One of Dropout Nation‘s constant bits of advice to President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan over the past two years has been to open up the Race to the Top school reform initiative to participation by school districts, charter schools, and community groups. Back in 2010, this site noted that allowing for such participation would “place pressure on states participating in the competition to embrace bolder reforms” and “ force school districts to seriously change their own practices and restructure their relationships with teachers unions”.

So it is good to see that the Obama administration is finally embracing most of our suggestion with the launch of its fourth round of Race to the Top later today. This round doesn’t do all that we suggest. Districts are neither allowed to become enterprise zones of sorts that can allow them to ditch collective bargaining arrangements, nor required to expand school choice (either through abandoning Zip Code education policies such as zoned schooling or by authorizing charters or voucherizing funds) or embrace Parent Trigger provisions that would allow families to take control of schools. But it does allow traditional districts, charter school operators, and American Indian and Alaska Native tribes to possibly gain federal money may finally push school operators on the ground — especially districts — to embrace systemic reform the way earlier rounds of the competitive grant program have made it easier for states such as California and New York to expand charter schools, require the use of student test data in teacher evaluations, and enact measures such as Parent Trigger laws.

One of the least-discussed aspects of advancing reform is the array of political challenges faced by those districts who do embrace the effort. Thanks to state laws that force districts to bargain with National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates, and the considerable political heft that the two unions bring to bear in the form of  lobbying and $TK million in campaign donations to state legislators, reform-minded districts are often outmanned and outgunned at the state level. While districts under control of mayors such as New York City and Chicago can count on the considerable political heft of municipal chief executives (and in the case of the Big Apple, the wallet of Mayor Michael Bloomberg) to beat back traditionalists in Albany and Springfield, districts with traditional school board governance structures often have few tools at their disposal against NEA and AFT locals with waning-but-still-more considerable political influence in statehouse corridors.

The now-stillborn school reform effort undertaken by the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, flourished under reform-minded California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (whose state board backed charter school chain Green Dot’s successful move to force the district into a corner) and a state legislature that was seeking a share of Race to the Top dollars. Now that the NEA and AFT can count on Schwarzenegger’s successor (and once-and-future governor) Jerry Brown and the state legislature to be at their proverbial beck-and-call (and the AFT now assured of a majority on L.A. Unified’s board), Supt. John Deasy has had to roll back efforts to expand choice and has had to hope on lawsuits by reformers to give him the edge in revamping the district’s woeful teacher evaluation system. Even the presence of a reform-minded governor and legislature doesn’t ensure that districts pushing to overhaul their operations won’t struggle with entrenched traditionalist constituencies opposed to any change — especially if the state still requires the district to reach consensus with the union. This can be easily seen in Buffalo, N.Y., where the AFT local has consistently opposed the district’s effort to implement the new state evaluation system championed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. These are just the reform-oriented districts. Traditional districts unwilling to change any aspect of their operations will only do the bare minimum unless there is some benefit (either in the form of money or flexibility) to doing so.

In expanding Race to the Top to include districts, the Obama administration has given reform-minded districts another tool for beating back opposition to more-stringent teacher evaluations and other efforts. As reform-minded governors of both parties could use the federal presence (both in the form of Race or the No Child Left Behind Act) to sustain their efforts, so can counterparts in school districts in their face-offs with NEA and AFT locals. Race’s requirement that school operators use student data in evaluating teachers and leaders, for example, will help superintendents in their contract negotiations. By supporting the efforts of reform-minded districts, the Obama administration can also force those in suburbia that have largely resisted reform to begin taking steps toward transforming their own operations. And in requiring evaluations for principals and other school leaders, the Obama administration is taking a strong stance on requiring the key adult players in schools to be held accountable for nurturing the genius and talents of children in their care. As pointed out in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on school leadership, principals and superintendents foster cultures of low expectations not only make it difficult for high-quality teachers and leaders to do their jobs, their neglect and malpractice gives license to laggards and the criminally abusive in schools to do the same.

By allowing charter school operators considered districts under state law to play in Race to the Top, the Obama administration is also signaling that the old-school definition of public education embraced unthinkingly by education traditionalists is out the door. As I noted earlier this month, there is nothing in state constitutions that spell out exactly what public education must look like or whether it should be provided in the form of traditional districts. It is time for traditionalists to stop the sophistry and accept that the best way to provide high-quality education to all children is by offering a wide array of opportunities through various means.

