If you are, as my colleague, Steve Peha, still disappointed in former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee for not sticking it out after her patron was ousted as Chocolate City’s mayor,  you will certainly have high hopes for her newly-launched Students First initiative. And if you are a general fan of work, as this editor is, you can’t help but support the initiative’s goals of rallying parents and community members to embrace and demand reform America’s teaching corps — and ensure that every student is given high-quality instruction.

At the same time, Students First is in some ways, less than satisfying. Why? Because Rhee’s initiative still doesn’t hit the sweet spot when it comes to school reform: Merging policy savvy with hard-core, take-it-to-the-streets activism and entrepreneurial (and operational) drive.

Right now, there is a divide of sorts within the school reform movement between the Beltway reformers (who spend plenty of time on policymaking and working the halls of Congress and statehouses), the grassroots activists (who do the tough work of rallying support door by door) and charter school operators and reformers working in state agencies and school districts (who put ideas into practice). While the three sides share the same goals and concern for reforming education so that every child can write their own story, they don’t see eye-to-eye when it comes to getting things done. More often than not, the three parties often fail to understand the shortcomings of their own approaches and the importance of the work their colleagues are doing.

The biggest offenders are the Beltway-based reformers. As seen in the reaction earlier this year from big-named players such as Rick Hess to the Los Angeles Times’ special report on the low quality teachers in L.A. Unified schools,  the Beltway reformers  seem to prefer bloodless talk about reform than taking the steps  to make reform a reality (including publicly naming laggard teachers and the institutional leaders who protect them). Beltway reformers are also more comfortable with theory and policy than making things work and rough public battles with teachers unions and other defenders of traditional public education. They fail to understand the key lesson of every reformer, activist and revolutionary of any sort: You don’t accomplish anything without afflicting the comfortable within the status quo.

This problem extends beyond the sparring matches. Beltway reformers fail to understand that it takes more than policy to make reforms work.  Save for a few outfits such as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (which actually authorizes charter schools), most are unwilling to do the unglamorous, difficult task of working with families and communities — from listening to concerns, providing time and other resources,  and dealing with the messiness of families (many of which are struggling with a litany of other issues) — in order to make reforms a reality. Although organizations such as Democrats for Education Reform are now playing more-prominent roles in political campaigns, they haven’t mastered the brutal art of election politics; so they end up conceding ground to teachers unions and other status quo defenders.

At the same time, grassroots activists and school reformers on the ground fail to understand the importance of policymaking, which often includes winning over politicians with carefully-worded jargon, working those legislative committee rooms, and crafting legislation that achieves the politically possible. As important as their shock troop work is to winning reform on the ground, they must still understand that the ground game is one part of the war over reforming American public education.

As for charter school operators and in-district reformers? Their problem lies in the fact that they are often too focused on operations and mission than on thinking about how their work can help make the case for reform. More-importantly,  as Rhee herself admitted in October in a Wall Street Journal she co-wrote with her former boss, Adrian Fenty, reform-minded operators don’t always realize the importance explaining to community members how their efforts will improve the quality of education for their kids. Nor do they dare to actually question their opponents within traditional public education on their essential anti-intellectualism and misunderstanding of such matters as economics and management theory. The operators can certainly teach the ed school profs and the teachers union bosses a few things about what the real world actually looks like.

Yet all three groups are important to making school reform a reality. Working together, they temper each other’s excesses, force one another to consider flaws in thinking, and inform each other’s work. The school reform movement needs thinking activists, men and women who both know how to work the corridors of power and get their hands dirty in the trenches, skilled at policymaking, bomb-throwing and implementing all at once. This need is why Dropout Nation discusses both policy and practice; they all must come together in a continuum of actions in order to foster a revolution (and not an evolution) in public education. Reformers can’t just stay in the Beltway , work the streets or operate schools; they must get involved in all three areas.

