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.

The End of Ed Schools — and Professional Development?: When it comes to training teachers and improving their skills, this is clear:  The nation spends a lot on it ($7 billion alone on training aspiring teachers); there are a lot of ed schools involved in handling this work (1,200 of them); professional development can be profitable for the players who provide it (including consultants like “culture of poverty” promulgator Ruby Payne, and ed schools); and the results are atrocious. Forget the low quality of instruction in our nation’s schools and a dropout crisis which saps the futures of 1.3 million kids every year: Teachers, administrators  and policymakers alike don’t even think the training is of any value.

The critical reason is that teacher training and professional development is garbage in, garbage out and garbage in-between. Former Teachers College President Arthur Levine pointed out in a 2006 study that 54 percent of the nation’s teachers are taught at colleges with low admission requirements. Once aspiring teachers are admitted, they’re not likely to get the training they need to get the job done. As the National Council on Teacher Quality noted in its recent study, just one in five of the 53 ed schools it surveyed in Illinois adequately trained their students in reading instruction, and only five schools had strong, rigorous undergraduate elementary school instruction. Many ed school professors think they don’t have an obligation to actually ensure that teachers have strong subject knowledge competency or skill in instructional methods (much less actually have entrepreneurial drive, strong leadership ability and care for all kids); they would rather focus on theories of learning that involve some vague notions about schools as democracies instead of teaching teachers how to teach. The fact that Jason Kamras’, John Taylor Gattos and Jaime Escalantes emerge from the muck and mire is more a testament to their fortitude than to the ed schools from which they graduated.

Meanwhile the professional development is well, abysmal. Just 132 of 1,200 professional development programs surveyed by the U.S. Department of Education focused on reading, math and science; only nine actually met federal What Works Clearinghouse standards for quality and outcomes. Meanwhile there is little evidence that site-based professional development teams — in which teams of teachers meet to brainstorm and learn from one another — works either. Which makes sense: If America’s teacher corps is largely mediocre, then all you have happening is laggard teachers learning from other laggards. Meanwhile the one area of professional development that doesn’t really get called that — graduate and post-graduate training by ed schools — essentially functions as a way for teachers to take advantage of degree-based pay scales. If the ed school did a poor job of training teachers at the undergrad level, then it won’t do such a hot job in post-grad.

So should we save ed schools or professional development. The organization that is supposed to ensure that teacher training is of high quality, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, declared this week in its report that ed schools must move to a “clinical practice” model that emphasizes mentoring by experienced teachers. As reported by Education Week in its special report on professional development, there are new and novel efforts going on to improve post-graduate teacher training. This is all nice. But it may be too little too late.

For example, the NCATE study suggests that ed schools should work with traditional school districts — especially urban systems — to develop training programs that actually match their needs. Ed schools have called for this for years to no avail. Some have already begun to move on from ed schools, working with outfits such as Urban Teacher Residency United and The New Teacher Project to form their own training programs. Suburban and rural districts, who struggle with the same issues, could begin doing so as well. Just imagine if consortia of districts or even, say, states such as California, Nevada and Arizona teamed up with a Teach For America to do mass-scale teacher training? One could also imagine groups of high-quality teachers developing apprenticeship programs of their own independent of teachers unions, districts and ed schools, taking aspiring teachers under their wing and having them work in classrooms; this throwback to the old guild concept would certainly work better than the high-cost system in place today. Such efforts, along with private-sector run teacher training courses, could be the wave of the future.

Sure, as NCTQ President Kate Walsh points out, ed schools train more than 90 percent of all new teachers. But at this point, there are only a few ed schools — notably Teachers College — that deserve the name.  If the rest were shut down and replaced with alternative certification programs, American public education wouldn’t be any worse for wear. In fact, we may actually get better teachers and better schools. As for the professional development? What is needed is something better than the status quo.

Why House Republicans May Not Be So Good for the NEA and AFT After All: Soon-to-be House Education and Labor Committee Chairman John Kline’s opposition to the accountability elements of the No Child Left Behind Act have certainly garnered headlines. But one aspect of his agenda that hasn’t given much attention is his general opposition to near-lifetime employment for teachers in the form of tenure. While Kline is certainly arguing for a return to local control, he is also supportive of President Barack Obama’s efforts to reform teacher quality. So one could expect one part of Obama’s blueprint for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act — requiring the use of student test scores and other data in teacher evaluations — to actually pass the House in the form of a separate bill. This step would begin clearing the way for states to move in the direction that Colorado has taken and end teacher tenure altogether.

