of today is just as damaging. And thanks in part to the nation’s education crisis and the inability of traditional public education to adapt to the knowledge-based global economy, this growing form of poverty will damage the nation’s future progress.

In this Best of Dropout Nation from last June, 2008 Teach For America alum Creighton Davis — now a middle-school teacher in the New York City borough of the Bronx and founder of youth empowerment program Serving While Achieving Greatness (S.W.A.G.) – offers his own solution for making education a catalyst in moving young men and women from economic and social despair. Read, consider, and offer your own thoughts on how we can bring high-quality education to bear in helping so many young men and women escape from poverty.

From an aesthetic perspective, when comparing urban poverty in the United States to that of other nations in the world, one might conclude that poor Americans have it pretty good. One would certainly be hard-pressed to find a poor child in Cairo or in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro with designer jeans and $150 dollar Nike shoes.

But in the United States, opulence creates a unique brand of poverty. While the poorest of our children may dress in designer apparel, most have gone to bed hungry at night and struggle with preventable illnesses that stem from a dependence on cheap food sources. In a country where the 99-cent burger reigns supreme, people are not confronted by an American child half-clothed and emaciated begging on the side of the road.

From afar Americans see a picture of relative comfort rather than poverty as we have come to understand the term. This causes many to believe that being poor is a result of bad choices rather than the consequence of an unequal system at play. If parents would spend their money with greater prudence, some might say, on healthy meals and books for their children rather than $200 dollar jeans then maybe that child could escape the cycle of poverty.

Unfortunately, this response fails to take into account the ubiquity of the American dream and the injustices at work that prevent one from achieving it. And it ignores the important key in ending this form of poverty: Education.

If a nation’s culture is predicated upon what you can buy and its people judged upon the rubric of what you possess, then most citizens in that nation will labor in the pursuit of an unquantifiable end-goal: To possess as much as one can while striving to have more than the next man. Children grow up indoctrinated in this culture, but as they grow older, many children, often African-American and Latino, realize that the tantalizing dream that hangs above their heads was, simply, not made for them. Resources are inequitably shared and jobs are in low supply. More importantly, when one out of every 10 low-income high school graduates are adequately prepared for college, the hope of progress through education is but a fleeting illusion highlighted by exceptions rather than a rule.

To escape the reality of this grave injustice – indoctrinating an entire nation in a dream but withholding the means to achieve it – comes the phenomenon of being ghetto rich. Rather than confront the lie and face a shattered reality directly, the young African-American or Latino child exists in a state of fantasy and denial. The child, now maybe a teenager, continues to subscribe to the dream that has enveloped him since birth and convinces him to believe that he is actually living it. That teenager, now a young adult, buys, buys, and buys with the few dollars he has, so that it seems on the exterior he embodies the dream that the rest of America seems to be living.

But while stepping over a shard of broken glass in a dark corner of his rat-infested, crime ridden project hallway, he glares at a reflection of a man that is hungry, hollow, and hopeless – his culture and character built upon the bedrock of falsehoods from which there is no escape. The omnipresence of the American dream serves as a constant reminder to his inadequacy with this injustice flaunted on nearly every billboard, song, movie, and magazine. The young adult now leads his own child through an inverted system of priorities where at all costs it is the superficial that is nurtured and the material things that are coveted at the expense of, literally, the mind, body, and soul. Without the option of a high quality education, there is no pathway to upward mobility and no escape from this uniquely American brand of poverty.

Education is the inextricable link in the food chain of a community. Without the existence of high quality schools, communities lack the intellectual sustenance needed to survive. Thus, the communities across the country that have become synonymous with poverty, crime, and hopelessness all suffer from a malnourishment of the mind. This is the true face of poverty in this country: An invisible straightjacket that sedates the limitless potential of a young mind by denying it access to quality schools, highly effective teachers, and experiences that might inspire him or her to realize that change is possible.

Change, though, must also come from within a community that is united under the common purpose of progress through education. While this inherently involves improving our schools, a burden must also rest on the shoulders of parents, grandparents, and extended families. For the mothers and fathers that have grown up in an environment that has supported an addiction to a hopeless dream, an incentive is needed in order to turn away from this inverted system of priorities that has existed as the norm for their whole lives.

