Photo courtesy of the New York Daily News

With  old-school civil rights groups complaining about President Barack Obama’s embrace of the school reform movement — and its commitment to improving the quality of education for all children — listen to this Dropout Nation Podcast from February on why their approach to educational equity doesn’t work. The only way educational equity will actually be achieved for every child is by addressing how public education is structured — including giving parents their proper place as kings at the education decision-making table, and improving the quality of curricula in every school. Not only does this commentary apply to these groups, but to fellow-travelers such as the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center.

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

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Remember, read to your sons and daughters.

“We’re going to stop lying to children and lying to families [about curriculum quality]… We have to challenge the status quo on when schools are failing… We think it is unacceptable” — U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Common Core State Standards and overhauling failing schools at the Military Child Education Coalition’s annual conference, via Dropout Nation’s Twitter feed (go ahead and follow).

“What’s frustrating is that there is a real issue here demanding attention. The trade-off between flexibility and prescriptiveness in federal school turnaround policy is a complicated one without a lot of good answers.  Too much flexibility and districts and states take the easy way out and do nothing meaningful for students stuck in lousy schools. Too prescriptive and you get meaningless box-checking (as we may be seeing overall with the current dollop of school improvement funds), perverse consequences, or you stifle innovative approaches that might work if educators could try them.” – Andy Rotherham responding to Michael Winerip’s claptrap of an article on the consequences of federal education policy.

“We need to push school districts to frame summer school as a good thing, something extra — not a punishment. There is a cultural barrier that we have to overcome.” – Ron Fairchild of the National Summer Learning Association on the need for summer learning (and ultimately, for year-round schooling), in Time.

“But why are we more willing to overlook lackluster test scores in middle class schools?” Mike Petrilli on laggard middle class schools (traditional and charter).

“My hope is that many of them improve, but at the same time, we need to make sure the bar is high. I’ve got two children in the system, and I don’t want a ‘minimally effective teacher’ and I don’t think anyone else does, either.” — D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee on her decision to dismiss 241 laggard teachers.

“Each year we visit the teachers at least twice – once in the beginning and ten again towards the end of the year. It’s a great opportunity to understand how our kids are progressing and to brainstorm areas of concern or ask questions. But the one thing that always surprised me is that no one from the school has ever asked us to review the teachers. Ever… I think the current model doesn’t give enough credit to our great teachers and doesn’t shine a bright enough light on the teachers that aren’t delivering the goods.” — Tech investor Bijan Sabat on the need to evaluate teachers.

“While you argue about Duncan and standardized testing and charters…teach little keisha, tyrone, twon how to read, ok?” — Nikolai Pizarro (@iwantwealth) on the complaining of defenders of traditional public education over school reform.

Check out Dropout Nation this week for news and commentary on the reform of American public education. And listen to this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on recruiting, developing and rewarding more good-to-great teachers.

The promise of the Harlem Children's Zone can be seen in Garry Kasparov playing chess with one of its Promise Academy students

The Harlem Children’s Zone and it’s chief executive, Geoffrey Canada, have not only exemplified what school reformers can do when they take a community-based approach to improving education, but has even spawned a movie, an American Express commercial, and the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhoods program for tackling poverty and education. So naturally, the release of a report this week by the Brookings Institution criticizing the performance of one of the Harlem Children’s Zone’s charter schools (and by proxy, the underlying approach of Promise Neighborhoods) was certainly going to get some attention (along with a terse response from Canada himself). While Canada and the report’s co-authors, Russ Whitehurst and Michelle Croft, get to sparring, here is Dropout Nation‘s analysis of the report and the competing philosophies behind both Harlem Children’s Zone and the Brookings report:

