On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss what parents, grassroots activists and men — including fathers and uncles — can do to stem the achievement gaps and literacy crisis among our young black, white and Latino men. We can’t stem the nation’s dropout crisis (and overall education crisis) until we address the low levels of literacy among our young boys and men — and reform the poor reading instruction in American public education.

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.

“One of the big problem in this industry is the whole human capital chain… can be improved… A great teacher in a dysfunctional school or a great school in a dysfunctional district isn’t going to affect the change we need. We need to change the whole system.” — Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff, Joanne Weiss, on improving how education recruits, develops and deploys talent.

“Made in America still means something… [But] we need to educate every child so that we can maintain the quality of life we have.” — U.S. Trade Representative (and former Dallas Mayor) Ron Kirk at the National Urban League Conference’s business dinner.

“What does [high-quality education] mean at the end of the day? We need to do a real better job of explaining what a high-quality education should look like.” — Byron Garrett, CEO of National PTA, on empowering parents, during a panel discussion about innovation in charter schools.

“We have not just written off kids in special education, but by association, teachers in special education. It’s a travesty.” — Kate Walsh of the National Council on Teacher Quality, discussing the low quality of teacher training at ed schools.

“States have been setting the bar artificially low, everywhere, for the past decade. This isn’t news… Standards aren’t the problem. Low standards are the problem.” — Derrell Bradford of New Jersey’s  E3 on the chatter about low cut scores in New York State.

“Parents can’t wait. They see pockets of educational excellence and ask why it can’t be everywhere—when their children have only one chance for an education.” – U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan before the National Urban League’s conference, on why old-school civil rights activists can’t keep offering their old paradigm for improving education.

Observations on what is happening in school reform today:

Fizzled Out of Touch: Last week, the NAACP and other groups pronounced that they were coming out with a grand manifesto challenging the Obama administration’s school reform efforts. Folks such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson of the Rainbow/PUSH coalition were to show up and complain about how the administration’s approach to education was failing the very poor students it was supposed to help — even though their own prescriptions were little more than overheated old-school concepts that have never worked in the past 40 years. But by Monday, two of the groups — including one run by charter school supporter Al Sharpton — declined to participate in the grand attack. The manifesto (which did have some laudable goals) was trashed by all but the most-stubbornly pro-status quo of pundits. And by Thursday, some of the players were declaring that they were behind Obama while the administration — including the president and  U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan –  took turns slapping around the groups over policy.

Certainly the Obama administration did a successful behind-the-scenes effort of diffusing the old-school civil rights tirade. The lack of support for the manifesto from the National Council of La Raza and other Latino civil rights outfits also weakened their efforts. But it was more than that.

Within Black America, there is a lot of disagreement between old-school civil rights players — who continue to see integration, busing and equity lawsuits as the cure for achievement gaps between blacks and whites — and the younger generation of African-Americans, who understand that more-systemic reforms (including breaking ranks with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers) is critical to black economic and social advancement. This generational and attitudinal divide (which has only become louder in the past couple of years) has resulted in many of the groups becoming irrelevant in the school reform conversation — and the discussion about improving the lives of African-Americans overall.

The NAACP, in particular, can no longer claim to be representative of all African-Americans — especially on education. It has spent most of the past two decades dealing with internal discord and overcoming its creakiness. Over the past two weeks, it has seen its stature fall further as it rushed to judgment over Shirley Sherrod and spent more time on racist elements within the Tea Party movement than on considering Duncan’s demand for them to join the school reform movement. As more blacks — especially celebrities such as John Legend and Fantasia — have become more-supportive of charters and the Race to the Top initiative, they are finding other organizations and methods to wield influence and mobilize like-minded colleagues (of all races) towards their own concerns. They have cut the NAACP out of their considerations.

Meanwhile other old-school civil rights groups are rife with constituencies who are charter school supporters — and in fact, started their own schools; integration-minded constituents can rile up anger all they want, but the groups can’t afford to alienate school reformers within their own groups without endangering their own pockets. When it comes to Obama — the nation’s first black president — the groups must also be careful, especially since some of its leading members (such as Jackson) were none too fond of him back when he was a U.S. Senator (and in some cases, didn’t even back him during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination against Hillary Clinton).