This incentive can arrive in the form of a program similar to Brazil’s Bolsa Familia, which is a conditional cash transfer program based on a family’s adherence to certain established criteria. In Brazil, in order for a family to receive funds, the criterion is set around a number of issues. A similar program should be started here and focus only on one issue: Education. Conditional cash transfer programs have been tested in the United States in the past, but have all included a host of requirements that often reinforce a focus on those same misplaced priorities. If this program only focused on education, and families received financial incentives based on their child’s attendance at school, completion of homework, and overall academic performance with bonuses given to students that achieve A’s or high scores on standardized tests, the system of priorities within families would change into one that places a significantly higher value on academic excellence.

Once empowered by this change in values and priorities, communities could then be the force that demands the transformation of its education system. And if this happens, then that young man walking through his project hallway is more likely to see a reflection in a brightly polished window of a doctor, lawyer, or teacher standing with purpose and prepared to march to the drumbeat of progress and change.

Any school reformer who has ever gone shopping for a home understands two things: That housing prices are in part connected to perceptions about the quality of schools in an area, even if perception doesn’t match reality. It is why people in the Beltway will pay $800,000 or more for an aging shack in Fairfax County, Va. and ignore less-expensive and more-spacious homes across the way in Prince George’s County, Md., even though a closer look shows that the former fails to provide poor and minority students with college-preparatory education (and is low-performing compared to international peers).

So no one should be surprised that the Brookings Institution’s latest report on Zip Code Education policies show that families will pay more for a home near schools they perceive to be high-performing. The report points out that on average, prices for homes near a perceptively high-performing school are $11,000 higher than those for homes near failure mills and dropout factories. Some of this makes sense, especially when one considers that most families don’t have access to data systems that provide comprehensive information on school performance, especially for how well young black men fare in a particular school or district. Home prices become a substitute for more-reliable measures of school and teacher quality. This data alone explains why we must further develop school data systems that can help families learn make smarter decisions.

But the report, written by Brookings Associate Fellow Jonathan Rothwell, isn’t really about how families value education. It attempts to prove that land use and zoning rules are the critical reasons why so many poor and minority families can’t get access to high-quality schools. Whether the underlying analysis really supports Rothwell’s hypothesis is a different story.

For one, the report uses school performance data from 2010 and 2011 (provided through GreatSchools.org) that is neither longitudinal nor has been subjected to any form of Value-Added analysis. So the study can’t really prove that housing policy drives school zoning and boundary rules that perpetuate Zip Code Education. The study also doesn’t consider that schools aren’t the only concerns for home buyers (especially families). Commuting distances, access to stores and other lifestyle amenities, perceptions about quality of life in a particular area, and even levels of racial and economic diversity (or lack thereof) are also critical factors in housing. It’s one reason why home prices in cities such as Santa Monica, Calif., and  Alexandria, Va. (the home base of Dropout Nation), are so expensive — even  in spite of the mediocre performance of the districts that serve them.

Another problem with the study is that it essentially treats metropolitan areas as school districts — instead of accepting the reality that there are often several (often, even tens of) school districts contained within them — also skews Rothwell’s analysis. The metropolitan area surrounding the nation’s capital, for example, seems to have a far smaller achievement gap than that around New Haven, Conn. But if one looked closer at the achievement gaps (and restrictions on access to college-preparatory curricula for poor and minority students) within each of the districts within the metropolitan area — especially in Fairfax County — then a different story would likely emerge, with achievement gaps in some districts in the Beltway being as wide as those in the districts in its Nutmeg State counterpart.

Rothwell also fails to consider the reality that traditional districts are operations that are generally not controlled by municipal and county governments. This means that the decisions on school boundaries are often made without consideration of what municipalities do on the land use front. It also means that schools don’t factor much into zoning and land use policymaking while other concerns — from the desire of local governments to boost property tax dollars, to the interest of existing homeowners in artificially inflating home values, to the concerns of environmentalists and historic preservationists — most certainly do.

This points to a flaw in Rothwell’s solution of crafting home zoning policies that require more affordable housing to be built in communities with high-quality schools. Such an effort would require zoning agencies to seriously think about schools; there may be good societal and economic development reasons for them to do so, but it won’t happen until districts and other local governments are under the control of either a mayor or county board. Even if a city does this without having a district under mayoral control, the penchant for districts to change their zones means that poor and minority families (along with white, middle-class counterparts) could still end up sending their kids to a failure mills.

