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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Yesterday, Dropout Nation analyzed how the National Education Association’s Connecticut affiliate was taking a defensive move against school reformers with its two-week commercial buy touting its legislative agenda — and how it reflected the next trend for teachers’ unions in their effort to preserve the privileges from which they derive their declining influence. Today, the American Federation of Teachers’ notoriously bellicose New York City local (whose boss, Michael Mulgrew, is angling to one day succeed predecessor — and current national president — Randi Weingarten) rolled out its own ad buy. Targeting the school reform record of Big Apple Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is now looking to burnish his success in overhauling what was once the toxic waste dump of American public education with a push for a series of new initiatives such as $20,000 bonuses for teachers rated highly-effective on evaluations, the AFT is proclaiming that the mayor still “doesn’t get” that his efforts aren’t appreciated by the union. The commercials compliment a series of full-page ads being placed by the union in the Daily  News that are supposed to be open letters rallying against the mayor’s efforts, including his push to use value-added analysis of student test score data in teacher evaluations.

This campaign isn’t just aimed at Bloomberg and attempting to appeal to Big Apple residents. After all, this will be an election year in the Empire State with Democrats seeking to regain control of the senate from Republicans. More importantly, the AFT is in the midst of a court battle (and related settlement talks) with the New York State Education Department and the state Board of Regents over its effort to allow states to allow for Value-Added analysis of state student test data to account for 40 percent of a teacher’s rating under the new teacher evaluation system. Meanwhile Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who successfully nudged education officials to allow for state test data to play a bigger role in evaluations, is continuing his teacher quality reform efforts (and also keep the $700 million in federal dollars the state received through the Race to the Top initiative). So the AFT’s Big Apple and Empire State affiliates find themselves in a pitched battle to preserve their influence. The AFT local’s ad campaign can be seen as another effort to beat back the efforts of the state’s reform-minded politicians and remind both Democrats and Republicans in Albany that they are dependent on teachers’ union dollars.

Image courtesy of GothamSchools

This play is also likely an attempt to shape the big election facing the Big Apple next year: Who will succeed Bloomberg as mayor, and thus, boss of the nation’s largest — and most reform-minded — school system. With the reformers such as state Board of Regents Chairman Meryl Tisch and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn likely to run for the job — and AFT allies such as city Comptroller John Liu either struggling with political scandals or lack of strong political backers — the AFT must also work hard to reshape the political game on the ground in order to stave off what would likely be another decade of strong reform efforts. Given that the AFT’s string of recent public relations disasters in New York City — including the failed lawsuit it filed along with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to shut down expansion of charter schools — Mulgrew has to garner some sort of victory. Especially if he wants to succeed the (until-recently) more politically-masterful Weingarten.

Certainly the AFT’s New York City local has the cash horde to pull out an even bigger public relations blitz. After all, the local spent $26 million in 2010-2011 on so-called representational activities, political lobbying, and contributions to organization’s such as the NAACP’s New York branch, according to its filing with the U.S. Department of Labor. One can also expect the state affiliate and perhaps, even the national union, to join in. After all, for Weingarten, a victory in her home state and in the Big Apple would also do wonders for the union’s national efforts. Either way, the AFT local’s ad buy just proves again that school reformers will have to go big in the coming battles to come.

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When an affiliate of the nation’s largest teachers’ union buys commercial time during the National Football League’s NFC Champion game, it certainly gets notice. That is exactly what the National Education Association’s Connecticut local did yesterday when it began its two-week campaign to push for its legislative agenda. And for school reformers, it is both a preview of the political battle that will come in the next few months within the nation’s statehouses — and a reminder that they will have to step up their political game to advance reform.

With the pleasant voice-over declaring that the union is pushing to “replace teacher tenure” and for greater “parental involvement”, the NEA’s commercial campaign is at least superficially appealing. The fact that its actual agenda actually calls for none of that at all — and merely offers a series of mild proposals, including a plan to reduce the time required for firing laggard teachers by 35 days, and cultural sensitivity training for the school governance councils through which the state’s Parent Trigger law is exercised — makes the ad campaign rather disingenuous. But the NEA’s attempt in Connecticut to play the same triangulation effort being tried at the national level by the American Federation of Teachers is at least slightly better than the bellicose messaging of its sister affiliates elsewhere.

But in many ways, the NEA has no other choice in this state. Why? Because it and its fellow education traditionalists are on the defensive. Over the past two years, school reformers have had some success, passing the nation’s second Parent Trigger law, and passing other measures allowing the state to take over failing districts. The Nutmeg State’s education department made waves last year when it took over Bridgeport’s collection of failure mills (and ruffled the feathers of Parent Power activists concerned about the secrecy of its process) and hiring  former Chicago and Recovery School District boss Paul Vallas to lead the overhaul. With Gov. Dan Malloy offering a series of reforms this legislative session — and the state’s school superintendents’ association breaking ranks with its fellow education traditionalist groups — the NEA and AFT, along with other status quo defenders, are on their own.

This defensive crouch became a proverbial fetal position last year when Dropout Nation revealed that a presentation by the AFT AFT and its Connecticut affiliate on how the union watered down legislation that created the Parent Trigger law, excluded Parent Power and other school reform groups such as ConnCAN from back-room negotiations with state legislators, and ultimately, helped oust Jason Bartlett, the state representative whose work helped lead to its passage. The revelations, which led national AFT President Randi Weingarten to issue a series of non-apology apologies (and even a formal in-person apology to  legislators and Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel),still echo in the mind of Nutmeg State legislators — and not in a good way. As a result, educational traditionalists — especially the NEA (which itself isn’t all that happy with either the AFT’s presentation or the sister union’s brag that it had to drag it “kicking and screaming” into efforts to water down the law) — will now have to work harder to keep the status quo ante.