An even greater possibility for reform lies in the move by the Obama administration to allow American Indian and Alaska Native tribes, which have long complained about being left out of these efforts, to participate in Race to the Top so long as they operate schools under the purview of the federal Bureau of Indian Education or through their tribal education department in partnership with districts. Certainly the fact that Native groups are  an important (and increasingly activist) political constituency for the administration played a part in the decision, as did President Obama’s signing of Executive Order 13592 (which requires the Department of Education, the Department of Interior and other agencies to collaborate on improving education for Native students). But the move may now mean that tribes and Native education advocates may become strong players in the reform arena. This is an area ripe with opportunities for reformers to help all children succeed. The schools run and overseen by BIE have been one of the ghettos of American public education, with a longstanding history of perpetuating abuse and malpractice (educational and otherwise).  The current director of the agency, Keith Moore, has made it clear that its schools must embrace the use of data in structuring instruction and operations, while tribes such as the Navajo Nation are asking tough questions about how schools on reservations and outside of them serving children from their communities are being managed. And with other efforts coming into place such as the Department of Education’s pilot competitive grant program to develop partnerships between tribal education departments and state education agencies, and the partnerships that are developing between tribes and traditional districts, tribal participation in Race to the Top could lead to helping the most-neglected of our poor and minority children.

Obama and Duncan deserve praise for pushing for the concept of competitive grants in spurring reform, and for making the strong case for ditching the old formula-based approach to doling out federal education dollars (even if some congressional Republicans such as California’s Duncan Hunter put themselves in the odd position of ignoring Ronald Reagan’s legacy by effectively pushing for maintaining the status quo). And with this round of Race to the Top, the Obama administration may spur even more reform right at schoolhouse doors.

Photo courtesy of the Times-Union

It is nice to see the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s announcement this past Saturday that it is supporting the state recognition of gay marriages. While I may not be a fan of gay marriage from a religious perspective, the Founding Documents make it quite clear that governments have no right to restrict gay men and women from the same privilege of civil marriage (and the accompanying benefits) given to heterosexuals such as myself. So the NAACP is perfectly right to demand that all Americans gain the same civil liberties they have earned from birth and by naturalization as citizens of our nation.

At the same time, it is difficult to take the NAACP seriously on this or any issue because it continues to be on the wrong side of the most-important civil rights and economic issue facing Black America today and this nation as a whole: The need to overhaul American public education so that all children — especially kids from poor, minority, and even gay households — get the high-quality education they need and deserve.

Even as NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous and the rest of the organization’s leadership has found time to weigh in on other issues, the old-school civil rights group still hasn’t released the education agenda it promised to release back in 2010 during Jealous’ appearance at an American Enterprise Institute confab. It did push an effort to increase school funding by diverting dollars from the nation’s criminal justice system without consider ing that the nation spends far less on prison construction alone (a mere $1.5 billion in the 2006-2007 fiscal year) than on building schools ($63 billion, including lavish high school football stadiums) — and, more importantly, that the nation spends $228 billion on courts and prisons badly because it spends $562 billion on schools abysmally.

Beyond offering that mishmash of a proposal, the NAACP has remained silent on systemic reform. Save for a few NAACP branches  (including its affiliate in Connecticut, have stepped up in the discussions over Gov. Dan Malloy’s school reform effort, and advocated on behalf of Bridgeport mother Tanya McDowell, who will serve five years for trying to provide her child with a high-quality school), the nation’s oldest civil rights group offers nothing substantial on addressing issues such as ending Zip Code Education policies, expanding school choice, addressing childhood illiteracy, and revamping how teachers are recruited, trained, paid, and evaluated (especially when it comes to bringing more black men into the teaching profession). Meanwhile it has ceded ground to Parent Power groups such as the Connecticut Parents Union and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, old-school civil rights organizations as the United Negro College Fund and 100 Black Men, and players such as Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Dr. Steve Perry, who are doing the work  for which the NAACP was once known.

What it has done since Jealous’ appearance is continue embracing an education traditionalist platform that actually puts the association in the position of aiding and abetting the damage to black children that it is supposed to defend. The organization rolled out a school-to-prison It has passed a resolution effectively declaring its opposition to the very existence of charter schools. Its New York chapter teamed up with the American Federation of Teachers’ Big Apple affiliate (from which it picked up $16,200 in contributions during the union’s 2010-2011 fiscal year) to wage an unsuccessful and embarrassing lawsuit to shut down charters that serve black children. Its New York chapter boss, Hazel Dukes, essentially declared that black families who seek out the opportunity for high-quality education by choosing charters were “doing the business of slave masters”, while her counterpart in Mississippi proclaimed this year that the charters would merely “create and maintain a permanent situation of second-class citizens.” The antics even extended to the local level in places such as Chapel Hill, N.C., where the local NAACP branch opposed the launch of a charter school named for Howard Lee, a former state education board chairman who was the first black man elected to head a predominantly white southern city since Reconstruction.