1. Certainly Harlem Children’s Zone can — and should — do better in improving student achievement in its schools: The fact that its Promise Academy does a better job of improving student achievement than traditional public schools in the community it serves isn’t enough, especially when those schools are abysmal in the first place. Harlem Children’s Zone isn’t just proving itself against those schools, but against other public charters that don’t offer such a wide array of services. More importantly, it comes down to this: Black and Latino children in its school have to do better than average because they often enter school so far behind academically. So Harlem Children’s Zone needs to take a hard look at its performance and get going on improving its outcomes.
2. But the Brookings report argues unconvincingly that the model doesn’t work: The report doesn’t really attempt any sort of true longitudinal snapshot of academic progress at Promise Academy over time; there is some evidence that Whitehurst and Croft had opportunity to do some longitudinal analysis for grades six-through-eight (from 2007, 2008 and 2009 results), but the report doesn’t offer evidence that such an attempt was made. Certainly the analysis provided offers a sobering glimpse on Harlem Children’s Zone’s success and challenge. But it  also comes to some headline-grabbing conclusions about the program’s future success with incomplete analysis.
3. The report also underscores an amazingly thoughtless conceit among Beltway school reformers — that grassroots networks don’t really matter: This may not be intentional on the part of Whitehurst and his co-author (or from folks such as Sara Mead), but it seeps through the entire piece. It is also quite incorrect. As Dropout Nation has argued ad nauseum this week, it is the very lack of bodies — especially networks of grassroots activists and churches — that has posed the single-biggest problem for Beltway-based reformers in sustaining their prescriptions for overhauling American public education. It isn’t enough to argue for policies: It also requires getting the hands dirty, working with the 51 million single parents, grandparents and immigrant families ready to embrace school reform (but who lack the resources, especially knowledge and guidance on what high quality education should look like, in order to make it a reality). Given the remaining strength of the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and their allies on the ground, Beltway reformers need get into the grassroots game. This means understanding that you can’t solve educational issues without also working with those who understand the other social issues (and who can rally support around reform solutions). [By the way: There is also a major difference between the family empowerment through education  approach taken by Canada -- who is a co-signatory on the Broader, Bolder manifesto Brookings so rightfully criticizes -- and the rest of the crowd, who are defenders of traditional public education and argue that education cannot overcome poverty. Sadly, however, Whitehurst (an otherwise excellent researcher) and Croft neither notes those differences nor provides much nuance on any of this. They should have done so. Period.]
4. But this doesn’t mean the Harlem Children’s Zone approach is for everyone: The idea behind Canada’s program is powerful and exciting, as is the promise and even the reality. It will serve well the children and families under its umbrella. But there are plenty of successful programs on the community end which can do the social services work better than any school reformer can; after all, there is something called comparative advantage. What Beltway-based school reformers can do (and, in the case of the grassroots-based reform counterparts already do) is form networks of organizations that can handle those social needs, then create data systems that can track how kids are doing over time. Easy to do? Not in the age of FERPA (traditional school districts don’t do this well). But school reformers have the resourcefulness to make this a reality.

President Barack Obama may not be a fan of school voucher programs — and has allowed D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program to go out of business. But his Race to the Top school reform competition has fostered new discussion about — and efforts to — launch and expand these forms of school choice for the poorest children. One state in particular is New Jersey, where Gov. Chris Christie and a coalition of urban leaders, centrist and idiosyncratic liberal Democrats, and conservatives are battling the National Education Association’s state affiliate to develop a statewide voucher plan. Among the supporters is Rev. Reginald Jackson, the pastor at St. Matthew A.M.E. Church, who has also been front-and-center on tenure reform and other school reform issues.

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.

Neither Roy Barnes or his possible future colleagues are doing much on school reform.

Five decades ago, the states below the Mason-Dixon line spurred the first modern major efforts to reform American public education. Concerned about low educational attainment, especially among its rural and poor black and white students, governors such as governors such as Lamar Alexander (a future U.S. Senator) and future presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (along with state chambers of commerce), began the first moves towards determining the sources of the problem. Their work, along with the publication of A Nation at Risk, spawned the No Child Left Behind Act, the teacher quality movement, efforts to improve curricula and the standards and accountability movement.

These days, however, the same sort of urgency that drove southern governors of previous generations no longer seems to exist. This is evident in Dropout Nation‘s observation of the 11 states defined by the National School Boards Association as the southern region. A few states are exceptions, including Tennessee (winner in the  first round of Race to the Top, and home to Memphis City Schools with its $900 million teacher quality effort funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), Florida (whose efforts on school data systems, vouchers and tenure reform are well-chronicled),  Arkansas (home to Jay P. Greene and an expanding charter school movement) and Louisiana (a  path-leader in teacher quality reform and charter schools).

The rest are lackluster. In Georgia, a state whose problems have been documented by your editor, none of the Democratic candidates for governor support school choice going beyond charter schools. This includes, most shockingly, Commission on No Child Left Behind honcho Roy Barnes, who as Georgia’s governor from 1999-2002, angered teachers unions by successfully passing a measure that ended tenure; he has spent more time apologizing to teachers’ union votes this time around. The Republican candidates, on the other hand, are too busy appealing to suburban Atlanta interests (and, given that the current governor, Sonny Perdue, beat Barnes by appealing to teachers unions) to actually discuss education.