Meanwhile the AFT fiasco has taught Nutmeg State school reformers that they need to step up their own game. They are putting those lessons to use.

Last week, the Connecticut Parents Union captured headlines with its own press conference laying out its legislative agenda to advance Parent Power; this includes requiring schools directly controlled by the NEA and AFT through the state’s Compact Schools initiative to have school governance councils and, thus, be subjected to the Parent Trigger law. Through its work helping families in Ohio launch a Parents Union, and its support of Illinois mother Annette Callahan in her battle against Zip Code Education, the Connecticut Parents Union has also won considerable goodwill with (and support from) organizations such as Democrats for Education Reform, Students For Education Reform, and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, which it can mass for its agenda. (Disclosure: Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle is a member of the Connecticut Parents Union’s advisory board.)

At the same time, longtime reform player ConnCAN and its new boss, Patrick Riccards, have taken apart the NEA’s proposals. The organization is also pushing its own school reform agenda in Connecticut’s statehouse, and could end up tag-teaming with the Connecticut Parents Union and others on efforts to revamp teacher evaluations and tenure.

Then there is a possible looming threat in the form of StudentsFirst, the school reform group launched by former D.C. Public Schools czar Michelle Rhee which has embraced the kind of political tactics (and ad campaigning) once reserved for political campaigns. Last year, StudentsFirst spent $900,000 in Michigan to advance an array of teacher quality and school choice reforms; it could easily pour similar dollars into Connecticut if reformers on the ground ask for the help. The very idea of Rhee and her team of ex-Democratic National Committee operatives launching ad campaigns isn’t exactly music to NEA or AFT ears.

So the NEA’s Connecticut affiliate has to take its considerable coffers to the airwaves in order to shape this session’s debates in their favor — and, by advertising during one of the nation’s biggest sporting events, quietly reminding legislators that the union may mobilize against them in upcoming primary and general election campaigns. The national union may also play its part. As Dropout Nation reported last month, the NEA poured $157,000 into Idahoans for Responsible Education Reform, which, along with the union’s Potato State affiliate, is looking to challenge school reforms successfully championed by the state’s school superintendent, Tom Luna, and Gov. Butch Otter, according to the union’s 2010-2011 filing with the U.S. Department of Labor; currently, the group is now looking to subject Luna to a recall. Don’t be surprised if the national union also provides funding to statewide progressive activist groups (as it has done in Ohio and Michigan), who can then attack centrist and liberal Democrat legislators supporting proposed reforms.

School reformers across the nation shouldn’t be surprised at what the NEA is doing in Connecticut. In fact, they should they expect NEA and AFT affiliates in other states to do the same. The success of reformers in passing school choice measures in 13 states, along with the string of victories on the teacher quality front (including the abolition of collective bargaining in states such as Wisconsin and Tennessee) have once again reminded the two unions that they will have to battle hard in every statehouse, either to stop reformers in their tracks or offer triangulating half-measures. The fact that families and taxpayers alike no longer feel much solidarity with NEA and AFT locals, and that school reformers have succeeded in ending the two union’s unquestioned support from Democrat politicians,has also put the NEA and AFT on the defensive. As governors and legislators tackle fiscal woes — including $1.1 trillion in teachers’ pension deficits and unfunded retired teacher healthcare costs, along with increasing Medicaid burdens — the unions are fighting to preserve the array of traditional teacher compensation arrangements (including near-lifetime employment and degree- and seniority-based pay) that have long sustained their influence and have won them support from rank-and-file members. And as state legislators in Indiana, Wisconsin, and elsewhere consider right-to-work legislation that would further reduce public-sector union influence, the NEA and AFT must fight harder just to stay in place.

Up to now, the NEA and AFT have taken different approaches to their political efforts; the former, by funding outfits such as Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in order to build coalitions against reform, while the AFT has engaged in triangulation by offering a sort of school reform lite. But with the former’s strategy failing miserably (and the AFT’s efforts not going so well), the NEA is now attempting other approaches. While the strategy of the NEA’s Connecticut affiliate has more in common with the triangulation approach of the AFT national, its sister affiliates (along with the national union) are becoming more militant, teaming up with outfits such as ProgressNow and raising more dollars to engage in big-dollar campaigning. And school reformers, especially centrist and liberal Democrat reformers, should expect more of their allies in legislators and gubernatorial spots to find themselves being primaried by progressive Democrat activists acting as stalking horses for the NEA and its sister public sector unions.

So reformers need to be more aggressive in the political game. As I noted in November, this means embracing an even more bipartisan approach of the kind advanced by Rhee and StudentsFirst, as well as teaming up with grassroots activists (including Parent Power groups) in order to reach families ready to support reform, but often ignored by the movement’s Beltway and operator wings. And finally, reformers need to spend more money on campaigning — and ensure that those dollars equal the amounts spent on policymaking and working statehouse corridors. Just imagine if school reformers spent $59 million during one election year on just congressional races and statehouse campaigns – the same amount spent by the NEA and AFT during the 2009-2010 election cycle? Right now, the only significant ad campaign from school reformers — other than those from StudentsFirst and the efforts two years ago  by the Eli and Edythe Broad and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations — has been run by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools — and that focused largely on informing Americans about what charter schools are.

The NEA’s ad campaign in Connecticut is a preview of what is going to happen in the rest of the nation this year on the education front. And school reformers will have to get their game right in order to stay on the offensive.

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