Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.

When it comes to the role of parents at the education decision-making table, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, school districts and folks such as Diane Ravitch think parents should be like kids: Barely seen and definitely not heard. If you don’t believe it, consider the reaction by the Compton Unified School District, the AFT’s local affiliate and such commentators as Valerie Strauss and Larry Ferlazzo to the move by parents at McKinley Elementary School to make use of California’s  Parent Trigger law and oust the district from management of the school.  From where the status quo folks stand, the McKinley parents exercising Parent Trigger are either dupes for nefarious charter school operators and evil, money-hungry foes of public education such as Ben Austin; or the parents are evil for daring to toss out decades of abysmal school management and classroom instruction. In their minds, it’s simply not possible for parents to actually be able to make their own choices.

Yet evidence abounds that when parents are highly-informed about the quality of education in their schools, driven to kick mediocrity and abysmal education to the curb, and given the tools to help their kids, they will certainly do so. Minorities and parents in high-poverty districts, for example, were more likely than middle-class parents to request a teacher for their child based on how teachers improved student achievement, according to a 2005 study by University of Michigan researcher Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren of Brigham Young University. The growth of the charter school movement, the continuing presence of Catholic schools, the growth of online and alternative education options such as Sylvan and Kaplan, and the work of such organizations as the State of Black CT Alliance in rallying support for school reform, are also signs that parents should be given their rightful places as kings and lead decision-makers in education.

Despite the evidence, the Ravitches and Ferlazzos  maintain an attitude that parents should stay at the kid’s table when it comes to actually making school decisions. And it isn’t limited to Parent Trigger. Whether one is in a middle class suburb or in a big city, the attitude is generally the same: Parents should stick to field trips, homework and taking blame when test scores and graduation rates are revealed to be abysmal or mediocre.

This is especially so in urban districts, where poor and minority parents — many of whom have suffered in the same dropout factories and failure mills their kids are now educationally imprisoned — are shunted aside as so much garbage. More often than not, many teachers look down at these parents as being their inferiors instead of treating parents as equals. The experience of Virginia Walden Ford, who launched the school reform movement in Washington, D.C., is echoed in a study by Sage Colleges professors Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg, who noted that urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.”

Certainly this attitude among the status quo is manifested in other ways: The opposition to charter schools among the Gary Orfield-Richard Kahlenberg crowd (most recently expressed in a Miller-McCune interview with Erica Frankenburg and Gary Miron) on the ground that they foster resegregation; Miron in particular, ignores the reality that parents seek charter schools as high-quality options by declaring that “parents choose based on race and social class”. Then there is the embrace of the Ruby Payne-promulgated poverty myth — that poor parents are simply incapable of playing strong roles in education — among teachers and administrators. The low regard for even middle class parents among teachers, who label these families as “Burger King Parents” and “The Grass is Always Greener” for daring to demand more on behalf of their kids.

Certainly the reality that the players within the status quo — teachers union bosses, ed school professors, school administrators and even many teachers — don’t want to give up their power and autonomy is one reason for this opposition to parent power. The other reason lies with their conceit (one they share with some school reformers) that experts should actually make education decisions. After all, an ed school professor and a teacher with an array of grad degrees should have more knowledge about what kids should learn (and how it should happen) than some parent. Yet, as we have seen over the past 150 years — from the comprehensive high school model (created because of the misguided belief that immigrants and African Americans were incapable of mastering college prep work) to the array of new math theories that have fallen flat and even the traditional system of teacher compensation — the experts aren’t so good at this thing called education. Combined with other problems among status quo circles — including the rampant anti-intellectualism, willful ignorance of economics and unwillingness to consider the developments in sectors outside of K-12 — and this conceited view of parents turns from mere condescension to outright hostility.

Yet the rise of the modern school reform movement — and the emergence of charter schools, school choice and Parent Trigger — has all but assured that parents will be playing a stronger role in education. The underlying infrastructure for exercising decision-making — easy access to useful information through guides, organizations or Web sites; actual mechanisms for exercising choice that exist outside of home purchases — is just coming into existence. Many parents are just beginning to realize that the old concept of education — that the school can educate every child without active engagement of families that goes beyond homework and field trips — has gone by the wayside. But as I wrote at this same time last year, the school reform movement (like the development of cellphones and other consumer goods) is fostering choice. And choice begets choice; once parents are exposed to having real power and engagement in school decisionmaking, they will not want the so-called experts — including NEA and AFT bosses and the Ravitches of the world — in their way.