What the NAACP has done is more than just refuse to be a much-needed public policy voice and activist on behalf of transforming a failed system — and refused to be allies with school reformers, black and otherwise.  It has alienated black families, particularly those in urban communities often served by failure factories, have seen how past solutions such as racial and socioeconomic integration have done little more than deny them high-quality schools in their own communities without helping schoolmates and kids succeed, and understand that AFT and National Education Association affiliates are far more-interested in keeping the status quo ante for their benefit. By adhering to the thinking of aging members who have a vested interest in maintaining failed ideas about how schools should serve black children, the NAACP has also lost opportunities to lure a new generation of African-Americans who realize that education is the most-important key to achieving social and economic equality.

Ultimately, the NAACP has effectively agreed to support policies and practices that condemn far too many of our black children it is supposed to defend to poverty and prison. This includes Zip Code Education policies such as zoned schooling and restrictions on the expansions of charters and school choice which effectively promote the very segregation it has long opposed. But it isn’t just about African-American childrens. For Latino, Asian, poor whites, and even those from gay households regardless of color or class, the NAACP has decided through its activities that those kids also don’t matter. It is better to collect NEA and AFT checks, and the outdated notion of integration as school reform that neither addresses the underlying systemic issues that lead to our children getting low-quality education (and was only supported by an earlier generation of civil rights leaders because it was the only way to get what they thought was high-quality education to black children of the time in an age in which Jim Crow-dominated school bards would never pour resources into schools in black neighborhoods). With one out of every two young black men dropping out of school and into poverty and prison — and too many black kids overdiagnosed as special ed caes and condemned to life’s short buses — the NAACP’s stance is shameful and morally untenable.

So it is good to see the NAACP get it right on one issue. Perhaps it will finally embraces systemic reform before it’s too late.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, RiShawn Biddle takes a look at the Darnell “Dynasty” Young bullying incident in Indianapolis and the Mark Berndt scandal enveloping L.A. Unified, and point out the consequences of failed school leadership. From superintendents such as Eugene White in Indianapolis blaming kids they call “crippled” and “crazy” for failure mills, to administrators looking away as criminal behavior happens in school buildings, the consequences of weak school leaders extend beyond academics.

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.

Watch On the Road 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.

When Both Sides Are Right, Hess v. Emerson Division: Contrary to what the inestimable Robin Lake would declare, there are a few absolutes in life. Birth, death, taxes, and the existence of God are four of them (and yes, dear atheists, you will know He exists when you’re in one of life’s foxholes). But there are also times when two sides can have equally correct points. And this can be seen in one of the inside-the-tent battles for which reformers are renowned: The argument between Fordham Institute’s Adam Emerson and American Enterprise Institute education czar Rick Hess over the former’s scolding of the Zachary, La., school district, which reversed its decision to participate in the expansion of the Bayou State’s voucher program advanced by Gov. Bobby Jindal (and take in a mere 30 students into its classrooms, increasing the enrollment I’d 5235 kids by less than one percent).

Emerson took aim at Zachary and the families who successfully lobbied the district’s board to bail out of the plan for wanting to ” to keep their investment exclusive” at the expense of poor and minority kids who, until recently, had no choice but to attend. Emerson also noted that the district also seemed to forget its own past efforts to help kids in need of high-quality education — including 300 children displaced from their home districts within the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Ever playing the contrarian (yes, I wrote it again), Hess took Emerson to task for showing “gooey-minded, self-righteous disrespect” to Zachary’s families and school leaders, who, in Hess’ mind, are only rightfully looking out for their own self-interests. Hess also takes it up a notch (and insults Parent Power groups to boot) by saying that Emerson failed to offer the kind of “ideas and fresh thinking ” considerate for which Fordham is supposed to be known. (Update: Emerson has responded to Hess.)

As anyone who reads Dropout Nation knows by now, I’m no split-the-baby kind of guy. But in this case, both Emerson and Hess have it right.

Emerson is proper and right to scold the district’s leadership  and the parents for refusing to open the doors. (Emerson, by the way, also pointed out, as I have, that reformers must constantly advocate in communities in order to gain support on the ground, something Hess fails to note in his critique.) I know Hess likes to think he’s above all that. But moral scolding — and reminding people to live up to their obligations as members of civic society and children of God– is what school reformers (including Hess) are supposed do. Given that the state would have given Zachary the full per-pupil dollars (including the equivalent of the local dollars that would have otherwise been borne by the district)  — and that it had originally agreed to participate in the program in the first place — the excuses given by the district for turning their back on these kids is just inexcusable. More importantly, districts 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 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hunter v. Pittsburgh ruling) and thus have no ability for independent action outside of what state governments decide. Zachary is essentially preventing Louisiana from fulfilling its constitutional mandate to provide all children with a high-quality education.