For these groups to remain relevant, they must adapt the school reform agenda, as the United Negro College Fund has done under Michael Lomax (who sits on the board of the Education Equality Project); the 100 Black Men is another example; , it cofounded the Eagle Academy Foundation, which operates two boys-only charters in New York City. If they don’t, they will face more than another Chicago-style tongue-lashing from the Commander-in-Chief.

Still Not Fessing Up Save for the back-and-forth between Andy Rotherham and Michael Petrilli, inside-the-Beltway education sparring tends to be done politely in dry language (and more viciously during drinking sessions). But on Thursday, the Center for American Progress’ presentation of its report on the low quality of teacher training programs brought out a battle royal between the American Association  of Colleges for Teacher Education — the leading trade group for the nation’s ed schools — and the leading critical of ed school training of teachers (and, nearly everything else about how teachers are recruited, retained and paid), the National Council on Teacher Quality.

After NCTQ boss Kate Walsh tore into ed schools for lacking rigor in their teacher training curricula — especially in special education — and state teacher certification agencies for their cozy ties to those schools and their parent universities, AACTE’s Jane West accused Walsh of making “sweeping statements” that were “off the mark”, as well as attacked its underlying methodology for evaluating ed schools (especially in Texas, the site of NCTQ’s latest ode to teacher quality failure). West then went on to praise the quality of special ed teacher training — and went on a tirade about the school reform movement’s failures to address special ed overall.

So as not to give the impression that Dr. West fully ignored the problems of ed school training, she did admit that there are issues. But she largely laid their causes at the feet of state legislatures (for laws that are restrictive about teacher data), school districts (for their unwillingness to share that information because of fears of violating FERPA), and the lack of political will to shut down poor-performing programs. But there are problems with those excuses. Ed Crowe, the author of the CAP study, reminded West that other professions — including medicine and nursing — took strong efforts to improve training and certification long-before state regulators got into the game. Besides, as Crowe said, “political will isn’t a gift”, groups gain it as a result of doing the hard work to gain consensus (or steamroll opponents).

By the way, don’t forget that AACTE is a huge recipient of funds from the National Education Association — the most-fervent obstacle to teacher quality reforms — including the use of student test data in teacher evaluations (which AACTE members would also use in their own evaluations). This includes $252,262 in 2008-2009 alone.

Meanwhile, Dr. West seems to forget that NCTQ’s research stands up to scrutiny — especially when one considers the evaluations of ed schools by others. This includes CAP — whose report is blistering in its criticism of ed schools — and Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College, who noted that 54 percent of teachers are trained at schools with low admissions requirements. These issues have become more embarrassing as alternative teacher training outfits such as Teach For America have emerged as the high-quality teacher training regimes of choice for school districts. As Walsh — who wants ed schools to actually turn around their performance — noted: “Most superintendents are eager to hire [Teach For America's] bright young talents.”

What ed schools fail to realize is that it is their very desultory quality of training that has helped sustain the nation’s educational crisis. They are also the reason why teaching isn’t highly respected as a profession (even though teachers are highly beloved as individuals). By keeping their collective heads in the sand, ed schools are merely aiding their own slide into irrelevance and worse.

Given that Teach For America (along with The New Teacher Project) trains just 7,000 of the 200,000 or so new teachers who come into American public education every year, ed schools must stop the rhetorical shuck-and-jive. Or else they will end up being replaced by the alternatives.

Standing in the Shadows of Fail: Detroit lived up to its reputation as the place where common sense — and care for the futures of children — goes to die. Despite the efforts of Mayor Dave Bing and even U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan, the city council voted 6-to-3 to not place upon the ballot a referendum that would have placed Motown’s atrocious school district under mayoral control. Why? Some, including onetime acting mayor and former city council president Ken Cockrel, declared there was no public demand for it.

Now, one apparently hasn’t been reading the local papers, or looking outside. But this doesn’t matter. From day one, seven of the nine council members were opposed to mayoral control. The current city council president declared it publicly. Old-school groups (who form the base for these members) were opposed to it, as were the school board (which hasn’t had control of the district since it fell under state receivership last year). They essentially opposed reform in spite of decades of evidence that the public school system is the new Superfund Site of American public education.

So let’s be clear about this: Once again, Detroit’s city council behaves irresponsibly towards its citizens — especially its children — because its majority has lost site of what matters most: The children who must attend this atrocity of a school system. For these politicians, the discussion about mayoral control is just another game. But for the kids and their families, it’s a lot more than that. It’s their educational, economic and social destinies at stake. Perhaps the parents should exercise their power and send their children to any of the new charter schools being opened in the city in the coming years. And while they are at it, vote out the city council once and for all.