What McKinley represents is a response to the status quo: How dare you argue that families can’t think for themselves! How dare you limit our kids only to the proverbial sky! And by the way: Work with us or get out of the way! You’re either part of a better future or just boulders to be pushed aside.

The hostility against parents among education’s status quo is essentially anti-children. What these experts are tacitly arguing is that the educational, economic and social destinies of kids — especially our poorest children — don’t matter a wit. It’s time for parents to shunt these folks aside and take the power that is rightfully theirs.

Watch this video from last year — long before the current debate over the role of civil rights groups (and their ivory tower allies among the Kahlenberg-Orfield crowd) in education — and consider whether the NAACP and other groups have outlived their usefulness. And, whatever your thoughts, how can they become relevant again.

The battle to improve education for blacks, minorities and the poor remains the same. But we can't fight it with the same approaches. (Photo courtesy of Salon)

Among the dominant themes in education this year is the debate over the importance of integration and desegregation in school reform. From the Gary Orfield-Richard Kahlenberg crowd launching rhetorical volleys against charter schools, to the battle between old-school civil rights groups and President Barack Obama, the question of whether education has swung too far from a goal of assuring that blacks, whites and Latinos sit together in classrooms and lunchrooms has become as much a discussion as Race to the Top and the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Certainly the question mostly arises from the battles over who will shape the reform of American public education (teachers unions and their allies versus school reformers) and how (charter schools versus magnet schools; competitive reform programs versus additional funding). But, as Education Next points out through its interview with Steve Rifkin and Susan Eaton, there is also whether or not we should continue to hold on to a noble ideal. For those who are dedicated to desegregation above all else, as Easton is, integrating all of society offers “untapped potential” to make society more diverse, add richness to our individual and collective social thinking, and even improve economic and social progress for all. After all, it is what civil rights activists of the 1960s always wanted. Right?

Not exactly. The ideals of the civil rights movement weren’t so much about bringing all children of different races and creeds together in order to promote a more-harmonious world. It may have been an ideal to which Martin Luther King may have appealed in order to win support from whites (and he clearly believed it himself). But for the rest of the movement (think Thurgood Marshall, Whitney Young and Malcolm X),  it wasn’t the goal. For civil rights activists, the primary mission was to allow for blacks and other minorities to be full members of the economic and social mainstream — that thing called equal opportunity under the law. This included improving the quality of education for black and minority children, who were segregated — both physically and fiscally — from what was then considered high-quality schools. They were tired of black students sitting in wretched school buildings, being unable to attend the best school near their homes, and not having up-to-date textbooks from which to study.

Desegregation and integration became the accepted means of achieving this goal for two reasons: The first being the realization that blacks wouldn’t achieve it immediately through the fiscal means (equal funding of schools) simply because segregationist whites controlled school boards and other political mechanisms . The second being that they thought that the way blacks would gain a better education (and greater entree into society) by merely rubbing shoulders with white kids and attending their schools.

Certainly integration achieved some good by helping middle class blacks gain greater access to society; but they, like their white middle class schoolmates,  were already guaranteed some level of it. But it didn’t do much for poor blacks or Latinos (or even for poor whites). These kids were already treated as afterthoughts by teachers in traditional public school classrooms in their neighborhoods; desegregation merely guaranteed that they would get desultory instruction and curricula in more-diverse classes.

Meanwhile minority neighborhoods suffered the consequences. Although there were some high-quality schools in those neighborhoods before desegregation, most of them were of the abysmal quality that led to Brown in the first place. Desegregation could have led to those schools getting what would have been for the time high-quality teachers and better school leadership if the civil rights leaders and school administrators were willing to do the work. This didn’t happen. Instead, the combination of busing, suburban flight, poor school district leadership and the economic malaise that took hold after the Great Society era led to these schools falling further into academic failure status (and that’s when they weren’t shut down altogether). As a result, minority neighborhoods — especially ones home to poor blacks — fell into wretched disrepair.

