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.

Scenes of the Season: New York's Waldorf-Astoria at Christmastime

Merry Christmas to each and every one of you and your families. And to those celebrating other holidays: Happy holidays to you and the ones you love.

Here is what’s going on in the dropout nation:

1. The NEA’s Los Angeles local is suing L.A. Unified over its school reform plans. John Fensterwald’s response? The suit is merely “an attempt to preserve dues-paying members.”
2. By the way: Check out my latest report, this on the pressures forcing the American Federation of Teachers to make some (small) moves towards embracing school reform, in The American Spectator.
3. Tom Vander Ark offers more thoughts on the role of entrepreneurism in education and how it can improve education for all students. He also discusses some of the changes that need to come to education philanthropy.
4. While some parents and teachers in the New York City borough of Queens are battling the closure of Jamaica High School, schools Chancellor Joel Klein isn’t backing down. Says he: “I would like to know — who would send their kid to a school that has a lower than 50 percent graduation rate. Well, if your kids wouldn’t go there, whose kids should go there?” He’s got a point.
5. The Merced Sun-Star isn’t too thrilled with the California legislature’s struggle to pass a second round of Race to the Top-related legislation. Meanwhile, in Maryland, a former state board of education member accuses Gov. Martin O’Malley of being more-interested in teachers union votes than in take advantage of the federal money to improve academic achievement.
6. And in Indiana, the state Department of Education has unveiled its plan for competing for Race to the Top dollars. It admits that it doesn’t meet many of the data system requirements. It will also require school districts to fully embrace reform in order to receive whatever RttT money the Hoosier State can muster. At least the state’s making some progress on the teacher quality front.
7. For those looking for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act data on education stimulus spending, here is the state and program data for this month (in Excel spreadsheets).
8. In Rochester, the mayor there wants to take over the city’s atrocious school district. He’ll likely have more success than his colleague in Milwaukee has had this year.
9. At EducationNews, teacher Marion Brady accuses Arne Duncan, the charter school movement and education philanthropists of attempting to “hasten the destruction of… universal, free, public schooling.” But then, Brady offers suggested reforms that would fully alter traditional public education as we know it. Enjoy.
10. Heritage Foundation’s Dan Lips reads Walter Williams’ discontent with graduation rates for blacks, then offers examples of how to improve educational achievement.
11. The Economist discusses how technology disrupted the media business — in 1845. The interesting question for education policy types and teachers should be: What technologies will disrupt education policy as we know it today.
12. U.S News & World Report looks at the role of post-Katrina New Orleans as the epicenter of the charter school movement and education reform. Slowly, the city’s education model is starting to resemble the Hollywood Model for education I touted some years ago.
13. Edurati Review offers up its best posts of 2009. One of them: A well-thought explanation of why American public education must be reformed.

Sign up for the Twitter feed for up-to-the-minute news. Also, check out Dropout Nation’s featured reports:

1. Making Families Consumers — and Kings — in Education
2. Ability Tracking: Outmoded Idea in the New Education Paradigm
3. Voices of the Dropout Nation: Walter Dozier on Education and Violence

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

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 begats 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.

What’s happening in the dropout nation:

1. There are children such as this child in this photo (a sufferer from Shaken Baby disorder and blind) who need special education. But why is it that at least ten percent of black, white and Latino boys are routinely labeled as learning disabled and often landing in special ed? Especially when the nature of their “learning disability” is likely specious at best? I lay out the scope of the special ed crisis today in The American Spectator.
   
2. By the way, let’s be real: Special ed, along with alternative schools, is the black hole of public education. It is also the black hole  for the school reform movement; it isn’t as sexy to talk about as charters or vouchers or as dry and yet seemingly meaningful as national standards. The inaction by both traditional public school supporters and many school reformers speaks volumes about what they really think about improving education for every child. Badly.
3. The most-disappointing state competiting for Race to the Top funding? The dubious distinction goes to Maryland, according to Andy Smarick. But Texas — once a leading pioneer in school reform — may end up ranking a close second.
4. Kevin Carey analyzes the NAEP urban math results and notes how far down Detroit has gone.
5. Why the New York City Department of Education remains the gold standard for school reform: A willingness to shut down failing schools such as this one in Harlem, according to the New York Times (via EducationNews).
6. Like stopped clocks, Heather Mac Donald gets one right every now and then. This time, it’s on the decades-old move by California to make full immersion in English the standard for bilingual education.

More opportunities to learn. Photo of St. Anthony Catholic School, Washington, DC

What’s happening in the dropout nation:

- The Foundry takes aim at the opposition among some D.C. politicos to reviving the soon-to-be-shuttered D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. Harry Jaffe of the Washington Examiner offered his own thoughts — and gave one of the District’s city councilmen the business earlier this week. Jaffe thinks vouchers “will get funded for another five-year program.”

- Meanwhile, in The Catholic World Report, I take a look at one of the key alternatives to D.C. Public Schools: The Archdiocese of Washington’s Catholic schools. Two years after Archbishop Donald Wuerhl decided to spin off several of its financially-lagging schools and convert them into charters, the proverbial Mother Church is working hard to ensure educational opportunities for its poorest families while fostering additional funding and support from the flock.