Rhee has shown success in the policy wonk and school operations arenas; she has also displayed her flaws in rallying grassroots support. Students First offers her an opportunity to get her hands dirty in all three areas, learn from her mistakes, and put some of the lessons she has learned into practice. And she can show all three groups within the school reform movement how to not be limited by their respective perspectives.

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.

Photo courtesy of GothamGazette.org

As you wind down from the Thanksgiving weekend, listen to this Dropout Nation Podcast, on the need to get poor-performing teachers out of classrooms. The damage wrecked by ineffective teaching — and the culture of mediocrity they foster — is promoted and sustained by schools of education, collective bargaining agreements, state laws and cultures within districts.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download 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.

Since taking office as Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Instruction two years ago, Tony Bennett has managed to make the kind of meaningful changes in reforming how the Hoosier State recruits and trains teachers — including requiring ed schools to screen out laggard aspiring teachers by using the Praxis I exam — that his predecessor, Suellen Reed, never deemed worth doing in her 16 years in office. This, along with his defense of the state’s charter schools from efforts to essentially abolish them, has certainly angered the state’s educational ancien regime. But it has also made him one of the more-fervent school reform-oriented state school chief executives — a role that will become more prominent as Indiana’s governor and state legislature consider a new round of reform initiatives in a state that dearly needs them.

In this Three Questions, Bennett — who will be coming to D.C. next week to speak  on an American Enterprise Institute book panel, offers a few thoughts on reforming American public education on the ground. Read and consider.

What is the one surprising thing you have learned during your tenure as Indiana’s superintendent from public instruction and how has it shaped your work and thinking?

It is surprising to me how infrequently children are the focus of conversations regarding education reform. Too often, the focus is on how change will affect adults in the system and not on how changes will benefit our students.  This inspired me, early on, to make putting kids first our top priority—and I look at everything through that lens.
What is the one thing school reform activists inside the Beltway don’t consider in their policy discussions and proposals and why?

Much of what we’re trying to do in Indiana aligns with federal policymakers’ vision for education reform. But specifically, I’d like it if the policymakers and leaders in D.C. removed as much of the bureaucratic red tape as possible.  I’d like to see them get rid of the superfluous reporting requirements that have nothing to do with educating children and instead pull educators away from focusing on their core mission to teach kids. In this regard, I think the feds have good intentions, but it’s difficult for them to envision how data and reporting requirements handcuff us at the state and local level.

What are the most-critical next steps that Indiana will need to take in order to improve the quality of teachers in classrooms? What are the challenges?

Our agenda is four-pronged: 1. Increase flexibility so that school corporations can meet the needs of their students. 2. Increase options for all students. 3. Increase accountability. 4. Recognize and reward great teachers.  Key in achieving these will be making sure teacher and leader evaluations are multi-faceted and fair—and can consider student achievement growth, which is currently prohibited by state law.   We must also work to ensure pay and promotion are based on factors other than seniority and degrees held. We need to make sure every parent has access to high-quality educational options for their child. Finally, we must act with fierce urgency to make all these changes now to benefit students—especially in our chronically underperforming school buildings.

The biggest challenges we face is opposing adult interests that seek to maintain the ineffective status quo.

How do you think charter schools will further reshape Indiana’s education landscape? What steps will you take to ensure that charters are of high-quality?

Charters are a powerful piece in our efforts to increase high-quality educational options for all students.  We have to provide a more hospitable environment for charters to develop.  And I believe charters should be held to the same high standards to which we hold traditional public schools.  If they aren’t demonstrating student growth and quality education, they should be closed.

Rethinking policies around seat-time requirements, class size, compensating teachers based on their educational credentials, the use of technology in the classroom, inequitable school financing, the over placement of students in special education—almost all of these potentially transformative productivity gains are primarily state and local issues that have to be grappled with.