What civil rights leaders of the first generation (and the second-generation old-school activists who succeeded them and now head up the NAACP and other groups today) didn’t understand was that the segregation wasn’t the only cause of low quality of education for blacks in American public education — and not even the biggest culprit. The real problem was systemic: A public education system in which most teachers weren’t trained by ed schools to work with poor and minority children; the use of ability-tracking to segment students deemed worthy of college preparatory education from those (namely minorities, immigrants and the poor) considered too cognitively inferior for such work; and the comprehensive high school (which further exacerbated the effects of ability tracking); the concept of zoned schooling, which prevents parents from exercising choice (and exacerbates racial, ethnic and income-based segregation). These issues were easy to miss in part because of the lack of good data on school performance, and the reality that even for poor blacks, the lack of a high-quality education had less to do with precluding them from middle class-paying work than racial bigotry in the rest of society.

By the 1970s, these problems were exacerbated thanks to the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. The contracts they structured with districts (along with their successful lobbying efforts at the state level), gave veteran instructors wide berth in picking their teaching assignments; longtime teachers who didn’t want to work with the poorest children or those from racial minorities they may have deemed unteachable, could easily avoid them by selecting the more-middle class (and less racially- and economically-diverse) schools. Magnet schools, because they are often selective, require kids to be on the right ability track (and support from gatekeepers) to get into them, and warehouse high-quality teachers from the rest of the school district, could never solve these problems.

Within the past 40 years, we have figured out most of the systemic problems and their underlying causes. Solving them requires a far different approach than simply integrating school populations (or simply increasing school funding, as the equity lawsuit crowd would prefer). The approach must be different: The traditional system of teacher compensation and seniority-based benefits must be changed in order to bring high quality teachers to schools serving poor and minority communities; charter schools and other school choice options must be expanded in order to provide every parent with a range of high-quality options to serve their children; families must also be given their proper role as kings and consumers in education decision-making; college preparatory curricula must be the floor — and not the ceiling — in every school throughout the nation in order to assure children that they will be prepared for the future.

The high levels of racial, ethnic and income segregation won’t cease in urban communities until school systems are of the high quality all parents — middle class and poor alike — demand. In suburban communities, segregation won’t stop until you make inter-district school choice — allowing parents to send their children anywhere they choose — a reality. This means opening the doors to school choice (as well as confronting suburban parents fast and hard about their prejudices). Old-school civil rights activists and their colleagues in the Orfield-Kahlenberg crowd must realize this — and also realize that they are reinterpreting civil rights history in ways that were never so.

Additionally, most minority parents have no interest in it. Since many of them were part of the very desegregation efforts of the past four decades, they recognize, as onetime busing supporter Charles Ogletree did, that integration is “a false promise”. As taxpayers, they have as much right as their wealthier counterparts to expect high-quality schools in their neighborhoods. More importantly, what is the point of a harmonious society when half of the population is poorly educated, likely to end up in prison, and will fall onto the welfare line? A nation in which a broad set of its population remains poor, uneducated and ghettoized will not remain harmonious for long.

Meanwhile the problems of race and ethnicity currently bubbling up these days — including the complex debate over Arizona’s immigration enforcement law — stem from problems that have long been part of the American political and social landscape. Immigration has been a lightning rod since 1882 when Congress passed the first round of immigration restrictions in order to stop Chinese migrants from coming to our shores. Racial and ethnic discrimination has been part of the American fabric for centuries longer. Education can help foster more-diverse mindsets; but it will take more than schools to deal with these deep-seeded legacies. Social integration can happen in other contexts (and already does); this will continue to happen as America becomes a majority-minority country. And what it means to be American isn’t defined by schools anyway; that’s why we have civic holidays such as Independence Day and rituals such as the Pledge of Allegiance.

This isn’t to say that desegregation and school reform cannot coexist. If anything, school choice could foster more diversity by opening opportunities for parents to send their children to schools anywhere they see fit, be it a traditional public school in the neighborhood, a magnet in another district, a local charter or even the Catholic diocesan school in the next neighborhood. School reformers — especially those working in the big cities and in the Beltway — also cannot forget about the importance of desegregation and integration. Expanding the minds and horizons of children is also important to their academic and social success; the lack of middle-class background knowledge, for example, may be the reason why many minorities perform poorly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the gatekeeper for college entrance. Working with organizations and cultural institutions to enrich their experiences (and broaden the perspectives of reformers themselves) is important to do and should be done.

