The school must be the unit of change-and schools must put kids on different pathway than most schools do today.

Canon Anderson, superintendent of the Newark, N.J. school district, on why our kids need systemic reform.

Imagine two eighth-grade students, Student A and Student B, who both attend public schools in the United States. Student A is significantly less likely to have a certified or experienced teacher, over twice as likely to have street gangs present at school and is 10 times less likely to take an AP exam than Student B. In anything else that could possibly affect student achievement — parent involvement, poverty, child care — Student B has the clear advantage. What could possibly cause this severe disadvantage for Student A? The answer is something as simple as the color of your skin. Student A is black, while Student B is white.

Seventh-grade Nashville student Iz Gius, in the Tennessean, saying succinctly what many school reformers sometimes fail to make clear.

We now Stat homelessness, we Stat domestic violence… We’re finding more ways to use it — monitoring day-to-day progress, monitoring the pace at which we improve and push it along. We’re doing a citywide analysis of how to use CitiStat to drill down into problems that have been in existence for years… We’re creating a Stat process — pull all the people into the same room with independent analysts and figure out how to get rid of roadblocks.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, to the New York Times, about the use of data in solving quality-of-life problems that plague every locale. This is the kind of unleashing of powerful data that must be embraced to give our children American public education that is worthy of their lives.

As a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 1990s working at the college’s supercomputer lab, Marc Andreessen found himself wondering what to make of what was poised to become a revolution. Just a few years earlier, a British scientist working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research named Tim Berners-Lee began formulating a way to take the bones of earlier information management systems such as Usenet, Arpanet, and TCP/IP (along with the European networked by Berners-Lee’s employer) and turn it into a system that could be used on a mass scale. By 1990, Berners-Lee and his staff had crafted what is now known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, and effectively opened up what we now know as the World Wide Web.

But it was still a backwater for scientists and computer enthusiasts, largely dedicated to chat rooms and exchanging computers (the early stages of the memes that are as much a feature of the ‘Net as YouTube videos and blogs). More importantly, those who did know about the Web didn’t think that anyone would want to use it. Andreessen understood there needed to be a better way of allowing access to this potentially powerful system — and realized that many would flock to it as soon as the proverbial mousetrap was built. So he began coming up with a new way of interacting with people via the rather novel World Wide Web; by the time he graduated from Urbana-Champaign in 1993, he had created Mosaic, the first Internet browser and the model upon which Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome are built. By 1995, he had teamed up with Jim Clark, the founder of computing pioneer Silicon Graphics to launch Netscape, the first commercially-successful Web browser and the tool that would cause headaches for computing giant Microsoft and other established firms for decades to come.

Netscape wouldn’t last as an independent firm beyond a few years of the dotcom boom; by 1999, it would lose the first round of the browser wars to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and end up being part of AOL (which itself would become irrelevant and part of one of the most-ill-fated mergers in Corporate American history with its deal with Time Warner). But by that point, Andreessen’s thoughts had moved beyond just mere browsers. By the end of the next decade, Andreessen had helped planted the seeds of cloud computing, the new version of old-school time-sharing that is as much a part of corporate life as Excel spreadsheets; funded firms such as Twitter and Instagram; and become a player in voice-over-Internet Protocol phone business by buying into Skype.

While the rest of us were engaged in Web chats, experimented with instant messaging, or like your editor, were launching Web sites and blogs while starting our careers, Andreessen recognized something none of us could really see because our minds were stuck on the existing paradigm: Once people connected to the Internet, a lot of things would happen. They would start surfing the Web with a browser, then visit Web pages. But this wouldn’t be enough. They would soon want to move from being mere content consumers to producers of their own media, launching their own Web pages, directing their own movies and short films, even starting their own businesses using the Web as their sales, marketing, and distribution platforms. As Andreessen pointed out to Wired Editor Chris Anderson in an interview for the tech magazine’s latest edition, “you have economic activity that’s far more advanced, far more distributed than ever before.”

