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This is the statement California Gov. Jerry Brown made earlier this month as he proceeded to get rid of the Golden State’s (admittedly useless) secretary of education job, appointing seven new members to the state board of education (and ousting in the process, Ben Austin and Ted Mitchell, the two school reform-minded folks already in place). And it is the wrong statement to make given that he will now have to figure out how to cut $12 billion in cuts to the state budget (much of which must come from education).

The question Brown should have asked was this: Why do we continue to have a byzantine structure of governing California’s schools and teacher pensions in 2011? This should also be the question every governor in every other state should ask as they begin dealing with $140 billion in budget shortfalls, $600 billion in long-term pension deficits and unfunded retiree health, the need to jump-start (or continue) reforms of their public school systems and any effort to expand parent power and school choice. When it comes to school reform, the structure of school systems can be as much a culprit for what doesn’t happen as it can be a reason for why tough action can happen swiftly.

For most of the nation’s incoming reform-minded governors and for those who reformers already in governor’s mansions, the structure of school governance in their respective states will be as major an impediment to their efforts as the opposition of teachers union affiliates and school boards. All but seven states allow their governors to wield line-item veto powers when it comes to budgets, giving them some tools in controlling state education spending. But in most states, the real authority over schools lies in an array of state boards of education, elected superintendents, teacher licensing boards and other authorities. Although just 14 states have elected school superintendents, only 12 states allow for the governor to appoint chief state school officers; and only 33 governors have the power to appoint the majority or all of the members of state boards of education. This means that in many cases, the governors must either hope for state boards of education to appoint reform-minded education czars or the public will care enough about education to elect the right people to chief school officer (and state board of education) posts.

The byzantine structure of education governance is mostly a legacy of the efforts of political reformers during the Progressive Era of the 2oth century to guard against centralized power and to isolate education from the perceived threat of politics, The idea was simple: Diffuse power among a group of players and therefore, folks can focus on what is perceived to be the common good for students (and keep cronyism to a minimum). But the problem is that it has never really worked. Education has always been in the crosshairs of politics largely because it is government-funded; the fact that for most of the past two centuries, education has been more about inculcating a Unitarian-influenced civic religion (not to mention the influence over its operations by teachers unions for most of the past six decades) also meant that the separation of politics from schooling was destined to fail.

As a result, education governance at the state level is a shambles. Competing bureaucracies battle to control their respective budgets and justify their existence; for example, teacher licensing agencies continue to exist in many states in spite of the fact that their teacher certification and ed school oversight operations should fall under state education departments. Policymaking over such matters as simply setting cut scores on standardized tests end up in different bodies instead of in a unified outfit. And the results can be seen in muddied policies, turf-battles over policymaking, and stalled efforts on any sort of reform (including anything involving developing school data systems).

California stands out as the ultimate example of wasteful educational governance. A state education superintendent (and the department of education the office oversees) and the state board of education remains, as does the Fiscal Crisis Management and Assistance Team (FCMAT), which oversees school finance and manages one of the state’s school data systems, the state’s teacher certification agency, and the 58 county-based departments of education that handle services to the state’s school districts. (This kudzu doesn’t include the boards for the state’s three university and community college systems, the boards for the state’s 72 community college districts, and the faculty senates that share governance with each of the University of California and California State campus administrators.)

What has resulted for the state can be seen in the fact that the state’s school data systems remain a shambles; the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (a subject of my reporting) remains a work in progress nearly a decade after the state began working on it. Save for a McKinsey report and a new online tool for teachers, efforts to tie state K-12 data to college data in order to form a P-16 system is still in slow motion.

Meanwhile the governance structure has simply done little more than slow efforts to actually push any meaningful school reform. Brown’s predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had to go around the California legislature and the state’s school superintendent to push for unsuccessful efforts to reform tenure. Arnold’s own battles with the (now-former) superintendent, Jack O’Connell, also meant that there was little that could be done to come up with a unified reform strategy. The fact that the Golden State has made some major advances in school reform — including the passage of the Parent Trigger law and the tying of teacher performance and student test data — has less to do with any work by players in state education governance than with the effort of Schwarzenegger, and the state legislature to finally get together to take advantage of federal Race to the Top funding.

