On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, Editor RiShawn Biddle takes a look at recent conversations about the traditional school district and why we need to abandon the old-school approach and embrace the Hollywood Model of Education. The very assumptions — including benefits of scale — at the heart of district bureaucracies hinders much-needed efforts to stem dropouts and help kids enjoy economically and socially prosperous futures.

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. 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 and Google Reader..

One of the biggest barriers to reforming American public education is the soft bigotry of low expectations for our children — especially those from poor and minority households — among many education traditionalists working in classrooms, districts, ed schools, and other outfits. These so-called teachers, school leaders, and others essentially think little of our children (and even less of their families and communities), even as their own capacity for improving student achievement and nurturing young minds is lacking. So they use theories, including the Poverty Myth of Education (either in the “poverty is an inescapable force” rhetoric of Diane Ravitch and her ilk, or the collection of reprehensible stereotypes about incapable poor parents offered up by Ruby Payne and the infamously faulty and skewed Hart-Risley study) as excuses for their failures.

But when data and evidence makes mincemeat of Poverty Mythmaking won’t sustain their views, then education traditionalists will embrace another school of thought: The Personal Responsibility Myth that ascribes academic failure to single motherhood, the lack of two-family homes, a lack of values, and the stereotypes of certain minorities — particularly young black men — as wastrels, drug dealers and worse. After all, it’s easier to declare that the kids and the homes from which they come are somehow defective instead of admitting the impact of educational neglect and malpractice.

So it wasn’t exactly surprising when Phi Delta Kappan, one of the foremost magazines on the education traditionalist front, allowed Milwaukee Center for Independence Vice President Tracey Sparrow and her sister, Abby (a teacher in D.C.) to indulge in such fantastic thinking — this time, about the young black men who, along with other young men from different racial and economic backgrounds, suffer the most from the nation’s education crisis — in six full-color pages. Focusing on a group of young black men they seemingly pulled out of  central casting, the Sparrows culled such quotes as “[young black men] don’t take stuff seriously because we want to smoke, do alcohol, and steal”, and are too influenced by rap music.  The Sparrows also found time to play blame-the-families, pulling quotes such as “Black parents give up on their kids and let them do whatever.”

From where the Sparrows sit, their interviews “reveal that the young men interviewed are clear that the challenge of educating black males is much bigger than the schoolhouse.” And ultimately, schools can do nothing to provide these young men the tools they need for success. What the Sparrows (and Phi Delta Kappan, by association) have actually have shown is that traditionalists would rather believe stereotypes and fantasies that make them feel good about their failed vision of education.

For one, the profiles themselves would not stand the legendary Leon Dash’s sniff test; after all, his famed Washington Post profiles were gleaned after months and years of interviews, asking the same questions (and gathering string from other interviews) to finally pierce through the stories people tell the facts instead of the yarns they think (and know) their interviewers want to hear. The fact that the Sparrows didn’t even cite anything in the way of statistics — and declared that they “did not approach this as a rigorous academic study” –  makes clear that they weren’t exactly looking to do more than aid the comfortable in classrooms at the expense of the children whose futures they are supposed to nurture.

The Sparrows also fail to acknowledge that American public education is academically neglecting kids — especially young men of all backgrounds. This is clear from the fact that one out of every two young American Indian men in ninth grade — kids who mostly live outside of big cities — will drop out by senior year in high school, as will one out of every two young Latino men. The fact that young men from middle-class households who, in theory, have strong moral values and be exposed to good parenting, are also struggling in reading and other aspects of academics should also give pause. One out of every five young white male high school seniors from college-educated households were functionally illiterate according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress. So were 42 percent of young black male eighth-graders whose parents were college-educated as well as three out of every ten of their American Indian peers according to NAEP’s 2011 exams.

When one looks at the low level of academic performance of American students against the rest of the world — including the fact that white students were outperformed by peers in 16 other nations on the most-recent PISA exam, and that our country has a lower level of proficient students than 22 other nations — then it is clear that the problem isn’t the perceived engagement of families in student learning.

If fact, the reality is that there are plenty of families, regardless of their race or economic background, be they single mothers or blended households, who are pushing hard not only to just be engaged in education, but to actually take power in schools. There’s the work of parents unions in Connecticut and Texas to enact Parent Trigger laws and take control of failing schools, as well as the grassroots efforts of Buffalo ReformEd in the biggest city in western New York State, and the evangelistic efforts of Parent Revolution in California. Then there are the efforts of parents in Adelanto, Calif., who are working to take control of Desert Trails Elementary School from a district that has been promoting academic failure for far too long. And then there are the families who are exercising school choice, either by using school voucher plans or sending their kids to public charter schools in their communities. These and other parents are finally coming to the realization that the myth that any school can serve their child is no longer true (and chances are that it was never so) — and are no longer willing to tolerate teachers and school leaders who consider them to be afterthoughts, nuisances, and troublemakers be cause they demand power.

Meanwhile the Sparrows (and by association, Phi Delta Kappen) fails to address the abysmal teaching, subpar curricula, and cultures of mediocrity and deficiency within American public education that is at the heart of why so many children from all households have been condemned to economic and social despair.

We know that 40 percent of all children enter school with reading problems regardless of what families do at home. This is especially true for young men, because the areas of their brains in which language and literacy is developed lags behind that of their female schoolmates. Yet most traditional districts fail to offer any form of intensive reading remediation that can help these kids catch up and stay on track. At the same time, the nation’s university schools of education continue to poorly train teachers in reading instruction; just one in five ed schools in Illinois surveyed by the National Council on Teacher Quality in one study adequately trained their students in reading instruction. The consequence are dire. As Reid Lyon determined in 1997, most black boys landed in special education because they struggled in reading. And as Stanford University Researchers Deborah Stipek and Sarah Miles determined in a 2006 study, low literacy levels in first grade are strong predictors of aggression and other school discipline problems two grades down the line.

Then there is the fact that traditional districts deny rigorous college-preparatory curricula to poor and minority students. As former National Math and Science Initiative president Tom Luce noted last year, even with the growth in students taking A.P. courses, far too many black and Latino students are shied away from them. This happens despite the fact that A.P. participation increases their likelihood of kids graduating from high school and completing college. In Atlanta, for example, just 7 percent of black students were taking AP courses during the 2005-2006 school year, while 31 percent of their white high school peers took those courses. Meanwhile district bureaucracies do little to inform parents of these opportunities for rigorous learning and fight those who are aware of them.

