Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.

When it comes to the role of parents at the education decision-making table, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, school districts and folks such as Diane Ravitch think parents should be like kids: Barely seen and definitely not heard. If you don’t believe it, consider the reaction by the Compton Unified School District, the AFT’s local affiliate and such commentators as Valerie Strauss and Larry Ferlazzo to the move by parents at McKinley Elementary School to make use of California’s  Parent Trigger law and oust the district from management of the school.  From where the status quo folks stand, the McKinley parents exercising Parent Trigger are either dupes for nefarious charter school operators and evil, money-hungry foes of public education such as Ben Austin; or the parents are evil for daring to toss out decades of abysmal school management and classroom instruction. In their minds, it’s simply not possible for parents to actually be able to make their own choices.

Yet evidence abounds that when parents are highly-informed about the quality of education in their schools, driven to kick mediocrity and abysmal education to the curb, and given the tools to help their kids, they will certainly do so. Minorities and parents in high-poverty districts, for example, were more likely than middle-class parents to request a teacher for their child based on how teachers improved student achievement, according to a 2005 study by University of Michigan researcher Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren of Brigham Young University. The growth of the charter school movement, the continuing presence of Catholic schools, the growth of online and alternative education options such as Sylvan and Kaplan, and the work of such organizations as the State of Black CT Alliance in rallying support for school reform, are also signs that parents should be given their rightful places as kings and lead decision-makers in education.

Despite the evidence, the Ravitches and Ferlazzos  maintain an attitude that parents should stay at the kid’s table when it comes to actually making school decisions. And it isn’t limited to Parent Trigger. Whether one is in a middle class suburb or in a big city, the attitude is generally the same: Parents should stick to field trips, homework and taking blame when test scores and graduation rates are revealed to be abysmal or mediocre.

This is especially so in urban districts, where poor and minority parents — many of whom have suffered in the same dropout factories and failure mills their kids are now educationally imprisoned — are shunted aside as so much garbage. More often than not, many teachers look down at these parents as being their inferiors instead of treating parents as equals. The experience of Virginia Walden Ford, who launched the school reform movement in Washington, D.C., is echoed in a study by Sage Colleges professors Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg, who noted that urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.”

Certainly this attitude among the status quo is manifested in other ways: The opposition to charter schools among the Gary Orfield-Richard Kahlenberg crowd (most recently expressed in a Miller-McCune interview with Erica Frankenburg and Gary Miron) on the ground that they foster resegregation; Miron in particular, ignores the reality that parents seek charter schools as high-quality options by declaring that “parents choose based on race and social class”. Then there is the embrace of the Ruby Payne-promulgated poverty myth — that poor parents are simply incapable of playing strong roles in education — among teachers and administrators. The low regard for even middle class parents among teachers, who label these families as “Burger King Parents” and “The Grass is Always Greener” for daring to demand more on behalf of their kids.

Certainly the reality that the players within the status quo — teachers union bosses, ed school professors, school administrators and even many teachers — don’t want to give up their power and autonomy is one reason for this opposition to parent power. The other reason lies with their conceit (one they share with some school reformers) that experts should actually make education decisions. After all, an ed school professor and a teacher with an array of grad degrees should have more knowledge about what kids should learn (and how it should happen) than some parent. Yet, as we have seen over the past 150 years — from the comprehensive high school model (created because of the misguided belief that immigrants and African Americans were incapable of mastering college prep work) to the array of new math theories that have fallen flat and even the traditional system of teacher compensation — the experts aren’t so good at this thing called education. Combined with other problems among status quo circles — including the rampant anti-intellectualism, willful ignorance of economics and unwillingness to consider the developments in sectors outside of K-12 — and this conceited view of parents turns from mere condescension to outright hostility.

Yet the rise of the modern school reform movement — and the emergence of charter schools, school choice and Parent Trigger — has all but assured that parents will be playing a stronger role in education. The underlying infrastructure for exercising decision-making — easy access to useful information through guides, organizations or Web sites; actual mechanisms for exercising choice that exist outside of home purchases — is just coming into existence. Many 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. But as I wrote at this same time last year, the school reform movement (like the development of cellphones and other consumer goods) is fostering choice. And choice begets choice; once parents are exposed to having real power and engagement in school decisionmaking, they will not want the so-called experts — including NEA and AFT bosses and the Ravitches of the world — in their way.

