On this week’s Monitor, RiShawn Biddle notes the House Education and the Workforce subcommittee’s hearing on Parent Power and Family Engagement featuring Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel; checks out the lawsuit filed by StudentsFirst, Parent Revolution and others against California’s state government over tenure and reverse-seniority layoffs; and looks at efforts in Missouri to expand charter schools and inter-district school choice.

Watch the Midweek Monitor on the site or download. You can also subscribe to this series and to the overall Dropout Nation Podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software, Google Reader, BeyondPod, DoggCatcher and other mobile software.

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.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, RiShawn Biddle explains how school data — especially early warning systems focused on stemming dropouts — can help keep kids on the path to college and career success. With so many new ways to identify children struggling with literacy and numeracy, there is no reason why schools and districts can’t get 1.2 million young men and women off the path to despair.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player, smartphone, Nook Color or Kindle Fire. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software, Google Reader, BeyondPod, DoggCatcher and other mobile software.

Pay Attention to History, or Why Andy Rotherham is Off-Target on What Mitt Romney’s education policies may be: When it comes to presidential candidates and policy, it can be easy to get caught up in the old-school biases of traditional politically partisan thinking. In the process, one can fail to realize how the policies of predecessors in the Oval Office (along with one’s to policy players) tend to all but assure that a candidate tends to stay the course. More often than not, the successful presidential candidate realizes once he wins office that the nature of federal policymaking makes it extremely difficult to step away from current courses of action. More importantly, the influence of policy players in ascendance, the iron triangle relationships formed during a predecessor’s tenure, and the president’s own recognition that his predecessor was probably correct in his course of action, often means that those wonderful campaign slogans are dropped rather quickly once a president gets into the day-to-day role of  running the national government’s executive branch.

This can be seen in foreign policy, with Barack Obama — who proclaimed himself an opponent of George W. Bush’s policies on Guantanamo and the invasion of Iraq — essentially adopting much of his predecessor’s positions once entering office; Bush, in turn, did the same thing, deriding Bill Clinton’s military interventions in Somalia and Bosnia, before engaging in the same sort of adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. And this axiom is even more applicable when it comes to federal education policy. This is what my friend, Andy Rotherham, would be able to see if he took off those dusty goggles of traditional political partisanship (which was evident in his off-the-mark criticism of my latest American Spectator column on Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s likely education policy agenda as president) and paid attention to history.

It is easy for those who haven’t paid attention to the history of the modern school reform movement to think that federal efforts to spur reform started with George W. Bush and the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act 11 years ago. This isn’t so. No Child was the first great leap in advancing reform after a series of small, fitful steps that began three decades earlier when the Reagan Administration released A Nation at Risk, the pathbreaking report that articulated the case for reform that was already being made by chambers of commerce in southern states and the governors at the helm there such as Lamar Alexander in Tennessee; by 1986, some 250 commissions had been launched focusing on crafting the first wave of curricula standards, and implementing the second wave of standardized tests (that began as a result of Dwight David Eisenhower’s signing of the National Defense Education Act in 1958). By 1989, Reagan’s successor (and Dubya’s predecessor), George H.W. Bush, would take an even more-explicit step towards a more active federal role in spurring reform by convening the nation’s governors to start turning lip service about reforming schools into reality.

By 1994, Daddy Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton signed into law the Improving America’s Schools Act,  reauthorized version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that took some steps towards actually making states and districts  accountable for the federal dollars they spent, expanded the scope of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (and in the process, shown light on the low quality of teaching and instruction in the nation’s traditional district schools), and fully embraced the charter school movement by providing federal dollars to support start-up efforts. Although the law didn’t achieve all that it intended, the passage of Improving Schools — along with the reform efforts undertaken at the state level by governors such as George W. Bush in Texas — would lead to the great leap forward in expanding accountability and promoting reform that would come with No Child seven years later.