This does create a conundrum for congressional Republicans such as Kline, which have railed against expansive federal policy especially in education. But as I have pointed out last month in The American Spectator, Republicans have been rather flexible in their opposition to strong federal education policy. From launching the committee that wrote the pioneering school reform report A Nation at Risk, to creating the now-defunct D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, to the passage of No Child itself, Republicans are no more interested in small government except when it suits. This is also true now: Kline likely opposes AYP because it exposes the failings of suburban districts such as the ones in his congressional district. Requiring the use of test scores in teacher evaluations, on the other hand, only hits teachers and their NEA and AFT representatives (the latter of which will not like the idea of losing bodies, the very source of their revenue).

More importantly, Kline and other congressional Republicans will get pressure from reform-minded GOP governors, who appreciate the cover No Child and other federal laws give them cover for taking on reforms of their liking. Teacher quality is already on the mind of one possible (but unlikely) presidential aspirant, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels; Kline will listen and behave accordingly. At the same time, weakening the NEA and AFT is something that would play well to movement conservatives and others who generally oppose unions — and also find favor with centrist Democrat and progressive reformers who have equal disdain for the unions.

There are also other aspects of the NEA and AFT agenda — including items that have little to do with education policy — that will be affected by a House Republican majority. The Employee Free Choice Act, whose consideration had stalled under House Democrat leadership, will whither and die under GOP control. Also unlikely to be considered: Any efforts to spur a federal bailout of woefully insolvent public defined-benefit pensions — including even more-underfunded pensions for teachers. There could end up being an investigation of union-managed health insurance funds such as the now-insolvent fund managed by the NEA’s Indiana affiliate, opening up a new can of worms. And don’t expect another Edujobs-style effort to stem teacher layoffs; Kline opposed the $10 billion effort the last time around and considering his more-powerful position, the Obama administration won’t even bother.

Essentially the NEA and AFT may be somewhat happy with the presence of Kline — and that’s only if he can somehow weaken AYP.

$228 billion

U.S. spending on criminal justice in 2006-2007, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics; prisons and jails accounted for just 33 percent of the total.

$562 billion

U.S. education expenditures in 2006-2007, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Current K-12 spending accounts for $477 billion or nearly the entire total.

$1.5 billion

Amount spent on prison construction in 2006-2007. It accounts for less than 1 percent of criminal justice spending.

$63 billion

Amount spent on school construction in 2006-2007. It accounts for 11 percent of overall education spending and 13 percent of K-12 spending.

Earlier this month, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous declared that the civil rights group’s Gates Foundation-sponsored education agenda would include a focus on moving spending away from prisons and incarceration to what he declared to be an underfunded K-12 education system. But as the statistics show, education spending outpaces criminal justice spending by a two-to-one margin — and school construction funding outpaces prison construction spending by more than 40-to-1.

As Dropout Nation noted this past January, the reality isn’t so much that the America doesn’t spend too much on prisons or that too much is spent on education. It’s that the country spends far too much on both inefficiently and ineffectively. We spend $228 billion on criminal justice badly largely because we spend $562 billion on education abysmally. So long as we continue a status quo in American public education that would best comparable to medical malpractice, millions of our kids will end up behind bars.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I issue a call to black men of character everywhere to stem the dropout crisis among our young black men. A look at new data — including a new report from the Council of the Great City Schools — paints a picture of despair and opportunities to rebuild Black America by reforming American public education and our communities.

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. And the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

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While the rest of the world has moved on, education is stuck in a phonograph form of governance.

When Sony announced last month that it would stop producing the cassette version of the famed Walkman, few had shed a tear. The music device had long ago been tossed into the proverbial ashbin of history by portable CD players and MP3 players. But in its time, the Walkman did something rather amazing: It helped foster the development of personalized culture and interactive entertainment. And American public education can learn plenty about how to develop a governance structure — and culture of genius — that fosters the kind of dynamism that led to the Walkman and the iPod.

