Committee of the Unthinking: Your editor hasn’t had much praise for House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, his fervent effort to eviscerate the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, his longstanding support for increasing federal special education subsidies that do little more than perpetuate education ghettos that condemn millions of young men and women to poverty and prison, or even his past failure (and that of Early Childhood subcommittee chairman, California Republican Duncan Hunter) to bring Parent Power activists to any of the committee’s hearings. But Kline (and Hunter) deserve thanks for this week’s Early Childhood subcommittee hearing featuring Parent Power activists such as Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel (a Dropout Nation contributing editor) and school choice activists such as former D.C. City Councilman and Black Alliance for Educational Options cofounder Kevin Chavous. Because the hearing once again revealed how both so many Democrat and Republican politicians (other than Kline and Hunter) still don’t get the importance of families being the lead decision-makers in schools and education as a whole.

You can easily surmise this from the questions and the grandiloquent statements made by education traditionalists fellow-travelers on the committee, all of which you can download or watch. There was the wrong and hostile declarations of New York Democrat Carolyn McCarthy, wagging a pencil as if it were a cigar, that charter schools “have the ability of not taking children with disabilities”, and similar words from her California counterpart, Lynn Woolsey; National Alliance for Public Charter Schools honcho Todd Zeibarth had to refute those statements and inform them that there are charters specially designed to work with kids with autism. Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott went on a five-minute round of speechifying, proclaiming that vouchers are terrible because they divert dollars from district schools that think those dollars belong solely to them (instead of remembering that they are payment for providing services to kids, and they shouldn’t get the dollar). Instead of asking why states don’t revamp their school funding systems so that the dollars are voucherized and thus, kids can use them at any school that fits them, Scott simply argued that “those who don’t get vouchers are worse off”.

Then there was Pennsylvania Republican Todd Russell Platts, who used his soapbox to declare that school choice and Parent Power makes things “worse off” because it allows families to “abandon” failure mills and takes families who can be advocates for public education out of traditional district schools (without ever considering that the public education is not about a district or a bureaucracy, but about providing high-quality opportunities for all kids). Platts went on to proclaim that “our duty is to every child, not to the very few” even as he defended traditionalist policies and practices that have denied high-quality education to poor and minority children.

Platt’s speechifying weren’t necessarily shocking nor were McCarthy’s; both are the darlings of the old-school “parent involvement” crowd who, as Temple University Professor William W. Cutler III illustrated in Parents and Schools: The 150-year struggle for control in American education, have long ago been co-opted by traditional district leaders and National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates; Platts, in particular, has long opposed school voucher programs (including the DC Opportunity Scholarship now facing another shutdown attempt by the Obama administration). Woolsey has long benefited from NEA and AFT donations, with $130,800 in campaign donations over her career, according to OpenSecrets.org. Scott has also benefited from teachers’ union largess, picking up $97,000 in donations from teachers unions over time; like fellow Virginian Henry Marsh (who was Scott’s colleague in the Dominion State’s legislature before winning his congressional seat 16 years ago), Scott is the kind of old-school black politician who has not realized the fact that education is the civil rights issue of this time.

But the fact that it isn’t surprising still doesn’t make it any less outrageous. What Platts, McCarthy, Scott, Woolsey and their fellow-travelers, both in Congress and in state legislatures, fail to realize is that families cannot “fix” or be engaged in education when they must tangle with bureaucracies and systems that treat them as afterthoughts and nuisances (when they aren’t being blamed by teachers’ union bosses and failed school leaders for their own performance problems). This is the reality in American public education today.

As Peter McDermott and Julia Johnson Rothenberg of the Sage Colleges have noted in their research on school engagement, urban and low-income parents often perceive schools to be unwelcoming and interactions with teachers to be “painful encounters.” Certainly some of this has to do with the negative experiences these parents have had with schools — especially those failure mills that they once attended and to which their children now go. But it is also about the fact that there are many teachers who look at parents — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — with condescension and disdain. The reality is that we have far too many teachers who look down on poor urban parents who may not be capable of helping their kids because of their own learning issues; who are hostile to those families who want to take an active role in shaping the education their kids receive in school; and would rather keep those families servile. And this disdain trickles down to how children, especially from the poorest households are treated. Contrary to what the GetSchooled Foundation and other groups attempted to declare yesterday in their report on chronic absenteeism, truancy is a natural consequence of kids realizing that they are illiterate, innumerate, and stuck with teachers and principals who treat their parents poorly and can’t help them as students make up ground.