Then there is the fact that the analysis is driven by Rothwell’s underlying philosophy that socioeconomic integration is some sort of school reform. This is similar to what Heather Schwartz of the Century Foundation and the think tank’s education czar, Richard Kahlenberg, attempted to do two years ago in an analysis of schools in Montgomery County, Md.; in fact, Rothwell cites Schwartz’s report in his own study, and, like Schwartz, wrongly views correlation — that is, the tendency of schools in poor communities to be low-quality — as causation. Yet as Dropout Nation has consistently pointed out, socioeconomic integration — either in the form of magnet schools or inclusionary housing policies that require affordable housing to be built in wealthy neighborhoods — does nothing to actually address the systemic problems within American public education. Given the wide achievement gaps even within otherwise high-performing districts, the struggles minority families have with teachers and school leaders in getting their kids into Advanced Placement courses (and evade racialist ability tracking policies), and the reality that the quality of teaching can vary from one classroom to another, housing integration policies just won’t work in providing all kids with high-quality education.

Certainly Rothwell’s study, imperfect as it may be, points to some key solutions to ending Zip Code Education. One step lies in mayoral (and even county board) control of districts. In fact, one potential benefit of placing schools in city or county government hands is ability of a mayor or county executive to reshape how schools serve all communities. Another lies in expanding school choice and Parent Power. Expanding charter schools, along with launching voucher plans, can allow poor and minority families to help their kids get high-quality school options either within their communities or outside the neighborhood. Expanding intra-district and inter-district choice (the latter of which is on the agenda of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder) would also expand opportunities for all families.

Finally, we still must push the overhaul of how we recruit, train, evaluate, and reward teachers, along with revamping the rest of American public education. There is no reason why a zip code should have power to determine the destiny of any child.

Your editor generally pays no mind to Leo Casey. After all, the mouthpiece for the American Federation of Teachers’ New York City local is more likely to spend his time offering absurd class war rhetoric (especially in light of the considerable fortunes of both the union and the local) and even engaging in an Reductio ad Hitlerum-like statement against Steve Brill than offering cogent arguments in defense of the union’s thinking. If anything, like Diane Ravitch, the Edwize writer discredits education traditionalist ideas every time he types. But then, what can you expect from someone who has the audacity to demand civility from others when he doesn’t practice it himself?

But Casey managed to get my attention this time because he penned one of his even less thoughtful than usual piece attacking Parent Trigger laws and Parent Power groups (in which he misspelled my name in the headline). Engaging in the kind of guilt-by-association argument that only a sophist with the lack of skill to be a proper propagandist can do, Casey essentially proclaims that Parent Trigger laws are “anti-public education” and “reactionary” because a version of it was touted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative outfit that also successfully promoted Stand Your Ground laws such as the one on Florida that the original prosecutor involved in the Trayvon Martin murder case thought complicated the prosecution of George Zimmerman. Proclaiming that legislators modeling laws in their own states were engaging in something akin to plagiarism, Casey then took a swipe at yours truly and other Parent Power activists for allegedly having “nothing to say” about ALEC’s role in promoting both Parent Trigger and Stand Your Ground legislation.

As someone who actually thinks things through, I had to re-read Casey’s claptrap twice because it is amazingly and absurdly illogical. The fact that Casey compares the sharing of proposed versions of laws (and related exchange of ideas) among politicians and wonks as something akin to plagiarism is absolutely ridiculous. Such activity is as old as the nation itself, and explains why Blaine laws, teachers’ union collective bargaining laws, and reverse-seniority rules are similar across most states. (That the AFT and other unions have engaged in promoting model legislation also makes one wonder if Casey knows what he is talking about in the first place.)