It isn’t much better in the rest of the southern states. The efforts by Alabama’s governor, Bob Riley, to make charter schools a reality in the Cotton State fell apart thanks to the state legislature, who ignored the prospects of Race to the Top money to accede to the demands of the National Education Association’s state affiliate. In South Carolina — a state whose educational attainment has been abysmal at best — the insolvency of the NEA affiliate there has done little to spur any real action on school reform.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell may have gotten a weak charter school expansion bill passed and brought in a noted reformer, Gerald Robinson, to office. But Virginia politicians and educational leaders — especially in Northern Virginia — are too self-satisfied with the status quo (and with the position of being better than D.C.), even if there is growing evidence that the state is falling behind. Texas Gov. Rick Perry and his colleagues are doing little more than faux sparring with the federal government over states rights in education and tolerating alleged fraud; the Lone Star State, once the standard-bearer for aggressive school reform, is now a north star for defenders of traditional public education.

The lack of urgency on education is a pity for southern state  families and, ultimately, the children to which they trust schools with their educational (and economic) destinies. Because changes in demographics are a tocsin for more action, not less.

Within the past six months, the Southern Education Foundation has proclaimed what most of us who once lived in Georgia and Mississippi already know: The American South (as defined by Southern Education, a group of 15 states including Kentucky) is now one of two regions (the other being the West Coast) where blacks, Latinos and other minorities make up a majority of school enrollment. In 1998, whites made up 56 percent of school enrollment (then at 13.9 million) in the 11 southern states surveyed by Dropout Nation. By 2007, minorities make up 51 percent of the 15.4 million students in those states. White enrollment actually declined by 230,321 students even as other population groups (including Native Americans) increased their population counts.

Meanwhile the population of poor students — in this case, students who live in what Southern Education calls “extreme poverty” or live 50 percent below the federally-defined poverty line — has also become a concern. Forty-two percent of the 5.8 million children considered in extreme poverty live in the American South, a wider share than any other region in this country. This matter — as much a consequence of the growth in the Latino populations as is a consequence of the South’s legacy of poverty — can only be addressed effectively by improving the quality of teaching, curricula and schools (including fostering the development of more high-quality charters and private schools) as well as by making parents the kings (and leading players) in all education decision-making.

Once the drivers of school reform, southern states are falling behind.

But this isn’t happening — and the results are clear from the graduation rates for the Class of 2007 (based on eighth-grade enrollment) and National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Although the 72 percent graduation rate for the region is better than the national average, it hides some glaring failures. Four states — Louisiana (56 percent), South Carolina (63 percent), Mississippi (65 percent) and Alabama (68 percent) — are at giant dropout factories. Many of the others aren’t much better: Florida and Georgia each share a graduation rates of 71 percent  (slightly below the regional average);  North Carolina (72 percent), Arkansas (75 percent), Tennessee (76 percent), Texas (76 percent) and Virginia (79 percent) are doing better than average. But the news isn’t good at all: Some 325,216 students from the collective class of 2007 — or 37 students every hour — dropped out.

Meanwhile the NAEP reading data is rather sobering. Georgia may share the same graduation rate as Florida, but not likely for long. Thirty-seven percent of Peach State fourth-graders read Below Basic on the 2009 NAEP versus just (an almost as woeful) 27 percent of their Sunshine State peers. Meanwhile the rates of functional illiteracy for fourth-graders in the other states aren’t much better: Thirty-seven percent of fourth-graders in Tennessee and Arkansas read Below Basic proficiency; for Texas and North Carolina, it is 35 percent; 38 percent in Alabama and South Carolina; a staggering 45 percent in Mississippi, and one out of every two students in Louisiana.

Just 26 percent of Virginia’s fourth-graders read Below Basic, the best in the region. But the rate of functional illiteracy has declined very slowly in the past decade versus other states: Four years ago, for example, Virginia’s Below Basic rate for its fourth-graders was four points lower than that of Florida, today, it’s only one percent ahead. And this has much to do with the complacency of Virginia’s political and educational leaders as it does with the hard work Florida’s leaders — including former Gov. Jeb Bush and his predecessor, Lawton Chiles — have done to improve education for its children. Given the lack of strong reform-minded players (newspaper editorial pages, parents groups, politicians, school reform think tanks, and activists), Virginia (along with Texas) will likely fall behind Florida (and possibly, Arkansas) in the coming decade.