This nauseating approach to families is just as strong in suburban districts such as the ones in Platts’ district– particularly for first-generation black and Latino middle-class households — as it is in big-city districts. As University of Michigan Associate Professor Karyn Lacey noted in Blue-Chip Black, her sociological study of middle-class black families in the area surrounding the nation’s capital, black families living in Fairfax County found themselves battling teachers and guidance counselors who wanted to relegate children to academic tracks that keep them from getting high-paying white- and blue-collar jobs, and finding themselves not informed about their options for preparing their kids for success in school and in life, including opportunities to take Advanced Placement courses or participate in the growing number of dual-credit programs. From inconveniently-schedule parent-teacher conferences to refusals by suburban schools to allow families to tour the classrooms their kids will have to attend, suburban districts are no epitomes of cultures of strong family empowerment and engagement.

The beauty of vouchers, charter schools and Parent Trigger laws is that these tools not only allows families to actually help their kids succeed in school and in life, they also spur parents to be fully engaged in education and learn more about how their kids can get a high-quality education. As James Guthrie of the George W. Bush Institute has pointed out, the only real way that families can really be engaged in schools is if they actually have the ability to actually shape the education their kids receive. They also become the kind of unabashed school reformers and impromptu leaders we need to overhaul American public education. More importantly, choice and power also allow for the very democratic action that education traditionalists tout as a defense for preserving the status quo; when families can choose how their kids are educated, they can be real players in the rest of American society.

Kline and Hunter should use this hearing as an opportunity to challenge their colleagues (especially Platts) and push for making choice and Parent Power key components of federal education policy; this includes encouraging states to embrace vouchers and Parent Trigger laws. On the  latter, they can already count on ranking Democrat (and former education committee chairman) George Miller, who once again proclaimed his support this past March for the passage of Parent Trigger laws.

As for school reformers? The challenge is to now remind congressional leaders such as Platts, McCarthy, Woolsey, and Scott that they need to embrace systemic reform and support the kinds of policies that allow for families to be real players in education. And when they still don’t get it, recruit challengers who will toss these politicians out of Congress for good.

Presently in Connecticut, we have over more than 220,000 children in Connecticut — or one out of every two kids — attend low-performing schools.These are children who do not vote, do not sign medical release forms, and do not sign the educational contracts that govern their educational experiences. And if the parents of those children try to advocate for their child’s educational rights, they will, more than likely, experience severe push back and retaliation from the status quo.

One would think that with the futures of these kids on the line, and $300 million if taxpayer dollars at risk, Connecticut’s legislators would ensure that families, along with administrators, small businesses and other taxpayers would be at the decision making table to help turn around low-performing schools. This would seem to be logical. Yet the only stakeholders allowed in the lawmakers “private” back door “education reform” conversations are the state’s teachers’ unions.

As a parent of color, knowing the achievement is comprised of majority people of color and impoverished communities and after seeing the “secret” partnerships between teachers’ unions and lawmakers, I can only conclude that for these people, the educational needs of some of our children don’t matter.

Ayn Rand once stated that the rights of individuals aren’t subjected to a vote. And this is especially true when it comes to the rights of our children to opportunities for a great education. Yet we as families struggle to give our kids the same opportunities to a better life as we did back in the civil rights struggle against Jim Crow in the last century.

Martin Luther King once declared that the law can’t force men to love me, but it can keep them from killing me. Today, we need laws and policies in education that allow our children, especially children of color and those who live in poverty in rural and urban areas, to get the high-quality education they deserve.

Yet we have teachers’ unions who essentially want to deny our kids opportunities for high-quality education. What they do is the 21st century of lynching. It leads our kids from schools to prisons, where we as taxpayers spend $41,000 a year to incarcerate men and women who could have been kept out of jails if they received a great education. And we have political leaders who support this 21st century form of lynching because only some kids matter to them.