One could say that any of these aforementioned presidents could have took a different path on education policy. Reagan declared on the campaign trail that he would abolish the U.S. Department of Education, while some of his staffers were none too happy about publication of A Nation at Risk. The rest, save for Bush II and his successor, Barack Obama, didn’t explicitly deal with education save for a few mild bromides about wanting a better education for kids. And until George W. Bush came along, education policy was a secondary aspect of policymaking for most White House occupants. Yet once in office, each of them paved the path towards advancing a stronger federal role in pushing states to meet their constitutional and civil rights obligations toward overhauling American public education. The coalition who make up the school reform movement — from the centrist Democrats and idiosyncratic conservatives and left-leaners in think tanks, to the corporate executives and entrepreneurs and their chambers of commerce, to the young urbanites, school choice-oriented libertarians and families in the grassroots — have proven skillful at ensuring that whoever ends up in the White House will pay plenty of attention to school reform, whether they like it or not. The fact that presidential policies often outlast their tenures also plays a part; so does the fact that nearly all presidential aspirants since Reagan got their starts as governors and state legislators, giving them an uncomfortable intimacy with how teachers’ unions and other education traditionalists influence school policy. And given that the nation’s education crisis is also at the center of the economic and social challenges facing the nation, no president can afford to embrace anything other than a strong, activist form of federal education policy.

In short, Romney, as artfully dodgy as he has been on education (and on everything else) this presidential campaign, will more than likely end up taking the same path on school reform if he wins office as Obama and Bush II and their predecessors. This doesn’t mean that Romney can’t end up in a different direction; as I mentioned in my latest American Spectator column, Romney’s penchant for going wherever the political winds blow means that he could easily end up in a different direction altogether. But given the realities that come with being president (along with Romney’s choices in advisers, which don’t include some of the most-fervent movement conservatives opposed to any federal role), staying the course on reform is what is likely to happen.

Holding All Schools Accountable, or Why Reformers Must Push for the Shutdown of Faltering Charters: As you already know, this week’s Dropout Nation commentary dissecting the faulty thinking of Diane Ravitch and other education traditionalists certainly attracted the attention of the once-respectable historian’s allies. It also attracted an important question from Michael Goldstein, the inestimable founder of the MATCH charter schools in Boston, about what reformers should do when it comes holding charter schools to the same high standards we demand for traditional district counterparts. Citing the move of the Los Angeles Unified School District keeping open the Academia Semillas del Pueblo, a failure mill in the City of Angels community of El Sereno that has maintained its longstanding status as one of the worst-performing charters in the entire district, Goldstein asked whether “charter supporters should hold charters to that higher standard for now?” That question, in turn, has hit upon one of the more-complicated debates happening within the school reform movement today.

As successful as school reformers have been in beating back opposition to the existence and expansion of charters, the movement still hasn’t dealt well with the claims from education traditionalists that many charters don’t make the grade. Over the past few years, this crowd has touted out the report by Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Options, arguing that it proves that charters are no better than traditional public schools. The fact that the CREDO study is flawed because it matches individual charter schools to groups of traditional public school students (along with the reality that the study is really a series of reports that shows the wide differences in charter school oversight in 15 states and the District of Columbia) has not stopped charter school opponents from using it as one of their most-forceful weapons in their rhetorical campaign. And when it comes to education, one must always remember that bad studies last forever and do even more damage than the verifiable facts themselves.

But education traditionalists do have one good point: That few poor-performing charters are ever closed or even turned around. As the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation noted in its report on school turnarounds, 72 percent of charter failure mills studied remained open and in abysmal shape five years later; 80 percent of traditional district failure mills remained open and perpetuating educational neglect as well. Only 15 percent of all charters opened since 1992 have ever been shuttered. While most charter schools do better or as well as traditional district counterparts (especially with poor and minority kids tossed away by so many in traditional public education), the fact that so many faltering charters remain open betrays the argument made by supporters that charters, unlike traditional public schools, can be easily shut down.

Certainly one reason why so many failing charters remain around lies with the fact that as bad as many failure mill charters may be, they may be better than the even worse traditional district schools to which kids were previously condemned. There is also the tension that comes between the important goal of improving quality versus the need to expand school choice; some parents may be satisfied with what the charter is doing even if the school is doing a terrible job academically. The need to allow for diversity in models of charter schools is also a factor; the current effort by reformers such as the Gates Foundation to focus more on building up the scale of existing top-performing charters such as KIPP is concerning because it could both stifle the development of new approaches to providing high-quality education and also foster the kind of bureaucratic failure that typifies traditional districts.  And there is also the reality that some charter school authorizers, more-interested in collecting fees from open schools than on maintaining quality, will allow for charter failure mills to stay around.