One need not be a fan of ALEC to recognize that the fact that it promoted one flawed bit of legislation doesn’t invalidate other bills it has promoted. Based on that reductionist thinking, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights would also be invalid because its authors were also slave-owners. Same with the underlying argument that Parent Trigger laws and Parent Power activists (along with the families who support them) are merely fronts (and dupes) for supposedly right wing foes of the public education. The fact that both hardcore progressives such as Parent Revolution boss Ben Austin, mainstream Democrats such as U.S. Rep. George Miller, and conservatives such as Bruno Behrend of the Heartland Institute can see past their worldviews on other issues to recognize the importance of placing parents into lead decision-making roles in education merely proves the positively bipartisan (and mostly post-ideological) nature of the school reform movement that frustrates Casey and his fellow traditionalists.

Casey is old enough to realize that his illogical thinking doesn’t stand up to any real scrutiny. But then, Casey isn’t trying to actually think. What he is doing is evading the real issues that Parent Trigger laws (along with efforts to expand school choice) are tackling: The reality that traditional public education policies have ling denied families, especially those from poor and minority backgrounds, the ability to help their kids get high-quality learning.

Contrary to Casey’s contention, the reality is that the AFT, along with the National Education Association, traditional district bureaucrats, and ed school players, have long considered families to be little more than nuisances and afterthoughts in education. From where the average NEA and AFT boss sits, families should be barely seen and almost never heard from except through old-school family engagement groups (and new versions such as Parents Across America) that the unions have long co-opted. As seen in battles such as those between mostly-black families in New York City’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville community and the AFT’s New York local in 1968, and fracases between modern Parent Power groups and NEA affiliates over the  use of Parent Trigger laws in the California cities of Adelanto and Compton — education traditionalists are none too fond of families demanding to sit at the proverbial adult table of decision-making. And it is this longstanding disdain toward — and inherent distrust of — families (along with the unwillingness to hand over hard-won clout over education policymaking) that explains why union officials (along with their counterparts in district bureaucracies) oppose the expansion of charters and other forms of school choice.

Such opposition to families has consequences. For one, the disdain trickles down into relationships between those who work in schools and the very families they serve. This is especially true for poor and minority families in urban districts. As Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg of the Sage Colleges have noted in their research on school engagement, urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.” While this is partly due to the  negative experiences these parents have had with schools — especially those failure mills that they once attended and to which their children now go — it is also . But it is also about the fact that there are many teachers who look at parents, especially those who may not be capable of helping their kids because of their own learning issues — and are downright hostile to those mothers and fathers who want their role in shaping education to extend beyond field trips and homework.

This disdain is also experienced by suburban families, who, unlike those in urban settings, supposedly have more clout to force change. Black, Asian and Latino families,many of whom are emerging from poverty and are entering the middle class for the first time, learn quickly that they have to battle teachers and principals just to make sure that their kids aren’t steered away from college-preparatory courses and aren’t denied access to Advanced Placement courses. As University of Michigan Associate Professor Karyn Lacey noted in Blue-Chip Black, her sociological study of middle-class black families in the area surrounding the nation’s capital, black families living in Fairfax County found themselves battling teachers and guidance counselors who wanted to relegate children to academic tracks that keep them from getting high-paying white- and blue-collar jobs. And as Dr. Steve Perry pointed out in his book, Push Has Come to Shove, the way schools deal with parents of all backgrounds (especially poor families) is particularly disdainful; from inconveniently-scheduled parent-teacher conferences, to the lack of meaningful communication about student progress until it is far too late to help kids succeed, traditional districts offer little to parents.

The disdain of families from AFT and NEA affiliates and their national leaders can also be seen in the very policies for which they advocate. They back quality-blind reverse-seniority layoff rules that lead to talented-but-less senior teachers in schools serving the poorest kids losing their jobs (while veteran instructors who are failures in the classroom keeping theirs). They oppose the use of student test score data in evaluating and rewarding teacher performance, which can result in removing laggard instructors families don’t want teaching their kids. And as seen in Chicago (where the AFT affiliate there has gone toe to toe with Mayor Rahm Emanuel over his effort to expand instructional time) and Waterbury, Conn. (where the NEA affiliate is filing labor complaints against the district’s effort to improve reading instruction and curricula for its students), teachers’ union affiliates and their fellow-travelers in education traditionalist circles are more-concerned with protecting their privileges and influence than providing the children their families love with high-quality education. This isn’t to say that they don’t think they care about children or think they support families; but it is clear that their actions belie (and betray) their words.