As families, we must vote for people that are willing to pass laws that end 21st-century lynching and keep our dollars from being spent on ineffectiveness teaching and schooling. When more than 40 percent of our children are condemned to prison and poverty, and $300 million dollars of our taxpayer dollars are wasted, we as families, homeowners, business owners, and college students cannot afford for this to continue.

It starts by demanding our legislators to support Gov. Dan Malloy’s SB 24, which will start our efforts towards giving our kids high-quality schools and teachers. We know that the law, as Gov. Malloy originally drafted, will not solve the entire states crisis. But it will help level the playing field towards equitable access to opportunity. And it is the most comprehensive education reform plan produced by any leader in this state.

It must be paired together with efforts to help our kids read, overhauling how we teach our kids how to read. Certainly the “universal reading” bill being proposed could help reduce the nation’s worst racial and economic achievement gaps by retaining third graders that don’t make the grade. But it will not work without passing SB 24, which will hold teachers and principals accountable through comprehensive evaluation of their performance as instructors and school leaders.

Yet other legislators want to support the universal reading law without passing SB 24 as originally crafted. How can our house speaker and senate leaders implement this effort at improving literacy without holding those who teach our children and lead our schools responsible and accountable?

The fact that they stood before teachers’ union leaders this week and pledged to not hold them accountable boggles the mind. What these legislative leaders have said is crystal clear: Teachers’ unions are more important than one out of every two kids who attend our schools. And that they will allow teachers’ union leaders and those who support them to bully families and other taxpayers who only want the best for all of our children.

This is why the uprising among families to protect the rights of their kids to high-quality educational opportunities, both in Connecticut and across the country, has only just begun. We are tired of political leaders and teachers’ union officials who make education all about their interests and not about the children we love.

Let’s be clear: The Schott Foundation for Public Education’s latest report focusing on opportunities for high-quality education for black and Latino students is an important report, but not exactly without flaws. For one, the report attempts to use the percentage of teachers possessing master’s degrees and certification status as markers of quality even though the preponderance of data shows that there is no correlation between either of them and student achievement. This is especially clear when one looks at Schott’s own data analysis: District 2, the zoned area for kids living in some of the toniest neighborhoods in New York City (including the Upper East Side of Manhattan) is considered to have far greater opportunities for learning than District 6, whose students come from Washington Heights and other neighborhoods at the far northern end of the borough. Yet only 44 percent of District 2’s teachers hold master’s degrees and have 30 additional hours of graduate coursework compared to 39 percent of teachers in District 6, while both zones have similar levels of inexperienced teachers, instructors working outside of their subject competency, and those not considered highly qualified under the No Child Left Behind Act; the fact that neither zone would have black or Latino students performing at advanced levels in reading (based on a comparison of New York State test data to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress) also belies the credentials-equals-quality argument.

Some of the conclusions reached by Schott in its report also don’t gel with the evidence. Certainly Schott is right to argue that New York City should provide college-preparatory classes (including Algebra II) to all students. But arguing that increasing school funding will help improve the quality of education for poor and minority students, for example, ignores evidence in its own report that the problems have far less to do with money. This includes the underlying issues of traditional teacher compensation (including seniority privileges that protect veteran teachers at the expense of less-senior counterparts regardless of individual talent in improving student achievement) that truly affect the Big Apple’s ability to improve teacher quality for poor and minority kids; the opposition of the American Federation of Teachers local and its bellicose president, Michael Mulgrew, to any effort by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s effort to improve teacher quality; and laggard school leaders, who like the low-quality teachers they oversee, don’t belong in schools (and are just as zealously protected by their own union) and often share the same low expectations for poor and minority kids.

All that said, the Schott report, like the flawed report issued last year by the Brookings Institution, offers more compelling reasons why we must abandon zoned schooling and other Zip Code Education policies that condemn millions of our children to dropout factories, failure mills, and warehouses of mediocrity. On this, Bloomberg and his chancellor, Dennis Walcott, can strike a blow against restricting opportunities for high-quality education — and advance his slow-yet-successful reform effort — by fully embracing all forms of school choice.