What McKinley represents is a response to the status quo: How dare you argue that families can’t think for themselves! How dare you limit our kids only to the proverbial sky! And by the way: Work with us or get out of the way! You’re either part of a better future or just boulders to be pushed aside.

The hostility against parents among education’s status quo is essentially anti-children. What these experts are tacitly arguing is that the educational, economic and social destinies of kids — especially our poorest children — don’t matter a wit. It’s time for parents to shunt these folks aside and take the power that is rightfully theirs.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I detail the economic and social value of education for our kids, communities, economy and nation. More than ever, a high-quality education is the ticket out of poverty, prison and despair.

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, the Education Podcast Network and Zune Marketplace.

If education is truly the most-important civil rights issue of this era, it means that black churches must play their part in ensuring that every child in the pews and communities they serve are educated in cultures of geniuses. It is as important for them to step up and embrace school reform as it was for them to combat Jim Crow segregation fifty years ago. For these churches, they can learn this important lesson from another civil rights movement — the effort by Catholics to receive equal treatment in public schools: You must take education into your own hands and start your own schools for the children in your flock.

Catholic schools had existed in this country since the 1600s, when the church started schools in the Spanish colonies (including what is now Florida and California) to indoctrinate American Indian children into Christianity. But by the early 1800s, Catholic education in the English colonies that became the United States took on a different purpose: to providing an education and freedom from religious oppression for the children of parishioners. At the time, most public schools were Protestant-dominated (in this case, a heavy dose of Calvinism at the expense of Unitarianism and other sects)  with students reading from the King James Version of the Old and New Scriptures.

This heavy-handed religiosity intensified by the 1840s as Irish emigres populated urban locales; Protestants, driven by their fear of foreign “papist” influences (and their own bigotry), began adapting the Unitarian-shaped civic religion approach of Horace Mann in order to get Catholics under their thumb. In Philadelphia, for example, Protestants burned down five churches after the diocesan bishop demanded that Catholics be exempted from having to read the King James Bible; in New York State, efforts by Gov. James Seward to provide funding to Catholic schools was met with the kind of bigotry that was otherwise reserved for African Americans of the time.

But Catholic schools didn’t become a widespread until 1852, when the First Plenary Council of Baltimore called for parishes to start diocesan schools in order to provide an alternative to Protestant-dominated public schools. This accelerated in 1859, when Thomas Whall, a Catholic attending the Eliot School in Boston walked out of the school after twice refusing to read the King James Version of the Ten Commandments (and being spanked by the principal after his second refusal); his walkout, along with that of 100 other students, led St. Mary’s Parish to start it own school; other parishes in Boston and elsewhere soon followed.

But for Catholic priests and laymen, it wasn’t enough to just free the kids of parishioners from religious oppression (and ensure that all kids who received communion were educated).  Ensuring that poor kids were educated became as much a part of the Catholic school mission. Catholics began educating black students in 1829 when Mother Mary Lange cofounded the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore; by 1894, this educational mission included teaching black and American Indian children in the West thanks to the work of Saint Katharine Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. And in an age in which preparation for factory work  was a critical part of education, Catholic schools began forming industrial schools to prepare kids for productive activity. By 1920, in spite of bigotry-inspired Blaine amendments and general hostility towards Catholicism, diocesan schools had become the primary private schools for America, serving 1.8 million students in 6,551 schools.

Today, Catholic schools continue this mission, with blacks, Latinos, Asians and American Indians making up 26 percent of its students; 14.5 percent of students overall (and often, the majority of kids in big city schools) are not even Catholic  These schools also achieve great results despite the poverty of the students in their care, with the average Catholic 4th-grader scoring 16 points higher on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress than their traditional public school peers; only 18 percent of kids reading Below Basic proficiency versus 34 percent of their public school peers.

But the high cost of maintaining aging Catholic school buildings, along with the costs of hiring laymen to teach students (versus the nuns and priests of decades ago), and the view among some Catholic that the schools have diluted their perceived primary mission of providing a religious education, has led to a decades-long decline in the number of schools. As seen in New York City (where the nation’s largest archdiocese is struggling with budget deficits) and in D.C. (which closed all but four of its inner-city D.C. schools), it is harder for dioceses to continue serving kids who aren’t part of their faithful.

Yet poor, minority, and even middle-class kids still need escape from the worst (and the mediocre) American public education offers. As seen this week in the results from the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (along with results from the NAEP and a dropout crisis that leads to 1.3 million kids dropping out every year), these students need and deserve high-quality education. And while charter schools have begun to fill some of the needs in big cities (and achieve the same levels of student achievement found in Catholic schools), state laws restricting their expansion, along with the opposition of affiliates of the NEA and AFT, frustrate the growth of charters.