The woman currently at the head of these Gates Foundation efforts, Vicki Phillips, offered her thoughts earlier this week. Watch and consider her points on why traditional teachers compensation does little for improving the quality of education for children — especially those in the poorest communities.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss how poor-performing teachers damage the educational destinies of students, bring down the morale of their colleagues and foster the nation’s dropout crisis. The damage wrecked by ineffective teaching — and the culture of mediocrity they foster — is promoted and sustained by schools of education, collective bargaining agreements, state laws and cultures within districts.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network and Zune Marketplace.

A few observations on improving teacher quality in the dropout nation:

• More reasons for focusing on improving teacher quality in urban school systems: As University of Pennsylvania researchers Richard Ingersoll and Lisa Merrill points out in Educational Leadership, 45 percent of teacher turnover takes place in just a quarter of public schools — mostly, the urban systems that help spur the dropout crisis. Certainly part of the problem is the environments in which those teachers must work — which, as Martin Haberman notes, are challenged by systemic bureaucratic decay and incompetence — and the fact that far too many teachers coming out of the nation’s university schools of education are ill-equipped to work in those schools. But as we have seen with layoffs that are occurring (or about to happen)  in New York City and elsewhere, as much of the problem lies with reverse seniority (or last hired-first fired) policies that make it difficult to retain young talented teachers. New York City, for example, will have to get rid of 13 percent of the 30,000 new teachers it has hired in the last decade.  Dealing with all of these issues is critical to improving teacher quality in urban schools.
• Promoting their obsolescence? University schools of education often attempt to defend their woeful programs by arguing that alternative teacher training programs such as Teach For America are no more successful at training high-quality teachers. But you wonders if they realize that by making such a statement, they are also justifying the end of their existence. Given that aspiring teachers pay a high cost for attending ed schools — and attend TFA and other such programs for free — why wouldn’t they direct their attention away from ed schools? For school districts, especially urban systems plagued by low-quality teachers, TFA and other alternative preparation programs offer them sources of new high-quality teachers specially skilled for their needs.
• Perhaps we shouldn’t let Baby Boomer teachers retire: As someone suggested at Reason‘s Hit and Run blog in response to my latest column in The American Spectator, it may be cheaper to make it difficult for teachers to retire. After all once a teacher retires, the costs don’t disappear; the costs are merely switched over to the pension system, which districts must pay into anyway. This wouldn’t exactly help children or improve teacher quality. But it would help alleviate the long-term costs of deals between districts, states and affiliates of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers that have become too expensive for taxpayers to bear.
• The next battleground in the teacher quality wars won’t be Colorado (where the battle is already being waged) or in Florida (where the tenure reform bill SB 6 was vetoed by the pusillanimous and ambition-oriented Charlie Crist), but in Texas, where the National Council on Teacher Quality took aim at the quality of the state’s ed schools with a recent report. With more than 30 school superintendents backing NCTQ’s conclusions, expect one of the gubernatorial candidates to eventually propose reforms that go beyond the changes already enacted in the Lone Star State and in Indiana last year. Tying student test score data to teacher performance evaluations would also go a long way towards measuring the quality of ed school curricula and shutting down schools that don’t deserve to exist.

Update: Speaking of my point about ed schools and TFA, NYU Professor Jonathan Zimmerman used the traditional argument in his (admittedly, moderately pro-TFA piece) in his Los Angeles Times op-ed.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I offer a few reasons — and statistics — for why American public education must be reformed. Far too many children are either dropping out or leaving school unprepared for life in the real world. The numbers may shock you — and hopefully, will spur you into action.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network and Zune Marketplace.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I take a look at the effort in Florida to end teacher tenure and explain how that move, along with tying student test performance to teacher evaluations, are only two of many steps needed to improve the quality of academic instruction in America’s schools. Contrary to what some say, this isn’t a sign that public education is “under attack”. But these steps will be meaningless without addressing how teachers are trained and how districts manage human capital.

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

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss the reasons why improving the quality of America’s teaching corps is tantamount to improving student achievement and closing the achievement gap between blacks, Latinos and whites. Outliers such as the firing of 93 high school  teachers by the Central Falls, R.I., school district cover up the reality that teacher dismissals are rare and — thanks to state laws — often too costly to do.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network and Zune Marketplace.

