Little Johnny goes to school, and he doesn’t see in the history books anyone who looks just like him being part of building this nation…. Then he goes home and watches TV and he people who look just like him playing sports, all the things that he is unlikely to achieve. And he gets frustrated…

A few years later, we see Little Johnny getting arrested on TV, and we ask “what happened to him? He was such a good boy.” It didn’t have to happen. Anyone of us could have taken little Johnny in our hands & give him a black history lesson he would never forget…

We could point to the soles of the shoes on his feet and tell him that it was Jan Ernst Matzeliger who invented the machine that made it. We can point to the street light and tell him it was Garrett Morgan who was responsible for it… We could tell him about Elijah McCoy, who was so prolific that when people saw a new invention, they would ask: “Is that a McCoy? Is that the real McCoy?” You had a racist like David Duke saying the phrase and he didn’t even know it was about a black man.

We can talk about Thomas Edison. You didn’t know he was black? He wasn’t. But Lewis Latimer, was, and he invented the carbon filament that allowed the light bulb to last longer than three days.

It’s not just our black boys. All boys can be shown that their people have contributed to American history.

Dr. Benjamin Carson, the famed Johns Hopkins surgeon and author, explaining at yesterday’s fundraiser held by consulting firm Navigant for one of his eponymous reading rooms, why we must do so much to help young men from poor and minority backgrounds get the high quality education and literacy they need for brighter futures.

But here’s my concern: while I think everyone understands that doing nothing is not an option, I am concerned that some people think we can wait another year, or longer, to tackle the big, tough issues. Let me be clear about this: we can’t wait. If we wait, we are consigning too many of our children to another year in which they will continue to fall behind their peers. The farther behind they fall, the less likely they are ever to catch up. And if they don’t catch up, well, we all know their chances of building a good life for themselves are slim.

Why would we allow that to occur?

We can’t wait to take on reforms that some of our neighbors implemented nearly 10 years ago, reforms that have led their graduation rates to improve while ours continues to decline. We can’t wait to implement an evaluation system that will make sure the good teachers in our system have peers that are their equal.

If I seem impatient, it’s because I am. I see kids almost every day who know I know we’re failing because we’re sending them to broken parts of our school system. It’s got to stop.

Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, apparently getting Dropout Nation‘s memo about standing up and battling against the efforts of legislators to all but cave in to education traditionalists who want to continue practices that fail far too many kids in that state — and across America.

[Parents] can’t just be empowered to choose charters, as some reformers believe. In most states, there is a surprisingly large inventory of private schools that are already serving low-income children. In some of these places there are few charters—sometimes (but not always) because the district is slow to authorize them. In Duval County, Florida, for instance, the district has only thirteen charters despite its large size (over 150,000 students). And not all of them serve low-income children. By contrast, there are over 100 private schools in the county that serve low-income children under the state’s tax credit scholarship program.

Low-income and working class parents must be empowered to choose these schools, with taxpayer dollars. Why not? With proper accountability, transparency, and oversight, the providers offer a vital solution.

Another advantage of full empowerment: It encourages the creation of powerful coalitions for choice that don’t exist with partial measures. In 2001, the Florida legislature created the tax credit scholarship program with only one Democrat voting in favor. In 2010, when the program was aggressively expanded, half the Democrats in the House and a third in the Senate voted in favor—as did a majority of the combined Black Caucus. That year Democrats clamored to speak at a rally where 5,500 low income parents and children came to the distant capitol of Tallahassee to endorse the bill… I have not yet seen a demonstration of support for choice or reform on a similar scale anywhere else in the country.

John Kirtley of Step Up For Students, explaining why expanding school choice is not only the right thing to do for poor and minority families, but a key way to foster coalitions for systemic reform.

In New Hampshire, as in every state where school choice comes up, defenders of the status-quo are claiming that it will hurt “underfunded” public schools and that they need more money… Let’s look at the reality of government school spending in New Hampshire: Per-student spending has increased more than 50 percent, after adjusting for inflation, since 2001. And though it’s declined slightly from the all-time high in 2010, per-child inflation-adjusted spending is still 5 percent above the previous all-time high in 2009, despite the struggling economy.

If more than $15,000 per student isn’t enough, how much is enough to educate a child?

Cato Institute’s Adam Schaeffler, pointing to the reality that we spend school dollars ineffectively in helping all kids succeed.

Everybody loves the underdog except when it comes to education reform. More than a week after the Florida Senate rejected the parent trigger bill, the story line is now David v. Goliath, with David (played by established parent groups like the Florida PTA and Fund Education Now) squeaking out a victory over Goliath (starring Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee, and the Republican-dominated Legislature.)

