American Enterprise Institute education czar Rick Hess took a vacation from writing his eponymous Education Week blog. But apparently, it wasn’t enough of a vacation to keep him from offering some wrong-headed thoughts on the importance of morality in fueling the school reform movement.

Taking aim at Tennessee’s efforts to overhaul its teacher evaluation system, the efforts of civil rights activists within the school reform movement to preserve the No Child Left Behind Act’s accountability measures, and a recent memo from Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst defending its efforts to oppose the recall of Paul Scott, Hess declared that far too many of his fellow reformers end up embracing “all kinds of half baked or ill-conceived proposals” that end up failing. Why? Because they don’t remember that these are tools that are only good if they are used. He also thinks that reformers are wrong to turn “school reform into a moral crusade” because it means that their “impassioned good intentions” blind them to the flaws of their own thinking. From where he sits, this moral crusading mentality, leads reformers to be too hasty, too thoughtless, and ultimately, doesn’t work in pushing for systemic reform.

Now let’s acknowledge this: Hess is right to say that reformers shouldn’t just tout anything thoughtlessly. Great ideas, no matter how well-intentioned, are useless without strong, thoughtful execution — and that can take some time. He is also right in arguing that there are no silver bullets for reforming American public education; the penchant among reformers to tout their one and only solution is one which I constantly criticized.

But Hess is off-base when he essentially argues that school reformers shouldn’t treat their work as a moral crusade. If anything, school reform can’t succeed if it isn’t a fundamentally moral mission to save the lives of children and end amoral practices that doom far too many of them to poverty and prison.

History has shown that successful movement has always been as much a moral crusade against systems whose practices behave amorally, even immorally, against people, as they were efforts at systemic change. Its leaders weren’t driven solely by intellectual argument, but largely by their indignation about a crisis that actually hurts real human beings in ways that neither Christian nor Humanist can ethically defend, and the conviction that nothing will be right in the world for anyone until the crisis is reversed.

Think of the American Revolution, in which the Founding Fathers declared that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were endowed by God to all men and cannot be taken away by tyrants. Or the Abolitionist movement of the 19th century, in which preachers such as Henry Lloyd Beecher teamed up with fiery pamphleteers such as William Lloyd Garrison to argue that slavery was a moral cancer liquefying the bones of the American ideal. Consider the civil rights movement of the last century, which was as much driven by ministers such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Fred Shuttlesworth, as it was by intellectuals such as Bayard Rustin, lawyers like Thurgood Marshall, and the grassroots advocacy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Or the global movement against colonialism which was fueled by Mahatma Gandhi’s moral-and-nonviolent resistance. And remember the conservative movement, which was (and remains) as much driven by the appeals against abortion and moral debasement of public life as by the opposition to expansive government and near-usurious levels of taxation.

If anything, a movement that isn’t inherently moral at its core will not succeed. For one, people are as much driven by their sense of what’s right and wrong as by intellectual considerations and their own interest in economic self-preservation. This is especially true in America, a nation in which the vast majority of its citizens attend church and donate most of their philanthropic dollars to faith-based outfits. Nineteenth-century Americans outside of the south were far more convinced about the morally repugnance of enslaving human beings than they were persuaded by the facts that slave labor was economically inefficient and unnecessary.

Morality is also critical to movements because of how it shapes thinking and action. Morality mean taking unequivocal stands, demanding passionate advocacy for what is right, and defying deft intellectualizing that gets away from the proverbial heart of the matter. Morality also forces people to be honest with themselves about who they really are and what they really believe. This is especially true when it comes to the lives and futures of children, including those from poor and minority backgrounds. As Sara Mead pointed out last month in a piece on the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, there are a lot of people out there are far too many people — especially education traditionalists — whose hearts (and views of poor and minority kids) remain as dark as a Joseph Conrad novel. Systemic reform isn’t possible without strongly, honestly, and morally confronting those soft and hard bigotries of low expectations.

Finally, morality is the fuel for sustained action that leads to change. The moral force, in turn, fosters grassroots activists and thinkers whose ideas and actions are shaped by their dedication and their indignation. It builds communities of civic agitation. It transforms storekeepers, mothers and journalists into impromptu leaders demanding change. It inspires collegians to reach beyond their beer goggles to make the world better. It creates networks of social entrepreneurs who start new programs and organizations. And finally, it attracts the support of philanthropists and others who share common moral cause with the builders of the movement.

The reality is that school reform has succeeded in large part because it has been a fundamentally moral movement that appeals to the sense of right and wrong within men and women. You have conservatives, centrists, and liberals who, despite their political leanings, join together to transform education because of their disgust with the reality that 150 young men and women drop out every hour into poverty and prison. They see these kids as being no different than their own, think they deserve the high-quality education needed for for them to be both economic, social, and moral adults, and realize that we only get one chance, every day, with every child, to help them succeed in the big, harsh world we know all too well.

Contrary to what Hess may think, the real question isn’t whether school reform should be a moral crusade. It is and it should be. The issue is how to make sure that this moral crusade pursues workable solutions and how to refine them over time. This is a problem for the movement in part because the various players involved in reform don’t always work well together. In turn, that problem exists because some reformers — especially Hess — dismiss the importance of new and different voices advocating alongside them for overhauling American public education. The sooner Hess and others realize that the movement needs as many Thomas Paynes, William Lloyd Garrisons, Henry Lloyd Beechers, and Martin Luther Kings as it has Thomas Jeffersons, James Madisons and Alexander Hamiltons, the easier it is to make reforms sustainable over time.

This is true for the other players in the reform movement. We need Beltway players to serve as the thinkers for the movement, charter school operators and other practitioners to show how ideas can work in real time, grassroots activists to serve as the shock troops who rally support on the ground, and advocates who serve as the William Lloyd Garrisons and Thomas Paynes of the movement. Without all of these components, reform efforts cannot be sustained. And they all must all remember the importance of school reform being both a moral, intellectual, and practical movement.

The school reform movement must be both a moral crusade in its advocacy, and intellectually thoughtful in its implementation. It isn’t just one or the other. It is both as one.