These are tough issues. Rethinking the status quo, by definition, can be unsettling. But I know that these discussions will be taking place in the coming year in schools, in districts, in union headquarters, in statehouses, and the governor’s mansion. The alternative is to simply end up doing less with less. That is fundamentally unacceptable.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, proclaiming during yesterday’s American Enterprise Institute conference that the status quo in American public education has to change. Well, it needs more than that: A revolution, not an evolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> http://dropoutnation.net/2010/11/12/wanted-walkman-ipod-educational-governance/feed/ 1 http://dropoutnation.net/2010/11/09/considerable-legacy-joel-klein/ http://dropoutnation.net/2010/11/09/considerable-legacy-joel-klein/#comments Wed, 10 Nov 2010 04:40:31 +0000 RiShawn Biddle http://dropoutnation.net/?p=3203

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

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

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

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

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

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

The single-biggest problem in discussions about reforming American public education is that nearly all players think their belief is gospel. Both defenders of traditional public education’s status quo, and school reformers hold certain ideas that they think lead to the one and only solution (or the most-important solution of all). The reality is that it will take a wide array of solutions — including ending the culture of mediocrity and disdain for data that permeates throughout our schools and districts today.

Dropout Nation has spent pages and podcasts taking down some of those viewpoints — including the notion that poverty is the underlying cause of achievement gaps and the nation’s dropout crisis, and that some kids are incapable of handling college prep curricula. At the same time, we have also made clear that school choice is just one imperfect (and sometimes incomplete) answer to solving our dropout crisis. Below are some more beliefs that are sorely mistaken: need to be embraced with other aspects of reform:

It’s All About Standards: Embraced by the standards and accountability types in the school reform movement (including supporters of the new Common Core State Standards), it’s based on a belief that more-rigorous curriculum standards will help in holding schools and districts accountable for results, in developing tests that actually measure what students are learning and in structuring better curricula and instructional practices. This certainly makes sense. After all, without standards for learning, schools, districts and states would simply continue with the decades of educational malpractice that has led to the current woes within public education.

The problem? Start with the reality that standards won’t mean much is school curricula isn’t aligned with them. Essentially, one can create rigorous standards and explain clearly what every child should learn — and it will be useless without assuring that the curricula follows according to them. This is a critical issue because so many of the curriculum developers are either skeptical of the underlying rationale for the standards or (wrongly)  any kind of curriculum standards whatsoever.

The second problem lies with how to ensure that that the standards are actually being enforced at the school level; essentially one will have to hope that everyone involved behaves honorably (unlikely) or that a state or federal agency will hold feet to the fire (which, based on past history, still means more gamesmanship). States have struggled with this challenge for decades. Thanks to the embrace of Common Core, this will now be a national struggle as well. While folks such as Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute dance around the issue by arguing that a national non-profit board can handle the job, past experience (including that of the U.S. Department of Education with some provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act) suggests otherwise.

Ultimately, you must still improve teacher quality (along with developing more-rigorous and aligned curricula) in order to make all this work.  This means ed schools must be overhauled in order to better recruit and train teachers. It also means expanding the pool of alternative teacher training programs, and expanding Teach For America and other existing programs.

It’s All About Curriculum: The flip-side is the line of argument advanced by Robert Pondisco and his employers at Core Knowledge, among others. It is based on a couple of rather seductive notions with the usual rings of truth. The first: That teachers are only as good as the curriculum they use in instruction. The second: That standards are meaningless without strong content that provides students both with skills and background knowledge

But as with so many beliefs, rings of truth  doesn’t mean absolute truth. Forget for a moment that none of the groups actually agree on which curricula is best for improving student achievement in any subject (much less all subjects): The  curriculum-is-the-solution crowd forget that curricula doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is shaped by a series of underlying standards, goals and beliefs; it is taught by teachers who must have the subject-matter competency, entrepreneurial drive and care for the lives of children needed to be good instructors; and the underlying rigor (including teacher and curriculum evaluation) must be reinforced by  strong, thoughtful principals and superintendents. If the curricula is divorced from standards, then it will be ineffective and will cause systemic problems up and down the line (including frustrating efforts to evaluate teachers and the most-important matter of all — ensuring every child learns). If the curricula is taught by lousy teachers, the kids won’t learn. And if school leadership doesn’t do its job of fostering a culture of genius, high-quality curriculum will become low-quality in an instant.