The truth is, titans clashed while David was en route to his second job. The underdogs who are lost in this narrative are low-income and working-class parents. They have virtually no one in their corner as they deal with conditions in their schools that would spark outrage – and quick remedies – if they happened in more affluent schools…

Established parent groups have tended to focus on adequate funding for public schools, which is critical. But I don’t remember them pushing for meaningful differential pay that may help staunch the steady flow of teachers from inner cities to suburbs. I don’t remember them pushing to keep underperforming teachers from being routed to high-poverty, high-minority schools…  if you are working in close alliance on an issue with the state teachers union, elected school boards, superintendents and big-name Democrats, you’re not Jeremy Linn.

Ron Matus of RedefinEd, reminding folks that Parent Trigger laws are geared toward helping those families who never get represented by the traditional parents-teacher group.

One of the running themes here at Dropout Nation is the usefulness of high quality data on student, teacher, and school performance. Such information allows school leaders and politicians to address the longstanding problems within American public education. Data also provides teachers with tools they can use in instruction and in nurturing the young geniuses in their classrooms. (Whether or not the nation’s ed schools do a good job of teaching them how to use it is a different matter entirely.)

But it is families that likely find data to be most-useful. Parents can use data such as Value-Added analysis of teacher performance to demand better for the children they love — from selecting schools , to monitoring their kid’s progress, to challenging failed thinking that helps perpetuate the nation’s education crisis, and even lead school overhauls.

In this Voices of the Dropout Nation, Alex Hernandez, a partner in school reform nonprofit Charter School Growth Fund (and lead writer on the site, Blend My Learning), explains how families will likely use data and blended learning tools to become the driving forces in systemic reform. Think, consider, and offer your own thoughts.

My kindergartner recently completed a Dreambox Learning unit on equivalent expressions (e.g., 3 + 4 + 6 = 7 + 5 + 1). He ran into the kitchen to celebrate and then ran back to the computer… and logged out of Dreambox.

To my surprise, he promptly logged back into Dreambox, but this time he went to the parent dashboard. Our five-year-old wanted data. He wanted to see his progress and make decisions about what to work on next.

Blended learning promises to increase the amount of student data available to teachers and administrators. And sophisticated educators closely scrutinize the reporting capabilities of online content providers.

But I rarely hear educators ask about the data going to students. We tend to “miss” the often profound ways students use real-time, feedback, choosing to focus solely on teachers and minimizing the role students play in their own learning.

I believe the proliferation of student performance data will help students take more ownership of their education, especially as the data from online content providers dwarfs the information yielded from school assessments. During a recent classroom tour, I was fascinated to see ninth graders clearly articulate the relative strengths and weaknesses of different learning resources. Some preferred peer-to-peer tutoring, others preferred direct instruction from the teacher, and still others preferred online content. The feedback provided to the students empowered them to make informed, strategic decisions about their learning.

The ubiquity of student data from online content is also breaking down walls between schools and families. At my first parent-teacher conference of the year, the teacher brought lots of data about my son which was collected over the prior six weeks. I had my Dreambox parent dashboard that showed my son’s performance across a continuum of standards ranging from kindergarten through second grade. In this instance, I actually knew more about my son’s math skills than our teacher. This was a profound shift for me, because, when it came to student performance data, there used to be a tremendous asymmetry of information between schools and families. Schools had all the data and parents did their best to piece together how their children were doing.

The dynamic is now shifting. Just as people use the internet to educate themselves about medical conditions and treatment options, families will use online education assessments to inform themselves about their children’s academic needs.

I suspect families will drive school reform over the next decade. Truly student-centered schools will thrive and mildly-responsive bureaucracies will face increasingly informed and demanding families. If we’ve learned anything about the internet era, we know data wants to be free and it can spark revolutions.

The idea that the Common Core standards are nationally-imposed is a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy. The Common Core academic standards were both developed and adopted by the states, and they have widespread bipartisan support. GOP leaders like Jeb Bush and governors Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, and Bill Haslam have supported the Common Core standards because they realize states must stop dummying down academic standards and lying about the performance of children and schools. In fact, South Carolina lowered the bar for proficiency in English and mathematics faster than any state in the country from 2005 to 2009, according to research by the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s not good for children, parents, or teachers.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, rightly chastising the Palmetto State’s legislature for pushing an effort to abandon implementing Common Core reading and math standards. If only Duncan and President Barack Obama showed greater commitment to systemic reform by abandoning the counterproductive No Child waiver gambit.