Andreessen was right. From an IT staffer for a Wall Street firm named Jeff Bezos (who used the Web to launch retail giant Amazon), to a financial news journalist named Nick Denton (who took to the Web to found the Gawker media empire); the Web has managed to make creative destruction in many sectors the norm instead of the exception. It has even revolutionized manufacturing. A gadget enthusiast with an idea, a broadband connection, and inexpensive computer-aided design software can launch their own firm, manufacturing gizmos on a small scale with the help of a Chinese outsourcing firm; buy your own cutting and fashioning tools (and add some equally ambitious friends) and you can turn your own garage into a manufacturing plant.

Even sectors that are heavily-regulated to the point of nearly being akin to government such as healthcare are being transformed by the Web. From the use of cloud computing in storing medical records that can be accessed by doctors at a moment’s notice, to the efforts of IBM and the Mayo Clinic to force medicine to use natural language processing systems in handling data (and ending the costly medical errors that come from illegible doctor’s notes), innovation is changing how healthcare is provided on a day-to-day basis.

This, in, turn, has forced all of us to accept new paradigms, even in how we work. Save for those of us working in old-school industrial jobs and fast food, telecommuting and flexible work environments (along with the burden of being always on and ever on call every weekend) have become the norm. The very idea of being constantly connected via some form of device, be it a laptop, a Nook Color, an iPad, or a simple cellphone, has moved from novelty to norm. And the days when newspaper editors, book publishers, encyclopedia crafters, and movie critics served as gatekeepers in determining news and culture is no longer; the myth of common culture, inculcated by Horace Manns and others through schools and other formats has been exposed for what it is.

What does this have to do with school reform? Plenty more than you think. Because the very disruption that has wreaked havoc on book retailers, newspaper publishers, and even first-generation computer-makers will also force the transformation of American public education. It will force school governance structures to change for the better — and restructure the career path for high-quality teachers whose work and talents go unrecognized and unrewarded.

Prompting these thoughts is Education Reform for the Digital Era, Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s latest book focusing on the challenges of making blended learning and smart use of digital tools in schools and districts. And there are plenty. Education traditionalists — especially districts as well as National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates — fear that digital and online tools and systems will fuel more steps in the transformation of public education (and put an end to the practices and policies they so cherish); they also play up on fears that some families have that their kids will have little in the way of interaction with real live teachers, and thus get a low-quality education. They have gone on the offensive to stifle digital efforts; in California, for example, traditionalists have successfully restricted the availability of online courses — and perpetuating Zip Code Education policies in the process — by banning children and families from availing themselves of courses offered by districts outside of the one in which they live. Teacher certification rules (that do little to ensure quality) also complicate the ability to use online learning as a tool for providing children with high-quality instruction across all state lines. Current systems of school finance, which favor the traditional district model and condemn poor and minority kids to dropout factories and failure mills, have not yet been revamped to fund online learning options.

Then there is the reality that most traditional districts are just not very good at using technology; the landscape is littered with examples such as Detroit, where former emergency finance czar Robert Bobb found out that the district bought 160 BlackBerrys that were never used, and reminders that most school districts are struggling to wrangle with the data systems needed to manage school operations (and even a few still dependent on old-school FileMaker software just to manage sophisticated tasks that need more-powerful systems). This, in turn, feeds into skepticism among teachers and education traditionalists (especially those with strong Luddite tendencies and an aversion to anything that may force them to shift their paradigm) that the technology that is being bought will ever be put to good use. The biggest issue of all may lie with reconciling our traditional structures of school governance, especially the traditional district model, which no longer serves children or taxpayers well; abandoning that model could be as much a challenge as enacting school vouchers and allowing for the expansion of charter schools.

Certainly Fordham and the collection of co-authors who put together this book are right in seeing the current problems of making digital education the norm and not a novelty. Those issues certainly need to be addressed. At the same time, the same power of the Web to foment creative destruction recognized by Andreessen three decades ago are as likely to force these changes in ways that no think tanker, school reform activist, district bureaucrat, or teachers’ union boss can ever imagine.

