Our K-12 system largely still adheres to the century-old, industrial-age factory model of education. A century ago, maybe it made sense to adopt seat-time requirements for graduation and pay teachers based on their educational credentials and seniority… But the factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century….the legacy of the factory model of schooling is that tens of billions of dollars are tied up in unproductive use of time and technology, in underused school buildings, in antiquated compensation systems, and in inefficient school finance systems.

Rethinking policies around seat-time requirements, class size, compensating teachers based on their educational credentials, the use of technology in the classroom, inequitable school financing, the over placement of students in special education—almost all of these potentially transformative productivity gains are primarily state and local issues that have to be grappled with.

These are tough issues. Rethinking the status quo, by definition, can be unsettling. But I know that these discussions will be taking place in the coming year in schools, in districts, in union headquarters, in statehouses, and the governor’s mansion. The alternative is to simply end up doing less with less. That is fundamentally unacceptable.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, proclaiming during yesterday’s American Enterprise Institute conference that the status quo in American public education has to change. Well, it needs more than that: A revolution, not an evolution.

Photo courtesy of the Schott Foundation for Public Education

As Research Consultant for the Schott Foundation for Public Education, Michael Holzman has helped shed light on the impact of low teacher quality and systemic academic failure on the educational and economic prospects of young black men. Through his research, Holzman and Schott have done plenty to show in numbers the depths of the nation’s dropout crisis: Few young black men are graduating from school; far too many are being relegated into special education (and placed on the path to dropping out); and that in many urban districts, young black men are subject to the kind of educational abuse that would lead to incarceration for school officials and teachers if it were actual physical abuse. Along with Robert Balfanz, Jay P. Greene and Christopher Swanson, Holzman is one of the leading figures in revealing the nation’s educational decay.

Dropout Nation wondered what reformers such as Holzman were thinking these days, what are some of the surprising conclusions they have reached, and what they think about what’s happening inside the Beltway when it comes to school reform. The result is a new series, Three Questions on School Reform. Holzman offers some of his thoughts below. Read them, give them some thought and, if you so choose, comment and offer your own conclusions:

1) What is the one surprising thing you have uncovered during your research on special education and over-labeling of children as learning disabled and why?

Male African-American students are systematically over-labeled as Mentally Retarded in most districts.  In some cases this reaches levels five to ten times the percentage of male White, non-Latino males.  As percentages of non-institutionalized mental retardation in any large population are approximately the same, this over-labeling seems to be caused by district policies or staff training deficiencies.

2) How is black male academic failure and special ed connected and why?

Given that male African-American students are under-represented in gifted/talented programs in most districts, and very under-represented in Advanced Placement classes, it appears that racial and gender stereotyping takes place in those districts, to the great detriment of opportunities for learning for male African American, and, to a lesser extent, female African American and both male and female Latino and American Indian students.

3) What is the one thing school reform activists inside the Beltway seem to ignore when it comes to addressing education and youth issues and why?

Equal opportunity to learn includes opportunities during traditional k-12 class-time and beyond.  All schools should be equally well-supported, without regard to location and family income.  This means that real estate tax-based school finance methods are inherently inequitable.  It means that variations in the quality of facilities, curriculum and teaching staffs among schools within large districts cannot be rationally justified.  It means that the distribution of students through assignment or “voluntary” methods, as with charters and public school choice, are only equitable when the child least able to protect him/herself is protected by the adults responsible for the schools.

It also means that the educational investments available to the children of middle class families should be provided for children living in poverty by those adults responsible for the schools.  Such investments include 0-3 pre-literacy activities (such as library programs for toddlers), pre-kindergarten programs preparing children for schooling, all-day kindergarten, after-school and summer academic programs, throughout elementary and secondary school.

Another issue, which is not well-framed in most policy discussions is the connection between inadequate schooling and incarceration.  This is not merely a school to prison pipeline.  It is a feedback loop.  As astonishing numbers of male African Americans are imprisoned, it follows that between one-third and half of African American children grow up in poverty, raised by their mothers without financial contributions from their imprisoned fathers (or fathers whose income possibilities have been impaired by involvement with the courts and prisons).

Poverty is a major negative factor in regard to educational achievement, limiting the time of the parents as first teachers, limiting out-of-school educational investments, increasing the likelihood of enrollment in inferior schools.  And limited educational achievement, especially for male African Americans, is highly likely to lead to prison.

There are two lines of work that can break this cycle:  1) End the inequitable targeting of African Americans for drug law infractions; 2)  Make educational investments equitable.