Unfortunately, this is typical in all but a few states. Governors who don’t have a governance structure that places education under their control will struggle to make things happen. Occasionally, as seen in the case of George W. Bush during his time as Governor of Texas and Mitch Daniels in Indiana, the governor can overcome the byzantine structures. But that is because in most cases, the conditions for reform are already in place. The efforts in Texas began with Bush’s predecessor, Anne Richards; while in Indiana, the work began with now-former Commissioner of Higher Education Stan Jones and an education roundtable dominated by the state’s reform-minded chamber of commerce that went around the status quo-minded elected school superintendent of the time, Suellen Reed.

The reality is that the most-successful school reform-minded governors are ones who either have strong control of the education governance structure (Tennessee under Lamar Alexander is one example) or have enough clout and appointment power to actually make things happen (as in the case Florida governors Lawton Chiles and Jeb Bush). But in an age of budget-cutting and the need to improve the quality of education for all kids, it isn’t enough to just cultivate clout. Especially when it comes to budgets, the players in education can work strongly to complicate any effort to either make cuts or to pass reforms in teacher compensation and school practices that can save dollars.

So governors, reform-minded or not, will have to take steps to get educational governance into their full control. Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire is taking an imperfect step with her own proposal to consolidate the state’s education agencies into one organization. Other governors will have to go even further by campaigning against the election of school superintendents, putting state pension boards under education department oversight (since the agencies are already fiduciaries) and even abolishing boards of education (which often seem to be as useless as the local school boards they oversee). These consolidations would both save some money and also allow for governors to start targeting the more-expensive aspects of education, including state laws and regulations that govern collective bargaining, and pushing for the end of school districts( and the fostering of the Hollywood Model of Education that will devolve school decision-making to the schools and parents).

While Brown’s move helped save a few pennies, it didn’t do anything to make education governance and decision-making any better-focused or more efficient. He needs to take a step back and actually campaign for an end to California’s ridiculous school governance structure. And the same is true for his fellow governors in similar governance predicaments.

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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss how we should look at American public education as an Etch-A-Sketch and shake up the status quo. More than ever, we must take the opportunities to overhaul a system that fails at least 150 kids every hour (and millions more every year).

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.

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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.

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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.

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Do we need a Stokely Carmichael for school reform? It may help to have an MLK first.

If education is truly the civil rights issue of this time, then African-Americans — whose children are often failed the most by American public education — must be more-engaged in education decision-making than they are now. Even with artists such as John Legend and organizations such as UNCF and 100 Black Men joining hands with the school reform movement, far too many old-school civil rights organizations (especially the NAACP — which will unveil a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded agenda in January that includes a focus on desegregation) maintain alliances with defenders of the status quo that perpetuate the harmful effects of poor instruction, lousy curricula and abysmal standards and practices. The Grad Nation report released earlier this week by America’s Promise, instead of being good news, makes the reality as clear as ever.

Elinor Bowles offers her thoughts in this Voices of the Dropout Nation on what Black America must do to truly achieve the goal of equal opportunity in education sought out by an earlier generation of civil rights activists. Consider her perspective and think about what you think should be done.

Whatever one thinks of Waiting for Superman or its point of view, the movie has made the failure of public education part of the national conversation–a much needed development. American public education has failed to effectively address the needs of its students or the nation. Despite the reality, known since the mid-1980s, that the nation’s schools are grossly inadequate, there has been a deafening silence about their dismal failure, particularly in relation to the needs of students of African-American descent.

The murder rate goes up, the graduation rate goes down and our youth increasingly end up in the wrong institution . Regrettably, African-American adults and community leaders have been seemingly preoccupied with other problems. It seems to take all the energy most parents can mobilize to take care of the needs of their own children. Scattered group efforts at educational improvement have led to extremely few sustained attempts at change, with varying degrees of success. Education is, after all, a complicated and time-consuming affair.