At the time Sony introduced the Walkman, the world was still stuck with just a few choices in entertainment and almost no way of personalizing media. You had three networks and a handful of independent stations; cable had yet to be widespread and even then, there were few channels. Music was almost purely a communal affair; with boom-boxes and large-scale stereo systems, you didn’t have much choice but to listen to Disco Duck or More Than A Feeling – even if you preferred London Calling or September. The Walkman made the personalization of music, media and culture possible. You didn’t have to listen to your neighbor’s music and in fact, both of you could co-exist in the same space without offending one another. As I wrote in Reason back in 1999: “You can stand in Grand Central Station during the afternoon rush hour and have one foot in Lilith Fair; or in a studio session with Mingus, Monk, or Miles Davis; or in a shouting match with Rush Limbaugh.”

This, in turn, fostered new generations of electronic devices and digital formats that allow people to reshape parts of the world to their liking — and even forced other technologies to evolve in ways that allowed for more-customized experiences. The former came in the form of the Walkman’s successor devices, including the iPod and the Nintendo Gameboy. The latter can be seen in the evolution of the Internet; thanks to the Walkman (and Tim Berners-Lee’s development of Hypertext Markup Language), the World Wide Web has become the ultimate tool of personalized media and culture. The Walkman and its successors also influenced the development of the cellphone (invented six years earlier by Motorola), transforming it from a simple mobile version of the landline phone to the portable computer and entertainment device it is today. And these changes, in turn, has made culture customizable– from video on demand editions of Community to Grey Album mash-ups of Jay-Z and the Beatles.

These innovative answers to unexpressed desires came largely because of the dynamic environments in which technology and media are fostered. Sony was a master of experimentation; this was the company that helped pioneer the compact disc and the third generation of videogames with the PlayStation. In fact, the Walkman emerged out of a period of reorganization in which Sony’s tape recorder division — fearing consolidation into one of its rival divisions — took an existing product (the Pressman) and added microphones; instead of complicated development and market testing, Sony put the Walkman out into the marketplace, showing teens using it while rollerskating and biking.

This same dynamism has played itself out decades later with the development of the iPod, and even the development of Google, Facebook and Twitter. No board or commission mandated their creation (and more than likely, such authorities would have stifled their development); instead, they were created by people who came up with responses to needs and desires unmet in the marketplace and provided compelling answers to questions asked and unconsidered.

While these changes in technology and media have been taking place, American public education remains stuck in the age of the phonograph. Forget for a moment that our classrooms largely look the same as they did at the turn of the last century. The structure of how our education system is governed would be familiar to a Detroit parent of the early 20th century: State boards of education and superintendents bereft of the capacity to fully hold districts accountable; elected school boards that are easily cudgeled into submission by teachers unions and occasionally, by superintendents; superintendents, in turn, whose positions are inherently unstable (because they lack political bases of their own) and are hamstrung in managing districts by collective bargaining agreements and state laws; principals who have little influence over the key elements of schools that are critical to educating students, yet bear much responsibility for results; and teachers who, despite their complaints of little power, have almost complete autonomy over what happens in classrooms.

Not one element of this structure actually recognizes the true role of families as consumers and lead decision-makers in education. More importantly, it doesn’t even allow for the embrace of new concepts in instruction and school management. While a lack of dynamism is generally acceptable in government because it keeps majority constituencies from reveling in (and subjecting the minority to) their worst excesses, in education, it all but assures that school reform moves in all deliberate speed (or as Thurgood Marshall defined it, slow, if not at all).

This certainly benefits teachers unions and their allies among traditional public education’s status quo; for them, a disruption in the structure of education governance (and of American public education overall) is troubling, not because it doesn’t matter, but, as Paul T. Hill noted a decade ago, because they know that it absolutely does matter. After all, they benefit from the ways things are and, while they may care about the millions of kids failed by American public education, the kids are only a secondary concern to their own goals.

Yet in keeping the status quo in place, we are failing to take advantage of the possible innovations in instruction, data system development and other areas that can help stem the nation’s dropout crisis. The success of high-quality charter schools such as KIPP, along with the work being done in New York City’s public schools with the ARIS data system offer promise. The technological developments outside of education — including tools for online learning — also offer possibilities. But little of this will be of any use in an education governance structure that promotes the slow and the status quo over stemming the nation’s education crisis with innovative solutions.