Meanwhile one can also say that these kids need more than just academics. At its best, religious instruction provides students with the hope and the moral education they need to avoid falling into poverty and prison. The lessons of self-sacrifice, delayed gratification and the Golden Rule are almost as critical to surviving in life as Algebra and reading.

For black children and their Latino counterparts in big cities and suburbia, black churches could provide the academic and spiritual education they will often not receive in traditional public schools. These  churches already provide food pantries, social services on behalf of government agencies, and provide Sunday School to kids in their flock. And black churches have filled this role before. It was the African Methodist Episcopalian denomination that launched some of the most-prominent Historically Black Colleges and Universities, including Wilberforce University (which my grandmother attended) and Morris Brown. During and after Reconstruction, other black religious leaders founded Morehouse, Clark Atlanta University and Spellman.

Some churches, most-notably Floyd Flake’s Greater Allen Cathedral in the New York City borough of Queens, are already involved in sponsoring charter schools and serving on their boards; others lease their surplus space to charters as part of expanding high-quality school options for kids in their respective communities (along with collecting rent on unused real estate). A few even operate schools of their own. But this isn’t enough. As Catholic parishes did 150 years ago, more black churches must step up to the plate and ensure that the kids of their faithful get the high-quality education they need in order to fulfill their economic and social destinies. It isn’t enough to stand idly by or simply provide mentoring programs to students in local schools. It is as important for black churches, their pastors and their flock to save their kids from the nation’s educational crisis (and keep them off of the ravages of public welfare) as it is for them to save their souls.

It isn’t as if black churches don’t have the money. As one would say, if you want to know about where the money of black people go, start at doors of their local churches. Ninety-percent of charitable giving from African-Americans goes to their local churches, according to the Internal Revenue Service; these churches often buy abandoned properties in the neighborhoods in which they serve in order to spur economic redevelopment. While many black churches aren’t blessed with massive treasuries or megachurch-sized memberships, there are plenty with the means — financial and otherwise — to start their own schools. One-eighth of all black churches have revenues of more than $1 million, or have more than enough means to get into the education game. Even smaller churches can band together and form schools that serve communities within their radius.

The issue is capacity; after all, many black churches struggle to properly manage their operations and use strong financial controls. But even that isn’t difficult to solve. In many black churches, the very people who can help with these capacity issues — including accountants, lawyers and other professionals — already sit in the pews. There are school operators, including Green Dot Public Schools and the Knowledge is Power Program, with whom churches can partner on developing the academic capacity. The emergence of digital learning and other technologies can also allow churches to provide education at a relatively low cost; imagine an Abyssinian Baptist Church providing blended learning in Harlem?

The benefits of black churches starting schools would most-certainly benefit kids. But it also helps the bottom lines (financial and social) of the churches themselves. By saving young minds, the churches keep kids out of prisons and help them become productive citizens who rebuild surrounding communities. The presence of black churches as school operators would also bolster the case for expanding school choice itself. For reformers, this is an opportunity to build the kind of alliances with grassroots leaders that will help sustain reform and end the status quo of mediocrity and educational malpractice in American public education. And for school choice activists and those who support a free market in education, the presence of black churches as school operators also expands the number of choices and players in the market for educational options.

Black churches can no longer play gospel in the sanctuaries while kids drop out into poverty and prison. They must embrace school reform and take the role that Catholic churches have done for so long and for so many.

Asking families and children to put up with mediocre schools  is almost criminal. It is just that simple. Keeping the families of our poor and minority kids shackled to dropout factories and failure mills should most certainly be against the law. When defenders of the status quo say that families should not have a wide array of educational options available — be they traditional districts, public charters, private and parochial schools, or even online learning — they are essentially arguing that there should be no civil right to a high quality education. That argument is absolutely wrong on every moral and intellectual level.

Poor and minority families should not have to wait for these dropout factories to either shut down or be overhauled. Neither should middle-class families or anyone else. What these families deserve is the option to escape. They deserve school choice.