Meanwhile there is no way to dance around the  general consensus that schools account for at least 40 percent of student achievement and that teacher quality accounts for as much as half (if not more) of student success. If one argues that schools account for half of variation in student achievement, then likely teacher quality looms even larger. That’s even before one considers that researchers admit that their own research may understate importance of schools (and teachers).

What Personal Responsibility mythmakers such as the Sparrows (and  their counterparts among the Poverty Myth crowd) are unwilling to do is acknowledge that American public education often does little more than chew up the futures of young black men and toss their lives out into the garbage like cleaned-off chicken bones. They are unwilling to admit the systemic problems why this happens: Low-quality instruction; mediocre curricula; abysmal recruiting and training of teachers and school leaders; Zip Code Education policies that deny high-quality educational choice to children and the families that love them; overdiagnosis of illiterate children (especially young men) as being learning disabled; school cultures that treat families as afterthoughts and nuisances; and a system of low expectations (including social promotion and a belief that only some kids deserve high-quality education). And they would rather conjure up fantasies of young men led astray by hip-hop music and wayward parents than address the cancerous beliefs they hold.

In the process, they essentially declare that these young men and women are mere throwaways whose lives are not worth saving, and that pursuing systemic reform is not worth doing. All in all, their beliefs are absolutely amoral and inhumane. And absolutely unacceptable.

Certainly good parenting and strong family structures can’t be helpful in improving educational outcomes. In fact, taking responsibility for shaping how schools serve children is at the heart of Parent Power and school choice. But at the same time, Personal Responsibility mythmakers and other education traditionalists are simply advocating stereotypes of young men and women that absolve them of their responsibility for perpetuating a system that fails far too many of our children. The kind of mythmaking that the Sparrows and Phi Delta Kappan has engaged in should not be tolerated. Simply put, they deserve our collective scorn.

For the past few months, Republican presidential nominees have sparred over everything picayune and otherwise. The percentage of income paid in taxes by front-runner Mitt Romney. The sexual peccadilloes of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (and those of now-ousted candidate Herman Cain). Even whether former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum is enough of a movement conservative — even with him walking the talk against abortion. And even with Romney’s win last night in Florida’s GOP primary, the sparring (and the rising and declining fortunes of each) will continue until the nominee finally gives his acceptance speech six months from now.

Yet the candidates have largely been silent on education, probably the biggest long-term issue facing our nation’s economy and social fabric. While President Obama, for better or worse, has built up his credentials as School Reformer-in-Chief, the GOP candidates have done little more that proclaim that students should take over the clean-up work of school custodians and make vague declarations that the No Child Left Behind Act is some sort of federal overreach (even as Romney backed the law and even said kind words about U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan before he stood against it). Certainly the rebellion among movement conservatives against the excesses of former President George W. Bush’s tenure (and his legacy, on education, as the Democrats’ favorite Republican) is one reason for this reticence. But in the process, Republicans are essentially conceding to Obama on this front and hurting their own odds of a general election victory. And considering that high-quality education is a key long-term solution to keeping future generations off welfare rolls (and, in the process, keeping government small), the Republicans are also failing to address a critical policy issue.

Here are three education policy declarations Romney, Gingrich or Santorum should make once one of them wins the nomination:

Admit the Need for a Federal Role in Holding States Accountable: The Republican nominee can immediately use Obama’s No Child waiver gambit as an opportunity to hammer the president on education. He can play on arguments advanced by conservative reformers that allowing states to evade enforcing the law’s Adequate Yearly Progress provisions violate the U.S. Constitution by stepping on Congressional law-making authority. He may want to trod Obama’s path if he succeeds in ousting him — and actually attempt a similar waiver gambit once in office. But this is politics, and that’s usually how it rolls.

But the Republican nominee will have to do more. He must make clear that school reform is a national economic and social priority. This means confronting the mistaken notion among movement conservatives (and conservative reformers who once supported No Child before standing against it) that No Child has been some form of federal overreach. (Whether or not the feds should be funding education at all is a different discussion.) It also means articulating that No Child simply recognized the reality that states, not school districts, are in charge of providing education, and that they should be held accountable for making sure that districts do their jobs in providing high-quality teaching and curricula to the kids in their care.

What the Republican nominee would be saying is this: If the federal government is going to subsidize education, then it shouldn’t just give it away, something that the feds allowed for 37 years before No Child’s passage a decade ago. States taking federal taxpayer dollars should accept the strings that are attached to them — or don’t take the cash at all. It’s a simple fact of life, no different than what the rest of us have do in the real world when we accept money from other, whether we borrow money from a bank, receive a grant from a foundation, or take a loan from our parents.

The nominee should then declare as president, he will make this declaration: that if states don’t want to be subject to accountability for how their spending of those subsidies improve student achievement, then they shouldn’t take the money. Such a move would force governors and legislators to have some long, hard, and honest conversations about the abysmally inefficient ways school dollars are spent throughout American public education — including the $7 billion spent annually on helping teachers get master’s degree when there is no evidence that such credentials improve student achievement. Given the $1.1 trillion in pension deficits and retired teacher healthcare costs that will burden taxpayers for the next few decades, it’s a conversation worth having.

Meanwhile the Republican can also strike a blow for the GOP legacy in education by declaring that No Child has largely worked in spurring reforms that have helped lead to at least 217,432 fewer fourth-graders being functionally illiterate (and thus being on the path to poverty and prison) in 2011 than in 2002 — and spurring the first wave of systemic reforms upon which we are building now. Such a move could undermine Obama’s own claim to the mantle of being the nation’s leading school reform advocate at the federal level — and also slightly rehabilitate predecessor Bush in the process.

No matter what happens, defending AYP and accountability is still a winner. The Republican nominee actually argue a conservative principle — that federal money shouldn’t be just doled out without condition — that resonates with independents. And if the position forces states to stop taking federal dollars, it can mean reductions in federal spending. All in all, taxpayers and families win.