But allowing these zombie charters to remain in operation has consequences for the entire school reform movement, especially when one considers that only 13 percent of Americans can accurately describe charters, the continued opposition to charters among old-school civil rights groups such as the NAACP, and the demonstrable evidence that players on the status quo side are more than willing to play fast-and-loose in their rhetorical and tactical gamesmanship.  A sector that currently finds favor among federal and most state education policymakers can suddenly find itself to be whipping boys for politicians and activists — especially when the reality remains that there are still plenty of threats to the very existence of charters. More importantly, the willingness to tolerate failing charters makes it difficult to force the shutdowns of traditional district schools (as well as the overhauls and shutdowns of the failing districts themselves); if school reformers aren’t willing to hold the line on quality when it comes to their favored school operations, then districts shouldn’t be subjected to such standards either.

Ultimately, it is about meeting the very goal of the school reform movement — to offer all children, especially those in poor and minority communities — a high-quality education fit for their futures that makes it critical to address charter school quality. We can no more allow charter failure mills to perpetuate educational malpractice than traditional district schools because our kids deserve better than proverbial muck. A charter school that fails to help students succeed is no better than a traditional district school. And both deserve to be shut down.

So school reformers should do as the Los Angeles Times did this week and demand that failure mills such as Academia be put out to education’s glue factory. We should also applaud efforts such as that of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, who is looking to shut down failing charters as part of his own reform of the massive dropout factory that is his city’s traditional district. Efforts to force authorizers to better-monitor charter school quality — including tighter scrutiny on those applying to launch charters in the first place — would also help. There are other tools that can be used to advance quality. One could come in the form of Parent Trigger laws, which could be used by families to take control of failure mill charters the same way those laws are geared for advancing overhauls of traditional district schools; California’s Parent Trigger law can already be used for this purpose and this could also be applied to charters in other states where Parent Trigger laws are in place. Certainly charter school operators won’t like that possibility; in fact, it is one reason why Parent Power activists have not gotten as much support from the charter school movement as they should. But allowing for such takeovers would certainly put added pressure on those running failing charters to get their houses in order.

The school reform movement must hold the line on quality. And that means closing down failing charters that do as much damage to children as the traditional district dropout factories and failure mills we seek to rid eliminate.

35

The percentage of all eighth-graders in the United States scoring Below Basic on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That is lower than the 37 percent of all eighth-graders who were scientifically illiterate in 2009.

32

The percentage of all young men in eighth-grade scoring Below Basic on NAEP science in 2011. That is a three point decline from the number of scientifically-illiterate young men in 2009. Thirty-five percent of eighth-grade young men scored at proficient or advanced in science, a mere one point increase over 2009.

37

The percentage of young women in eighth-grade scoring Below Basic in science in 2011. That is a mere one-point decline from the number of scientifically-illiterate young women in 2009. Only 28 percent of young women scored Proficient or Advanced in science, just a one percent increase over 2009.

63

The percentage of young black eighth-graders who were scientifically illiterate in 2011 according to the 2011 NAEP; it is a four percent decline over 2009. But still, young black eighth-graders trail every racial and ethnic group; only 10 percent of young black students scored at Proficient on NAEP Science 2011, a two percent increase, still trailing every peer group. The average black student also had the lowest average scale score on NAEP science, scoring only 129 points on the exam, versus 137 points for the average Latino peer, 141 for the average Native American peer, 160 points for the average Asian student, and 162 for the average white student.

52

The percentage of Latino eighth-graders who were scientifically illiterate in 2011 , a five percent decline over 2009; it is the largest decline in science illiteracy among all racial and ethnic group. Sixteen percent of Latino students scored at Proficient on NAEP Science 2011, a four percent increase over the same period two years ago; it is the largest increase in science proficiency levels for any racial group (followed by American Indian and Alaska Native peers, whose percentage increased from 17 percent in 2009 to 20 percent in 2011).