At this moment, for many families (and most-certainly for our poorest kids in urban and rural communities) choice doesn’t really exist. Most traditional districts continue to zone kids to particular schools, restricting their ability to escape low-performing schools. Even in cities such as Houston and Indianapolis that are home to numerous school districts, a child must still attend a zoned school even if a better traditional public option is right across the street from their home. When intra-district choice options — notably magnet schools — do exist, they usually end up being used by middle-class households, who use their strong political connections (and exploit ability tracking systems that serve as the gateways into such schools) to assure seats for their own children.

But it isn’t just about escaping the worst American public  education has to offer. Even in relatively better-performing (if often still mediocre) suburban schools, poor and minority kids are often afterthoughts in instruction and curricula. For them and their middle-class schoolmates, the need for options that better-suit their educational needs is one that most traditional districts just cannot meet.

We know that better options are emerging and some of our poor black, white and Latino families can walk with their feet. High-quality charter schools can improve student achievement, especially for poor and minority students. Are all charters high-quality? Certainly not. But most of the problem lies mostly with how schools are authorized and which agencies or groups handle the authorizing; high-quality charter school laws will lead to high-quality authorizers will foster the development of high-quality schools; low-quality charter school laws (such as those in Missouri), will lead to the converse. Solving those issues is a matter of improving regulations (and moving away from allowing traditional districts from serving as authorizers), not by restricting the growth of charters. Charters should be as plentiful in suburban communities as they increasingly are in our big cities.

School vouchers can help poor students attend private and parochial schools that succeed in improving their achievement. The options are already out there. Catholic diocesan schools have been serving as a way out for poor families for the past century; the average nine-year-old Catholic school student scored 8 percent higher on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress than his counterpart in a traditional district (and that gap remained constant among middle-school and high school students tested). Is it a perfect solution? No. The biggest problem of choice is providing poor families with the information they need to make high-quality choices. The other problem is that  there aren’t enough of them. The number of Catholic schools in the United States — 42 percent of which are located in big cities — has declined by 12 percent between the 1998-1999 and 2008-2009 school years, according to the National Catholic Educational Association.

But as seen in Milwaukee and in Florida, vouchers can help stimulate a market for new school options; more importantly, unlike traditional public schools, failing schools can also be shut down — especially when knowledgeable parents walk away from them with their feet. The solution is to the availability of school data, provide parents with resources for making better choices, and stronger oversight of schools, not restricting the options. (This also holds true for online learning options.)

The reality is that the traditional model of public education — school district bureaucracies, zoned schools and local control — is not only antiquated (if it ever worked at all), it also denies our poor and minority kids equal opportunities for high-quality education. If education is truly a civil right, then there should be no political restrictions on school choice. Wider array of school choices are always better than fewer and none. And opponents of full choice — a group that can sometimes include centrist Democrat school reformers opposed to vouchers — can’t offer strong and convincing arguments to the contrary.

The argument that public funding shouldn’t go to private or religious organizations doesn’t hold water: As the Thomas B. Fordham Institute pointed out in a 2008 report on reviving urban Catholic schools, the federal government already pours $3 billion annually into Catholic Charities alone. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Zelman ruling allows for vouchers. Centrist Democrat and progressive school reformers are more than happy to back charters, which are operated by nonprofit and even for-profit organizations. And billions of federal and state funds flow through our nation’s private universities — the choice options for aspiring collegians.

Nor can opponents appeal to history to continue justifying the restriction of choice. From Blaine amendments to the debate in the early 1960s over President John F. Kennedy’s effort to provide funding from the National Defense Education Act to Catholic and Jewish schools through loans, the opposition to the use of public money for parochial schools has had less to do with any honest objections than to religious bigotry. The old-school goal of immersing kids in a civic religion — be it the old Protestant-dominated version of a century ago or the more political ideology-tinged versions of the modern day — should be abandoned for the more-important goal of making sure children have the tools they need to take advantage of all the opportunities life in the global economy offers.

All this said, choice cannot work without the rest of civic society playing its part. African-American churches such as Floyd Flake’s Allen A.M.E., for example, have played strong roles in fostering charter schools. But they must take on the role long-occupied by the Roman Catholic Church and start their own parochial schools serving the very kids in the community whose souls they shepherd on Sundays. Charter school operators must improve the quality of their own offerings, innovate in training teachers and make parents the true kings and lead decision-makers in education they should be. And it may be time for black and Latino families to conduct their own homeschooling on a mass level, starting schools that serve kids in apartment complexes or even on just one block.

If defenders of the status quo truly want every child to receive a high-quality education, they need to abandon their opposition to school choice. Progressive and centrist Democrat school reformers must get over their squeamishness about vouchers. And we must all accept that choice is part of securing the civil right of high-quality education. There is no reform of American public education — and education cannot be a civil right — without school choice.

