An army of families are ready to overhaul public education. Will Beltway school reformers join them and get their hands dirty?

And no, I don’t mean the occasional trip to observe a high-achieving charter school or even to watch Geoffrey Canada and Steve Barr do their respective work at the grassroots level. Save for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (which does authorize charter schools in Ohio) and some work by the Education Trust, school reformers in the Beltway generally stay out of the grassroots game. In the process, they aren’t serving themselves — or our children and families — as well as they should.

As I discussed in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, there are 51 million households — single mothers, grandparents caring for kids, and immigrant families — ready to be rallied around improving American public education. While many of these parents live in the nation’s big cities, they are also in rural communities and in suburbia (where the standards and accountability measures in the No Child Left Behind Act have shown clearly that many of the schools there aren’ bastions of high quality instruction and curricula). Most of these families are dissatisfied with the quality of education their children are offered and are dismayed by the unwillingness by many within traditional public education to treat them as the leading partners in education decision-making. As seen with the tremendous growth of charter schools within urban communities and even in films such as The Lottery, these families will support school reform with their feet and with their voices.

Grassroots-focused school reformers such as Barr, Canada and Phillip Jackson, along with charter school outfits such as Green Dot and KIPP (the subject of a Washington Post editorial today) and Teach For America, have managed to further the reach of some elements of school reform among these households. But for school reform movement to sustain its solutions, more of them must be on the ground working with what former Urban League president Hugh Price would call these impromptu activists. Yet the Beltway-based reformers — the ones most-associated with school reform — aren’t getting their hands dirty on the ground where it counts.

In some sense, this is understandable. Developing and rallying groups around public policy is their specialty — and they have largely succeeded in winning over Capitol Hill policymakers and White House officials. But it’s not the only reason. As evidenced by the Brookings Institution’s less-than-thoughtful study on the effectiveness of the Harlem Children’s Zone, far too many reformers ignore the importance of working with families on child development and other issues. For many within the Beltway education reform community, policymaking is rather easy work; it can be painful (in terms of policy development, building alliances and hashing out compromises), but easy to do because it doesn’t require getting the hands dirty on the ground.

As Barr would point out, working with communities and families is difficult work. It requires lots of listening to concerns, providing lots of resources (including precious time), and moving quickly on the dime (think tanks aren’t known for lightning speed in getting anything done). Add in the messiness of families — many of which are struggling with a litany of other issues — and suddenly, this grassroots activity work gets rather, well, unglamorous.

But Beltway school reformers forget that policy is meaningless without successful implementation. This includes winning the hearts and minds of parents and community players — who are given more attention by the status quo even as they also rip their children off educationally and economically. It also involves working with grassroots activists and even churches, who have the networks to make in-roads. The reformers have already seen this through the work of the charter school movement, which has managed to even win over such folks as the Rev. Floyd Flake and Al Sharpton. Imagine if they rallied those same groups around teacher quality reforms, Common Core curricula and other prescriptions for reforming schools?

When coalesced around important goals, networks within communities can accomplish plenty and successfully challenge the status quo. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s exemplified that on one level; so did the array of networks assembled by Booker T. Washington at the end of the 19th century. Then there are the networks that exist within communities of interests such as the modern conservative movement and the environmental movement of the past decade. A committed group of people working together can accomplish plenty. This is critical for school reformers in the Beltway to understand.

Certainly the school reform movement has weakened the hand of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. Maintaining that upper hand, however, will require the very assets the NEA and AFT have in spades: Bodies on the ground. While the NEA and AFT are struggling internally — especially as younger generations of teachers agitate for the end of traditional teacher compensation systems — they still have member loyalty (for now). This means that the unions can rally their rank-and-file members to serve as lobbyists at the state and local levels.

The political campaigning of groups such as Democrats for Education Reform is laudable. So is the effort to lobby and work on policymaking at the state level (an approach that, until now, was only successfully embraced by Achieve Inc.). But it isn’t enough.  To counter the manpower advantage held by defenders of traditional public education such as the NEA and AFT, school reformers — especially Beltway-based players — need to be working the community centers, church pews, and the extensive local networks.

There are 51 million families waiting to join forces with Beltway reformers. Now it’s time for the wonks to get off K Street and join them.

Just because schools are shutting down for summer doesn’t mean families can’t expand their role as consumers — and kings — in education decision-making. Check out the first-ever Dropout Nation Podcast from this past December, which focused on how Race to the Top affects the role parents must play in the new education paradigm and what school reformers must do to accommodate the interests of parents in their policymaking efforts.  Then read Phillip Jackson’s Three Questions on the role black families must play in school reform). Afterward, play your part in parent power.