68

The percentage of black eighth-grade boys eligible for free- and reduced-priced lunch scoring Below Basic on NAEP Science in 2011, a five percent decline over 2009. Fifty-four percent of Latino male counterparts scored Below Basic on the science portion of the national exam in 2011, also a five point decline. Both groups had the largest decline in science illiteracy in the two-year period; but still, two out of every three young black men and one out of every two young Latino men were scientifically illiterate. (One out of every three young white men in eighth-grade from poor households — and two out of every five Asian male counterparts — struggled with scientific literacy.) Meanwhile the percentage of young Asian and Native American males who were scientifically illiterate had increased in that same period.

8

The percentage decline in the number of black and Latino eighth-grade boys not eligible for free- and reduced-priced lunch scoring Below Basic on NAEP Science between 2009 and 2011, the largest decline in scientific illiteracy among all groups. The percentage of young American Indian and Alaska Native men who were functionally illiterate declined by seven percent during that same period. Still, one out of every two middle class young black men — and one out of every three of their Latino and Native American counterparts — struggled with science literacy in 2011, while one out of every eight of white and Asian peers were scientifically illiterate.

7

The percentage decline in the number of American Indian and Alaska Native eighth-grade young women eligible for free- and reduced lunch scoring Below Basic on NAEP Science between 2009 and 2011, the largest decline among all groups; the decline for black, white, and Latino eighth-grade women from poor backgrounds was five percent in that same period. Still, three out of every five young Native American women, three out of every four young black women, two out of every three young Latino women, and two out of every five young white women from poor households were scientifically illiterate in 2011.

10

The percentage decline in the number of young Latina eighth-graders from middle-class homes who scored Below Basic on NAEP Science between 2009 and 2011, the largest decline among all groups. The decline in scientific illiteracy among young black women eighth-graders declined by only three percent in that same period. Still, two out of every five Latina students and one out of every two young black women couldn’t handle even basic scientific concepts.

Science, technology, engineering, and medicine are among the most-important fields in the increasingly knowledge-based global economy. Yet far too many American students — including young women, Native Americans, and black and Latino children — are struggling to master such facts as which atoms make up a molecule of water. Even worse, while there are programs such as Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program and FIRST Robotics that are immersing kids in physics and building technology, we have far too few teachers equipped to teach science, and expose far too few young black and Latino kids to strong, college-preparatory courses that can challenge them and build up their science knowledge. And because of the low quality of reading and math instruction in the early grades, far too many kids are ill-prepared to handle the abstractions that come with understanding astronomy and other aspects of science.

This state of affairs is intolerable. It is why we must push harder to transform American public education. When one out of every three of our kids are scientifically illiterate, the nation’s economic and social future is at risk.

Dropout Nation’s raw analysis of NAEP Science 2011 data is available for you to peruse. 

The standards movement is grounded in the idea that children benefit from clear and high expectations. But this research suggests that, even when students are exposed to the same content and given the same assignments, the expectations we have for study work may be very, very different. So how can we ensure we hold the bar equally high for all students? Yes, we need to adopt and implement rigorous standards and/or curricula. But, what if teachers are systematically adjusting their feedback to praise children of color for meeting a lower bar?

We actually are all too familiar with how this plays out in the real world, and these findings would be unsurprising to the many minority students who graduated from high school at the top of their class, but who’ve had culture shock when they matriculated to elite colleges and universities. One such student, Darryl Robinson, recently penned a piece for the Washington Post detailing how far behind he was when he started at Georgetown… Interestingly, it wasn’t until Robinson pushed his way into Advanced Placement courses that he felt like he was being really pushed. “Suddenly,” Robinson explained, “I was expected to think about concepts, such as public policy’s cause and effect, and apply these ideas to real-life situations.”

But, what was the difference? Robinson was seen as an exceptional student. He clearly had the aptitude and the drive necessary to achieve at high levels. So why did it take until late high school to ask of Robinson what teachers had no doubt been asking of his white, middle class and affluent peers for years?

There are no doubt multiple explanations, but it’s hard for me to ignore that, in AP classes, there are not only rigorous standards and quality curricular materials, but there are also assessments to which all students will be held, regardless of their background, prior knowledge, or experience. And these assessments set a clear bar for where all students should be. Such clarity makes it more difficult to allow personal biases—whether deliberate or subconscious—to subtly lower standards for students from whom you don’t expect quite as much.