But for the poorest parents and for minority families — whose options are often limited to the worst that American public education offers — they’ve seen desegregation and want something a lot better: Great schools for their kids and opportunities to learn in order to fully be a part of the American mainstream. And as committed as I am to a color-blind society, both in principle and in my own life, this middle-class black man can hardly disagree.

What are your thoughts? Feel free to comment.

Photo courtesy of the New York Daily News

With  old-school civil rights groups complaining about President Barack Obama’s embrace of the school reform movement — and its commitment to improving the quality of education for all children — listen to this Dropout Nation Podcast from February on why their approach to educational equity doesn’t work. The only way educational equity will actually be achieved for every child is by addressing how public education is structured — including giving parents their proper place as kings at the education decision-making table, and improving the quality of curricula in every school. Not only does this commentary apply to these groups, but to fellow-travelers such as the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player or smartphone.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why the NAACP, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center should abandon their tried and truly counterproductive approaches to improving equity and equality for the nation’s poor black and Latino children and embrace approaches offered by the school reform movement.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod or MP3 player. Also, subscribe to get the podcasts every week. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley and the Education Podcast Network.

Update: You can now download the Podcast from Zune Marketplace.

What’s happening today in the dropout nation:

1. When the National Education Association took control of the Indiana State Teachers Association last year, Association after the collapse of its insurance trust fund, it was more than just a colossal embarrassment of alleged financial mismanagement – and a loss of coverage for its 50,000 rank-and-file members. After decades of winning expensive compensation packages that have made teaching one of the best-paid professions in the public sector, the collapse of ISTA — along with $600 billion in pension deficits and underfunded retirement liabilities — exposes teachers unions to increased scrutiny — especially as taxpayers may end up on the hook for the unions’ failings. Read more about the collapse — and how it could help spur teacher compensation and quality reforms — in my latest Labor Watch report.
2. Tom Vander Ark sums up the problem with the Obama Administration’s decision to essentially gut the No Child Left Behind Act by eliminating its Adequate Yearly Progress provisions: Doing so will abandon the promise of assuring that every child no matter their race or economic status, can attend a great school staffed by high-performing teachers. Of course, as I hinted last week in The American Spectator, the administration may be doing this (along with boosting education spending for FY 2011) in order to placate the NEA and AFT, whose help they will need in order to keep control of Congress.
3. The folks behind The Lottery are rallying folks around an “Education Constitution” demanding teacher quality reforms, expansion of school choice and other reforms. Check it out and sign it.
4. The U.S. Department of Education releases a timely report on an important — if rarely-considered — use of school data: Improving teaching, staffing, student diagnostics and other matters at the district, school and even classroom levels. As I wrote last year in A Byte at the Apple, school data will only be the most useful once the information is delivered and made accessible in ways teachers, administrators and parents find appealing and useful. Right now, however, this is still a problem.
5. Speaking of useful data, the Consortium on Chicago School Research has a series of papers examining the on-time graduation progress of the Windy City’s high school students. Each of Chicago’s high schools are examined in depth. Read them. I am.
6. EducationNews is re-running another one of teaching guru Martin Haberman’s fine essays, this on whether the right people are entering teaching. Given the efforts to reform ed schools and weed out laggards before they even apprentice, the piece is as timely as ever.
7. And, with Gary Orfield’s study of charter school segregation gaining attention from newspapers and school reformers alike, Sonya Sharp of Mother Jones points out the one thing everyone forgets: Traditional school districts are just as segregated (and often, even more segregated) no matter where we go. Joanne Jacobs also offers a compendium of the arguments (including those by your friendly neighborhood editor). And, by the way, here is a piece I wrote a few years ago about diversity and public schools.
8. Intramural Sparring Watch: Big Edreform Andy #1 (also known as Andrew Rotherham) calls out This Week in Education‘s Alexander Russo (and his employer, Scholastic) for for allegedly running “hearsay” claims against Massachusetts’ education secretary, Paul Reveille, for his supposed intervention in the authorizing of a local charter school. Russo, by the way, has taken potshots against Rotherham and his folks at the Education Sector (which Rotherham, by the way, is leaving by the end of March) for years. Most recently, he accused EdSector of allegedly mucking around with a report authored by EdSector’s now-departed cofounder. Yeah, I’m exhausted from just writing about this.