The news about the latest release of U.S. diplomatic information by WikiLeaks has caused a global uproar, with federal and international diplomatic officials putting its founder in their respective cross-hairs for daring to inform us on matters about which we have always sort of suspected. Certainly the leaks aren’t exactly in the interest of American national security (nor does your editor support the underlying anti-American philosophy of the site itself). But in releasing the information, WikiLeaks has fulfilled two fundamental tenets at the heart of America’s democratic republicanism: That American citizens have the right to know how their government conducts its activities; and that a free press — including the ability to leak government documents — is critical to keeping government accountable to the citizenry.

One wouldn’t think American public education needs a WikiLeaks of sorts. After all, we have plenty of school data (125 data collection regimes in California alone); graduation rates and test scores are already available in one form or another. But the reality is that most school data and analysis, like national security information, is a black box of sorts, making data unavailable for  easy use by parents, policymakers and even teachers and principals for making smart decisions. The kind of longitudinal, value-added analysis of student, school and teacher performance that families and school systems need to improve education is also not widely available.

Most state data systems remain difficult for even sophisticated researchers to use. Florida, Indiana and even California (whose overall data systems are neither fully longitudinal nor in great shape) are still the easiest-to-use systems for laymen even two years after I co-wrote A Byte At the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. School district data systems are generally even worse. More often than not, it’s as hard to use district Web sites out how to find something as simple as information on how to enroll in a particular school as it is to find out test and enrollment data.

When it comes to value-added data, it is even worse. As seen in the battle in October between New York City’s Department of Education and the American Federation  of Teachers’ affiliate there, teachers unions will do all they can to stop any analysis of teacher performance through the use of student test data. If anything, there is clearly need for a WikiLeaks of sorts; parents should be able to know the quality of the teachers who teach their kids.  And the growing evidence shows that teachers are the most-critical factor in student achievement.

One underlying problem is that education data has largely been used for complying with federal, state and local regulations, not for actual use as a consumer good. This is, in part, the natural consequences of a government-controlled system of education, and a culture that has little regard for the importance and use of data. The dysfunctional political structures of state systems of educational governance is also a culprit; as seen in California, the Progressive-era decentralization of school governance (ostensibly meant to get politics out of education) often ensures little cooperation on availing all forms of school data.

The other reason why school data remains a black box affair: The fear, especially among the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and other defenders of education’s status quo (and even among school reformers who should know better like Rick Hess) that data and analysis will be used by families and politicians to finally hold all players in education accountable for laggard instruction, turgid curriculum and antiquated practices and rules (tenure and degree- and seniority-based pay scales) that don’t actually work in fostering the cultures of genius needed to improve education. This not only can be traced back to the traditional disregard for data among education circles, but to the conceit held by many of them that education is a domain for experts alone.

This is shameful. As much as we demand parents to be actively engaged in education, we don’t provide them the data they need in order to be informed players. Just as importantly, education is as much a consumer good as it is a civil right. As the people who pay for the operation of school systems and the guardians of the customers (our kids) who must attend them, parents should have easy access to data and should have the tools needed to understand what data actually means for their kids.

School choice activists among the school reform movement should be particularly interested in making widely accessible and understandable school data a reality. Parents can’t exercise smart choices without being fully informed. Those who argue that public schools are essential to preserving the nation’s democratic republican values should also want widely-available school data. After all, you cannot make sure schools do the job of preparing kids to fulfill their economic and social destinies unless you have data. You can’t address achievement gaps or stem the nation’s dropout crisis without knowing what schools are actually doing and measuring results.

Organizations such as GreatSchools.org (whose origins date back to ratings agency Standard & Poor’s efforts a decade ago to evaluate school spending) have begun providing some useful data on school performance. The Los Angeles Times helped move the ball further earlier this year when it published value-added performance data on 5,000 teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District; for parents and for the rest of us, it is more evidence that teachers are the most-important element in student achievement (and has shown how state laws and union collective bargaining agreements have promoted laggard instruction, desultory performance management and lax operational management within traditional districts). All these steps should be applauded and supported.

