When it comes to educating poor, urban children, far too many consider it impossible to do without solving all the surrounding issues within a community. Essentially, those folks — especially defenders of traditional public school practices that promote educational malpractice — simply give up on our poorest children. But as seen in the success of some traditional public schools, Catholic diocesan school systems and charter schools run by Harlem Children’s Zone and the Knowledge is Power Program, high-quality schools with highly-effective teachers, rigorous curricula, strong leadership and high expectations can help every child succeed.

One such school is Chicago’s Providence-St. Mel, a former Catholic school that was taken over by a group of parents after it was targeted for shutdown by the Second City’s archdiocese in 1979. Since that threat, Providence-St. Mel has made it its mission to get every one of its students ready for college and life. Watch this trailer from the documentary profiling the school, The Providence Effect, and consider how we can expand the number of high-quality schools in every community. It will take the reform of American public education — and even redefining it to mean a system of funding the best educational options, public or private, for every child — to stem the dropout crisis that leaves 1.3 million kids trapped in despair.

Within the past month, the NAACP and other old-school civil rights groups have weighed in on the nation’s achievement gap and President Barack Obama’s school reform efforts — and have come out on the wrong side. This has resulted in questions about their relevance — and the appropriateness of their tactics — in an age in which black parents have come out strongly for charter schools and other reform measures that give parents power over the quality of education for their kids. It also stands in contrast to the work of onetime fellow-traveler Al Sharpton (whose own embrace of school reform has been chronicled here) and a new generation of educators such as Dr. Steve Perry, the CNN commentator and principal of Capital Prep charter school in Connecticut.

Watch this video from last year — long before the current debate over the role of civil rights groups (and their ivory tower allies among the Kahlenberg-Orfield crowd) in education — and consider whether the NAACP and other groups have outlived their usefulness. And, whatever your thoughts, how can they become relevant again.

As a single mother of two sons attending Washington, D.C.’s public schools in the 1990s, Virginia Walden Ford should have been at a complete loss at how to improve education for her kids. Instead of remaining helpless, Walden launched the school reform movement in the District — whose school system was once considered the Superfund Site of education — by taking to the streets, lobbying Congress and fighting for charter schools and voucher programs. The results of her work can still be seen today, as D.C. has become one of the foremost centers for charter schools, and in the efforts by Michelle Rhee to overhaul D.C. Public Schools. Ford showed how even one parent can build a movement to improve education, both for their child and for all children.

Watch this excerpt from a Bluegrass Institute presentation, listen to this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast (and an earlier podcast on building parent power), and consider what you would do for your own child. Then take action for all children.

Seven years ago, Sacramento High School was considered a dropout factory before the term was actually coined. Although 85 percent of its students overall from its original Class of 2003 were promoted from 9th to 12th grade, that number is deceiving: Just 49 percent of Sacto’s black and Latino freshmen earned enough credits to make to senior year, while only 68 percent of white freshmen made it to 12th grade. Such numbers more than explain why the Sacramento City Unified School District voted in 2003 to shut down the school (then the nation’s second-oldest high school west of the Mississippi), convert it into a charter and hand it over to St. Hope Public Schools, a charter school operator cofounded by now-Sacramento Mayor (and soon-to-be Mr. Michelle Rhee) Kevin Johnson.

These days, the school — now called Sacramento Charter High and one of four charter schools on campus — is no perfect graduation haven. Just 58 percent of Latino males and 50 percent of their black male counterparts graduated with the courses needed to get into a University of California or California State university (versus 75 percent and 69 percent, respectively, of their female colleagues); a mere 40 percent of its white male students graduated with US/Cal State-qualified courses (versus 75 percent of their female schoolmates). It must still overcome its abysmally low promoting power and graduation rates for Latino students overall. But the school has succeeded in improving graduation rates for its students. This includes a 93 percent promoting power rate for black freshmen in its Class of 2008. It deserves credit for making strides, even as it must do better.

Watch this video on Sacto’s efforts to improve the quality of education for minorities and the poorest of students — and consider how American public education can make the strides needed for all children.

As chairman of the California state senate’s education committee, Gloria Romero would be expected to be feted and beloved by the state’s National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates. Instead, she has been one of the biggest thorns in the sides of the Golden State’s two primary teachers unions. The California State University, Los Angeles professor — who was the first woman to serve as the upper house’s majority leader — has been responsible for legislation that has removed the cap on the number of charter schools and allowing for student test data to be used in teacher evaluations. And as part of her work with outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to win a share of federal Race to the Top dollars, Romero also helped enact Parent Trigger,  the law that allows 51 percent of parents at a low-performing school to remove teaching staff, administrators or even the entire district (and convert the school into a charter). Although the unions have managed to defeat her effort this year to run for state schools superintendent, they haven’t exactly weakened her passion (or her efforts).

Watch this video of Romero discussing the underlying reason why she is pushing for reform: The thousands of young white, black and Latino Californians who, along with more than 1.2 million other teens this year, will drop out into poverty and prison. Think about what you can do to solve this problem — and then take action.

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

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

(Click on the headline to watch the video)

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

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

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

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

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

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

For better or worse, Al Sharpton has surely made a name for himself as an enfant terrible of the post-1960s Civil Rights Movement. But when he co-wrote an op-ed with New York City Chancellor Joel Klein advocating for ending restrictions on the expansion of the charter school movement, everyone has to take notice. His own conversion to the school reform movement offers one more reason why defenders of traditional public education such as the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers can no longer count on the Democratic Party for unquestioned support. It also shows to school reformers why they must reach out to grassroots activists and parents to further their goals.

Watch this excerpt of Sharpton’s 2008 speech before a conference held by Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions. Then give Sharpton’s words some thought and consider how you will build new alliances for solving the nation’s education crisis.