It’s become popular in many education circles to decry “teaching to the test,” but this latest research provides one more reason why these independent checks on what students have actually learned are a critical element of an effort to close America’s achievement gap.

Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Kathleen Porter Magee, explaining how testing, along with strong, college-preparatory curricula and underlying standards, helps set high expectations for all children and ensures they get the challenge they need for success.

In order to have high expectations of students, educators must first have high expectations for themselves

The organization Success for Black Boys, pointing out that teachers and school leaders must become accountable for success and failure (and subject each other to scrutiny)  in order to help all children succeed.

Yes, folks…our children are in fact those “Come in Behind-Stay Behind” children. Yours, mine, our neighbors’, our friends’, our church members’…they are our kids. Who knows, maybe now, we, communities and concerned citizens, will rally together and do something to prevent this from happening since it’s so close to home?  We certainly fail miserably at doing even the most basic things when it comes to empowering the poor (insert more sighs please). What pains me most about children not having the necessary skills to emerge as readers by kindergarten is how easy and accessible these skills are.  Parents and caregivers need a little guidance, that’s all.  More knowledge, less products, a few songs, poems, and key guiding principles are needed.  The children do the rest.  They are built for it.

This is much of what I do.  I build parental skills so that parents know how to build their children’s skill, in a timely manner, before school.  Low income…middle income…parents and children are the same and we need to get to them with the same intensity and urgency. With patience, love, and a lot of singing, clapping, and exposure to print children can have the skills they need to develop an interest in reading and the confidence needed to get there.. the idea that they can’t build skills one-on-one at home, with a loving caregiver or parent, is just plain…silly for a lack of a better, but less appropriate word.

Parent Power activist Nikolai Pizzaro, on how families, with just some tools, can help their kids succeed in school and in life. Dropout Nation offers families advice through its continuing series, the Five Questions all families should ask. You can listen to the first, second, and third podcasts here or at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page.

Let’s get the bad news about the school reform compromise finally approved yesterday by Connecticut’s state legislature. These are only modest steps that won’t do enough to help transform education in that state and ultimately, help all children get the high-quality teaching, strong, college-preparatory curricula, and nurturing school cultures they need and deserve.

The plan to pilot a new teacher evaluation system using objective student data in just eight-to-10 districts (along with the fact that nearly all the reforms are being launched in pilot form) is real small ball stuff; it is one clear example of how Nutmeg State legislative leaders, including Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams and Education Committee Co-Chair Andrew Fleischmann (the subject of a Conversation at Dropout Nation podcast featuring Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel), ignored the successful reforms happening in the rest of the nation and merely bowed to the will of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates opposed to any stronger form of teacher performance management. The decision to also ban for-profit charter school operators from working with the newly-created regime for turning around the state’s  worst failure mills and dropout factories merely proves the point I made yesterday about the anti-intellectualism endemic in education (especially among traditionalists opposed to any form of reform that they do not favor).

Legislators made no effort to address the state’s school residency law, which, along with other Zip Code Education policies, condemn kids to low-performing schools and districts; this means more mothers such as Tanya McDowell will be tossed into jails and prisons for doing what’s right to help their kids succeed in school and in life. Nor did the legislature consider creating an inter-district school choice program that would expand the number of high-quality school opportunities for poor and minority kids. And the last-minute move to pilot a reading remediation effort is — which plays on successful efforts in Florida to retain third-graders struggling with literacy — is rather meaningless without forcing Connecticut’s ed schools to overhaul their abysmal training of teachers.

All that said, the good news is that Gov. Dan Malloy got much of his ambitious school reform effort contained in what is now Senate Bill 27. More importantly, the passage of the reforms is an important step towards overhauling public education in a state with one of the widest achievement gaps.

By requiring annual evaluations of teachers and principals based on Value-Added analysis of student performance over time, Malloy and legislators are finally providing the first opportunities to support and reward high-quality teachers and strong school leaders (as well as weed out those instructors and school leaders who don’t belong in the classroom). The launch of the school turnaround network, which is based largely on the successful Recovery School District model pioneered in New Orleans, is also an important step towards helping revamping failure mills that have failed far too many kids in the state for far too long; the decision to allow for top-performing charter school operators . The move to increase per-pupil dollars for charter schools by 22 percent by the 2014-2015 school year will do plenty to spur the opening of new charters throughout the Nutmeg, expanding the opportunities for high-quality education.