Parent Power and School Choice Must Be Key Elements of Federal Education Policy: One of the Obama administration’s failings on the school reform front has been its rather mixed embrace of school choice and Parent Power. Certainly the administration has pushed hard for the expansion of charter schools and has made it part of its agenda. But as with other centrist and liberal Democrats, it opposes school vouchers and voucher-like tax credit programs largely because think that allowing families to use those dollars to attend parochial schools violates the U.S. Constitution’s separation between church and state, think lowly of vouchers as a school reform strategy, and argue that their party has never historically supported them. Meanwhile it has been unwilling to embrace Parent Trigger laws such as those passed in California, Connecticut, Texas, and Mississippi that would allow families to actually shape the quality of education their kids receive in the schools that serve them. The fact that the otherwise voluble Duncan has been reticent in using his bully pulpit on behalf of Parent Trigger laws being proposed in Arizona, Indiana, and Florida says plenty — and it is not flattering.

For a Republican presidential aspirant, Obama’s lack of presence on Parent Power is an opportunity to score points in several ways. Supporting current efforts to pass Parent Trigger laws would essentially be advocacy for expanding school choice. At the same time, it would also serve as an opportunity to please the Heritage Foundation crowd that argues for local control of schools; parent trigger laws can be seen as the best form of local control because the decisions are moved away from school bureaucracies to the very families who send their kids to the schools. And it encourages systemic reform from the ground up, playing upon the language that congressional Republicans such as House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline have used in justifying their efforts to kibosh No Child (even as Kline himself has pushed to increase federal special ed subsidies).

Meanwhile the Republican nominee can voice his support for expanding choice by backing state efforts happening in key states such as Florida. He can also declare that future federal funding will only go to states that allow for the creation and expansion of voucher programs, bring down barriers to charter school expansion (while also improving quality), pass Parent Trigger measures, and allow for the growth of online learning efforts that can allow families and the rest of civil society to start schools on their own. This move, by the way, would also be seen as being fiscally conservative.

All Federal Education Dollars Should Be Doled Out As Competitive Grants: The most-essential aspect of Obama’s Race to the Top effort has been its underlying principle that the federal government should move away from the traditional program-centered approach to funding schools. All that has resulted from it is the exacerbation of the nation’s education crisis — including the double digit increases in number of capable young men condemned to special ed ghettos, to the compliance approach that has hindered providing easily-understandable school data to families and teachers so they can make smart decisions and improve teaching.

This reality should be enough to convince the Republican nominee to go further than Obama and call for nearly all dollars — including Title I (and excepting those fund tied to education for American Indian students) — to be doled out in through a competitive grant model. Doing so allows Republicans to strike a blow for smaller, efficient, and more accountable government. States, after all, would only get money if they actually propose and follow-through on efforts.

In the process, Republicans can also dust off a concept that the party has long embraced — that of enterprise zones — by allowing for districts implementing innovative reforms to be exempted from state laws that render them servile to NEA and AFT affiliates.

Certainly movement conservatives would rather see the nominee push to end all federal education subsidies. One can reasonably see why it makes sense. But few Republicans in Congress would stand for it; after all, the districts in their own backyards, especially those in suburbia, are as unwilling to let go of Title I dollars as big city counterparts. And given that school reform is critical to the nation’s long-term fiscal, economic, and social health, maintaining the federal role just makes sense.

It’s high time that Republican presidential candidates do more than just hem and haw on education reform. They owe more that vague statements to the families, taxpayers, and children they want to serve in while in the White House.

There are two tiresome arguments that always emerge whenever there is a discussion about school choice. The first, coming from centrist and liberal Democrat reformers such as Education Sector Higher Ed czar Kevin Carey that vouchers are terrible school reform strategies and are politically divisive because it means using tax dollars to send kids to private and parochial schools. The fact that Carey — a colleague of mine whose work on teacher quality reform, higher education policy, and the faulty thinking of Diane Ravitch is admirable — hardly offered much in the way of strong evidence to support his views (especially in light of the evidence that vouchers are effective), along with Carey’s (and other centrist and liberal Democrats’) support of charter schools (which also involve using tax dollars to fund private-sector entities) makes the entire opposition to this element of choice and Parent Power rather senseless.

Then there is the new twist on an old argument against choice — that it leads to inequality in educational opportunities — that is being advanced in Mississippi by the NAACP’s chapter there and other groups that proposed efforts to expand charter schools will somehow exacerbate inequities for African-American children. The NAACP opposed a similar effort last year. From where the NAACP and its allies sit, any effort to revamp the state’s charter school law — which is ranked as one of the most-restrictive in the nation — would only lead to poor and minority kids in the state being denied high-quality education. Why? Because charter schools would divert the state’s already allegedly low levels of funding from traditional districts that serve mostly-black students, while perpetuating segregation of black students from what are perceived to be better-performing suburban schools.

Last time around, the NAACP chapter president, Derrick Johnson, had declared that school choice will “create and maintain a permanent situation of second-class citizens.” This time around, perhaps because of all the licks the nation’s oldest civil rights group has taken over the language it used in opposing charters at the national and New York City levels, Johnson couched the argument in terms of equal funding. Says Johnson: “Our concern at the NAACP is Mississippi has never fully committed itself to providing the highest available quality education necessary for this state to move forward.”

Certainly the arguments offered up by the NAACP and charter school opponents in Mississippi is a twist on a longstanding (and wrongheaded) conceit. As Dropout Nation has noted over the past three years, ivory tower civil rights activists such as the NAACP and Gary Orfield of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA — have argued that charter schools perpetuate segregation — and thus make provide unequal educational opportunities to poor and minority kids — because few white students attend them. That argument, partly based on the misguided idea that economic and racial desegregation amounts to some form of school reform strategy and driven in part on a romantic belief that earlier civil rights activists fought hard to end desegregation in order to promote a more-harmonious world, is as much a driver of their opposition to choice as their longstanding ties to the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and school districts (especially in urban locales), that aren’t interested in dealing with new competitors for students. In Mississippi, the NAACP is also using tying this theory to the school funding advocate belief that more money always leads to better academic outcomes.

The fact that earlier generations of civil rights activists fought for integration because they knew that they could never get equal resources from districts in an age of Jim Crow segregation, along with the lack of data on — and knowledge about — the role of failed traditional education practices in fostering low quality education for poor and minority kids, never comes to their minds. They also fail to admit that traditional district schools are still largely segregated even now thanks to the Zip Code Education practices they essentially defend as part of opposing the expansion of charters and choice.