By giving in to families that opposed allowing kids to transfer into the district, Zachary also allowed them to indulge their own bigotry toward poor and minority children who they likely fear will sully the classrooms of this precious district’s schools. Hess may want to think class (and to a lesser extent, race) don’t play a part in these discussions, but anyone who has spent time on sites such as DC Urban Moms know that there are plenty of middle class folks who express their low expectations view of other people’s children through the comfort that anonymity provides. Certainly school reformers can’t force everyone to think highly of their fellow men and women. But they can, and should, hold all adults accountable for their roles in denying kids opportunities to get the teaching and curricula they deserve.

At the same time, Hess is right in pointing out that reformers need to do more than play the role of moral scolds. This is especially true when one keeps in mind that local property tax dollars still account for, on average, 44 percent of all school funding (and 39 percent  in the case of the Bayou State), and often more in suburban districts. It would make sense for states to replace local property tax funding with state dollars, thus allowing for the expansion of all forms of choice by turning the dollars into vouchers that follow every child to whatever school, public, private or parochial, they so choose. This in turn would stop districts from arguing that reforms will cost them in terms of local tax dollars as their justification. But districts can justify opposition to charters and all choice — as well as perpetuate the myth of local control — because they   are still dependent on local property tax dollars.

Then there is also the reality that these families have, as far as they are concerned, exercised choice by buying a home in a district that is home to what they perceive to be high-quality schools (regardless of evidence to the contrary); from where they sit, poor people who want choice should go ahead and buy themselves homes too. This financial consideration, along with the emotional ties to the school buildings in the community, and the common desire among all for a school for their kids right in the neighborhood, and socioeconomic bigotry, explains why some families want to keep what they think is the good stuff all to themselves. Suburban district leaders have proven skillful at playing upon both the property tax dollars and the emotional concerns of the families that fund them in order to keep charter schools out of their boundaries and stop other school choice measures, even as they show contempt to these families (especially first-generation middle class households from minority backgrounds) in their own day-to-day dealings with them.

What reformers must do is both be the conscience of men and women who should know better (and, for the sake of their own enlightened self-interest, make sure that both other people’s children and their own can get a high-quality education) and offer solutions that lead more people to live up to their moral obligations (as well as expand opportunities for good-to-great teaching). Demanding better from middle-class families is important. But it is also important for reformers to also scold governors and state legislators for allowing situations such as Zachary to happen; this includes demanding full state funding of education (and effectively voucherizing those dollars so that they follow children to any school their families choose).

At the same time, reformers need to offer other ways of advancing reform that go beyond scolding. One way would be to team up with real estate developers to create “educational villages” in which families can send their children to school in the daytime, drop them off for babysitting at a child care center in the afternoon, and take them to the park on weekends. Such a concept would appeal both to households regardless of race or class alike. As I noted four years ago in an American Spectator column, such an idea would not only expand choice, it would also help advance systemic reform.

Integration Isn’t Worth Anything If Kids Can’t Read: Education Sector’s Sarah Rosenberg finds it “worrisome” that school choice — especially charter schools — lead to “increasing self-selection into segregated schools”. Why? From where she sits, this stratification (which is what it is since families make the choice instead of governments) denies kids the “firs opportunity to have significant contact with children from different backgrounds”, and “we risk starting with an achievement gap and ending with a divided nation”.

Forget for a moment all the studies and other evidence that choice – especially charters and private schools — may actually do as good or better job of helping kids become thoughtful citizens than traditional district counterparts — or the fact that reality that traditional district schools have historically been vehicles for forcing kids and families to adopt a Unitarian-tinged civic religion that disavows diversity. The fact of the matter is that Rosenberg sees this stratification and its underlying causes in the wrong way.

For one, Rosenberg fails to realize that there is little diversity or integration of any kind in most traditional districts; this of course, is a function of Zip Code Education policies such as zoned schooling, and the reality that districts only serve geographic areas (which, especially in big cities, tend to also be socioeconomically homogeneous). Nor does she consider the fact that state laws establishing charters (which often restrict the location of charters and even the kind of students they can serve), and the fact that suburban districts don’t charters in their boundaries (and do plenty to keep them out)  play a much larger role than self-selection in determining the homogeneousness of enrollments. Rosenberg also fails to realize that the problems with low-quality education have almost nothing to do with lack of diversity and far more to do with the low quality of the nation’s teaching corps and the practices (shaped by state laws and collective bargaining agreements) that subject poor and minority children to substandard schools; even in socioeconomically diverse schools, ability-tracking and policies that keep black and Latino kids out of college-preparatory courses ensure that education is separate and unequal.