New solutions must be undertaken if we want high-quality teachers in the classroom, especially in order to turn around the nation's dropout factories.

The dropout nation at a glance. Updated continuously throughout the day (new stories and updates marked with an *):

• Time for alternatives to teacher licensing? So suggests the San Francisco Chronicle, which peers into the licensing and test requirements for becoming a teacher in California and find it a tad onerous. The paper’s solution: Audition each teacher to see if they are qualified, something similar to the method teaching guru Martin Haberman uses to determine whether a teacher should be a candidate for his Star Teacher program.
• Although I agree with the Chron that the licensing requirements are a little much, the test-taking makes sense; you want teachers who have the subject-level competency needed in order to assure that every child gets a high-quality education. The real issue is that so much of teacher recruiting, training, licensing and recertifying in many states (actually, in all states to one degree or another) has little to do with actual instruction and subject-competency in the first place. Fifty-four percent of America’s teachers are trained in schools of education that are generally of low quality, according to former Teachers College president Arthur Levine in a 2006 report; the SAT score requirements are low as are other admission requirements, so the aspiring teachers (and the schools of education) are basically not ready for prime time. And most states don’t require teachers to actually take a subject-competency test before entering a teaching program; this means that many teaching students are coming in without having a strong knowledge base from which to educate students.
• Then there are the license renewal requirements: Thirty states require teachers to gain a master’s degree in order to have their licenses renewed; this, despite there being no research showing that earning an advance degree improves academic instruction or student academic performance, according to the most recent report by the National Council on Teacher Quality (disclosure, I am a co-author of the report). Eighteen states require districts to give raises to teachers based on additional graduate work, even though, again, there is no proof that such busywork will improve student learning. So teachers spend less time on improving their instructional skills and knowledge base and more time on gaining paper that will yield them better salaries and keep them employed. And you wonder why the quality of K-12 instruction is not where it should be.
• Teacher licensing should be focused on assuring that people with strong subject knowledge, polished in instruction and caring about children should be in the classroom. But this means restructuring schools of education, licensing renewal requirements and salary structures in order to make this happen. If you want more math and science teachers — both of which are in short supply — states must structure compensation to include salary differentials that can lure at least some aspiring math and science students into the field. At the same time, alternative teacher training programs that target baby boomer professionals looking for a second career after retirement, must also be part of the teacher supply landscape.
• *At the same time, the teacher compensation system — which rewards seniority and degree-accumulation over improving instructional method, subject-level competency and willingness to work with the hardest-to-teach students — must also be restructured. Simply raising salaries, as DC schools chieftain Michelle Rhee is attempting to do (in exchange for the elimination of tenure) isn’t enough. The problem isn’t simply a matter of money: There are shortages of teachers in math, science and special education positions; paying more for an indiscriminate number of teachers no matter their subject doesn’t solve the problem. Higher salaries need to be paid in high shortage positions while the entire compensation structure must be aimed towards improving instruction and knowledge base. Until those things are done, students will never get the kind of high-skilled teachers they need.
• *Speaking of Rhee: Fast Company has a profile of Rhee and her efforts to turn around the nation’s most pervasive academic failure complex. Thanks to Erin O’Connor and Critical Mass for the tip.
• Adding options for New York children: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg polishes up an otherwise mediocre legacy as mayor with his pioneering work on education; this time, he is expanding the range of school choices for the city’s students and parents. Eighteen new charter schools will open this year, reports the New York Times, adding to the 50 schools currently open for business; 51 charters have been started since Bloomberg took office seven years ago.
• Who should prevail in accountability: Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act seven years ago, California has insisted on operating two different accountability systems — the federal AYP mandates and the state’s own Academic Performance Index — that don’t fully match up with one another in terms of expectations and performance indicators. The state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office takes a look at both AYP and API and find them wanting. It, instead, wants an accountability system that focuses on how school districts actually get the schools they oversee — especially those that are dropout factories and academic failure mills — up to speed. [Update: Link fixed per Jacqui Guzman. Thanks Jacqui.]
• Why running a school district ain’t easy, Volume 500: The Monitor in the Mexican border town of McAllen, Tx., takes a look at the tenure of outgoing district superintendent Yolanda Chapa. From accusations of forcing out a predecessor to complaints about her not having a doctorate (as if having a graduate degree results in tip-top school leadership) to the programs she started, one gets the sense that Chapa will be happy to get out of dodge and let someone else handle the mess.