But there are other reasons why the arguments offered by the NAACP and other charter school foes fail the smell test.

For one, all children in Mississippi and elsewhere, regardless of race, ethnicity, or economic status, are being poorly served by traditional districts. Forty percent of fourth-graders attending suburban district schools, along with one out of every two fourth-grade students attending schools in big cities such as Jackson and in small towns, read Below Basic on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Young men, regardless of race or economic background, are essentially tossed onto the path of academic failure. Seventy-six percent of young black male fourth-graders eligible for free- and reduced-lunch are functionally illiterate — and so are 48 percent of their white male counterparts; meanwhile one out of every five white male fourth-graders, and 45 percent of black male counterparts are also struggling with literacy. And while more young men struggle with reading than young women of all socioeconomic backgrounds, even the girls are struggling: Thirty percent of young white black female fourth-graders and one in five of their female peers are also functionally illiterate.

If equal opportunity for academic failure is what charter school opponents want for kids, then that is absolutely shameful.

Then there is the fact that, contrary to the assertions of charter school opponents, Mississippi has spent plenty on its schools, and has equalized spending between mostly-white and majority black districts. State spending on schools increased by 19 percent between 2005 and 2009 — the latest data available — according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The state provided 53 cents of every dollar spent on traditional districts throughout the state in 2009, barely budging from levels four years earlier. In Jackson (City), where nearly all of its 30,093 students are black, the percentage of school dollars provided by the state increased from 46 percent to 50 percent over that period; meanwhile in Rankin County, where white students make up 76 percent of enrollment, the state’s share of funding increased from 48 percent to 50 percent in that same period. The fact that Mississippi’s five-year graduation rate (based on 8th-grade enrollment) declined from 64 percent to 62 percent within that period proves lie to the education traditionalist belief that more money alone equals better academic results. So doe the fact that the five-year graduation rate of 54 percent for Jackson is 17 points lower than for Rankin.

Contrary to what the NAACP and its allies think, expanding charter schools and choice doesn’t limit equal opportunity. If anything, it is choice that will help expand and equalize opportunities high-quality school opportunities for poor and minority kids by ending Zip Code Education policies — such as zoned schooling (along with restrictions on expansion of school choice that are supported by the NEA, the AFT, and district bureaucracies) — that relegate families to schools that aren’t worthy of their children’s futures. Right now in Mississippi, poor families, regardless of where they live, are restricted to failure mills in their neighborhoods, while middle class families (especially those who are minority or the first in their generation to achieve such status) are often restricted to warehouses of mediocrity whose shiny new buildings hide laggard instruction and low expectations for poor white, black and Latino kids. At the same time, choice also helps to give families their rightful roles as lead decision-makers in education, breaking the power of district bureaucracies (who are the biggest employers and political players in many parts of the Cotton State) and the NEA affiliates that influence them.

If anything, school choice can help jumpstart the push for other systemic reforms. Bringing leading charter school operators such as KIPP and Green Dot to the state (along with nurturing high-quality local operators) would certainly help poor and minority kids get the high-quality teaching, curricula, and cultures of genius that they need for lifelong success.At the same time, expanding choice will jumpstart reforms — especially in improving how teachers are recruited, trained, evaluated, and compensated — needed to improve American public education in Mississippi and throughout the nation.

The NAACP and its allies should stop engaging in faulty thinking that stands against all kids, including those from poor and minority households. Particularly given its proud legacy in advancing civil rights, the NAACP should stand for choice and equal opportunity, not for just one or the other.

Photo courtesy of GreatEcology.com

It’s simple: A high-quality education for all children is the best long-term solution for poverty. As this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast points out, this is especially true in an age in which what you know trumps what you can do with your hands. One of the underlying causes of the nation’s current economic malaise is the 14 percent unemployment rate among high school dropouts aged 25 and older; this along with the high levels of unemployment among the 150 children dropping out from high school each hour, has led to a drag on economic growth that will continue to burden the nation and its poorest communities both economically (and through an expanded welfare state) decades into the future. Meanwhile the unemployment levels for high school grads with at least some college education is far lower.

In this Best of Dropout Nation from last June, Editor RiShawn Biddle further explains why ensuring that kids currently in school get high-quality teaching and curricula can help stem poverty. Read, listen to the Podcast, consider, and take action.

When it comes to the matter of the role of high-quality education in stemming poverty, the thoughtlessness on the subject is rather bipartisan. Bring in the question of whether every child should be given a rigorous, college preparatory education, along with the idea that every child should attain postsecondary education, and the mindlessness becomes astounding. This truism was proven once more this week amid the publication of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce’s latest report on the need to increase the number of college-educated American children. From Deborah Meier’s latest anti-intellectual defense of the status quo (on a blog she shares with Diane Ravitch that should be called “Thoughtless Minds Think Alike”), to the meanderings of the usually more-thoughtful Neal McCluskey of the reform-minded Cato Institute, their general complaint is that there is no economic or social value for kids supposedly uninterested in college. And ultimately, that providing kids with college preparatory education (and encouraging them to attend college or some other form of higher education) is rather wrongheaded.

One can at least say that McCluskey is partly right about this: There isn’t necessarily any magic in attaining a degree, especially if one’s goal is to go into fields such as the Humanities, where the possibilities of attaining a decent-paying job is unlikely. But liberal arts, social science and history degrees only account for 15 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in 2008-2009, according to the U.S. Department of Education; high-paying fields such as business, health-related fields, education, biological sciences, engineering and computer science account for half the baccalaureates earned by collegians. Let’s also be clear that there is plenty wrong with America’s higher education system. (I have noted some of those problems this month in my report for Organization Trends on for-profit colleges.) But those problems don’t negate the value of higher education, especially for poor and minority children.