Dropout Nation has spent plenty of time discussing how online education tools offer families and communities the ability to start their own DIY schools that serve the specific needs of the children they love. It is already happening. Even as traditional districts struggle to roll out iPads into classrooms, some 1 million children took online courses during the 2007-2008 school year, according to Anthony J. Picciano of Hunter College and Jeff Seaman of Babson, a 47 percent increase over the number of kids taking online courses two years earlier. Given the rate of growth in those past years, your editor would estimate that the number of kids taking online courses has doubled in the following four school years. While many students were likely augmenting what they learned in school or ex-dropouts engaged in credit recovery programs, more students and families are turning to online courses as their primary way of getting instruction and curricula they need. While these kids are getting their courses, their parents and siblings are also engaged in online learning through college courses. Online colleges account for 31 percent of all higher ed courses by students as schools surveyed in 2010 by the Sloan Consortium, with 6.1 million adults taking at least one course online. And more than half of collegians rate online courses as being the same or better than traditional live classes.

With more families engaged in one form of online learning or another — along with growing evidence that online engagement of all forms doesn’t damage the ability of kids to socialize with others — it will be harder to education traditionalists to play upon fears of technology. More importantly, the very convenience of online learning and ability to customize instruction to student learning needs also means that even more families — especially those with kids wrongly labeled as special ed cases, along with poor and minority households in suburbia who constantly battle with districts to put their kids in comprehensive college-preparatory courses and cannot avail themselves of brick-and-mortar forms of school choice — will demand wider arrays of online and blended-learning choices.

For churches and community organizations looking to help the kids in their pews and neighborhoods stay off the path to poverty and prison, digital learning is even more appealing; they can access high-quality instruction at a lower cost than hiring teachers, and even possibly provide the kids they serve with online guidance counselors who can help kids get prepared for life on the college campus (an especially important issue when working with ex-dropouts who are graduating from high school and entering higher education). The kind of intensive work done by charter schools such as See Forever Foundation’s Maya Angelou schools (along with regular K-12 schooling) can now be done on a mass scale. More importantly, it even could change the game in ways none of us have ever considered. A group of parochial schools could band together to provide online education to an even wider array of students served by other churches, while the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma could do the same, serving other Cherokee communities on the East Coast as well as working together with other tribes in the rest of the country.

None of these groups will stand for any barriers from state education agencies or school districts — and they will fight hard against them. In fact, they won’t have to do much lobbying at all. The nature of the Web is such that it is difficult for any state education agency — or even the federal government — to impose regulation. And the likely consequences could be amazing. Teacher certification, for example, would move away from state teacher licensing boards to national organizations such as ABCTE — or, more likely, American public education would move away from traditional licensing altogether. This, in turn, would speed up efforts to move away from traditional, low-quality teacher evaluations to ones based on objective measures of teacher success in improving student achievement over time.

The greatest potential of digital education lies with revamping how we reward teachers, especially those high-quality instructors who are stuck with the same degree- and seniority-based compensation packages as those who aren’t worth the salaries they collect. This is something that education traditionalists, especially those with a Luddite mentality, never consider. Given that the average teacher likely owns a Samsung Galaxy Android or Apple iPhone, lives in a home equipped with Wi-Fi broadband, and has children using iPads and Nook Tablets, they are probably far more-sophisticated about technology than most would expect and thus, won’t need any form of professional development. More importantly, there are teachers such as Chad Sansing already using video games and other digital tools and techniques in their instruction — and they can help other teachers figure out the ropes.