Schott and its research czar, Michael Holzman (whose insights grace the pages of Dropout Nation) rightly points out that the educational and economic destinies of so many of New York City’s kids are determined by the zip code in which they live. A black or Latino teen attending a middle school in, say, the city’s East New York section of Brooklyn could immediately improve their opportunities for high-quality education just by moving a few miles into my old neighborhood of South Ozone Park. Same is true for a kid in Harlem whose family figures out a way to find an affordable flat in the area surrounding Columbus Circle (if they can’t get their kid into a charter school above 110th Street). The shameful lack of high-quality options for so many children is especially galling when one considers that even the poorest family in the city’s South Jamaica section has a wider array of choices in restaurants (and can even eat at some of the city’s most-expensive eateries if they save up enough cash) than in high-quality schools.

Certainly Bloomberg and his school czars (including former chancellor Joel Klein and his successor, Walcott) have certainly done a great of making the city’s schools better than they were in the 1980s and 1990s; the percentage of fourth-graders reading Below Basic, as measured on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, declined from 53 percent in 2003 to 39 percent in 2011, while the average black male fourth-grader reads at a grade level higher in 2011 than in 2003. But with black males still trailing three grades behind their white male peers in reading — and all young men trailing behind young women regardless of race, ethnicity, or class — Gotham still has plenty of work to do on providing all children with the high-quality teaching, instruction, leadership, choices, and school choices they need to be ready to help the city and America continue bending the arc of history toward progress.

Meanwhile the city’s past reticence in expanding school choice has meant that few families outside of Harlem and some parts of Brooklyn can avail themselves of high-quality operations such as those run by the Harlem Children’s Zone and Success Academy. Certainly the Empire State’s recently-lifted cap on charter school expansion, along with the lack of high-quality schools within the district itself, made it more difficult for the city to provide greater choices. At the same time, the Big Apple could have long ago allowed for robust intra-district choice — especially since families can easily access transportation thanks to the nation’s largest public transit system (and kids already get free and reduced-priced bus passes to ride from home to school).

The good news is that the city is pushing harder to overhaul its teacher quality system —  especially through its effort to force the AFT local to accept the new teacher evaluation system being implemented throughout New York State. But Bloomberg and Walcott should embrace the findings in the Schott report and use it to spur this second round of reform. Expanding the use of college-preparatory curricula such as Core Knowledge (which is being used in just a smattering of Big Apple schools) would help; so would improving its data system so families can know exactly what’s going on with schools. But families, especially those from black and Latino backgrounds, can’t wait for systemic reform to happen over time. So Bloomberg and Walcott should accelerate school choice and Parent Power.

Bloomberg’s move to allow 50 more charter schools to open throughout the city by the time he begins ending his tenure as Big Apple mayor is a good start. But he should immediately end zoned schooling throughout the city and allow families to send their kids to any school throughout the city. The city should also enact its own form of Parent Trigger law, allowing those families who want to overhaul the very schools in their own neighborhoods to do so; such a step would not only expand choice, but also reduce the rancor from those who have been swayed by the AFT to oppose the closing of failure mills and dropout factories because they can now offer to take control of the schools and revamp them on their own.

But it’s not just New York City that needs to expand choice and Parent Power. With four out of every five families unable to exercise any form of school choice — and thus stuck sending their kids to mediocre and abysmal schools — expanding choice and Parent Power is critical throughout the nation. As I noted in today’s Midweek Monitor, states such as Alabama need to give families — including those from poor and minority backgrounds — the options and tools they need to help their kids escape failure mills, overhaul dropout factories in their own communities, and ultimately, help their children get the high-quality education they deserve. Meanwhile the Obama administration, which has done a fine job for the most part on supporting the expansion of charters, needs to fully embrace choice and Parent Power as well. Fully funding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program should be on its agenda. The administration should also require states and districts to enact Parent Trigger laws and provisions as part of the next round of Race to the Top.

The Schott report once again reminds all of us that it is high time for systemic reform. All children deserve a high-quality education that is fit for their futures.

Back in October and November, Dropout Nation reported on the lawsuit filed by a group of Southern California families organized by activist Alice Callaghan (with backing from the school reform group EdVoice) against the Los Angeles Unified School District, charging that the district had continually violated its obligations under the state’s Stull Act to adequately evaluate teachers and demanding the district to reform its teacher evaluation system. In the months since then, L.A. Unified has struck a deal with the American Federation of Teachers’ local that would allow traditional district schools to operate similarly to charter schools, with autonomy from district policies and the ability to use student test score data in evaluations. This deal, largely driven by the union regaining control of L.A. Unified’s board, came in exchange for essentially ending the effort to expand school choice and embrace the Hollywood Model of Education undertaken by current Superintendent John Deasy’s predecessor, Ramon Cortines. But the deal did not satisfy the Callaghan families’ demands (or even Deasy’s own push for overhauling teacher evaluations).