But at least McCluskey is coming from a good place. He actually wants high-quality school options for all children. Meier, on the other hand, is like her EdWeek colleague: Ready to damn poor kids with low expectations and using condescending nostalgia about a student that chose to go into law enforcement to justify her point. The fact that one young man did manage to get into one of the few middle-class careers that didn’t require college or technical school (even though police academies are, in fact, higher ed institutions of a sort) doesn’t prove her point. (The fact that her own grandchildren are attending college disproves her argument entirely.) And given the educational requirements to succeed in law enforcement (which involve abstract thinking), along with the fact that college education is required for attaining more-prestigious positions in that field (including serving with the FBI), even aspiring cops can use college preparatory education.

For anyone to say that encouraging kids to pursue higher education — and thus, provide all children a college preparatory education — is ridiculous. Especially when it comes to our kids who grow up in the poorest urban and rural communities. Higher ed has value for the kids and the communities in which they live.

As Dropout Nation has noted, the math and science skills needed to get into college and white-collar fields are also needed in high-paying blue-collar fields such as welding and elevator installation (which one can only get into if they attend other forms of higher education such as community colleges, technical schools and apprenticeships). The jobs that those with some form of higher education can attain is often higher-paying than that for those who only finished high school or worse, just dropped out.

The value of higher education in bolstering incomes is especially clear when one looks at its impact on income for blacks and Latinos. A black man or woman with some form of college education will earn at least $9,142 more in annual income than their dropout counterpart; the gap grows both with additional higher ed credentials and as the better-educated person attains experience in the workforce in higher-paying fields. Those additional dollars flow into the economies of the communities in which they live, spurring home ownership, entrepreneurial pursuits and the emergence of middle-class families on whose energies and dollars civil society is dependent.

For a lower middle-class black community such as the one in which I grew up, South Ozone Park in New York City (part of the zip code 11436), those additional higher ed credentials equals a decline in poverty. If just a third of the 3,110 residents living below poverty had attended college for at least two years, they would triple their income and contribute at least an additional $20 million a year in income to their neighborhoods (and more if they reach the nation’s median annual income). If every one of the 1,276 kids under age 5 went to college and returned to the community, that would be an additional $36 million in annual income.

Such numbers seem small on their face, and yes, these quick-and-dirty estimates don’t account for such things as migration and neighborhood transition. But even for this blue-collar community, where many of the residents are employed in high-paying jobs and own homes, higher education equals more men and women who can help sustain the area. In the case of the kids, it means avoiding poverty and prison in their adulthood.

If this is true for South Ozone Park, it is also the case for Eight Mile in Detroit, for rural Liberty, New York, and for our poorest communities.

This is just the economic impact. For most of us, the campuses of colleges and technical schools are the places where we build the connections that lead to career opportunities and fulfilling friendships. Then there are is the knowledge — from the courses on economic theory to the simple lessons about navigating life outside of the communities in which one had grown up — that is even more value. Well-educated men and women beget learned children who continue economic renewal. And for those who live in poor communities where optimism is in short supply, watching neighbors achieve higher education and economic success brings the bright light of hope they need to move their kids on up.

Attaining higher levels of education alone won’t ensure happier lives. But for minorities, acquiring at least some college education often means the difference between being able to feed their children or subsist. And for the communities in which they live, education, along with low crime, and the flourishing of entrepreneurism and free markets, is the most-effective form of long-term economic development — and it is cheaper over time than costly tax increment subsidies. One would dare say if cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia and Newark devoted more civic energy to school reform than to tax abatements and stadium deals, they wouldn’t be facing the economic abyss.

This reality is why rigorous, college-preparatory education at the K-12 level, and the implicit expectation for all children that they must attain higher education, is critical. It is also why we must improve reading instruction and make sure that every child is literate.

For our poorest kids, especially those in black and Latino households , the education they receive at all levels is critical to brighter, less-economically impoverished futures and wider social options. And for the communities in which they live, it can mean the difference between vibrancy and continued decay.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address provides an opportunity to fully understand how high-quality education transforms lives and communities — especially in an economic time in which every white- and blue-collar job is one dependent on strong reading, math, and science skills.

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.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software and Google Reader.

When Dropout Nation last turned its eyes to the City of Brotherly Love, it had just fired it superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, after a tenure wracked with enmity from nearly everyone in the city (especially over her rather sweet pay packages). Since then, the district’s condition hasn’t gotten much better. Faced with a deficit of at least $61 million (and based on the remaining deficit that the district plans to solve, as much as $98 million), the state-controlled school reform commission has hired a former local utility chief executive, Tom Knudsen, to serve as its “Chief Recovery Officer” and replace acting superintendent Leroy Nunery II as the district’s top boss. Knudsen will spend the next six months addressing the current shortfall, along with challenging the district’s long-term woes.

In hiring a turnaround artist, Philadelphia is taking a well-paved path. Nine years ago, St. Louis hired the turnaround firm Alvarez & Marsal to fix its longstanding financial woes; by 2007, it still ended up being taken over by Missouri state officials.  Other districts, most-notably Detroit, have largely failed in wrangling with their fiscal woes and found themselves under some sort of state takeover. But unlike those districts, Philadelphia is already under control of Pennsylvania’s state government. More importantly, this isn’t the latest overhaul. In the 11 years since the state took over Philadelphia, the district has gone through an array of overhauls, including the hand-off of school operations to outfits such as Edison Schools, and even the hard work of reformers such as Paul Vallas (who began Chicago’s successful school reform effort and has just finished up a successful stint overseeing the revamp of New Orleans’ school system).

But Philly remains a fiscal mess. Back in 2000-2001, the district faced a $216 million deficit in its $1.7 billion budget; the district projects that it will face $269 million in shortfalls during its 2012-2013 fiscal year, even with revenues likely to have increased by two-thirds in the past 13 years.This isn’t surprising. Shuffling superintendents in and out of leadership isn’t a school reform strategy; contracting out school operations also doesn’t work when there is no underlying plan for overhauling how the district does business. The fact that the district currently has no plans to revamp its central bureaucracy or address inefficiencies in operations outside of whatever changes Knudsen plans to make, also points to the reality that state education departments — especially Pennsylvania’s — are just ill-equipped to handle school or district takeovers.

It also doesn’t help that the district also has little wiggle room with which to maneuver. Eighty-three percent of Philly’s costs are either tied to its contract with the American Federation of Teachers local or state laws governing the district’s management of teacher and school performance. These restrictions make it difficult for the city to overhaul its overly burdensome traditional teacher compensation structure — or develop alternatives that are more cost-effective (and, at the same time, reward the district’s good-to-great teachers).