The possibilities are endless. As Bryan and Emily Hassel of Public Impact noted in the Fordham book, the advance of digital education offers an array of new career paths for high-quality teachers with entrepreneurial savvy, especially in working for online education firms who can offer stock options and other forms of private-sector compensation that would be more appealing that seniority- and degree-based pay scales. One can even imagine high-quality teachers who don’t want to go into administration — the usual route that turns many a high-quality teacher into a mediocre and abysmal school leader — to pursue their own paths. With access to Blackboard, Apple’s e-textbook system, and Citrix GoToMeeting, a teacher who wants to just teach being able to craft their own courses, write their own textbooks, and charge money for instruction; they could also band together to launch their own online and blended learning operations similar to what Salman Khan is doing now with his eponymous flipped learning academy.

Once teachers get their hands on digital and online tools, they will no longer simply be users. They will also not be satisfied with a traditional model of teachers’ unionism that no longer applies in the 21st century (and was never the right fit for education in the first place). One can imagine the kind of professional associations emerging as alternatives to NEA and AFT membership becoming even more widespread, with teachers demanding to becoming as entrepreneurial outside of the classroom as Silicon Valley types such as Andreessen.

The very transformation of society, economy, and culture that Andreessen recognized would happen 20 years ago is also likely to happen in education. And the obstacles that would appear to make these changes a nonstarter aren’t likely to stand up to the creative destruction that always comes with technology. Which is why school reformers must embrace digital learning; along with political mobilization, it is one more tool that can force the overhaul of a failed system.

Photo courtesy of the Times-Picayune

The terrible news coming out of [New Orleans] about the children being murdered must put our efforts while we are here at [the New  Schools Venture Fund Summit] in perspective Our children need us more than ever at so many different levels. Their dreams and hopes. Their very lives are at stake.

Howard Fuller, eulogizing 15-year-old KIPP Believe College Prep student Christine Marcelin, who was senselessly murdered last week. It is important to systemically reform American public education so that we keep our kids out of poverty and prison. And it is equally vital that we improve quality if life in all areas of our communities so that our kids are as safe outside of schools as they should be in them. We shouldn’t have to bury our children’s futures or their bodies.

Contrasts in Leadership: Plenty can be learned from the weak work of Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley on school choice, and the strong efforts of Bobby Jindal in Louisiana on more ambitious reform efforts.

If you want to understand why gubernatorial leadership matters in overhauling American public education — and why school reformers must mobilize politically in order to gain traction for their efforts — consider the profiles in courage -(or lack thereof) of Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal in advancing their respective school choice and systemic reform plans.

Earlier this year, Bentley proposed a law that would allow for the existence of 50 public charter schools — and he knew he faced an arduous task. The Iron State remains one of seven states that don’t allow for any real form of school choice thanks to muscle-flexing of education traditionalists such as the National Education Association’s Iron State affiliate and school districts that are often the biggest and most politically-influential employers in the state. Back in 2010, Bentley’s predecessor, Bob Riley, with leverage courtesy of the Obama administration in the form of the Race to the Top competitive grant initiative, pushed hard and unsuccessfully for passage of his charter school plan against a then Democrat-controlled legislature fully under the thrall of the state’s educational status quo.

So Bentley knew he was going to have a tough time even with a Republican-controlled legislature in place. And he did, thanks to vitriol from NEA and school district officials, along with the religious- and immigrant-baiting rhetoric (especially the fear-mongering about possible presence of successful charter school operator Harmony, with its ties to Turkey’s Gulen Movement, coming into the state to run charters that education traditionalist groups such as NEA beneficiary Leonie Haimson’s Parents Across America have also begun to embrace). But instead of fighting hard, Bentley jas seemed to have all but abandoned his own school reform effort. The legislation itself, which aimed to only allow 50 charters to be authorized, showed early on that Bentley lacked a profile in courage. Save for a trip to visit a charter in New Orleans and an occasional word or two, Bentley has been missing in action on advancing the charter school bill. No wonder why the proposed bill is on the legislative version of life support.