Which is why the families filed a Writ of Mandate petition last week in California superior court demanding that L.A. Unified immediately comply with the Stull Act — including making specific recommendations to teachers on their performance. Basing its argument off of information it gleaned from Deasy during a deposition, the Callaghan parents argue that the district has systematically evaded its obligation to evaluate teachers using student performance data — or to conduct proper evaluations altogether — under California’s Stull Act, which governs how L.A. Unified and other districts are supposed to handle teacher evaluations and performance management.

Under the law, newly-hired teachers are supposed to be evaluated every year until they earn tenure, while tenured veterans are evaluated every two years until they reach their 10th year on the job. Teachers have to be evaluated based on the Golden State’s curriculum standards, those evaluations must be put in writing in order to be valid, and corrective action must be required for those teachers who fail to make the grade. But as the families note in the suit, L.A. Unified is doing almost none if this because it has become servile to the AFT and the union that represents school principals. Declare the parents: “The problem is a District that has relinquished its obligations to the students in order to placate more powerful interests.”

L.A. Unified admits that it has the longitudinal student data needed to adequately evaluate teachers as required under the Stull Act, and can establish standards for student achievement as required under the version of the law amended in 1999 thanks to the efforts of then-California Assembly speaker (and now-L.A. Mayor) Antonio Villaraigosa. It isn’t as if L.A. Unified has never used student performance in measuring teacher quality. As the Callaghan brief notes, the district was doing this back in the 1970s and 1980s.

But since the 1980s, L.A. Unified has essentially evaded subjecting teachers to strong evaluations base on objective measures of student achievement, alleges the Callaghan families. Deasy admits this is the case. In his deposition, the superintendent states that “the current system doesn’t best serve adults or students” and does not focus on “the whole part if an education, and that is how students do.”

L.A. Unified has not creates a “uniform” process by which student performance is part of evaluations, nor has it developed a process by which teachers can gain feedback on performance. Even when (or if) the district moves to using student data in evaluations, it will be a challenge because the principals and assistant principals charged with doing the job “are not trained with any regularity or in any kind of uniform way” to either use such data or to even conduct proper evaluations as expected under the state law.

The families aren’t the only ones pushing for L.A. Unified to get its act together and stand up to the AFT and the principals’ union. L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa, who now runs several former traditional district schools as part of the now-defunct school choice effort, filed a friend-of-the-court brief also pushing for the district to fully comply with the Stull Act and revamp its teacher and principal performance management systems. Villaraigosa notes that L.A. Unified essentially admitted that its evaluation efforts were not helping to provide kids with high-quality teachers two years ago when it launched a commission that eventually proposed such an overhaul. The brief also points out that a quarter of all L.A. Unified teachers have said that they never received feedback on their performance from their principals, and 60 percent of those teachers who do get some form of guidance on their performance only find it to be “somewhat helpful”. This dovetails with the National Council on Teacher Quality’s 2011 report on L.A. Unified’s teacher evaluations, which found that just 40 percent of veteran teachers and 70 percent of new hires were evaluated by the district during the 2009-2010 school year. (Contradicting the arguments of the Callaghan parents, NCTQ does note that L.A. Unified’s evaluation procedures do follow the letter of state law, but argues that the district hasn’t made the evaluations more-thorough and of better use for teachers and principals alike, even though state law does allow the district to do so.) Villaraigosa’s decision to weigh in on this front isn’t all that surprising. He has long agitated for L.A. Unified’s overhaul, successfully teaming up with Green Dot Public Schools founder Steve Barr to force the district to embark on the now-abandoned school choice and spinoff plan, and unsuccessfully pushed to put the district under mayoral control.