Meanwhile, check out this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on the reauthorization of No Child, along with my pieces this week on charter schools and segregation. The next podcast, on civil rights activists and education reform, will be available on Sunday before the Super Bowl. And since you are all stuck inside, get your debate on.

Photo courtesy of Jose Vilson

While one appreciates Fordham’s Mike Petrilli for arguing that racial and ethnic integration in charter schools is as worthy a goal as it is in other aspects of American life,  there are a couple of problems with his overall argument.

The first? He involves a false assumption not based on evidence: That charter school operators aren’t necessarily interested in integration. This isn’t the case. If anything, as evidenced by National Alliance for Public Charter Schools President Nelson Smith’s response to Gary Orfield’s latest report decrying segregation in charters (or to be more precise, the latest study coming out of his Civil Rights Project at UCLA), charter school advocates definitely think integration is important. This is also true in the fact that most charters are open-enrollment, lottery-driven schools which are open to all comers so long as the children and the parents commit to being the active players in education decision-making they should be.

Petrilli also downplays the role of state charter legislation in fostering the segregation he and Orfield mutually decry. (It could be worse, of course: Orfield and company pretend this doesn’t even exist.) As I’ve noted, the likelihood of integration is as much dependent on the location- and demographic-based restrictions as it is on the choices of parents. As evidenced in Maryland and Virginia, the dual role of traditional districts as both public school operators and charter authorizers also means that charters are also less-likely to exist in suburban communities. Suburban districts abhor the presence of charters even more than their big-city counterparts. Until these barriers are eliminated, charter schools will continue to confined to the nation’s urban locales. And unless those cities manage to lure more whites from suburbia through sensible fiscal and quality-of-life policies, charters will also remain highly-segregated.

Certainly integration is a great benefit, both to society and to the people on an individual level. After all, I’ve spent most of my career arguing for a color-blind society and even, demanding that my fellow African-Americans stop placing themselves into ghettos intellectual and otherwise. Petrilli is correct in noting that, depending on the setting, integration can even help improve student academic achievement (as well as, to borrow from J. William Fulbright, promote mutual understanding). Eliminating restrictions on the growth of charters would greatly aid that goal. So would the expansion of school voucher plans, the abolition of intra-district zoning  and magnet school policies, the promotion of inter-district public school choice (by making school funding a state-level role), and even the expansion of grassroots groups aiding parents in education, be it the Black Star Project or the PTA.

But integration isn’t the only social good. More important to black and Latino families — especially my own — are opportunities to provide the best education for their children. Given the low graduation rates for blacks and Latinos — and the consequences of mass academic failure wrought upon these communities — integration becomes a secondary priority. These families can no longer wait for the benefits of integration, wonderful and enriching as they are, as their young men and women struggle in traditional public schools that treat them as afterthoughts.  They want — and deserve — the power to choose better options.

Photo courtesy of the New York Daily News

Dear Gary Orfield:

As someone who grew up in one of the better (of the admittedly abysmal) urban neighborhoods in America, I can tell you that many parents care greatly about the quality of education for their children. So when they see opportunities to escape woeful public schools — as in the case of Virginia Walden-Ford as a most-famous example — they will take it quickly.

This is the chief reason (along with the restrictions on the location, growth and even demographics placed by state legislators at the behest of teachers unions and suburban districts) why America’s public charter schools are mostly black and Latino, generally attended by they poor, and largely in big cities. It is also why there are some 39,000 New York City children waiting for seats in charters and why President Barack Obama is pushing states to end restrictions on their growth.

In some ways, this lack of diversity also explains the success many charters have had in bolstering the academic achievement of their largely at-risk student populations. Besides the attention given to kids in their mostly-small settings, the opportunity for children to see peers of their own race and color succeed academically — a reality that happens far too infrequently in traditional public schools — gives these children the sense of pride they need in order to succeed in school and in life. Certainly, we may all believe in a color-blind society, but most of us don’t think that the melting pot and racial pride are mutually exclusive.

When the cvil rights activists of five decades ago used to talk about “separate and unequal”, they were talking about a lack of equal funding for schools, the restrictions on black children to attend any kind of school they wanted — majority white or otherwise — and ultimately, fulfill their academic and economic destinies without barriers codified into law. Most of those racial barriers have been brought down (although some of the issues of funding still do exist, partly because of the neglect of “broken windows” by generations of big-city leaders, along with their economic decisions  to grant tax abatements and other deals that have reduced much-needed tax revenue). But the political and political barriers — including woeful public school bureaucracies; gamesmanship by districts with Title I funding; and zoning and “magnet school” policies that favor wealthier families — still exist.