Meanwhile in Louisiana, Jindal offered an even more ambitious collection of reforms. This included expanding the state’s voucher plan from serving just 3,000 children in New Orleans to as many as 300,000 kids statewide stuck in dropout factories and failure mills; and a teacher quality reform package that would effectively end near-lifetime employment for laggard instructors. And the challenges Jindal faced were just as tough. Bayou State districts, which nearly succeeded in ending the original voucher program some years ago, were even more opposed to the expansion plan. Meanwhile NEA and AFT affiliates were even more vocal in lobbying against Jindal’s teacher quality reforms, even staging protests at the state capital in Baton Rouge to make their point.

Yet Jindal stood strong against the state’s educational ancien regime, going so far as to call out the executive director of the NEA affiliate for declaring that poor and minority families are too incompetent to make smart school choices. And Jindal’s aggressive stance, along with the strong lobbying of Parent Power and school reform groups, proved to be successful. By April, Jindal’s entire reform package passed into law with bipartisan support, angering education traditionalists across the nation hoping for a much-needed victory in a reform-oriented state.

Certainly the fact that Louisiana already has robust forms of school choice in place — including the entire city of New Orleans in which 80 percent of students attend charter schools — gives Jindal an advantage that Bentley doesn’t have. But Bentley really doesn’t have much of an excuse. After all, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is successfully withstanding pressure from teachers’ union bosses in his own efforts on overhauling teacher evaluations, while Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber successfully passed a law that puts him directly in charge of education policy in the dual role of state superintendent. More importantly, Bentley hasn’t even used the advantage of having majority Republican control to get anything done; this is opposed to the success California’s former Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had in getting  a series of reforms — including the nation’s first Parent Trigger law and tying together student performance data to teacher performance data — passed by a Democrat-controlled legislature during his last two lame duck years in office.

What does matter is leadership, the willingness to stand up and strongly push for policies and ideals, especially amid hostile opposition from those who benefit fiscally, politically, and ideologically from the status quo remaining ante. The reality is that Bentley isn’t much of a leader on systemic reform, while Jindal most-certainly is. Which is why school reformers must work hard on the ground to elect governors who will stand up and be counted to help our kids get high-quality schools fit for their futures.

One of the realities in American public education today is that reformers must work hard at the state level in order to transform our failed systems. Given that state constitutions put governors and legislatures in charge of providing public education to children, and that districts are merely tools of state governments, this has always been true. But since the 1960s, the  successful lobbying efforts by NEA and AFT affiliates to force districts into collective bargaining arrangements that have helped render them servile to union demands, and the passage of property tax relief efforts such as California’s Proposition 13, have greatly expanded the state role in shaping education. The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, along with the Race to the Top initiative and President Barack Obama’s senseless No Child waiver gambit have merely signaled this reality.

With state governments effectively in charge of shaping education, the role of governors in education have grown even more prominent. Certainly not all governors have direct authority over state education departments; in fact, only 12 states allow for the governor to appoint chief state school officers, while 33 states grant governors the power to appoint the majority or all of the members of state boards of education. But power over education doesn’t simply rest on actually overseeing state school boards and agencies. Through their roles overseeing state budgets (all but seven have line-item veto power over fiscal spending plans), their critical role in promoting economic and social development, and the bully pulpits they control as state chief executives, governors can do plenty to shape education policy and advance systemic reform.

Indiana's Daniels (sitting alongside state schools superintendent Tony Bennett and state higher education commissioner Teresa Lubbers) has been a profile of courage on school reform.

If anything, one of the most-important lessons from the states where school reform has gained the most-traction is that strong leaders serving as governors can advance reform even if the governance structures aren’t necessarily in their favor.

Outgoing Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, for example, has no line-item veto power over budgets (and in fact, must gain approval for fiscal adjustments from state legislators on a budget committee he technically co-chairs) , and save for appointing the state board of education and half the members on the Hoosier State’s education roundtable, doesn’t directly oversee education. Yet this hasn’t stopped Daniels from advancing reform. From teaming up with state Supt. Tony Bennett on a series of teacher quality reforms, to successfully convincing legislators to launch what is currently the nation’s largest school voucher program (until Louisiana’s new program gears up), Daniels has shaken off his initial reluctance to take on school reform to become the kind of leader needed in a state chief executive.