Check out the Dropout Nation Twitter feed for instant news and updates on the reform of American public education. Here are some select tweets from March 13th:

• RT @ELWATERS: “A child has instincts. He knows If you love him or if you don’t.” ~@DrStevePerry 03/13/10 Hbg, PA #
• RT @ClaytonMuhammad: ‘Choice, not chance, determines your destiny’ ~ Aristotle #
• RT @mickeyrevenaugh: RT @tcnixon: If Rip Van Winkle woke up today, the only thing he would recognize is education. #edtech #onlinelearning #
• RT @Edubeat: America’s high school graduation rate ranks 19th in the world. (Forty years ago, it was number one.) #edreform #edpolicy #edgap #

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Given the array of plays on the Indiana U.S. Senator’s name — including some of my own reports — I’ll shy away from the pile-on amid his decision to end his re-election bid. But Bayh’s exit does give one pause about the role he has played, not only in American politics (and especially in the Hoosier State), but in helping to re-shape how the nation measures academic performance and emphasizes rigor and data over guesswork and academic failure.

For the most part, Bayh’s role in this was incidental. Save for championing some odd policy or two, education was an afterthought for him. The earliest school reform efforts came before Bayh’s tenure as Indiana Governor in the late 1980s thanks to a group that included then-state superintendent H. Dean Evans and future state House Republican leader Brian Bosma.  The most direct impact he had on education wasn’t even on  policy itself, but on a move back in the mid-1990s to address the state’s perpetual deficit in its teachers pension. Although Bayh and his main successor, Frank O’Bannon, helped decided to use funds from the Hoosier Lottery to pay down those deficits and fully fund the pension, it didn’t work. Indiana’s teachers pension is currently $10 billion under water.

One indirect legacy lies not with Bayh himself, but with his onetime chief of staff, Bart Peterson. After becoming Indianapolis’ first Democrat mayor in four decades, Peterson struck a blow for school reform and school choice when he successfully battled his fellow Democrats in Indiana’s statehouse to become the first mayor in the nation to authorize charter schools. Whatever Peterson’s other flaws as a politician (namely a lack of focus on quality-of-life issues), he remains a pathbreaker in education reform through his founding of the Mind Trust, one of the leading incubators of education reform solutions in the nation.

Bayh’s most-important school reform legacy was rather incidental. It came during his last two years  in the governor’s office when he appointed one of his aides, a former state legislator (and onetime candidate for state schools superintendent) by the name of Stan Jones, to the state’s Commission for Higher Education. At the time, the agency did little more than serve as the sounding board for the state’s higher ed policymaking and presenting budgets to the legislature.  What Jones managed to do over the next 13 years set the path for how education policymakers — both in the Hoosier State and throughout the nation — should approach systemic reform.

Even before the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, Jones was among the first to call for reform of the state’s high school graduation rate calculation, which had been so inaccurate for so long that perpetual failing school districts such as Indianapolis Public Schools were allowed to post graduation rates of 95 percent and higher (even when it was more likely that they were graduating a mere 50 percent of freshman in four years). Not only did Jones call for replacing the old graduation rate calculation with a new one, with the help of one editorial board (on which I served) and a smattering of state leaders, Jones spent much of his tenure battling school districts, his fellow Democrats and even the state’s longtime education superintendent (and longtime foe) Suellen Reed to make it happen.

More importantly, along with the state’s Chamber of Commerce and Derek Redelman (a once-and-future Chamber executive who once, oddly enough, helped Reed beat Jones in winning the superintendent’s job), Jones began rallying state officials — including Bayh’s successor, Frank O’Bannon, Joe Kernan and Mitch Daniels — and business leaders to begin addressing Indiana’s most-pressing educational issues. He helped transform a politically-driven state college into a network of community colleges where high school graduates who weren’t ready for the rigors of Indiana University and Purdue could get prepared.  He began addressing the reality that the Hoosier State — home to the university that hosts the nation’s second-largest foreign student population (and another whose international tentacles extend into Asia) — couldn’t even assure that more than a quarter of its high schoolers were attending college.

These days, Jones is working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to address the nation’s problems of low college attendance and completion. But his past work has an impact far in Indiana and beyond. These days, state schools superintendent Tony Bennett — who may be the most-successful state schools chief executive in the nation — has to thank Jones for paving the way for Bennett’s own efforts to address teacher quality and end social promotion. Outside of Indiana, the work on graduation rates — along with the pioneering research of Jay P. Greene, Robert Balfanz and Christopher Swanson — is the underlying reason why President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top effort is gaining traction.

Bayh hasn’t exactly done much since on education policy. He hasn’t even been much of a presence in the debate over No Child or Race to the Top. But let’s give him credit for picking the men who cared about school reform and improving the lives of America’s children.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I analyze President Barack Obama’s efforts to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act and argue why neither he — nor school reformers — should bother with reauthorization this year. Pursuing reauthorization may allow for Obama to put his finishing touches on the law, but not without exposing it — and himself — to battles between reformers and defenders of traditional public education that he isn’t likely to overcome.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, while profiling one of  America’s worst school districts, I explain how the failures of every school district isn’t just a problem of teachers unions. School leadership at every level is critical in turning around dropout factories, the academic failure mills that feed into them, and the school districts that operate them all.

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 and the Education Podcast Network.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download