One of the most-important reforms approved by the legislature is the pilot reading remediation program. As mentioned, the pilot program won’t fully work without addressing the low quality of reading instruction among Connecticut’s teachers. At the same time, the very fact that the state is even moving to address this aspect of the education crisis deserves recognition. With the percentage of Connecticut fourth-graders reading Below Basic proficiency having  increased from 26 percent to 27 percent between 2003 and 2011, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (even as more reform-minded states experienced declines in illiteracy), the state can no longer ignore this leading factor in the state’s yawning racial-, ethnic- and gender-based achievement gaps. The move to launch another early childhood education effort — which includes offering 1,000 new pre-kindergarten spots to low-income families — could also be an important step for improving literacy so long as any gains can be sustained once a kid enters K-12 schools; that, in turn, will only happen if the state takes additional steps towards systemic reform.

The fact that any of the reforms were passed at all is a testament to Malloy’s success — and that of school reform activists on the ground such as the Connecticut Parents Union and ConnCAN — in forcing legislators to stop kowtowing to NEA and AFT leaders who have spent more time buying ads to defend failed thinking than on actually offering substantive reforms of their own. It is also a credit to black and Latino legislators such as State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield, who forced Williams and House Speaker Christopher Donovan to come up with a plan that would be more-palatable to Malloy and take steps towards advancing high-quality education.

But Malloy and reformers in the state cannot stop pressing hard on transforming education. As I made clear in March, Malloy needs to campaign for school reform-minded legislators, while reform advocates should force legislators such as Fleischmann into primaries against challengers more-willing to stand up to NEA and AFT leaders. Reformers also need to work more-closely with Parent Power activists — including groups such as the Hartford Parents Organization — to further support on the ground. As Malloy showed last month in the round of town hall meetings held in Connecticut’s urban locales, there are plenty of families tired of schools that aren’t fit for their children’s lives — and they are willing to hold politicians accountable for defending failed thinking.

What happened this week in Connecticut is proof of why strong gubernatorial leadership and strident advocacy is critical to advancing reform. Nutmeg State children need more of this — and so do all of our kids everywhere in America.

One of the most-amazing aspects of the battle over the reform of American public education is that the lack of thoughtfulness among education traditionalists in their defense of failed policies and practices that have done little more than condemn 1.2 million children a year to poverty and prison. This is especially true when it comes to how teaching and curricula should be provided to kids, and whether the families that love them should be able to choose and shape the conditions in which their kids should learn. From where they sit, public education can’t possibly include public charter schools, publicly-financed school voucher programs, or even online providers paid by states (and chosen by families) because these are operations that aren’t run by traditional districts with elected (or mayor-appointed) school boards and executives. This is why they constantly try to argue that charters  – which are run by nonprofit and corporate entities — aren’t “public schools”, even when they are clearly defined as such under state and federal law, and why they argue that the very existence of charters is an affront to “local control” by school districts. And it is why folks such as once-respectable (and now largely-discredited) educational historian Diane Ravitch constantly proclaim as she does today that moves such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s successful effort to expand the state’s voucher program to serve as many as 300,000 more students is “dismantling public education”.

Reformers know this collective line of argument is one of the most-tiresome (and infantile) education traditionalists make, and one that is the most-circular. This is because traditionalists base their notions not on facts or data, but on mistaken interpretations of the very laws that govern public education in this country. Yet it is important to constantly point out this faulty anti-intellectual thinking. Why? Because challenging the illogic posed in traditionalist arguments is key to advancing reform.

Reformers must constantly point to education traditionalists that  public education is ultimately a state government function. All state constitutions charge state governments with the role of providing “free public education” in one form or another, from deciding how education should be financed to how it should be delivered to children and families. So states can shape public education in any way it wants so long as it is allowed in their respective constitutions; if vouchers are allowed to be used as a means for providing public education in a respective state, than the state can do it; same if the state wants to allow for (and finance) public charter schools, blended and virtual learning providers, even homeschooling and DIY education efforts by collections of families and communities.