The inability of Philly to get a handle on its fiscal woes reflects the reality that the traditional district structure it embraces no longer works. Given that the district remains a giant dropout factory — with a mere 65 percent of the city’s Class of 2010 were promoted from 8th grade to 12th grade versus 74 percent of students from the graduating class nine years ago — it no longer makes sense for the state to continue a central bureaucracy that can neither improve finances nor student achievement. While handing control of the district to Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter could be a step to take, the fact that the city government is struggling to get control of its own fiscal and operational house (along with the reality that Philly still doesn’t have a handle on its quality of life and crime woes) means moving the district from one failing overlord to another.

So it is time for the district to embrace the Hollywood Model of Education and essentially move away from traditional district management. Pennsylvania can easily start by embracing the approach taken by Louisiana and its so-far successful reform effort in New Orleans, handing over control of traditional schools to an array of Parent Power groups, community organizations, and charter school operators. Allowing families and churches to launch their own schools through a DIY model – which is possible thanks to the advent of online and blended learning — would also be a smart step.

Either way, the status quo in Philly can no longer continue — and taxpayers and families shouldn’t have to stand for it.

One would think a school reformer would applaud the letter sent yesterday to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan by House Education and the Workforce Committee Ranking Democrat George Miller and Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chairman Tom Harkin demanding that the Obama administration’s No Child waiver gambit doesn’t allow states to dismiss their obligations to poor and minority children by essentially eliminating subgroup accountability as set up through the No Child Left Behind Act’s Adequate Yearly Progress provisions. One would also think the average reformer would also give some thoughtful consideration to the letter sent earlier this week by groups such as the Education Trust lambasting House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline for proposing to essentially allow states to ditch accountability altogether.

But Thomas B. Fordham Institute Executive Vice President Mike Petrilli is none too happy with any of them. In his latest commentary, Petrilli lambastes them for supposedly favoring “flexibility” in federal education policy, but are demanding that subgroup accountability remains intact. From where he sits, there’s no way his fellow reformers can be supportive of flexibility and still demand states to maintain AYP as is. In the process, Petrilli seems to be more concerned with allowing states to do as they please than with the core principle of helping all children succeed in school and in life that is at the heart of the school reform movement.

The first problem with Petrilli’s argument starts with his declaration that all Beltway reformers think No Child “went too far”. Neither former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings nor Sandy Kress (who crafted No Child in the first place) or Andy Rotherham would agree. Same is true for the EdTrust,  the Black Alliance for Educational Options, and the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, just to name three prominent groups. If anything, there is a rather vocal group of reformers who argue that No Child hasn’t gone far enough in addressing the systemic problems plaguing American public education — and, by extension, plenty of disagreement over how much flexibility there should be in federal education policy (or even if there should be any flexibility at all).

The second problem with Petrilli’s argument is his underlying theory, shared by far too many of my conservative and libertarian fellow-travelers these days, that No Child is too inflexible. Certainly the legacy elements of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act upon which No Child is based is certainly far too compliance-oriented. For example, the supplement-not-supplant rules, which essentially lead school districts to use Title 1 dollars in providing field trips instead of developing innovative instruction and reading remediation programs, is one aspect of the law that needs to be ditched altogether. But when one looks at the aspects of No Child charged with spurring systemic reform — including the Highly-Qualified Teacher provisions and even AYP itself — one can easily say that states and school districts have been given too much flexibility (and thus, ability to game the system).

Contrary to what some want to argue, No Child has always been more of a symbolic expansion of the federal role in education — and the acknowledgement that the nation has an education crisis — than a real one.  The expansion of the federal role in education — one which has existed since the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Act in 1862 — came with the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958 and the enactment of the original Elementary and Secondary Act seven years later. Even with the passage of No Child, the feds still account for a mere nine percent of the $591 billion spent annually on schools. From the federal perspective, what the law did was finally demand states and districts to show results for those dollars given after four decades of receiving billions with only compliance strings attached. This signaled the  federal government’s slow move from a compliance mentality to a results orientation (as well as made it clear that solving the education crisis is a national priority).

What No Child really did was signal the reality that states, not school districts, control the direction of education. Given that school districts, as local governments, are merely tools of state control, this has always been implied. But since the 1960s, the passage of state laws forcing districts to bargain with teachers’ unions, along with school funding lawsuits, property tax reforms, and the advent of the standards and accountability contingent of the school reform movement (of which Fordham is — or was — a leading light), has led states to take a more prominent role in shaping education. No Child demands states to account  for how schools are improving the performance of poor and minority children, and hold districts accountable for success or failure. But it also gives plenty of leeway to states when it comes to interpreting how to meet certain requirements, like the one assuring that all teachers be “highly qualified” for instruction, and  allows them to develop their own solutions in order to achieve them.

Thanks to federal education officials in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, states have actually had far too much flexibility and have been allowed to game accountability. States were allowed to spend too much time slowly putting AYP into place (and in some cases, even lowering standards for academic success), then ratcheting things up. This act of gamesmanship — and the willingness of federal officials to allow for it — is one reason why Duncan has been going around this past year proclaiming that as many as 82 percent of schools would be found academically failing. This tolerance of gamesmanship has continued in the Obama administration. Duncan, for example, allowed Montana and Idaho to keep their accountability targets at 2010 levels (and thus breaking their own promises to hold their districts accountable for failure) and allowing Virginia to set its accountability targets retroactively.

When one considers how states were allowed to simply grant Highly-Qualified Teacher status to veteran instructors, and the tacit unwillingness of failing districts to abide by the spirit of No Child’s school choice provisions, one realizes that the real problem is that No Child has allowed for a tad too much flexibility. And yet, even amid all this, as I pointed out in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, the law spurred reforms that have helped lead to at least 217,432 fewer fourth-graders being functionally illiterate (and thus being on the path to poverty and prison) in 2011 than in 2002 — and spurring the first wave of systemic reforms upon which we are building now.

Instead of rolling back No Child’s accountability provisions, we need to expand them. This includes holding the nation’s ed schools to the fire for their poor recruiting and training of aspiring teachers; requiring states to monitor the performance of young men of all socioeconomic backgrounds; and establishing a uniform chronic truancy rate that teachers and principals can use in stemming dropouts. The Obama administration and Congress could easily do this through the reauthorization process, and still revise the supplement-not-supplant rules and other mere compliance aspects of the law that should be repealed.