What Rosenberg also doesn’t understand is that black and Latino families have already experienced integration in the form of forced busing and, like Harvard professor (and onetime integration advocate) Charles Ogletree, realize that it is little more than a “false promise,” that led to districts not providing high-quality teaching and curricula in the communities they live; and they have a right to make that point, since, after all, they are taxpayers whose dollars are siphoned off by districts in the form of taxes at the local, state, and federal levels. Like American Indians (which had their own experience with ‘integration’ in the form of boarding schools), black and Latino families feel that integration denied them chances to interact with successful role models who looked like them — and they want their kids to be able to experience this. The racial pride is why historically black colleges and universities remain prominent players in higher education and why charter schools named after civil rights leaders such as Cesar Chavez are common throughout the sector. For black and Latino children, in particular, who, unlike their white counterparts, are exposed to different races even before they go to school, what may matter more is to know that people who look like them can be just as successful and valuable in society as those of a lighter skin tone.

Ultimately, for these families, the opportunities to send their kids to an all-black or Latino charter school in which kids are getting the preparation they need for success in life is far more important to them that the diversity Rosenberg (and traditionalists of the integrationist mode such as Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg) seek out as some form of school reform. Or, as I declared to Gary Orfield two years ago, black and Latino families don’t care what Rosenberg thinks.

Committee of the Unthinking: Your editor hasn’t had much praise for House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, his fervent effort to eviscerate the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, his longstanding support for increasing federal special education subsidies that do little more than perpetuate education ghettos that condemn millions of young men and women to poverty and prison, or even his past failure (and that of Early Childhood subcommittee chairman, California Republican Duncan Hunter) to bring Parent Power activists to any of the committee’s hearings. But Kline (and Hunter) deserve thanks for this week’s Early Childhood subcommittee hearing featuring Parent Power activists such as Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel (a Dropout Nation contributing editor) and school choice activists such as former D.C. City Councilman and Black Alliance for Educational Options cofounder Kevin Chavous. Because the hearing once again revealed how both so many Democrat and Republican politicians (other than Kline and Hunter) still don’t get the importance of families being the lead decision-makers in schools and education as a whole.

You can easily surmise this from the questions and the grandiloquent statements made by education traditionalists fellow-travelers on the committee, all of which you can download or watch. There was the wrong and hostile declarations of New York Democrat Carolyn McCarthy, wagging a pencil as if it were a cigar, that charter schools “have the ability of not taking children with disabilities”, and similar words from her California counterpart, Lynn Woolsey; National Alliance for Public Charter Schools honcho Todd Zeibarth had to refute those statements and inform them that there are charters specially designed to work with kids with autism. Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott went on a five-minute round of speechifying, proclaiming that vouchers are terrible because they divert dollars from district schools that think those dollars belong solely to them (instead of remembering that they are payment for providing services to kids, and they shouldn’t get the dollar). Instead of asking why states don’t revamp their school funding systems so that the dollars are voucherized and thus, kids can use them at any school that fits them, Scott simply argued that “those who don’t get vouchers are worse off”.

Then there was Pennsylvania Republican Todd Russell Platts, who used his soapbox to declare that school choice and Parent Power makes things “worse off” because it allows families to “abandon” failure mills and takes families who can be advocates for public education out of traditional district schools (without ever considering that the public education is not about a district or a bureaucracy, but about providing high-quality opportunities for all kids). Platts went on to proclaim that “our duty is to every child, not to the very few” even as he defended traditionalist policies and practices that have denied high-quality education to poor and minority children.

Platt’s speechifying weren’t necessarily shocking nor were McCarthy’s; both are the darlings of the old-school “parent involvement” crowd who, as Temple University Professor William W. Cutler III illustrated in Parents and Schools: The 150-year struggle for control in American education, have long ago been co-opted by traditional district leaders and National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates; Platts, in particular, has long opposed school voucher programs (including the DC Opportunity Scholarship now facing another shutdown attempt by the Obama administration). Woolsey has long benefited from NEA and AFT donations, with $130,800 in campaign donations over her career, according to OpenSecrets.org. Scott has also benefited from teachers’ union largess, picking up $97,000 in donations from teachers unions over time; like fellow Virginian Henry Marsh (who was Scott’s colleague in the Dominion State’s legislature before winning his congressional seat 16 years ago), Scott is the kind of old-school black politician who has not realized the fact that education is the civil rights issue of this time.

But the fact that it isn’t surprising still doesn’t make it any less outrageous. What Platts, McCarthy, Scott, Woolsey and their fellow-travelers, both in Congress and in state legislatures, fail to realize is that families cannot “fix” or be engaged in education when they must tangle with bureaucracies and systems that treat them as afterthoughts and nuisances (when they aren’t being blamed by teachers’ union bosses and failed school leaders for their own performance problems). This is the reality in American public education today.

As Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg of the Sage Colleges have noted in their research on school engagement, urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.” Certainly some of this has to do with the negative experiences these parents have had with schools — especially those failure mills that they once attended and to which their children now go. But it is also about the fact that there are many teachers who look at parents — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — with condescension and disdain. The reality is that we have far too many teachers who look down on poor urban parents who may not be capable of helping their kids because of their own learning issues; who are hostile to those families who want to take an active role in shaping the education their kids receive in school; and would rather keep those families servile. And this disdain trickles down to how children, especially from the poorest households are treated. Contrary to what the GetSchooled Foundation and other groups attempted to declare yesterday in their report on chronic absenteeism, truancy is a natural consequence of kids realizing that they are illiterate, innumerate, and stuck with teachers and principals who treat their parents poorly and can’t help them as students make up ground.

This nauseating approach to families is just as strong in suburban districts such as the ones in Platts’ district– particularly for first-generation black and Latino middle-class households — as it is in big-city districts. As University of Michigan Associate Professor Karyn Lacey noted in Blue-Chip Black, her sociological study of middle-class black families in the area surrounding the nation’s capital, black families living in Fairfax County found themselves battling teachers and guidance counselors who wanted to relegate children to academic tracks that keep them from getting high-paying white- and blue-collar jobs, and finding themselves not informed about their options for preparing their kids for success in school and in life, including opportunities to take Advanced Placement courses or participate in the growing number of dual-credit programs. From inconveniently-schedule parent-teacher conferences to refusals by suburban schools to allow families to tour the classrooms their kids will have to attend, suburban districts are no epitomes of cultures of strong family empowerment and engagement.

The beauty of vouchers, charter schools and Parent Trigger laws is that these tools not only allows families to actually help their kids succeed in school and in life, they also spur parents to be fully engaged in education and learn more about how their kids can get a high-quality education. As James Guthrie of the George W. Bush Institute has pointed out, the only real way that families can really be engaged in schools is if they actually have the ability to actually shape the education their kids receive. They also become the kind of unabashed school reformers and impromptu leaders we need to overhaul American public education. More importantly, choice and power also allow for the very democratic action that education traditionalists tout as a defense for preserving the status quo; when families can choose how their kids are educated, they can be real players in the rest of American society.

Kline and Hunter should use this hearing as an opportunity to challenge their colleagues (especially Platts) and push for making choice and Parent Power key components of federal education policy; this includes encouraging states to embrace vouchers and Parent Trigger laws. On the  latter, they can already count on ranking Democrat (and former education committee chairman) George Miller, who once again proclaimed his support this past March for the passage of Parent Trigger laws.

As for school reformers? The challenge is to now remind congressional leaders such as Platts, McCarthy, Woolsey, and Scott that they need to embrace systemic reform and support the kinds of policies that allow for families to be real players in education. And when they still don’t get it, recruit challengers who will toss these politicians out of Congress for good.

Few traditional districts have been as reform-minded as New York City under the mayoral control of Michael Bloomberg. From shutting down more than 100 failure mills and dropout factories, to allowing principals to keep laggard teachers from working in their schools, the mayor and his array of chancellors (including the legendary Joel Klein) have succeeded in turning the district around from being a Superfund Site of American public education. Although the Big Apple still struggles in providing all children (especially young black men)  in every corner of the city with a high-quality education, the district has reduced the percentage of functionally-illiterate fourth graders (as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress)  from 53 percent in 2003 to 39 percent in 2011, and improved graduation rates and has shown a willingness to not be servile to the American Federation of Teachers local that had long held the city under its proverbial thumb.

So the announcement this morning by current schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott that he would institute a series of teacher performance management policies if the AFT affiliate doesn’t agree to allow the district to use New York State’s new teacher evaluation system was definitely not surprising. But it was once again heartening to see a school leader move to advance reform and be willing to take a union far too concerned with defending the interests of even the worst-performing of its members at the expense of children.

Certainly the intransigence of AFT’ New York City local President Michael Mulgrew, whose opposition to using the Empire State’s new evaluation system is as much driven by is desire to succeed predecessor Randi Weingarten as head of the national union as by the opposition of the Baby Boomers who are a dwindling minority of rank-and-file members, is driving Walcott’s latest move. Within the past month, the AFT launched its third lawsuit against the city to stop the shutdown of failure mills (this time, without the help of the union’s fellow-travelers at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s New York State branch), this time all but admitting that the goal is to keep rank-and-file members (including those who probably should have left city employ years ago) on the job. The union has also taken to the airwaves and newspapers, paying for ads proclaiming that Walcott’s boss, Bloomberg, still “doesn’t get” that it doesn’t appreciate his efforts (and also reminding state legislators in Albany and those aspiring to succeed Bloomberg as mayor that they better not think of following his example).