It must also be pointed out that districts, like other municipal governments within states, 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). The U.S. Supreme Court said as much a century ago in the Hunter v. Pittsburgh ruling. This means that districts have no ability for independent action outside of what state governments decide. If a state decides that it wants to allow nonprofit and for-profit organizations to provide education alongside districts, this can be done and the district has no say in it. It also means that districts have no ability to decide whether the financing for education provided by local taxpayers and the state can remain with them even if the children and families no longer use the district schools that once served them.

Reformers need to remind traditionalists that their  opposition to the expansion of vouchers and other forms of school choice is merely a legacy of the 19th-century religious (and ethnic) bigotry of Know-Nothings and Unitarian Protestants toward Catholics, all but some Protestant denominations, and even American Indians. The Blaine laws that ban school vouchers and other public school dollars for educating kids in parochial settings, for example, were crafted specifically to force the children of Irish Catholic immigrants to become good Americans who followed the Unitarian-inspired civic religion pushed earlier in the century by Horace Mann and his allies. Before that, Protestants, fearful of the influx of Irish Catholics entering the nation (and that they may attempt to put the nation under the control of the Pope), did all they could to effectively squelch Catholicism; in fact, it was this bigotry that led to the mass formation of Catholic diocesan schools that still remain the nation’s second-largest collection of education providers. And let’s not forget the federal government’s effort to “kill the Indian, save the man” through Bureau of Indian Education-operated boarding schools that forced kids off reservations and subjected them to educational, physical, and emotional abuse.

Then there is the argument that private-sector involvement in education, be it through companies or nonprofits, is somehow evil. This is a traditionalist argument reformers must also shut down because it is based on a senseless belief that somehow free enterprise and the operations involved in it are somehow evil while government is naturally good and virtuous. Anyone who has lived through Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, and even the recent financial meltdown knows that there is nothing true about it. There’s nothing inherently virtuous about government-run district schools or anything evil in utero about corporations providing schools. The tax status of the organizations providing education don’t matter.

More importantly, in posing these arguments, traditionalists fail to remember that companies and nonprofits are already critical players in how districts provide public education, from publishing textbooks to providing accounting services. Whether or not those private operators always do a good job in those aspects (or, more importantly, if districts do a good enough job of managing their contractors) is a different discussion. But the reality is that public education is quite dependent on the private sector in order to provide some of the most-critical aspects of educating kids (and especially dependent on companies for the taxes that fund their operations in the first place). This fact should be pointed out ad nauseam.

And finally, reformers must point out to traditionalists that public education is not about the kind of organization that provides instruction and curricula, but how it is financed and regulated. Charter schools, private schools, online schools, DIY operations, and even teachers working together or on their own, are as capable to provide high-quality education (and even promote good citizenship) as a traditional district. Based on the track record of late for traditional districts these days, one can even say that the bureaucratic model is outdated and obsolete for this purpose. What matters more is not whether the school operators are government or private, but whether they provide our children with good-to-great teachers, strong, comprehensive college-preparatory curricula, and cultures of genius that nurture the genius inherent in all kids. Those school operators that don’t provide this (or behave illegally and unethically), be they traditional, charter, or private, should be shut down and not get public funding, while those that do the job deserve praise and support.

The warped, anti-intellectual thinking of education traditionalists deserves to be tossed into history’s paper shredder. And as reformers, it is our job to battle faulty thinking from whoever poses it.

For most of the past two months, Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy’s school reform agenda had been torn apart by his fellow Democrats in control of the state legislature. Thanks to the menacing lobbying of the Nutmeg State’s National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates (and memories of what happened two years ago to then-Rep. Jason Bartlett after he teamed up with what is now the Connecticut Parents Union to successfully advocate for the passage of the nation’s second Parent Trigger law), the state legislature’s education committee had all but ditched Malloy’s proposed teacher quality reforms and expansion of charter schools. As I mentioned in last week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, legislative leaders in that state have proven to be so pusillanimous that they all but kowtowed to the NEA during one of its rallies.