But we have not yet seen the kind of collective effort to provide deep, understandable information that WikiLeaks is now making a standard in understanding foreign policy and national security. We don’t have armies of volunteers ready to conduct value-added analysis or even build robust data systems akin to a Wikipedia. Nor do we have companies that are working to develop such systems (which would help foster a true free market for school data in the long run). We need more news outlets and school reform groups willing to challenge state laws that ban the use of student data in measuring teacher quality by actually getting the data and doing the work. The citizen’s right to know — and the importance of providing a high-quality education to every child — should be paramount.

What if every school was a charter school? Or a private school? It should happen in the Big Easy -- and elsewhere. (Photo courtesy of colorlines.com)

As much as defenders of traditional public education complain about additional funding and efforts to expand charter schools, the vast amount of attention and funding in school reform is focused on overhauling traditional school districts. reforming traditional school districts. From the $3.5 billion in funding from the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program to much of the funding for Race to the Top, the real action remains in saving a model of providing public education that have proven to be inefficient, allows opponents of reform to stubbornly resist any change and captured by political and regulatory structures that benefit the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers over the kids that are supposed to be educated.

But what if the traditional school district model was abandoned altogether? This could be a possibility in New Orleans, where the state-controlled Recovery School District — which took over schools once ran by the woeful Orleans Parish school district after Hurricane Katrina — is putting itself out of business. What could happen in the next few years could serve as the first step in developing a form of what I call the Hollywood Model — essentially getting rid of school district bureaucracies and allowing individual schools to operate akin to Hollywood producers, actually handling actual classroom instruction.

The official plan, according to Louisiana’s school superintendent, Paul Pastorek is to allow the 33 schools to go back under the Orleans Parish school district (which ran most schools in the Big Easy until Katrina) or choose to be under the watchful eye of the state. But there is a catch: New Orleans Parish can only gain oversight over the soon-to-be-former Recovery district schools if they govern in a “21st century manner”, that is, the district will only serve in an oversight role similar to what the state would do instead of operating schools. The Recovery District schools, on the other hand, will operate on their own. Essentially, the Orleans Parish wouldn’t be able to go back to its old ways, poorly managing schools, tolerating internal corruption and failing students and taxpayers alike.

It isn’t that Orleans Parish would be in any position to do any more damage or take on operation of these schools. The district, once a sprawling bureaucracy of 103 schools, now operates just seven; given that it authorizes and regulates seven charter schools on its own, it doesn’t have the capacity to oversee the Recovery District schools. So it is more than likely that the schools will end up becoming charters and fall under state oversight.

NOLA is already several steps in the midst of the Hollywood model. After all, public charter schools (which operate independently of any central district) enroll 57 percent of all students and account for 75 percent of all schools in the Big Easy. Converting another 33 traditional schools into charters wouldn’t exactly put a strain on the system. But it would force Louisiana officials to consider its own capacity for regulating so many schools from Baton Rouge. The biggest obstacle in abandoning the school district model remains the reality that most state education agencies are ill-equipped to manage their own operations, much less provide wide oversight over tens and hundreds (much less thousands) of individual schools. The lack of strong governance is one complaint lodged against the Recovery District by those New Orleans residents who remain skeptical of a school choice model of education.

For the schools themselves, the question is how to provide those very services — transportation, school lunches and building maintenance — that would otherwise be provided by a central district — especially since Orleans Parish (which would otherwise handle those functions under my original thesis) wouldn’t be able to do so. Once possibility: Groups of schools teaming up and contracting out those services to outside vendors, something that think tanks such as the Reason Foundation (with help from Deloitte Consulting’s Bill Eggers) have floated in discussing how to improve traditional district operations. Another is to bring in more charter school operators such as the Knowledge is Power Program and Green Dot Public Schools; but that would also lead to complaints that public education is becoming a private business (even though education has always been as much a business as a means of building the minds of people).

What happens in New Orleans may actually reshape what happens in federal policy. The Obama could abandon the emphasis on school turnarounds — which like those in the private sector, succeed only a fifth of the time (at best) — and focus on developing new structures for educational governance and foster charters, vouchers and other kinds of schools. The administration could even take some Title I funding and actually put it into efforts that will elevate families to their proper roles as kings and lead decision-makers in education.

Ultimately, what will happen in New Orleans with the end of the Recovery District will be interesting to watch. After all, we already know that the traditional public school district is obsolete and not worth preserving as a model for educating our children. Now, we must replace it with a model that works for all children.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explore the culture of condescension among defenders of traditional public education — and even some school reformers — against parents, and their unwillingness to embrace families as king — and consumers — in education. Despite all the statements about the importance of parental engagement in education, what actually happens in classrooms, among policymakers and in think tanks is runs counter to embracing parent power and the true role of parents as kings — and lead decision-makers — in education. This culture against parent power must end.