But in declaring that the district would remove teachers who failed to improve student achievement for two consecutive years (and offering to buy out their continuing contracts), Walcott is making clear that Mulgrew and the AFT are merely avoiding discussion about one of the biggest challenges facing the Big Apple as it embarks on a second wave of reforms: Overhauling how it hires, compensates, rewards, and manages the performance of its teachers. Although the first round of reforms have helped improve student achievement in the city, New York City will need to take more-aggressive steps in this second step. Providing all kids in the city with strong, comprehensive college-preparatory curricula (an area which Walcott and his predecessors have tended to ignore) would certainly help, as would expanding charters, shutting down more failure mills, and allowing families to take over those schools they want to save through Parent Trigger laws. But none of this — even rolling out Core Knowledge’s strong reading curriculum — would accomplish little until the city takes stronger steps to remove laggard teachers and replace them with those who make the grade.

This was made clear by the city last year when results from the teacher performance management pilot it undertook revealed that 18 percent of teachers evaluated were deemed ineffective in the classroom. Based on the efforts that Washington, D.C., has undertaken with its pathbreaking IMPACT program, one can expect New York City to dismiss five percent of its teaching corps. For the AFT, which is dependent on having as many rank-and-file members in classrooms (and paying dues) to sustain its $205 million-a-year operation, more-stringent teacher evaluations equals lost dollars. And it will fight to oppose more-robust evaluations (and the use of objective student test score data in them) even if it means battling with insurgents representing younger teachers such as Educators4Excellence (which is demanding more-objective evaluations of teachers and the school leaders who supervise them), and, perhaps, even opposing the (slightly) more-moderate line now being taken by Weingarten at the national level.

Walcott has essentially forced the AFT into a rhetorical (and tactical) corner. If the union continues to oppose using the new evaluation system, it puts itself in the awkward position of talking out of both sides of its mouth. It can’t continue declaring that it wants teaching to become more-professionalized and then oppose efforts by New York City and the Empire State to do just that. On the tactical end, if Walcott goes ahead and begins dismissing teachers and buying them out, the union will then have to play by his ground rules (or accept an even worse deal) once it relents and strikes a bargain (and it will).

But for New York City taxpayers, Walcott’s moves would not only help improve the schools for which they pay a pretty penny, it would also get rid of laggards who collect sweet perks in exchange for riding the proverbial pine (and keeping out of classrooms). Currently, the city pays $100 million annually to keep 800 laggards out of classrooms (some of whom were not teaching since the days of the infamous rubber rooms); buying those teachers out would be better from both a fiscal and teacher quality perspective. For the city’s high-quality teachers, Walcott is effectively stating that they should be able to teach in schools with professionals who are their equals and not deal with those who don’t deserve tenure. And for Big Apple kids, Walcott’s declaration (and that of his boss) that low quality teachers shouldn’t be allowed to continue educational malpractice is an important stand for ensuring that all kids get the good and great teachers they deserve. All in all, not a bad move at all.

Last July, your editor argued for school choice activists and other reformers to take a page out of the playbook of funding and equity activists and embrace legal action to advance overhauls at the state and district levels. Since then, Parent Power activists such as those in the Los Angeles Unified School District organized by Alice Callaghan (with backing from the school reform group EdVoice) , and the Connecticut Parents Union have launched their own tort actions to force districts and states to use objective student performance data in teacher evaluations and end Zip Code education policies that criminalize the actions of families such as that of Marie Menard who want to keep their kids out of failure mills.

But school reformers in other circles have largely shied away from this tactic. Until now. On Tuesday, a coalition of groups that include Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, Democrats for Education Reform, Parent Power group Parent Revolution, and families throughout the California, backed a suit filed in state superior court on behalf of eight teenagers against the Golden State and L.A. Unified, demanding an end to one of the most-pernicious policies defended by the National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers and other traditionalists: Reverse-seniority (also known as Last In-First Out or Last Hired-First Fired) layoff rules that force districts to sack young teachers — including those who are successful in improving student achievement among poor and minority kids — in order to keep  veteran instructors (especially laggards who don’t deserve to be in classrooms) on the job. Declaring that “outdated laws” are “preventing school administrators from… improving the quality of our public educational system by denying them the flexibility to make teacher employment decisions driven by the needs of their students”, the Students Matter coalition is demanding that Golden State officials ditch LIFO rules and allow districts to make layoff decisions based on how teachers perform in the classroom.

