As Creighton Davis made plain in Tuesday’s Voices of the Dropout Nation commentary, giving our poorest children in urban communities a high-quality education is critical to their success in life. And it takes good-to-great teachers dedicated to their success, caring adults who care about their futures, and cultures of genius that nurture learning, for our children to gain hope, build their confidence and emerge from poverty. Even something as simple as learning to write and perform poetry can help get kids out of educational prisons.

Watch this trailer of the film To Be Heard and listen to the these three young men and women tell their stories in rhyme and verse. Go watch the film at a local film festival near you. Think about what you will do to help young men and women succeed in school and in life. And then, make a difference.

There are so many ways that traditional practices in American public education — many of which are tied to the traditional system of teacher compensation — shortchange poor and minority children. From seniority-based pay scales that only reward teachers for staying in place (and not for improving student achievement), to seniority-based rules on school assignment that restrict the ability of schools to keep high-quality teachers in place (and get rid of laggards), to even last in-first out layoff rules that force less-senior teachers out of classrooms without regard for performance, poor and minority kids constantly lose out.

In this presentation, University of Washington researcher Marguerite Roza — whose pioneering work on school spending has revealed many of these inequities — explains how the poorest and minority kids often get thrown to the back of the education bus. Watch, listen, consider and take action.

When one out of every three American children drop out of high school and into poverty and prison, there is no time to wait. As important as it is to take on the tough slow work of systemic reform, we must also create new options for getting kids out of dropout factories and cultures of mediocrity into cultures of genius and centers of learning. Whether it be voucher programs such as the now-shuttered D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (which congressional Republicans have taken steps to revive), charter schools or even public school choice within traditional districts, all steps must be made to give kids opportunities to escape academic failure.

Watch this video in which Kevin Chavous and parents whose kids are in the D.C. Opportunity voucher program explain to voucher opponent Danny Davis why it is important to open up and expand choice. Watch, consider and take action.

It will take a variety of efforts to reform American public education and stem the nation’s dropout crisis. This includes young men and women talking to their peers about the importance of staying in school. Whether it comes in the form of films such as Beyond the Bricks, through entertainment, or through simple conversations, it is important to enlist every teen and young adult in keeping their classmates and neighbors in school (as well as help them get the remediation at-risk kids may need to get up to speed).

This video from St. Louis rapper Keke Bubbles, one of 11 that are finalists in the DefJam Rapstar Get Schooled competition put on by the Get Schooled Foundation, is one example of the messages we need to help keep kids on the path to graduation. Even as we overhaul curricula and instruction — especially in the early grades — messages about the importance of education to our middle- and high school students also remain important. Watch, listen, consider and take action.

The move by Michigan’s state legislature last week to remove control of school curriculum and academics from Detroit Public School’s board to financial czar Robert Bobb is just the latest of many changes to move education from under control of the nation’s most-dysfunctional big city school board. From the scandal involving former board president Otis Mathis (whose illiteracy was as head-shaking as the behavior that led to his resignation) to the antics of David Murray (who defended Mathis), the school board epitomizes the most-publicly worst that American public education governance can offer. But the problems aren’t limited to Detroit alone; while there are plenty of school boards, urban, suburban and rural, who serve their families, taxpayers and children well, there are far many more that have contributed to the nation’s educational crisis.

As you watch this video produced by the Education Action Group Foundation last year, consider what we can all do to end traditional education governance and move to a system in which parents are the lead decision-makers in schools and cultures of genius can be nurtured and sustained. We can’t wait for atrocious and merely mediocre school boards to finally get themselves together. Our kids deserve better.

As a D.C. city councilman during the 1990s, Kevin Chavous embraced the parent power movement began by Virginia Walden Ford and helped make the District one of the prime centers for school reform. Then in 2003, he took it a step further and teamed up with then-D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams to get Congress to create the now-shuttered D.C. Opportunity school voucher program. The move may have came at the cost of his career, losing to future D.C. mayor Vince Gray a year later. But he helped thousands of the city’s children escape its dropout factories and improve their odds for better lives.