As with school choice and the rest of the school reform movement, Parent Power activists have emerged because families are no longer willing to simply trust the adults in schools — especially those in urban communities — who have perpetuated educational neglect and malpractice. In joining alongside longtime reformers for both the expansion of choice and the enactment of Parent Trigger laws, these mothers and fathers are using the tools at their disposal to take power and be truly engaged in education. That’s the the thing about Parent Trigger laws and choice: Unlike so many of the so-called family engagement exercises touted by education traditionalists, Parent Trigger laws and school choice truly empowers parents because they can actually shape the quality of education for their children.

This kind of influence, which would crowd out the outsized influence NEA and AFT affiliates have had since the 1960s, is one that Casey and his AFT bosses, Michael Mulgrew and Randi Weingarten, have no interest in supporting. And it is why Casey would rather try reductionist thinking than truly engage in a real discussion about transforming education so that all children and their families can continue to bend the arc of American history towards progress.

The continuing debate over releasing teacher performance data has shown at least on thing: Many supposedly bold school reformers (including Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp) are none too interested in providing families, including those from poor and minority backgrounds, the data they need to make smart decisions for their kids and play lead decision-making roles in education. They are far too focused on the operational aspects of reform to consider the consumer demands of families (who want better for their kids) and taxpayers (who must pay the high costs of subsidizing the salaries of those who don’t belong in classrooms). Yet the underlying flaws in their faulty thinking make clear that they should the kind of transparency that not only helps families and kids, but also the very high-quality teachers they proclaim to be supporting by keeping performance data under lock and key.

In this Best of Dropout Nation from last August, Editor RiShawn Biddle further explains why families, taxpayers, and teachers deserve to see the results of high-quality and low-quality teaching. Doing this is key to bending the arc of American history towards future progress for all kids.

When the Los Angeles Times released it value-added analysis of teacher performance data based on student test scores (and the names of the teachers whose work was analyzed) last year, some school reformers, including American Enterprise Institute scholar Rick Hess, surprisingly joined education traditionalists in opposing the effort. Why? From his perspective, there’s no reason to make such data transparent, and that the data itself is too imperfect for public dissemination. As your Dropout Nation editor showed, Hess’ arguments didn’t stand up to scrutiny.

So it wasn’t surprising when Hess and others joined common cause  last week with the American Federation of Teachers’ New York City local to decry the New York State Appellate Division’s decision to allow the New York City Department of Education to release value-added data on individual teacher performance to media outlets and the public. And once again, the objections raised by Hess, other reformers who share his thinking, and education traditionalists, are off-target.

The first argument — that releasing the data serves no compelling public interest — is most-certainly off base. For taxpayers and for families who subsidize New York City’s public school system to the tune of $24 billion a year — most of it spent on teacher salaries and benefits — knowing how well teachers are performing in classrooms is certainly important. Releasing this data is essentially no different than disseminating salary data (which, as the husband of a former state government worker whose salary was exposed by the paper for which he had worked, I know how discomforting this can be). And given that school districts are government agencies accountable to taxpayers — and that New York State law doesn’t ban such release of data (and shouldn’t) — the decision by the Appellate Division is the right one.

For families, there is certainly a compelling interest for knowing the individual success of teachers in improving student performance. After all, they are finally learning what has been emerging as fact for some time: That the quality of a child’s education can vary from classroom to classroom. Even in the best-performing schools, traditional, charter or private, there are high-quality teachers working across the way from those who need help improving their instruction, and those who don’t need to be in classrooms at all. Contrary to what Hess and other foes of releasing teacher performance data may think, empowering parents and caregivers with this information can help them in making high-quality decisions for their families — and spur them to push for much-needed teacher quality reforms that will benefit all of our children.

If anything, releasing the data addresses one of the biggest problems in American public education: The fact that school data is largely a black box, with reporting mostly geared toward compliance instead of helping parents make smart educational decisions. For most parents, the data that is most-important for them is that about the teachers who instruct their kids every given day in the school year. By releasing this data, we finally get parents into important conversations about teacher quality that need to be had — and also take the next step in helping them attain their rightful roles as lead decision-makers in education.