As standards is only one part of the formula for school reform, so is curriculum. Standards and curricula both need to be of high-quality in order to be worth their respective salts. And you need systemic reforms in place in order to assure that the curricula does its job.

It’s All About  Economic Desegregation: The usual line trotted out by the Jerry Orfield-Richard Kahlenberg crowd is one based on the Civil Rights Movement concept of integration and busing. Minorities and the poor, according to this view, can’t receive the same quality of education as their white middle-class peers unless they attend school with these peers. Based on this logic, it’s better to just ship poor kids to the schools attended by middle class kids instead of improving the quality of schools in poor neighborhoods.

Kahlenberg in particular has spent the past two decades trotting out studies and school districts that supposedly prove this line of thinking. A couple of decades ago, it was Wake County, N.C. (even though its achievement gaps were never truly closed and the desegregation effort involved only a smattering of all students). These days, it is the D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, Md., the subject of a recent report by Heather Schwartz, a Rand Corp., researcher brought in by  Kahlenberg’s employer, the Century Foundation. This, despite the fact that Montgomery County (in which only 65 percent of black males graduate from high school, according to the Schott Foundation  for Public Education) isn’t exactly the model Kahlenberg and Schwartz claim it to be.

What I’m saying, to be kind, is that Kahlenberg and Orfield are touting a strategy (originally developed by an earlier generation of civil rights activists out of political necessity) that hasn’t worked in improving student achievement. If anything, integration has done more to keep poor and minority kids from getting high-quality education in their own neighborhoods. Magnet schools, for example, haven’t

The biggest problem with integration is that it tacitly argues that there is no way to improve the quality of education our poorest kids receive in their own neighborhoods; in essence, no one should bother reforming education so poor kids can have high-quality schools in the communities in which they live. This view ignores the success charter schools operators such as the Knowledge Is Power Program and Catholic diocesan schools in improving student achievement right in those very neighborhoods. There are other words for it, but we’ll keep them out of this family publication.

Integration is no substitute for complete, systemic and much-needed overhaul of American public education.

It Comes Down to Working Things Out at the School Level: A good number of folks, including Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews, articulates this perspective (which is what used to be called site-based or school-based decision-making). From where they sit,  school bureaucracies, policymaking bodies and legislative edicts merely set up a framework for school activity — and not even a good one at that. Ultimately, the people best-suited to deciding school activities — from curriculum to hiring, evaluating and compensating teachers — are school principals,  who are closest to the ground. This perspective makes sense on its face: No matter how robust the school data system or well-informed the superintendent or state legislator, these players aren’t anywhere near the classroom and cannot observe every bit of activity that happens daily in schools.

But the school-based decision-making viewpoint ignores the complex structure that is American public education, one in which hiring and firing decisions are made not by principals and not even by superintendents, but largely controlled by collective bargaining agreements, state laws and federal and state regulations. Moving all teacher hiring-and-firing decisions down to principals (a move taken in New York City) definitely helps

If we moved to a private sector-driven education system, fully decentralized all districts or even adapted the Hollywood Model — my formula for reforming governance and delivery of education — then the site-based approach would work. Until then, we must reform every aspect of American public education in a systematic way.

You have to make all teachers better: This belief, held by many teachers union officials and teachers such as 2009 California Teacher of the Year Alex Kajitani and David B. Cohen, assumes that every teacher is capable of high-quality instruction. From where they sit, teachers need help developing their classroom instruction. Performance management should not use objective student performance data (especially test data) for hiring and firing teachers; instead, evaluations (along with so-called peer review) should be used to help laggards get better.