The lawsuit goes even further by demanding that the state end its traditional system of granting tenure under which newly-hired teachers can gain near-lifetime employment in just two years. Near-lifetime employment privileges is a terrible idea in any case, but even worse so in California because it takes four years to fully determine whether a newly-minted instructor has the chops to stay on the job; given that a teacher is unlikely to be better at improving student achievement after 25 years than after four, at least 640 children over a period of four decades (based on federal data on student-teacher ratios) may be subject to educational malpractice from a low-quality teacher. And given that it can take a district as long as seven years (and $2 million) to unsuccessfully attempt to fire a teacher through California’s 10-step process, it often means that few incompetent teachers — and few criminally abusive instructors such as recently-indicted L.A. Unified teacher Mark Berndt (who was paid $40,000 in exchange for dropping his effort to keep his job despite widespread evidence of alleged sexual abuse of children) — are ever tossed to the curb.

Meanwhile the lawsuit hits upon the impact of traditional teacher compensation and performance management within the Golden State (and throughout the nation as a whole) on the quality of education children — especially those from poor and minority households — receive. Given that the quality of teaching likely accounts for half (and likely, more than 50 percent) of the impact of schools on student achievement over time, near-lifetime employment rules, reverse-seniority laws, and desultory teacher dismissal policies conspire to put kids on the path to poverty and prison. This is especially so for poor and minority children, who then must deal with the consequences of Zip Code Education policies such as zoned schooling and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools and other forms of choice. And in turn, the Students Matter lawyers declare that these policies violate the California state constitution’s equal protection and public education clauses. Declares the brief: “Those statutes thus make the quality of education provided to school-age children in California a function of race and/or the wealth of a child’s parents and neighbors”.

The Students Matter suit comes on the heels of the Callaghan suit as well as the scandal enveloping L.A. Unified emerging from the arrest and indictment of Berndt, a laggard rated among the lowest-performing teachers at the school district’s Miramonte Elementary School, who now faces 23 charges of abuse of children; Berndt had fought an attempt by L.A. Unified to dismiss him after the district learned last year that he was being investigated for lewd conduct against children. The scandal led to an effort in March and April by reformers and L.A. Unified to pass a new law that would allow for those facing criminal charges that was successfully fought back by the NEA’s and AFT’s California affiliates. The lawsuit also exposes the deliberate efforts by the state’s governor, Jerry Brown, and State Supt. Tom Torlakson, to do the bidding of traditionalists that backed their election campaigns two years ago and role back the array of reforms successfully pushed by their predecessors, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jack O’Connell, with the help of former legislative powerhouse (and now DFER California honcho) Gloria Romero. Since taking office, Brown has all but abandoned reform efforts, including putting the kibosh on the development of CALTIDES, the longitudinal teacher data system, and effectively ended the effort to tie student performance data to teacher evaluations. Torlakson has basically become a hero of education traditionalists everywhere for defending the practices they back so wholeheartedly.

If the suit succeeds, one can expect California’s state legislature to end up taking up the very reforms already being enacted in states such as New York and Indiana. It would also force L.A. Unified and other districts to actually do their job and actually perform comprehensive evaluations using student performance data that, as the Callaghan suit argues, can be done and should have been done for the past four or so decades; L.A. Unified, in particular, has been called out by the National Council on Teacher Quality and Dropout Nation for evaluating just 40 percent of veteran teachers and 70 percent of new hires were evaluated by the district during the 2009-2010 school year — and this is one for which neither the district nor reformers can blame on teachers unions. More importantly, the suit may spur other reformers to finally give up their reluctance for using the courts in advancing reform. As Heartland Institute scholar Bruno Behrend pointed out last year on The Conversation, using constitutional clauses to help students succeed is something that all reformers should do.

Education traditionalists are already howling that the lawsuit is just an attempt to eviscerate workplace protections that supposedly help teachers from losing their jobs without cause. But they have little chance of making a strong case for this. For one, an earlier suit filed two years ago by the American Civil Liberties Union’s Southern California branch successfully forced L.A. Unified to abandon last hired-first fired in layoffs at failure mills serving poor and minority students; although the notoriously-bellicose AFT local there is appealing the decision, the underlying argument behind that case has plenty of legal merit. More importantly, there is more evidence that the very practices traditionalists defend do little more than foster cultures of low expectations in which laggards become cancers, making it difficult for high-quality counterparts to gain the recognition and rewards they deserve.  The fact that the laggards can teach for decades without being forced out also means that they bring down the performance of students by as much as a full year — and force counterparts to work harder in the next year just to get those students back up to speed.  The policies also demoralize younger teachers doing good and great work in helping students succeed because they must work alongside veterans who don’t make the grade — and can keep their jobs to boot in the event of reductions in force. In short, the defense of these policies NEA and AFT affiliates (along with their allies) do damage to the very teachers they say they are defending.

No matter what happens, the Students Matter suit is another important step in developing new strategies for advancing systemic reform. And our kids may be the better for it.

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.