Meanwhile Petrilli dances around the rather legitimate and substantial issue being raised by Miller, Harkin, and array of school choice activists and civil rights players in the school reform movement: How to ensure that states are holding districts and schools accountable for providing high-quality teaching and curricula to all of their students, including those from poor and minority backgrounds. On this count, the Obama waiver gambit is a gutting of accountability, while Kline’s reauthorization effort is a white flag on federal education policy and strong vigorous systemic reform.

As Center for American Progress scholar Jeremy Ayers pointed out last month in his report on initial waiver applicants, only Massachusetts and Tennessee have submitted proposals with clear goals and worthwhile accountability systems. Other states, including those with otherwise exemplary and aggressive reform-minded governors and school leaders such as Indiana and Florida, have proposed to ditch racial, ethnic, and economic subgroup categories and replace them with a super-subgroup that commingles poor and minority students into one.

Meanwhile the Kline plan, contained in a series of bills including the Student Success Act, doesn’t even require states to still subject the nation’s 5,000 dropout factories and the five percent of schools with wide achievement gaps, something that both the Obama waiver plan and Sen. Harkin’s own less-than-satisfactory plan for reauthorizing No Child had required. Although Kline’s plan does require states to develop accountability systems, it offers little in the way of direction for what those systems should look like and doesn’t even set any form of aspirational goal for proficiency. In short, it’s not worth the paper upon which it is written.

If either the Obama waiver plan allows for these states to do this subgroup lumping, or the Kline plan actually sees the light of day, states and districts would be let off the hook for ensuring a high-quality education for all children. It also makes it more difficult to spur systemic reform — including the implementation of the very Common Core standards in reading and math Petrilli and Fordham has championed over the past two years. As Brookings Institution scholar Russ Whitehurst pointed out right after Obama and Duncan announced the waiver gambit last year, common standards won’t work without common accountability; without accountability, it is almost impossible to hold states, districts, and schools accountable for actually providing high quality curricula.

For parents, in particular, it would mean the loss of information on how children of different racial, ethnic, and income groups are served by districts and schools that is critical to their decision-making. After all, these families — especially black, Latino, and Asian families who are joining the middle class for the first time and moving into suburbia — have learned the hard way that suburban schools can be just as abysmal as the urban dropout factories they fled, and that their kids are often afterthoughts in instruction and curricula. Given their realities, the elimination of subgroup accountability actually does more to hurt their efforts to help their kids get the high-quality education they deserve. It also hurts their ability to exercise school choice effectively and limits their ability to exercise their rightful lead role as decision-makers in education.

Contrary to what Petrilli may think, Harkin, Miller, and others are raising a rather legitimate point, one that strikes at the two core beliefs of the school reform movement itself: That all children, especially kids from poor and minority households long abused by American public education, need and deserve a high-quality education — and that we must do everything possible to make sure they get it. Certainly one can argue for a flexible approach that doesn’t require regulating every step taken to achieve those goals. But when questions of flexibility in federal education policy conflict with those core belief, reformers should be expected to not be too ready to embrace the former at the expense of the latter. Especially when the real issue isn’t flexibility, but the problems education traditionalists have with spotlighting the harsh reality that the practices they defend have contributed to the substandard quality of education throughout this country, regardless of whether you live in New York City or Fairfax County, or whether your child is in a special ed class or in the gifted-and-talented program.

There is honestly little to say about yesterday’s State of the Union address. Although President Barack Obama did make clear that he was staying the course on his school reform efforts, he offered little in the way of specifics. While it may be a tad surprising in one way, it isn’t because education reform has been the one part of his agenda that has garnered largely bipartisan support (witness outgoing Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ praise of the president during his rebuttal). On the other hand, Obama’s short-term economic stimulus efforts and push for healthcare reform are the areas that have been his greatest political weaknesses — and threats to his re-election prospects — so he naturally spent more time on touting proposals such as a “January surprise” federal refinancing of home mortgages that could be a short-term boon for homeowners (even as they remain in debt for decades to come).

But the good news is that Obama is, at least rhetorically, not backing down from systemic reform. His call for removing laggard teachers from the classroom once again reminds the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers that they can no longer count on the Democratic Party for unquestioned support of the traditional teacher compensation system the unions have long defended. So does the possibility that the administration will try to expand the Teacher Incentive Fund, which helps finance performance pay efforts by states and districts. Considering that his fellow congressional and senate Democrats (especially those facing stiff re-election campaigns), still count on NEA and AFT dollars to finance their campaigns, Obama can’t full out call for an end to tenure. But his rhetoric can be used cannily by those rightly pushing to abolish near-lifetime employment policies that harm children and make it difficult to remove laggard teachers. All in all, he is still pushing for teacher quality reforms embraced through Race to the Top and the School Improvement Grant programs.

Obama also briefly discussed one of the symptoms of the nation’s education crisis: The dropout crisis in which 150 teens every hour drop out of school and drop into poverty and prison. His call for states to raise their compulsory school ages from 16 to 18 is, rhetorically sound. Some states have already done this, including Indiana (which made the move after I co-wrote the nation’s first series on how inflated graduation rates hid the extent of the education crisis). But as longtime school reformers such as Rebekah Richards of the American Academy have pointed out, raising compulsory ages will do nothing to keep kids on the path to graduation; the research is also largely contradictory on the value of simply raising compulsory school ages. Just keeping kids in school until age 18 only means that they will just age out of school, still never graduating with a diploma, and still be unprepared for higher ed and career success. States must still address the underlying culprits of laggard instruction, abysmal curricula, and the lack of intensive literacy interventions needed to help kids succeed in school and life.

The bad news is that Obama once again remains silent on Parent Power and school choice. Certainly the administration will continue to push for the expansion of charter schools. But Obama had a chance to directly call out California’s state legislators, who are considering AB 1172, which would allow traditional districts to shutter the expansion of charter schools in the nation’s most-populous state if the bureaucracies deem them a negative fiscal impact. Obama could have used the State of the Union to call for states to take charge of approving charter school openings and taking this role out of the hands of traditional districts (which is essentially akin to letting Red Lobster decide if an Applebee’s can open next door). He could also have also pushed for states to move toward the Hollywood Model of Education and away from the traditional district system.