- One of the three School Reform Andys (Rotherham, in this case) and Education News Colorado take aim at the Denver school district’s decision to hire a counselor to help school board members with their marriage problems (among other personal issues). Why should the kids — half of whom are likely to never graduate – count for anything? Well, at least it isn’t all going into administrators’ salaries, as it seems to be happening in the case of Indianapolis Public Schools.

- Will the AFT embrace school reform? Based on its New York City affiliate’s response to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Race to the Top efforts, keep the money off the betting line.

- In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger prods the Democrat-controlled legislature to take further steps in competing for federal Race to the To funds. The president of the state’s AFT affiliate isn’t thrilled with any of it.

- In research: The Center on Education Policy surveys state government uses of federal stimulus funds for education. The conclusions are mixed.

- Joanne Jacobs takes a look at the Deloitte study on the disconnect between the expectations of high school from parents and children, and the expectations of those who teach the latter. My thoughts will come later.

- In Charleston, S.C., one school superintendent is lambasted for winning an award, one that doesn’t have to do with improving the education of the children in the district’s care.

More news coming the rest of the weekend. Meanwhile, follow Dropout Nation on Twitter for continuous news and updates.

- Parent Revolution’s Ben Austin offers his own reasons why California needs to reform public education and prepare for Race to the Top.

All's quiet on the Massachusetts front -- tonight at least. Photo by PhilPie

Last month, I noted how states such as California and Tennessee have pushed to qualify for federal Race to the Top funding by passing measures lifting caps on the number of charter schools and allowing the use of student test data in measuring teacher performance. Now, New York and Massachusetts are trying to get into the act. And unfortunately for school reformers in those states, not even federal money is enough to gain traction.

Tonight, senators in the Bay State passed a reform measure by a vote of 28-11 after hours of debate and some 100 proposed amendments. The bill does lift the cap on the number of charters the state can authorize, but it also restricts the presence of charters to areas of the state where traditional public schools are in pervasive academic failure. Charter school advocates weren’t satisfied for several reasons, including the fact that the requirement that the first three schools authorized had to be located in the worst-performing districts; since only three charter schools are approved annually, the advocates fear that charter school expansion is just smoke.

Opponents of charter school expansion may figure out a way to kill the bill in Massachusetts’ lower house. One legislator, Liz Malia, has already told the StateHouse News Service that: “Charter advocates did a lot of things very quietly… and they got too much of the pie.” The bill may not even be passed this year.  

Meanwhile in the Empire State, the New York State United Teachers — an affiliate of both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association — is already bearing its teeth in opposition to a set of proposals from state Assemblyman Sam Hoyt to end the state’s ban on using test scores in evaluating the performance of probationary (pre-tenure) teachers and lift the cap on charter school expansion.  The state Education Department and Board of Regents also wants to bring back the use of test scores in evaluations. Given that United Teachers successfully brought the ban back to life last year after it was ended in 2007, the likelihood of tying student and teacher performance may be a dead horse not worth the time for legislators — thinking about their re-election efforts — to kick.

New York State officials also remain stubborn about addressing other changes needed to qualify for Race to the Top. Lame duck Gov. David Paterson (yes, he’s running for election, but he’s unlikely to win) hasn’t been willing to exercise any of the pluck he has shown in battling the legislature over the state’s fiscal morass. The new state education commissioner, David Steiner, also seems less interested in reform than even his predecessor, the much-lauded (and also, much-bemoaned and often spendthrifty) Richard Mills.

These battles do show the limits of federal government-led reform initiatives even when the dollars are attached to the effort. That the final Race to the Top rules hardly touch teacher quality reform — among the most-important issues in achieving true education reform — also makes the opposition among traditional education supporters at the state level seem rather, well, ridiculous. After all, allowing parents additional school options — and thus, making them true partners in education decision-making — should be embraced by every educator. And test score data is certainly far more objective than the standards used in private-sector performance reviews (which, by the way, use plenty of subjective multiple measures).

School reformers have clearly won the battle for the hearts and minds of leaders at the federal level; they have certainly won the day in states such as Indiana and Colorado, where legislators and governors have reached agreement some agreement on the need for overhauling public education. Even California, who may find itself replacing one reform advocate (Arnold Schwarzenegger) with another (former Gov. Jerry Brown) after 2010, may actually move towards meaningful reform.

But in states where systemic political dysfunction is the norm, teachers unions and other defenders of traditional public education can rally supporters on their behalf.  They can count on  some of their longtime critics on issues such as the expansion of charter schools. There is also the skepticism of school reform among suburban parents, who may realize public schools are in atrocious shape, but also have a relationship with schools and teachers that few school reformers (save for the Steve Barrs and Geoffrey Canadas) have dared to match.

The relationships between parents, traditional public school officials and teachers are, for the most part, superficial; the latter two are disinterested in any active parental involvement outside of the traditional jobs of supervising homework and attending field trips. They don’t want parents to be full partners in decision-making. But like any, dare one say, abusive relationship, the parents are more than willing to play along . And together, this trinity is formidable against school reform. In those states, school reformers must move themselves out of the Beltway and into the grassroots in order to win the day.

Given the influence of state legislation on local reforms and on national efforts, these battlegrounds will loom larger in school reform discussions.