Daniels’ counterpart in Michigan, Rick Snyder, is also technically hindered by a governance structure that effectively gives him little control over education policymaking; the state superintendent is appointed not by Snyder, but by an elected school board upon whose board the governor sits as a mere ex-officio member. But in the last two years, Snyder successfully passed a law that expands his ability to appoint emergency financial managers over fiscally faltering school districts (along with other municipal governments), pushed successfully for a teacher quality reform plan, and successfully advocated for a law expanding charter schools (including virtual charter school operations) throughout the state. This hasn’t exactly come without some political damage — notably with an ally, state Rep. Paul Scott, losing his seat in a successful recall driven by the NEA affiliate there. But Snyder has managed to get plenty done in just two years in a governance structure that doesn’t favor gubernatorial intervention.

Then there is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who does have a stronger role in controlling education with his ability to appoint the Garden State’s education commissioner, but must work with a Democrat-controlled legislature — and an NEA affiliate that has long-sustained the party’s political coffers. But thanks in part to his hard-charging persona, the realization among voters that the Garden State must wrangle with $58 billion in retiree healthcare liabilities for teachers and other civil servants, and the support of a cadre of centrist Democrat school reformers such as state assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver and her patron, state Sen. George Norcross, Christie has been able to pass some modest changes in teacher compensation, is pushing for expansion of school choice, and has started a much-necessary conversation about overhauling teacher evaluations.

What all three have in common is a willingness to use their considerable reserves of political support to advance reform, even when education traditionalists and their fellow-travelers seem to have public opinion on their side. They used their bully pulpits effectively, framing the need for expanding choice and overhauling teacher quality in the context of the economic and fiscal challenges facing their respective states. Each are willing to suffer temporary political setbacks, even when conventional wisdom (and the maxim of politics being the art of the possible) dictates that they should take a proverbial few slices instead of grabbing the entire loaf. All three are not necessarily accommodationalist by nature; it helps that they aren’t necessarily trying to stay in office just to hold power, which usually leads most politicians to agree to compromises that do little to advance their vision.  And from their offices, they successfully built coalitions for reform, rallying school reformers, business and civic organizations, and grassroots activists on the ground.

These important traits are typical with strong and effective leaders, regardless of the issues they undertake in the political and social arena. But as seen in the case of Daniels, Snyder, and Christie (and clear in the successful work of these are traits that are especially important in reforming American public education. After all, the penchant for false collaboration that achieves little for the futures of children is endemic within education traditionalist circles; there’s no incentive for those in those circles who may realize that traditional public education policies and practices no longer works for taxpayers, families, or children to support any changes that will anger friends and allies. More importantly, strong leadership isn’t about trying to deal with just the challenges of today, but advancing a vision that will position communities and states for the changes that are coming. And this especially true in an increasingly global economic age in which what you know is more important than what you do with your hands.

In short, the small ball-weak kneed approach to advancing systemic reform at the heart of Bentley’s efforts in Alabama, as well as those of counterparts such as Virginia’s Bob McDonnell, just won’t do. Nor will the head-in-the-sand obstinate opposition to reform represented by Schwarzenegger’s successor (and predecessor), Jerry Brown (and that of outgoing Washington State governor Christine Gregoire) will do either. This doesn’t mean that a governor will always win passage of a reform (something that Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy is learning all too well) and it doesn’t mean being popular. But it does mean that strong gubernatorial leadership matters, especially in building long-term support for sytsemic reform. Which means that school reformers must put more strong leaders in office by playing more-prominent roles in the political realm.