Nothing wrong with trying to believe that. But in the real world, some folks just aren’t fit for certain jobs. This doesn’t mean that they are terrible people and it doesn’t mean they can’t be successful in other lines of work. What it does mean that they won’t do a good-to-great job — be they lack the skills, talent, temperament or desire — in a particular field. No matter how much additional training or assistance they receive, they won’t do any better. Teachers are no exception. An instructor is no more successful in improving student achievement after 25 years of teaching than an instructor working for four years, according to a report by Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen of the Center for Reinventing Public Education. This means that a teacher that is poor-performing after four years in the classroom is unlikely to get any better 21 years down the line (and vice versa for her high-quality colleague). Given everything that we know at this moment about the impact of high-quality and low-quality teaching, we can’t afford to continue exposing kids to instruction by teachers who don’t make the grade.

Teachers union bosses and teachers have to face this reality: Many of of their colleagues lack either the subject competency, empathy for children, or entrepreneurial zeal needed to be high-quality teachers. Quite a few lack all three characteristics. They are all too willing to mire themselves, their students and their colleagues in mediocrity in order to collect their paychecks. These teachers cannot be made better. The best solution is to improve how we recruit and train teachers, and develop performance management systems that separate good-to-great teachers from those who aren’t.

Editor’s Note: Originally, I had mentioned that Core Knowledge was opposed to standards. Robert Pondisco took time to note that Core Knowledge did support Common Core. For accuracy’s sake, I have made the proper correction. Apologies to all for the error.

In her response to a recent speech on education by President Obama, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, used what has probably become the greatest cliché in all of education reform: “Teaching is a complex enterprise, and there are no silver-bullet solutions for our schools.”

This is a self-serving fallacy. There is a silver bullet and we all know what it is: competent teachers. Not rock stars. Not geniuses. Not Rafe Esquiths or Jaime Escalantes. Not carefully recruited, alternatively certified, finely tuned specimens of human capital. Not former four-star generals or ex-Fortune 500 CEOs. Not Six-Sigma-superstars or Seven-Habits-heroes. Just competent teachers acting in the best interests of the children and families they serve.

This works every time. In fact, it’s the only thing that seems to work. So why do we say out of one side of our mouth that teaching quality is the most significant influence on student achievement and then, out of the other side of our mouth, we say that, “Teaching is a complex enterprise, and there are no silver-bullet solutions for our schools.”

Teaching is a complex enterprise, but being a competent teacher is not. Being responsible for our competence can be challenging at times, but most of us get the hang of it after a while. If we don’t, we never grow up. And if we never grow up, it really doesn’t matter if we ever become competent. We’re the adults in the room. If we don’t act like adults, there’s no point in being in the room.

Teaching is hard. No argument there. But one advantage of its difficulty is that it’s not hard to figure out if you’re any good at it. Competence—yours, mine, or anyone else’s—is easy to gauge. Being responsible is how you become competent if you’re not, and knowing whether you’re being responsible is easy to gauge, too.

We could fix the competence problem if we applied the following principals of responsibility:

1. If you know what to do, do it.
2. If you don’t know what to do, learn.
3. Iterate through challenges quickly.
4. Assess your progress often and honestly.
5. Apply Principal #1 or Principal #2 as needed.

This is exactly what we ask of small children, so we can be certain that we all understand it. Acting the same way we expect others to act is called modeling in the classroom. Another thing every teacher is familiar with. It’s called integrity in life. Integrity is easy to gauge, too. When we say that there are no silver bullet-solutions for our schools, we are out of integrity with what we know to be true.

I do not mean to trivialize the challenge here. But neither will I support the oft-repeated position that education is too complex to be tamed or that straightforward approaches can’t be implemented. How complicated is it to ask that adults who care for children take it upon themselves to be competent, and if they are not competent, to be responsible about achieving competence?