The discussion generated by Waiting for Superman has been promoted and highlighted by Oprah Winfrey, MSNBC, numerous news and special TV programs, and an excellent article in the September 30, 2010, issue of The Root written by R. L’Heureux Lewis, an assistant professor of sociology and black studies at the City College of New York. His piece, “Waiting for School Reform,” provides an overview of the difficulties confronting efforts at educational improvement, including the enormous financial costs and the lack of comprehensive research. However, as noted in a comment by a reader, E. Cederwell, it only superficially touches on “the single most important element explaining the great disparities in any school’s ability to achieve educational success: the world outside the classroom, and in particular, the culture each young person is surrounded by.” Cederwell states that “the perceived value of learning and education . . . is hugely important. . . . Communities need to be ready to take a . . . searching examination, and, where indicated, be willing to commit to adopt certain values. This may be hardest of all.”

Query: What is the general culture and attitude within the African-American community toward the education of its youth, particularly those who are poor and often in great need of love and guidance as well as material things? In using the word “community,” we are not talking about a geographical space, but a cultural configuration of persons who have a shared history, values, and life circumstances. This focus elicits a multitude of complications, given the current lack of cohesion in the African-American “community,” which many believe is becoming irreparably splintered along economic lines.

The discussion generated by Waiting for Superman has focused on the funding of education and the roles of politicians, administrators, principals, parents, and especially teachers and unions. However, it has failed to seriously address the difficult, dominant, and ubiquitous role of the African-American community in school reform. What can African-Americans and their institutions do to send the message to our young people that education is important, that it is cool, that it is vital to the good life, that it is a requirement for an interesting and safe environment, that it can be exciting, and that it makes you a better, more desirable individual, mate and parent? How can we create an environment that convinces our young people that education has more rewards than merely hanging out and, for most people, more concrete rewards than athletics and music and selling drugs?

How can we make education a dominant, outstanding value in the African-American community like it was in the early 20th century? Those of us who were born in the early or mid-20th century remember the dictum that “you’ve got to be twice as good.” And we all know the important role of the family in forming character and promoting educational values. But as African Americans we also know that many of our families today have been so damaged by a variety of forces that they do not have the will or the resources to be what we are saying they must be in terms of an educational support system for their children. And while we must do everything possible to help them overcome their liabilities, if their children are to be rescued we must also do everything within our power as a community to compensate for what parents lack.

Despite the seeming lack of involvement of the black community in the education of its youth, many individuals and groups actually are addressing this question. Individuals and organizations are providing scholarships, from the Ron Brown Scholar Program, which contributes close to $800,000 in scholarships annually, to people who contribute a couple of scholarships of $500 a semester to youth in their church. People are becoming mentors and big sisters and big brothers. They act as tutors for specific subjects. Professionals and business people visit schools and lecture about the work they do and how students can prepare themselves for various careers. Others invite students to visit or work in their offices during summer vacation. Churches provide space and material for after-school programs. It’s not that nothing is being done. It’s that we need much, much more and we need to do it more loudly and, in some instances, in a more organized way. We need to find more ways to publicly recognize and reward those children who work hard to achieve. We need everybody to know how important education is.

Perhaps we need a national organization to do for education what SNCC did for voting in the 1960s. Maybe we can call it something like Community Campaign for Educational Excellence. Perhaps we need to clearly explain what is meant when we say that “education is today what civil rights was in the 1960s.” We need to make it clear that we are talking about a similar urgency and significance and deterrent to equality, not about tactics like marches or content like legislation. The civil rights movement of the 1960s eliminated the state and local laws that restricted the movement and behavior of blacks. The educational movement of the 21st century must create educational institutions that serve the needs of all of the country’s children.

There are multiple ways the African-American community can change its culture in order to create an environment where education is recognized and honored. These ways are limited only by the imagination. There are, however, three basic requirements: First, we must care about all African-American children and have a burning need to save them from the lives of violence and crime and unemployment and meaninglessness that so many of them are living or facing. Second, we must truly believe that all children can be educated. And third, we must be willing to reach out and touch — to contribute our time, our energy, and our material resources, however limited they may be, to the salvation of our youth. African-American youth, given today’s dominant economic and social condition and trends, are in grave danger. What do we intend to do?

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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain what it should mean for education to be the leading civil rights issue of this era. School reformers and others make this statement every day, but it will be meaningless jargon unless several steps are taken to walk the proverbial talk.

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

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