What is needed is a disruption in the education governance structure. This may mean the end of school districts and state boards of education; it could mean replacing education departments with contracting divisions that simply monitor what schools do on the ground. The Hollywood Model that I offer up is one possibility; there are certainly others. (It would help if education was a fully private system funded by out-of-pocket dollars than out of tax money that parents and others don’t directly control; but a fully private education system isn’t going to happen in this lifetime — and some would argue it wouldn’t help our poorest children.)

But it will take more than just revamping educational governance. One of the biggest problems in education is the lack of a dynamic mindset among its traditionalists. As seen with charter schools, vouchers, and the use of Value-Added data in teacher evaluations, any new idea that disrupts the status quo is greeted with outright hostility. School reformers have had to go outside of the traditional ed school confines to develop innovative approaches to the human capital and instructional practice problems within education, but such an approach is unsustainable. So reformers will have to storm the gates — including teaming up with grassroots activists — and oust the status quo by force. It will also mean bringing in talented, innovative thinkers outside of education.

It also means accepting the end of a few conceits. This includes: That education decision-making should only be in the hands of supposed experts (who, since the advent of the comprehensive high school model, haven’t actually succeeded in improving public education); that only teachers and educators should be in charge of education (and that outsiders should not be anywhere near the classroom); that parents are nuisances who should remain ill-informed about such matters as growth models; and that, perhaps, public education should be the financing of the best educational options instead of district bureaucracies.

We need a Walkman and iPod for education — especially for educational governance. And we need to make education a more-dynamic, data-driven, innovation-oriented sector. Our kids need it. It’s just that simple.

Joel Klein wasn’t exactly the natural choice for chancellor of New York City’s gargantuan and stupendously dysfunctional traditional public school system when he got the job in 2002. After all, the former U.S. Assistant Attorney General was better-known for his successful antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s than for any forays into education. As it turned out, the school district — which was taken over by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as one of the first major efforts to place school systems under mayoral control — needed someone who wasn’t fully ensconced in the  stale status quo of the traditional education establishment to set it on a course for the better.

Eight years later, as Klein steps down as head of the nation’s largest traditional public school system, one can say he has changed the district’s once-infamous culture of mediocrity, byzantine bureaucracy and shockingly banal corruption. Graduation rates for the district (based on eighth-grade enrollment) have increased from 56 percent for the Class of 2002 to 63 percent for the Class of 2008, according to Dropout Nation‘s analysis of federal and New York City data. Student achievement levels have progressed steadily even as New York State has revised its own state tests for greater rigor.  The district is still a work in progress; the city’s abysmally low graduation rates for black males (and the New York Post‘s report about the travails of Wayne Knowland (who graduated from Fannie Lou Hamer High School despite his functional illiteracy) shows that there is still more work to be done. But the city is still doing better for its kids than it did nearly a decade ago.

Meanwhile New York City has become the pioneer for concepts that are (sadly) still considered innovative for education. Its development of the ARIS system has given teachers and administrators a tool that can be used for identifying potential dropouts, improving instruction and fostering long-term connections between teachers and their students. The shutdown of the city’s worst dropout factories and their replacement with smaller high schools with new cultures and more-dynamic staff has also shown an alternative to the rather faulty model of school turnaround efforts being advocated by the Obama administration. And Klein’s relentless pursuit of teacher quality reform — including efforts to use student test data in evaluating newly-hired teachers (and keeping laggards from gaining near-lifetime employment through tenure), and the attempt last month to publicly release Value-Added performance data has helped galvanize school reformers and others around dealing with one of the most-crucial steps in stemming the nation’s dropout crisis.

But Klein’s tenure isn’t just notable for its results. It offers some lessons to school reformers everywhere: You can successfully overhaul a traditional school system — and take numerous tough steps — and still be amiable to allies and critics. Traditional districts can be top-notch authorizers of high-quality charter schools — and even play significant roles in fostering their development (and giving families escape hatches from the worst traditional public education offers). And he has proven that education should not be left to teachers, principals and traditional players alone. We will not revolutionize American public education until we create dynamic cultures that embrace the genius within all of our children.

Cathleen Black, who succeeds Klein as chancellor, will have to do as good a job as he has. She has no choice but to succeed. Our kids need her to follow upon Klein’s stellar work revamping the Big Apple’s school system.

Watch this Dropout Nation excerpt of Klein’s speech earlier this year about turning around New York City’s high schools