Wouldn’t you want your plumber to be able to quote Shakespeare?” I posed the question to our veteran math teacher, thirty years in the trenches, and he said, succinctly and without hesitation, “No.” At first, I was taken aback, but, as we chatted, I realized that he saw it as a zero-sum question. He had nothing against Shakespeare; he simply wanted his plumber to be a good plumber and considered the Bard a distraction. I understand. We want our auto mechanics to know the difference between a brake line and a muffler, our carpenters to appreciate the importance of a plumb line and the use of a hammer—oops, nail gun. But it is not a zero-sum game. And knowing the foibles of Macbeth does not mean you must be useless with a soldering gun.

Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Peter Meyer, explaining the importance of every child getting strong, comprehensive college-preparatory curricula, a subject of this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast.

To understand why the release of this data makes sense, you must step back and see the intense, broader battle underway throughout the nation. The fight is between those who want to improve the schools and those who like the system as it exists today. Those who want to preserve the status quo have historically had the upper hand. For generations, they have been able to control policy change by focusing attention on the adults in the schools through the contract bargaining process, through labor laws in the legislature and through a supportive media environment. This political balance has, however, taken a sudden turn. Within the last few years, a surprising number of states have revisited the idea of teacher tenure based solely on a couple of years on the job and not on any true evaluation of the teacher’s contribution to students’ learning. There has also been valuable movement to finally begin to base personnel decisions, including both rewards and dismissals, on the basis of real measures of teacher quality.

Hoover Institution scholar Eric Hanushek, joining Dropout Nation in challenging Bill Gates’ opposition to publishing teacher performance data.

Among advanced degrees in engineering awarded at U.S. universities during the 2007-08 academic year, 28 percent went to whites; 2 percent went to blacks; 2 percent went to Hispanics; and 61 percent went to foreigners. Of the advanced degrees in mathematics, 40 percent went to whites; 2 percent went to blacks; 5 percent went to Hispanics; and 50 percent went to foreigners. For advanced degrees in education, 65 percent went to whites; 17 percent went to blacks; 5 percent went to Hispanics; and 8 percent went to foreigners. The pattern is apparent. The more rigorous a subject area the higher the percentage of foreigners — and the lower the percentage of Americans — earning advanced degrees. In subject areas such as education, which have little or no rigor, Americans are likelier — and foreigners are less likely — to earn advanced degrees.

Economist and columnist Walter Williams, breaking down the high cost of innumeracy, a symptom of the nation’s education and dropout crisis.

In too many places, public schools are failing their two most basic missions: to provide children with an equal, world-class education, irrespective of race or income, and to ensure that their skills and knowledge match the needs of Connecticut’s employers.

As I traveled around the state last summer on my jobs tour, nothing was more frustrating than a refrain I heard from too many employers.  They said, “I have job openings, but I can’t find workers in Connecticut with the skills to fill them.” To be honest, it was maddening to hear. Because just prior to that, I’d spent two months traveling around the state to do 17 town hall meetings on the budget and in that time I met hundreds of people who were unemployed or under-employed.

Imagine that: we have jobs that need to be filled – good jobs — and we have people that desperately want to work.  Yet those jobs remain unfilled and those people remain unemployed. It’s got to stop…

Since 2009, 31 states have enacted tenure reform, including our neighboring states of New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.  It’s time for Connecticut to act. For those watching or listening who don’t know what tenure is, it’s basically job security.  Let me explain. Right now, if you’re a teacher and you have tenure, your performance in the classroom has to be rated “incompetent” before a dismissal process can even begin.  Even then – even if you’re rated “incompetent” – it can take more than a year to dismiss you.

And to earn that tenure – that job security – in today’s system basically the only thing you have to do is show up for four years.  Do that, and tenure is yours. The bottom line?  Today tenure is too easy to get and too hard to take away. I propose we do it a different way.  I propose we hold every teacher to a standard of excellence.

Under my proposal, tenure will have to be earned and re-earned.  Not earned simply by showing up for work – earned by meeting certain objective performance standards, including student performance, school performance, and parent and peer reviews. And my proposal says, you should not only have to prove your effectiveness once, after just a few years in the classroom.  My proposal says that if you want to keep that tenure, you should have to continue to prove your effectiveness in the classroom as your career progresses.

And we won’t get drawn into making a false choice between being pro-reform or pro-teacher… I’m pro-teacher, as long as that doesn’t mean defending the status quo

Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, whose state is among the ones to watch for action on systemic reform, making clear his goals on education during yesterday’s special school reform session of the legislature.