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.

To complement this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast — and the upcoming podcast on Sunday on more questions parents can ask to improve education for their kids — here is a rebroadcast of a podcast on steps school reformers must take to in education decisionmaking. The expansion of charter schools and other forms of school choice, along with initiatives borne out of the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top such as Parent Trigger, offer great opportunities to truly put children and families at the center of education (and improve the lives of even the poorest children). But only if an infrastructure is built to help parents make the best decisions.

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,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

The battle to improve education for blacks, minorities and the poor remains the same. But we can't fight it with the same approaches. (Photo courtesy of Salon)

Among the dominant themes in education this year is the debate over the importance of integration and desegregation in school reform. From the Gary Orfield-Richard Kahlenberg crowd launching rhetorical volleys against charter schools, to the battle between old-school civil rights groups and President Barack Obama, the question of whether education has swung too far from a goal of assuring that blacks, whites and Latinos sit together in classrooms and lunchrooms has become as much a discussion as Race to the Top and the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Certainly the question mostly arises from the battles over who will shape the reform of American public education (teachers unions and their allies versus school reformers) and how (charter schools versus magnet schools; competitive reform programs versus additional funding). But, as Education Next points out through its interview with Steve Rifkin and Susan Eaton, there is also whether or not we should continue to hold on to a noble ideal. For those who are dedicated to desegregation above all else, as Easton is, integrating all of society offers “untapped potential” to make society more diverse, add richness to our individual and collective social thinking, and even improve economic and social progress for all. After all, it is what civil rights activists of the 1960s always wanted. Right?

Not exactly. The ideals of the civil rights movement weren’t so much about bringing all children of different races and creeds together in order to promote a more-harmonious world. It may have been an ideal to which Martin Luther King may have appealed in order to win support from whites (and he clearly believed it himself). But for the rest of the movement (think Thurgood Marshall, Whitney Young and Malcolm X),  it wasn’t the goal. For civil rights activists, the primary mission was to allow for blacks and other minorities to be full members of the economic and social mainstream — that thing called equal opportunity under the law. This included improving the quality of education for black and minority children, who were segregated — both physically and fiscally — from what was then considered high-quality schools. They were tired of black students sitting in wretched school buildings, being unable to attend the best school near their homes, and not having up-to-date textbooks from which to study.

Desegregation and integration became the accepted means of achieving this goal for two reasons: The first being the realization that blacks wouldn’t achieve it immediately through the fiscal means (equal funding of schools) simply because segregationist whites controlled school boards and other political mechanisms . The second being that they thought that the way blacks would gain a better education (and greater entree into society) by merely rubbing shoulders with white kids and attending their schools.

Certainly integration achieved some good by helping middle class blacks gain greater access to society; but they, like their white middle class schoolmates,  were already guaranteed some level of it. But it didn’t do much for poor blacks or Latinos (or even for poor whites). These kids were already treated as afterthoughts by teachers in traditional public school classrooms in their neighborhoods; desegregation merely guaranteed that they would get desultory instruction and curricula in more-diverse classes.

Meanwhile minority neighborhoods suffered the consequences. Although there were some high-quality schools in those neighborhoods before desegregation, most of them were of the abysmal quality that led to Brown in the first place. Desegregation could have led to those schools getting what would have been for the time high-quality teachers and better school leadership if the civil rights leaders and school administrators were willing to do the work. This didn’t happen. Instead, the combination of busing, suburban flight, poor school district leadership and the economic malaise that took hold after the Great Society era led to these schools falling further into academic failure status (and that’s when they weren’t shut down altogether). As a result, minority neighborhoods — especially ones home to poor blacks — fell into wretched disrepair.

What civil rights leaders of the first generation (and the second-generation old-school activists who succeeded them and now head up the NAACP and other groups today) didn’t understand was that the segregation wasn’t the only cause of low quality of education for blacks in American public education — and not even the biggest culprit. The real problem was systemic: A public education system in which most teachers weren’t trained by ed schools to work with poor and minority children; the use of ability-tracking to segment students deemed worthy of college preparatory education from those (namely minorities, immigrants and the poor) considered too cognitively inferior for such work; and the comprehensive high school (which further exacerbated the effects of ability tracking); the concept of zoned schooling, which prevents parents from exercising choice (and exacerbates racial, ethnic and income-based segregation). These issues were easy to miss in part because of the lack of good data on school performance, and the reality that even for poor blacks, the lack of a high-quality education had less to do with precluding them from middle class-paying work than racial bigotry in the rest of society.