But as it turns out, at least half of Malloy’s reform effort may actually survive. Why? Largely because of the legislature’s black and Latino caucus, which offered up its own support of Malloy’s original plan last week through their own set of proposals. By unveiling their own proposals, the group (which includes state representatives Gary Holder-Winfield and Billie Miller), have stood up to the NEA and AFT affiliates, and called out the legislature’s education committee (along with state House Speaker Christopher Donovan and Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams, who engaged in last month’s embarrassing display of poor leadership). More importantly, their endorsement — coming just as the legislative session is coming to an end — gave Malloy and grassroots reformers on the ground enough well-timed support to force legislators to come up with more reform-minded legislation. (Whether or not the new version will be a strong step toward systemic reform is a different question entirely.)

The leadership showed by Holder-Winfield, Miller, and their colleagues on behalf of Connecticut’s poor and minority children is absolutely commendable. And it is an example black politicians elsewhere should follow.

Far too often, black politicians spend far too much time aiding and abetting policies and practices that condemn the futures of young black men and women than embracing solutions that can help our kids get the high-quality education they need and deserve. The most-recent example can be seen in Alabama where state Sen. Quinton Ross — a senate education committee vice chair — declared that allowing charter schools to exist would lead to the  ”hijacking, for the lack of a better word, of our public education system.” Then there is the continued obstinacy of Ross’ colleague in Virginia, state Sen. Henry Marsh, who voted against a voucher-like tax credit program because it was in his eyes “a war on public education.” And while big-city mayors such as Cleveland’s Frank Jackson and Newark’s Cory Booker, are actively agitating for reform, there are far too many black mayors  who are more than willing to just turn a blind eye to the dropout factories, failure mills, and warehouses of mediocrity whose dropouts and poorly-educated graduates weigh down the very economic revival efforts these chief executives undertake.

This isn’t exactly shocking. Even as a younger generation of civil rights activists realize that overhauling American public education is the most-critical next step for helping young black men and women achieve economic and social equality of opportunity — and address the ills that plague black communities, especially in urban areas, in this day and age — old-school black politicians and civil rights leaders continue to fight battles of the 1960s and 1970s that they largely won decades ago. From where they sit, integration, busing and equity lawsuits are the cures for low-quality education, even as decades of evidence has shown that none of those formulas do anything to address the systemic problems within American public education. Driven by both their financial and political ties to NEA and AFT affiliates, and their mistaken belief that school choice will lead back to the kind of segregation that earlier generations of civil rights leaders so successfully opposed, these politicians discredit their otherwise-laudable legacies opposing state-sanctioned racial bigotry.

But the good news is that there are black political leaders who understand that the only way that we can revive and sustain our communities — and help all young black men and women succeed in life — it to address the fundamental issues of abysmal teacher quality, shoddy curricula, cultures of low expectations, and Zip Code Education policies that deny high-quality choices. This means standing up up to teachers’ union officials and other education traditionalists who think that black leaders should just go along with what they propose, and battling with legislative leaders who insist that they should just toe the line. It also means taking on old-school players who still wield tremendous influence. This includes state legislators such as Oklahoma State Rep. Jabari Shumate, whose efforts to back school choice put him in the crosshairs of the state’s NEA affiliate, and Mississippi State Rep. Chuck Espy, scion of the famed political family who has been pushing for legislation allowing for the creation of charter schools in a state in which high-quality education in traditional district settings is almost hard to find even for white middle-class families. And now there are black politicians in Florida and Louisiana taking strong stands for reform — and reform-minded candidates running for office throughout the country.

This is certainly good news. But we need to rally more black politicians around reform. This starts by developing young leaders within churches and in the grassroots willing to take on longstanding politicians whose continued presence in state legislatures does little for our children, their families, and the communities in which they live. This is why the growing Parent Power movement (along with the development of student groups such as Students For Education Reform) is so important; when mothers and fathers move from being bystanders in education to demanding their rightful place as lead decision-makers in schools, they also learn how to play the political game and, in the process, become the battle-ready politicians who can navigate the political arena.  At the same time, we must continually (yet respectfully) challenge old-school black politicians to do the right thing by our kids; they must be reminded that their past successes in breaking barriers mean nothing if our children don’t have the literacy, numeracy, and knowledge of science needed to take advantage of opportunities.

It’s good to see Holder-Winfield, Miller, and their colleagues stand up and be counted for systemic reform. For the sake of our children and the future of Black America, we need more like them.