It starts by backing gubernatorial candidates regardless of party affiliation who will fight hard for systemic reform. This means a centrist Democrat in Washington State should be backing the Republican nominee presumptive, Rob McKenna, whose school reform bonafides are far more substantial than Jay Inslee, the likely Democrat standardbearer. Reformers must do a better job of building coalitions of support on the ground. This includes rallying the 51 million single parents, grandparents, and immigrant families, especially in urban communities, who are more than ready to support their efforts, as well as building support with churches and community groups (and playing upon their need for dollars the same way education traditionalists have done for decades). More bodies on the ground equals greater support for governors willing to risk political capital on reform (and more pressure on legislators who always keep count of which constituents may damage their political futures). Finally, reformers must go out there and play the political game as fiercely as NEA and AFT affiliates with vastly more experience in the game. This means running ad campaigns during legislative sessions, providing support to reform-minded politicians on Election Day, and making those who oppose choice and Parent Power pay for not voting the right way on legislative floors.

School reformers and their allies in governor’s mansions can learn plenty from Bentley and Jindal about what not to do (and what should be done) in advancing reform. And these lessons are critical for helping all of our kids get the education they need for successful adult lives.

Emerging from conversations with these nonunion teachers association representatives, one wonders that teachers unions can get away with bullying teachers and that unions are able to control the message both to teachers and the general public that they promote teachers’ rights when, often, they in fact step on teachers to promote unions’ political power. “The public perception is there’s millions of teachers out there in lockstep with the union, ready to join the union and march, and it couldn’t be farther from the truth,” Farmer said of his own experiences talking to teachers interested in alternatives.

Unions attempt to tighten control over their members, and thus political power, by making alternative organizations look not worth the social and emotional trouble, while restricting information about teachers’ options, even though this is unfair, unprofessional, and unethical. This is textbook bullying: a repeated pattern of aggressive physical or verbal actions “that cause physical or emotional distress, or indirect acts of social aggression.” It is also, Farmer says, classic unionism: “The union has done a good job of creating a chasm between the administration and teachers. Most teachers would tell you they’re terrified of having their administrator have the power to hire and fire them. If you look at charter schools, it’s a more cooperative environment…”

That dependence is rooted in fear rather than confidence. Ruling by fear is a tactic of bullies and tyrants. When you add fear and controversy to an environment teeming with children, teachers and children inevitably lose.

School Reform News’ Joy Pullmann, noting in a report on efforts by the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers to keep out new forms of teacher professional associations, another reason why the old-school industrial unionism embraced by the unions does littlefor those who actually work in classrooms

“The people here in reform in Arkansas are much further ahead than I had anticipated,” [Virginia Walden Ford] said. “I fought the D.C. fight so … I’m very much a realist. But this is what I’m seeing. I’m quite excited about it. I don’t think it’s going to be easy … but it’s on the minds of people now, legislators and citizens, that we have to change something.”…

Earlier this year, she started the Arkansas Parent Network, which aims to better inform parents about what school choice options they have and don’t have. It’s also teaching a more fundamental lesson, she said – that it’s okay to stand up and demand better for your kids.

“We know when parents have the right information to advocate for their children, it’s really empowering,” Walden Ford said. “Those are the lessons I learned that I want to share in Arkansas.”

RedefineEd’s Ron Matus, learning about what could happen in the Diamond State from the longtime Parent Power activist who sparked reform in D.C. two decades ago. And Ford’s example exemplifies the importance of political and grassroots mobilization in advancing the transformation of American public education.

These challenges illustrate that there is no silver bullet solution… But that’s exactly why teachers are more essential than ever —because they can do so much to empower students, and to give them the tools they need to navigate a tough environment. Across the country we see examples of dedicated, talented teachers who lead their students to success despite long odds. They walk into their classrooms, determined to reach every last child, no matter what it takes. It’s great teachers that give us our great confidence that every child—regardless of circumstance—can learn.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Allan Golston, explaining why overhauling our system of recruiting, training, evaluating, and compensating teachers is more important than the NEA or AFT want to admit.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, RiShawn Biddle observes the politically craven behavior of politicians in Connecticut, Alabama, and Washington State, bending to the will of NEA and AFT affiliates — and challenges reformers to fully embrace politics. It will take more than crafting policies to force politicians fearful of teachers’ union influence to do what’s best for our children.

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.

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