For a region that is increasingly the most-dominant in the nation, the unwillingness to fully embrace the school reform mantle will likely wreck havoc on the national effort — especially as states and the federal government expand their critical role in education policy decision-making. And right now, given the stakes for all of our children, this is no time to whistle Dixie on school reform.

Gut check time.

As I have pointed out since the beginning of the year, the efforts by congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama to keep control of Congress may be the most-immediate problem for the school reform efforts being orchestrated by Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. As Republicans continue to gain momentum — and are likely to capture seats in Indiana, Arkansas and perhaps, even Connecticut — Democratic leaders will need all their activists on the ground to bring out the votes — especially the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, the single-biggest donors in Democratic (and general election) politics. But NEA and AFT support won’t come without a price — or without conflict with centrist Democrats who are driving Race to the Top and other Obama initiatives.

This was exemplified yesterday when outgoing Rep. David Obey proposed to use $500 million in dollars slated for Race to the Top to fund a $10 billion package to stave off an ever-dwindling wave of teacher and school staff layoffs. School reformers such as the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Congressman Jared Polis and the Education Trust went on the warpath, wrangling support against Obey’s effort, while the NEA and AFT reminded other congressional Democrats that they better pay to play.

As Education Trust communications czar Amy Wilkins rightly points out, Obama and Duncan can’t afford to let Obey succeed — and not just because the administration will lose credibility among states and the school reform movement. The reality is that the Obama administration has little in the way of concrete achievements (at least those that don’t involve the controversial and still-likely-to get-partly-overturned health care reform plan). Education reform is one of those sparse achievements and anything that renders it a failure may lead to Obama going the way of Jimmy Carter in the re-election department.

Then there is the reality that this latest version of the education bailout plan (originally planned for $23 billion) is not even needed. A few months ago, it was assumed that as much as five percent of the 6.2 million teachers and school staffers would be laid off due to fiscal problems. Since then, as Mike Antonucci points out almost daily, those layoff numbers have dwindled further as school districts and states use furloughs, tighten belts and attempt to divert federal special education funding to keep teachers and staff on payrolls. That this comes after a previous $100 billion bailout (as part of the federal stimulus plan passed at the beginning of Obama’s term as president) — along with news that education spending hasn’t exactly been flatlined in the past decade — makes school districts and states look downright spendthrifty.

Obama and Duncan probably realize that ARRA II, as I call it, won’t force states to deal with the long-term causes of their fiscal woes: Pension deficits, overly generous benefits such as nearly-free healthcare for teachers, and the traditional system of compensating teachers, which has been costly to taxpayers and students alike. Even if ARRA II forced school districts to abandon the use of reverse seniority (or last hired-first fired) in layoff decisions, it wouldn’t mean much without the acquiescence of NEA and AFT locals, who oppose any change in the status quo.

But for the Democrats, other considerations matter. This includes bolstering the re-election prospects of vulnerable candidates and setting the table for Obama’s re-election effort two years beyond. For the Democrats to overcome the odds of a Republican victory in November, they need lots and lots of bodies. And money. The NEA and AFT offer plenty of that — including $66 million during the 2007-2008 election cycle alone — and far more campaigners on the ground than what school reformers can muster.

Which has always been the problem for the school reform movement. Sure, they have succeeded in winning over most of the policymakers within the Beltway and the nation’s statehouses. But the NEA and AFT have the advantage of strength in numbers. Until now, that intimidation power — the combination of teachers working the corridors of Congress and state capitals and the soft lobbying of parents in schoolhouses — is why the two unions have dominated education policy. Although teachers unions have fewer supporters and can no longer count on unquestioned support from Democrats, they can still whip up enough money and bodies to stave off the most-pathbreaking of reforms, and win over support for bailout schemes that benefit their rank-and-file.

School reformers need to pay attention to what is happening now and build stronger ties to grassroots advocates and parents on the ground; and challenge politicians opposed to school reform at the ballot box and in the hallways. Without them, Race to the Top will become crawl back to the past. The 1.3 million kids destined to drop out in the next year need more than that.

UPDATE (10:54 p.m., July 1): Proving my point, Obey rallied all but 15 Democrats to approve the Race to the Top cuts 239-182 [note: link still says vote not yet available). All but three Republican voted against it.