By the 1970s, these problems were exacerbated thanks to the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. The contracts they structured with districts (along with their successful lobbying efforts at the state level), gave veteran instructors wide berth in picking their teaching assignments; longtime teachers who didn’t want to work with the poorest children or those from racial minorities they may have deemed unteachable, could easily avoid them by selecting the more-middle class (and less racially- and economically-diverse) schools. Magnet schools, because they are often selective, require kids to be on the right ability track (and support from gatekeepers) to get into them, and warehouse high-quality teachers from the rest of the school district, could never solve these problems.

Within the past 40 years, we have figured out most of the systemic problems and their underlying causes. Solving them requires a far different approach than simply integrating school populations (or simply increasing school funding, as the equity lawsuit crowd would prefer). The approach must be different: The traditional system of teacher compensation and seniority-based benefits must be changed in order to bring high quality teachers to schools serving poor and minority communities; charter schools and other school choice options must be expanded in order to provide every parent with a range of high-quality options to serve their children; families must also be given their proper role as kings and consumers in education decision-making; college preparatory curricula must be the floor — and not the ceiling — in every school throughout the nation in order to assure children that they will be prepared for the future.

The high levels of racial, ethnic and income segregation won’t cease in urban communities until school systems are of the high quality all parents — middle class and poor alike — demand. In suburban communities, segregation won’t stop until you make inter-district school choice — allowing parents to send their children anywhere they choose — a reality. This means opening the doors to school choice (as well as confronting suburban parents fast and hard about their prejudices). Old-school civil rights activists and their colleagues in the Orfield-Kahlenberg crowd must realize this — and also realize that they are reinterpreting civil rights history in ways that were never so.

Additionally, most minority parents have no interest in it. Since many of them were part of the very desegregation efforts of the past four decades, they recognize, as onetime busing supporter Charles Ogletree did, that integration is “a false promise”. As taxpayers, they have as much right as their wealthier counterparts to expect high-quality schools in their neighborhoods. More importantly, what is the point of a harmonious society when half of the population is poorly educated, likely to end up in prison, and will fall onto the welfare line? A nation in which a broad set of its population remains poor, uneducated and ghettoized will not remain harmonious for long.

Meanwhile the problems of race and ethnicity currently bubbling up these days — including the complex debate over Arizona’s immigration enforcement law — stem from problems that have long been part of the American political and social landscape. Immigration has been a lightning rod since 1882 when Congress passed the first round of immigration restrictions in order to stop Chinese migrants from coming to our shores. Racial and ethnic discrimination has been part of the American fabric for centuries longer. Education can help foster more-diverse mindsets; but it will take more than schools to deal with these deep-seeded legacies. Social integration can happen in other contexts (and already does); this will continue to happen as America becomes a majority-minority country. And what it means to be American isn’t defined by schools anyway; that’s why we have civic holidays such as Independence Day and rituals such as the Pledge of Allegiance.

This isn’t to say that desegregation and school reform cannot coexist. If anything, school choice could foster more diversity by opening opportunities for parents to send their children to schools anywhere they see fit, be it a traditional public school in the neighborhood, a magnet in another district, a local charter or even the Catholic diocesan school in the next neighborhood. School reformers — especially those working in the big cities and in the Beltway — also cannot forget about the importance of desegregation and integration. Expanding the minds and horizons of children is also important to their academic and social success; the lack of middle-class background knowledge, for example, may be the reason why many minorities perform poorly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the gatekeeper for college entrance. Working with organizations and cultural institutions to enrich their experiences (and broaden the perspectives of reformers themselves) is important to do and should be done.

But for the poorest parents and for minority families — whose options are often limited to the worst that American public education offers — they’ve seen desegregation and want something a lot better: Great schools for their kids and opportunities to learn in order to fully be a part of the American mainstream. And as committed as I am to a color-blind society, both in principle and in my own life, this middle-class black man can hardly disagree.

What are your thoughts? Feel free to comment.

Watch Jackson’s impassioned explanation about why the poorest children and their families — especially those in our urban communities — need tools for improving their educational and economic destinies. If you oppose vouchers, think about why you do — and then consider how can you deny the poorest of our children the choices for brighter futures availed even to their middle class schoolmates.