These, along with the sclerosis within public education systems makes it more critical than ever to give poor urban families as many choices as possible to escape the worst traditional schools. They don’t care about the segregation they knowledgeably choose; their concern is about the quality of education for the children they love. They truly understand that for which Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were fighting. Choices of great schools, traditional, charter or private, both in their neighborhoods and outside of them without restriction.

In other words: Urban parents don’t care about so-called civil rights activists who work in ivory towers, live in suburbs, release reports on “segregation” just in time for Black History Month (wink, nudge), and avoid the worst American public education offers on a daily basis.

And Mr. Orfield (and you too, Richard Kahlenberg), they mean you.

What the dropout nation is reading about:

1. John Fensterwald notes some new teachers union antics on the Race to the Top front. The NEA’s California affiliate and its locals are intoning to districts that they shouldn’t sign the memorandums of understanding required to receive Race funds. Other NEA and AFT affiliates will likely take similar steps — or even offer their own alternate visions (as seen in Pennsylvania) as other state legislatures ignore their lobbying and entreaties.
2. Meanwhile in Tennessee, outgoing Gov. Phil Bredeson is pushing to use student test score data in evaluating teacher performance in a special session. The state’s largest teachers union has its own thoughts. Of course.
3. By the way, my American Spectator colleague, Joseph Lawler, offers his own skeptical thoughts about Race to the Top, looking at Massachusett’s reform efforts (which may soon sit on Gov. Deval Patrick’s desk).  In Kentucky, the Bluegrass Policy Institute takes aim at state legislators for offering a Trojan Horse version of Race reforms (HT to EducationNews). And Jamie Davis O’Leary looks at what he describes as Ohio’s embarrasing Race reform plans.
4. James Guthrie takes some time at Education Next to assess whether school reform is actually happening. He has his answer. I would say that it is happening, but still incomplete.
5. Monise Seward is none too pleased with the results from the Southern Education Foundation’s report on public education in the southern states. Her biggest issue: “the correlation between minority status and/or poverty with low academic expectations by the ‘experts’ and public education institutions.” The lack of discussion about over-diagnosis of black and Latino males (along with white males) is particularly jarring to her.
6. At the New York Review of Books, David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow read over the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics’ report on sex abuse in juvenile prisons and jails. Let’s just say that they are more shocked by the evidence than yours truly. If anything, America’s juvenile justice system is sometimes even more shameful in the pervasive neglect, abuse and denial of due process rights to children than the woeful public schools this publication covers.
7. EdTrust releases their report on addressing achievement gaps in the age of Race to the Top and No Child. From its perspective, it isn’t enough to just close the gap. More thoughts from yours truly this weekend.
8. Mike Antonucci notes that the president of the AFT’s California affiliate has some choice thoughts about parents who support the newly-enacted “parent trigger” in the state’s Race to the Top-driven school reforms passed yesterday. No comment.
9. This headshaker of the week comes from the News Leader in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. And the lack of thought starts at the headline: “We can’t let charter schools steal funds from public education.” Pardon me, but public charter schools are part of the public education system, right? Or am I — and virtually everyone else covering education — just dreaming?
10. While Michigan politicians aren’t even considering handing over control of Detroit’s traditional district to Mayor Dave Bing, Wisconsin is still picking over whether Milwaukee’s mayor will gain control over that city’s public schools. As reported in the Journal-Sentinel, one parent opposed to mayoral control asks: “How in the world does excluding parents from selecting their school leadership encourage them to participate in the education of their children?” Everyone in the hearing savvy about the politics of school boards elections likely laughed under their breath and paid him no more mind.
11. And finally, the debate between education civil rights activists such as Gary Orfield and the charter school movement over diversity in charters is the subject of my latest National Review report. As I hinted at in the piece, it’s easy for those in the ivory tower to go on and on about diversity when they have the choice to not send their children to the nation’s worst dropout factories and academic failure mills. Integration only works if the schools are of the kind that all children can achieve their respective educational destinies.