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

And this Sunday, listen to the next Dropout Nation Podcast — Building Ties Between Teachers and Students: The Hidden Potential of Technology in Education.

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Choice is no panacea. But as seen in the consumer products market, choice can help spur innovation. Let's try this in education.

Back in December 2009, when this piece was written, the efforts to enact Parent Trigger legislation in California had just made it through its first round and charter schools hadn’t yet come under its latest array of criticism from the Gary Orfield crowd. And before events such as the protest by New York City parents (and tort filed) against the shutdown of 19 schools made one wonder about whether parents should even be allowed at the table.  In any case, this piece once again makes the point clear that family engagement in schools cannot be limited to field trips and homework. If school reform is to make any long-term impact — and if America’s public education system is to improve — parents must be the key decisionmakers in education. Even amid bad choices by parents, their participation is crucial.

I will offer more thoughts this weekend in the latest Dropout Nation Podcast.

If Calif. State Sen. Gloria Romero succeeds in allowing  parents in the state to to replace administrators and teachers at their schools (or convert the schools into charters), it will be an amazing step. Same is true if discussions in New Jersey about expanding its inter-district choice program come to pass. And the  federal Race to the Top initiative could provide even more options to parents — especially those stuck with sending their children to the worst urban school systems.

At the same time, these events offer an opportunity to consider what education policy — and America’s education system itself — should look like in the next half-century. And the answer is: Similar to the markets for consumer products everyone enjoys.

Few sectors in the American public or private sector are as dominated by experts, technocrats and lobbyists as education. From the development and approval of curricula to the kind of schools children can attend, the decisions are based, much consideration is given to what some adults want, how some adults want to be paid, national economic and social priorities, and occasionally, what children actually need. Every now and then, what children and their parents want does come into play. But this a rare event.

But imagine if children (and to be honest, their parents) actually could choose the kind of schools they want to attend, select the curricula that they will learn, even whether they will attend a neighborhood school or a manicured campus in suburbia? It would be difficult to figure out the direction of education at that point; after all, parents use schools as much for social-climbing and instilling their own values as they do for providing the most-rigorous education possible for their children. But it would be interesting: Perhaps “education villages” — where hipsters-turned-parents and single mothers can stay in the city and still gain the best of suburbia — would spring up in the heart of Atlanta. Or children otherwise deemed troublemakers in the traditional public school settings of today will learn in classes where the instructional day is compacted for more efficiency (and thus, less time for having to sit in class wasting time as likely to happen for students in Chicago).

These thoughts come as the Wall Street Journal presents its chart on the 25 largest companies in the world at the end of this decade. As pointed out by William Easterly (who spends his time criticizing foreign aid), only eight of the top 25 companies at the end of the 1990s kept their places by the near-end of 2009. Only six tech firms made up the top 25 versus 13 at the end of the 1990s; the tech firms on the list range from old-school software crossing into videogames and consumer wares (Microsoft) to handy cloud computing and search (Google), to a company that managed to switch gears and helped complete the personal technology revolution began by the Sony Walkman (Apple Computer).

Certainly, many of the companies knocked off the list had merged into other companies or went bust altogether; others just seen declines or stagnation in their market value. But mergers and market value losses represent a reality that these companies didn’t cater to their consumer markets. Notes Easterly: “Creative destruction is one of the triumphs of the market. The consumer is king: in 2009… The radical uncertainty of how to please consumers is an argument FOR free markets.”

At this moment, American public education is undergoing its own peculiar form of creative destruction, as education reformers and a smattering of parents — armed with data, research and political power — are forcing defenders of the status quo (teachers unions, schools of education, and school districts) to accept the need for effective change. As Fordham’s Checker Finn points out, reformers are slowly being forced to admit that their longstanding conceits also need updating (and more often than not, ditching altogether).

Yet, as I’ve pointed out over and over, the reformers must also rid themselves of their faith in expertise. They must begin to embrace the grassroots and, more importantly, accept that children and their parents must have more than just a seat at the table of decisionmaking. They must be the decisionmakers, period, and anything less just won’t do.Why? Because the nature of the reforms being proposed, promoted and legislated — all of which  involves choice, consequences and accountability — requires active participation from parents, and therefore, their support.