Then there are the benefits of releasing this data for good-to-great teachers. For far too long, high-quality teachers have gone without the proper recognition — both in higher salaries and other rewards — for their success in the classroom. They never get the full recognition (or the wide range of compensation and career opportunities) they so richly deserve. Even worse, because we don’t recognize those teachers, they are often  forced by their colleagues to remain quiet about their achievements (or in the case of the John Taylor Gattos and Jaime Escalantes, forced out of the profession because of jealousy within the ranks).

Meanwhile they have had to serve alongside poor-performing teachers, who have lurked in the shadows, aided and abetted by teachers unions, administrators and colleagues who instinctively (if not quantitatively) knew better and did nothing. These teachers, who have gained near-lifetime employment (through tenure) just after three years on the job, are paid as much as $100,049 a year, and get nearly-free healthcare benefits and defined-benefit pensions, are a burden on taxpayers and colleagues alike. And because they help foster cultures of mediocrity in which only some children are considered capable of learning, they reap comfortable compensation at the expense of young boys and girls, many of whom will never enjoy the kind of middle-class salaries and strong job protections.

This isn’t to say that the data is perfect. But value-added analysis has stood up to three decades of scrutiny. As the work of Dan Goldhaber, Jonah Rockoff and others have shown, the data generally remains consistent over time. The arguments made by Hess, other reformers, and opponents of teacher quality reform against such uses are mere hogwash. The solution to the question of data quality is to improve the quality of data, not keep it from being released to the public. And to not use student test data in evaluating teachers, especially when it stands up to scrutiny, is just plain doing a disservice to families, teachers and children.

One can understand why AFT and National Education Association affiliates oppose releasing this data. After all, for them, it is the pursuit of perfection at the expense of the good of improving education for children, largely because the second goal is of secondary importance to them. As for Hess and other reformers who agree with this stance? This is a different story.

The unwillingness to support releasing such data proves one of the problems with some reformers: For all their talk of bold reform — including demanding the use of value-added teacher performance data in evaluations — they are unwilling to embrace it when the proverbial rubber meets the road. As a result, they are looked upon by other elements of the reform movement as being paper tigers, only interested in theoretical and policy discussions instead of real-world application of those ideas.

Releasing this teacher data is the right thing for everyone — and especially our children. Hess and other reformers opposed to the idea should be celebrating its release and developing ideas for improving the use of this data.

Earlier this week, Dropout Nation analyzed the failed tenure of Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent Eugene White and his attempt to find new gigs in Greenville, S.C. Since the piece ran, White’s luck in landing another job hasn’t gone so well. On Tuesday, days after deadlocking on whether to hire White, Greenville’s school board voted 7-5 to pick the district’s interim superintendent to fill the top slot. Then another district to which White was attempting to flee, this in Mobile, Ala., unanimously picked another internal candidate. With almost no options this time around, White announced that he would remain as top boss of the Titanic district. Declared White: “I’m going to do what needs to be done.” And upon hearing the news, one can imagine all the parents in Indianapolis served by the district who can afford to leave put their kids’ names up for charter school lotteries and called U-Haul. (The ones who can’t are stuck with abject failure that damages the futures of their kids.)

But White’s future remains cloudy, even if IPS’ clown college of a school board (which has indulged his incompetence for seven years) decides not to send him packing in the next few months. The threat of Circle City Mayor Greg Ballard taking control of the district looms large, especially after the mayor (who already authorizes charter schools) hired a former Teach For America executive to be his education czar. The state branch of Democrats for Education Reform stepped up the pressure to reform the district this week by holding a confab featuring Neerav Kingsland of New Schools for New Orleans, who discussed how Indianapolis had to embrace at least part of the Recovery School District model that has advanced reform in the Crescent City. And Indiana’s state government could weigh in further this summer by seizing more IPS schools from White’s management.

Certainly White isn’t the only failure among school district chieftains. He may not even be the worst of them. But we cannot continue to tolerate those in charge of providing education for our kids remaining in jobs they are ill-equipped to hold. If we are to hold laggard teachers accountable for their failures in the classroom, then we require all school leaders (including superintendents and those on school boards who abet them) to meet the same high standards.

No matter what happens, it is high time for White to take his leave of the district. As I said seven years ago about both White’s predecessor, Duncan “Pat” Pritchett and then-state superintendent Suellen Reed, White’s departure would do a host of good for the Circle City’s children.