The president also had an amazing opportunity to advocate for the rightful role of parents as lead decision-makers in education — and failed on that front. His unwillingness to embrace vouchers is particularly galling given that, thanks to his taxpayer-funded salary, he and Michelle can exercise choice and Parent Power by sending their two daughters to one of the nation’s exclusive (if not necessarily top-performing) private schools, and through his exalted status as the nation’s School Reformer-in-Chief. With Parent Trigger laws up for consideration in Indiana, Florida, and  Arizona this year, Obama’s call could have rallied Democrats in those states to step up and support Parent Power. Obama could have also called for states and districts to release value-added teacher data so that parents can know the quality of the teachers who have our kids in their care, something that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has supported; the failure to do so is also rather disappointing.

Then there is Obama’s continued push to weaken his own school reform accomplishments through the administration’s No Child waiver gambit. As I have pointed out ad nauseam in the past year, the effort to essentially gut the No Child Left Behind Act’s accountability provisions is a retreat on the very accountability that has spurred reform. Under the waiver plan, schools that are merely warehouses of mediocrity — including suburban districts that are failing to properly educate poor and minority kids — will largely be left alone, and thus, allowed to subject those kids to educational neglect and malpractice. Certainly the plan requires states to put ambiguous “college and career-ready” curriculum standards — likely Common Core standards in reading and math already done by 45 states so far — in place in exchange for avoiding accountability; but the fact that the administration can’t actually explicitly demand this without running afoul of congressional Republicans and some reformers who essentially declare that doing so oversteps the Department of Education’s authority, means that states can come up with some mishmash, call it college- and career-ready, and then avoid being accountable altogether.

Meanwhile the waiver gambit is a failure in other areas. It doesn’t address the crisis of low educational achievement among young men of all backgrounds, one of the leading symptoms of the education crisis — including requiring gender to be measured as part of subgroup accountability in state systems, something Richard Whitmire and I proposed last year. The waivers may allow for the possibility of states targeting gender for subgroup accountability, but the conditions under which the waivers are being granted don’t require states to take on any additional accounting for the performance of young men or other children whose academic failures are the result of the education crisis. Nor does the waiver plan call for states to expand choice, enact Parent Trigger laws, or a plain, simple measure of chronic truancy that can help teachers and principals work on keeping kids in school. And the fact that the administration’s waiver plan doesn’t even address the need to overhaul ed schools (which train most of the nation’s new teachers) or push for the development of alternative teacher training programs outside of university confines, makes the entire effort unworthy of pursuing.

Those states that are applying for the waivers have already figured this out. As Center for American Progress scholar Jeremy Ayers pointed out last month in his report, only Massachusetts and Tennessee have submitted proposals with clear goals and worthwhile accountability systems; the rest have offered little in the way of specifics. In the process, the clear accountability and progress goals set in No Child will be ditched for 51 different goals that offer no sense of what is actually going on. In short, Obama and Duncan are sabotaging the administration’s own reform efforts, and in the process, as I pointed out in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, the slow but amazing progress that has been made in stemming the education crisis since the law’s passage a decade ago.

Meanwhile Obama isn’t the only one pushing for the dismantling of accountability. House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline has his own plan for reauthorizing No Child — actually a collection of bills — which differs little from Obama’s proposal in spirit (even if it pushes for an a greater rollback of the federal role in fostering school reform); more than 50 groups, including 50CAN and even the NAACP, have issued a letter opposing it. Then there is also the now-comatose plan crafted by Kline’s Senate counterpart, Tom Harkin.

President Obama certainly should get credit for much of his work in spurring systemic reform. But he needs to ditch the No Child waiver gambit — and actually commit to expanding accountability, school choice, and Parent Power — in order to sustain those successes. Our kids deserve a stronger, more-comprehensive push for reforms that can help all of them succeed.

I was very disappointed in the logical fallacies, and the boogeymen, that [Diane Ravitch] kept bringing up. “We must improve them (schools), not lose them.” She seems absolutely convinced that there is a movement afoot to destroy public schools and to privatize them. If you believe that’s so, then her statements make sense. If you don’t, and she offered no evidence that it’s so, then she’s insane. She piled on: There are two goals of the “corporate reform movement”, privatization and deprofessionalism…

Her bad statistics and bad logic could have been picked out by my first-year statistics students. At one point, when talking about how charter schools in Milwaukee haven’t improved education, she said that African-American charter students in Milwaukee score no better than African-American students in Mississippi. Uh, to determine if the schools are an improvement over Milwaukee’s public schools, shouldn’t those kids be compared to African-American students in Milwaukee public schools? She makes several of these types of errors. In another attack on Michelle Rhee she mentioned something, I didn’t write down what, that good teachers do, and then said that “Michelle Rhee certainly didn’t do that in DC.” Great applause line, but Michelle Rhee never taught in DC, she was the chancellor (superintendent) of the public schools there…

I didn’t expect a red meat feeding frenzy. From someone of Ravitch’s stature I expected much more intelligence, decency, and evidence. It’s not that I disagreed with her–I knew going in that that was the case–it’s just that I expected better. I was truly disappointed at the intellectual shallowness of her talk. This was the great Diane Ravitch? Really?

California teacher Darren Miller, surmising what Dropout Nation and others have been saying about the once-respectable education historian.

Imagine, for a moment, what could happen if teachers unions came to the negotiating table with an open mind and a realization that parental choice is about educating children, not protecting the few teachers who are failing them. Teachers are committed professionals who did not choose this vocation in order to become rich and famous. They genuinely care about educating our children and we should respect that.

However, we also must hold them accountable for our children’s academic success and failure. Fighting merit pay, which deals with so much more than student test scores and could actually reward the best teachers, is tone-deaf. Restricting teachers willing to put in extra work is counter-intuitive. Telling parents they should have no power in the way their child’s school is run or where their child is educated is simply inhumane and cruel.

MSNBC Commentator Michelle Bernard, commenting on the declining influence of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. One reason for their decline: The No Child Left Behind Act, which, as this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast explains, has changed the conversation on teacher quality.