If you think you detect a lack of compassion in my tone, I encourage you to detect again. I know as well as anyone the pain of incompetence when the well-being of children for whom I am responsible is at stake. Few things I have experienced in my life have ever felt as awful, day after day, and for many days thereafter, as letting a group of struggling elementary school students go an entire year without learning a thing about learning to read. But over the ensuing summer, I read books on reading instruction, practiced on a few patient kids, and became a competent reading teacher—not a great reading teacher, just a competent reading teacher. And when September rolled around, I felt like a human being again. My own experience, and that of many teachers whom I have trained, leads me to believe that supporting every teacher in achieving competence is one the most compassionate gestures we can make on behalf of people who devote so much of themselves to what is often a very unforgiving vocation.

We must also have compassion for children, of course, especially for those who are most sensitive to poor learning conditions at school because they may not have the support at home that we would wish for them. The most compassionate gesture we can make on behalf of our children is the guarantee of a competent teacher in every classroom. It’s hard to live a good life these days without a good education. And every teacher I know— competent or not—feels the pain of poorly educated children as they head out of school, ill-prepared for the world that awaits them.

Competence is the “silver-bullet solution” for our schools. Any time we say it isn’t, we lie to ourselves and to our country. Competent teachers provide quality educations to the children they serve. This is a research-proven fact and an empirically tested hypothesis in our own personal lives. Tens of thousands of these people exist across our land. We all know at least a few of them. Some were our teachers.

Competent teaching is not a mystery. The mystery is why more of us don’t take ownership of our competence. Again, the word is “competence”. Not “excellence” or “perfection” or “greatness” or “self-less saintly sacrifice”. Just competence.

Every teacher working in every school today is either competent or has within his or her sole power the social, emotional, intellectual, financial, and temporal resources to become competent. Many of us may have to get a little training, we may have to read a book or two, we may have to practice a bit, and mess up a few times before we get our act together. But competence is within our grasp.

Don’t even try to tell anybody it isn’t, least of all yourself.

There have been many times when I wasn’t competent. Incompetence stalks me even fifteen years into this work, when situations arise that are new to me and for which I am not well prepared. Recently, for example, I realized I didn’t know nearly enough about helping kids with ADD and ADHD. I am not competent in this regard. So I e-mailed a few smart people, read a couple of good articles on the web, purchased a highly recommended book on the subject, and started to learn. I’m not competent yet, but I will be soon enough. Probably just in time to be faced with another situation in which I am not competent.

School is like that. It encourages us learn. Yet some of us manage somehow to avoid learning at school. That’s when the responsibility part kicks us in the ass. If we can feel the pain of our own failure, we can heal ourselves and move forward. If we can’t feel the pain, it’s time to welcome someone else up to the front of the room.

There is very little about competent teaching that is not stored somewhere ready for anyone to access, often for free. Some of it is in books. Some of it is on the web. Some of it is on DVD. Some of it is in training. Some of it is inside the brains of competent teachers and teacher trainers across our nation. But it’s all there somewhere.

In my personal quest to understand education, I have, in pursuit of competence, posed a seemingly endless stream of questions, few of which have remained unanswered for very long. The answers haven’t always been right for me or for my situation. But other answers have usually been available as long as I have been willing to look for them. The amount of knowledge we have about education is overwhelming. But no one needs to know it all; not even close. We just need to know enough—enough to be good enough. That’s what being competent means, being good enough. We don’t have to understand the universe of education, just our tiny part of it. And there’s nothing overwhelming about that.

We can say all kinds of things about how hard teaching is. No one’s going to disagree with us. But we can’t say we can’t all become competent because that’s just as much of a lie as saying there are no silver bullets. We’re the silver bullets, ladies and gentlemen. Competence is the gun. Responsibility pulls the trigger. Integrity holds us together and attracts into our lives other people who share our values and lend their support. In a spirit of community and compassion, we teach our way toward competence, and improve our education system one silver bullet at a time.