Choice begets choice; this is true when it comes to cellphone plans and this is also happening in education. The advent of Milwaukee’s school voucher plan in the early 1990s didn’t foster widespread development of vouchers. But the program, along with the charter school movement, has spurred the interest among parents in the kind of choice initiatives being considered in these states (and may likely become reality in the Los Angeles Unified School District). Once parents are exposed to having real power and engagement in school decisionmaking, they will not want the traditional expert-driven approach. This is a good thing.

Now, I’m not advocating for an education system that is fully free market in orientation. The reality is that the underlying infrastructure for such choice — easy access to useful information through guides, organizations or Web sites; actual mechanisms for exercising choice that exist outside of home purchases — is only coming into existence. 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; they will make mistakes along the way.

Poor parents, in particular, need guidance; yet the current public education system treats them as even bigger nuisances than the middle-class families (who can exercise enough influence to just be merely ignored) and wealthier households (who ditch the public school system altogether). Assuring equality of opportunity in education, no matter one’s income, should not only be of paramount importance, it would be a more-effective form of economic policy than stimulus plans and tax cuts combined; the evidence largely clear that dropouts cannot be contributors to economic and social life.

But giving parents power, choices, options, advice and information should be the governing credo of education reform for the next half-century. It can be done.

Let's encourage at-risk kids to get real diplomas, not meaningless feel-good certificates.

NEWS AND COMMENTARY inside — and outside — the dropout nation. Updates and new stories added throughout the day are marked with an *asterisk:

• The definition of insanity: School districts in Fort Bend, Texas, Houston, Saginaw, Mich., and Munster, Ind., are teaming up with local prosecutors and police departments to combat chronic truancy. Parents will be charged and fine for not keeping track of their children’s attendance while the kids themselves will be picked up. This isn’t a new tactic. The evidence that the sweep-and-fine method actually works to keep kids in school and gets them back on track towards graduation, however, remains elusive. More importantly, such programs don’t address one of the main reasons behind truancy: The low academic performance and lack of educational engagement (caused by not-so-rigorous curricula) of the children who often chronically skip school. Children realize their low academic performance even if they are getting promoted from grade to grade despite their low grades.
• The meaning of irresponsibility: The Senatobia School District in Mississippi — a state with an unbelievably awful record of academic failure — decided that it was time to offer General Education Development classes that will target 16-year-olds, according to The Democrat of Tate County. Yes, a school district decided to target teenagers that should be in school. Why gee whiz, why not simply offer the students free prison cells, liquor and Food Stamps at the same time. The school district should be finding ways to keep the 16-year-olds in school and on the path to graduation, not letting them drop out.
• Sadly, despite evidence that GEDs aren’t anywhere equivalent to a regular high school diploma, newspapers are reporting far too many feel-good stories about adults picking up one. One wonders if editors and reporters actually think these things through. Wait, I know far too well that they don’t.
• More Core Knowledge: Richard Whitmire reveals that the school reform outfit is unveiling a reading program and laments the end of Reading First.
• Kevin Carey reads Paul Tough’s piece on education reform in New Orleans and learns that, when it comes to parental involvement, schools need to be focused on that thing called parental engagement. Essentially, if schools want parents to get involved in student learning, they must also provide various levers by which they can be engaged.
• From where I sit, I also say that traditional public schools, public charters and private schools must also be willing to accept the reality that parents must be involved in education beyond just helping kids with the homework. Given the role that instructional methods can play in student learning and the reality that it is, at times, too easy for minority students to land in special education programs or not get into gifted programs, parents must also be actively involved in structuring how their children will learn. This won’t make administrators or teachers — the self-appointed experts in education — very happy. But it is key to stemming dropouts and gaining more involvement from parents.
• *Math teacher shortages, Volume XXX: California is making an ambitious — and frankly, overdue — move to require all 8th graders to learn beginning Algebra. For students — especially those who are not slated for the honors track that leads to college admission — such rigorous math work will help them gain the knowledge they need to get into whatever higher education option (be it college or trade programs) they choose upon graduation. Making the plan come into reality, however, is a problem because of a shortage of math teachers, notes the Sacramento Bee, a common problem throughout the nation. One possible solution should be alternative certification for mid-career professionals who want to get into teaching, but can’t afford to spend two-to-four years in ed school. Another is to finally begin offering higher pay for math and science positions; although it won’t lure all the math and science collegians into teaching — largely because the pay will still be lower than the incomes they can make in the tech sector and the reality that teaching is a harder job than most think it is — it will help alleviate those shortages. Attracting foreign math students and teachers into the profession through the use of skilled worker visas will also help; this is a reason why H-1B and other skilled immigration quotas should be increased or eliminated altogether.