In this video, Chavous explains why Parent Power and school choice must no longer be a political football, especially for old-school black politicians too stuck in the past (and in their ties to teachers unions) to help the very kids for which they express concern. Watch, listen to this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, and consider how we can ensure that parents are the kings and lead decision-makers in education.

As districts such as New York City’s Department of Education and Providence (R.I.) Public Schools look at strapped budgets and begin layoffs, it is important to remember that the impact of these moves comes not so much in number of teachers laid off, but in which ones are lost. Young, talented teachers with less-seniority working in schools serving poor and minority kids are the ones who end up on the streets thanks to reverse-seniority (last hired-first fired or last in-first out) policies. And as studies by The New Teacher Project, University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education, and a recent report in the Yale Law Journal have pointed out, last hired-first fired equals kids dropping out into poverty and crime.

The American Civil Liberties Union made this point in a lawsuit if filed last year against Los Angeles Unified System over layoffs at three of the district’s poorest schools . This lead to a settlement that bans the use of seniority in layoffs in 45 of its schools serving its poorest kids. But as Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa points out in this video, the end of reverse seniority layoffs — and by extension, seniority-based privileges — must come to every school in America. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers should be ashamed of defending these atrocious policies that harms kids and even the young teachers in their rank-and-file. We can’t continue to proverbially (and sometimes, literally) killing our seeds before they grow.

As important as it is to improve teacher quality and curricula, the need for strong, thoughtful, entrepreneurial and bold leaders — be they teachers, principals, even parents — is critical in reforming American public education. At this moment, as much of the problem lies with abysmal principals, superintendents, ed school deans and other players in education unwilling to do what it takes to improve the quality of instruction and learning children receive each and every day. Although the dearth of strong leadership is evident in pervasive dropout factories such as Detroit, it is sometimes even worse in suburban districts that appear on the surface to be high-performing; more often than not, the unwillingness to challenge long-held assumptions and longstanding practices often sets up generations of kids for mediocrity (if not failure down the road).

Teach For America Founder Wendy Kopp offers some thoughts on the need for leadership in this video from last week’s 20th anniversary summit. Watch, consider and think about what you can do to become the leaders we need to help all children succeed.

One of the biggest problems in discussing the need for systemic reform of American public education is that so much of the underlying problems can sometimes be hard to see. The impact of state laws and collective bargaining agreements on classroom teaching is tremendous, yet it is easy for those who defend the status quo to declare that the problems lie with poverty, with students or with school reformers supposedly making more of issues than they really are.

But in the past few years, directors such as Davis Guggenheim and Madeleine Sackler have produced films that dramatize why reform is needed more than ever. Defenders of traditional public education may decry the films as propaganda (as if their own polemics couldn’t be declared the same), and some school reformers may bemoan the flicks as over-simplistic (while forgetting that the average person will never read research reports). Yet the capacity of these films to bring new voices into school reform cannot be underestimated; reformers such as Hess should welcome them with open arms. We need more films, more declarations from artists such as John Legend and Will.I.Am, and more people demanding a revolution, not an evolution, in American public education.

One of the films that captured the need for reform is The Cartel, Bob Bowden’s documentary on how the players in traditional public education — including teachers unions and school boards — have poorly served the kids in their care. Watch this trailer, consider what needs to be done to overhaul our schools, and take action.

As a weather reporter on Seattle television station KCPQ-TV, M.J. McDermott talks more about the Emerald City’s wet weather than about education. But in her spare time, McDermott has been a front-line player in the nation’s battles over the direction of math curriculum and instruction, explaining succinctly to Washington State parents why the curriculum used in the state’s schools is hardly worth paper or the time of students and teachers.

In this excerpt from her 15-minute video for the math reform group Where’s the Math?, McDermott shows why some math curriculum programs fail to show the basic steps kids need to know in order to move from computation to mastery. While real-life examples are important in providing students with relevance so they can get interested in learning math, kids can’t succeed with faulty methods for handling simple computations. Watch, consider and take action. And also, read my latest column for The American Spectator on the math instruction and curriculum aspects of the nation’s education crisis.