If the Callaghan parents do succeed in their suit, it will force L.A. Unified to stop negotiating with the AFT local — which has steadfastly opposed the use of student data in evaluating teachers in spite of the trend in other districts throughout the nation and California to do so — and simply get to work on launching a new evaluation system. It would also follow up on a successful suit against L.A. Unified launched three years by the American Civil Liberties Union’s SoCal branch that led the district to abandon the use of seniority in determining teacher layoffs at its worst failure mills. Efforts to force teacher quality reform got a boost two years ago when the Los Angeles Times revealed the performance of the district’s 11,500 elementary school teachers — by name — during its powerful, controversial and much-needed series on the low quality of the district’s instruction. The move led Deasy to make additional moves, including unveiling a rating of schools based on Value-Added analysis of student (and ultimately, teacher) progress.

More importantly, it marks another step in parents forcing their way to the head of the table in education decision-making.

Even as efforts to pass Parent Trigger laws in states such as Florida (and a proposal in Colorado to allow the public to sit in on contract negotiations between districts and teachers’ union locals died in a state legislative committee), more families are demanding their say in shaping education. Using the courts to advance choice, Parent Power, and even teacher quality reform in the manner similar to torts launched by school funding advocates will also have to be part of the arsenal. It is quite likely that by year’s end, groups of families (in alliance with reformers) could file suits over teacher evaluations, either targeting districts or even states such as Connecticut where legislators beholden to AFT and National Education Association affiliates and refuse to pass proposals that overhaul teacher performance management and tenure.

Other lawsuits that may follow will surround the quality of the curricula used by districts. This will be an especially important issue as 45 states and the District of Columbia begin aligning curricula to the Common Core reading and math standards. As Brookings Institution scholars Russ Whitehurst and Matthew M. Chingos point out in a report released today, most districts are choosing curricula that have not been proven effective in improving student achievement (or have even been subjected to any form of rigorous, longitudinal scrutiny). As I noted last year in my column for The American Spectator on innumeracy, just one out of 63 elementary math programs surveyed by the U.S. Department of Education has been rated as having “potentially positive” effects on student achievement; even that rating is based on just one study that met the agency’s stringent research standards. Given the longstanding history of American public education subjecting kids (especially those from poor and minority backgrounds) to lackluster curricula and restricting access to strong, comprehensive, college-preparatory content — along with complaints from middle-class families about the low quality of such curriculum as Everyday Math — expect more families to file suit to force districts and states to provide curriculum that meets and even exceeds Common Core.

In short, what is happening in L.A. will likely become the norm throughout the nation.

The move today by Louisiana’s legislature to approve the expansion of the state’s voucher program can only be seen as a success for children in that state. The centerpiece of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s school reform efforts, the proposal — which would transform the program from one that just serves 3,000 students in New Orleans — will likely help as many as 300,000 more children get out of the Bayou State’s failure mills and dropout factories.

But the passage of the plan, along with one that would allow for the opening of more charter schools, is another reminder of the important shift that is happening, not only within Louisiana’s public education system, but throughout American public education as a whole. Families once relegated to the sidelines are taking more-powerful roles in shaping education decisions decision-making. It’s past time for this to happen. It is absolutely immoral and unacceptable to deny families, especially those from the poor and minority households, the ability to reshape education for their kids and keep them out of the worst education in this nation has to offer.

As Dropout Nation has reported over the past few years, more families are realizing that they can no longer assume that their children will fare well in just any school. Thanks to the work of the school reform movement — including the work of standards and accountability advocates and civil rights-based reformers in advancing the array of measures that would eventually come together in the No Child Left Behind Act — parents know more about the abysmal quality of teaching and curricula endemic in both the worst urban districts and mediocre counterparts in suburbia. And this data, along with the first wave of school choice efforts that started in the early 1990s with Milwaukee’s school voucher program and the first charter schools opened in Minnesota, have allowed families, especially those from low-income backgrounds, to realize that they don’t have to take anything that is given by traditional districts.

As a result, more families are banding together (often with small help from already-established school reformers) to launch their own grassroots efforts. One of the earliest offshoots began some years ago when Latino families teamed up with Green Dot Public Schools to demand the Los Angeles Unified School District hand over control of the riot-plagued Thomas Jefferson High School, and eventually, forced the district to hand over the even more-troubled Alain Locke High School. Those efforts, along with push by then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democrat-controlled legislature to gain a share of federal Race to the Top funding, led to the passage of the nation’s first Parent Trigger law. By last year, groups such as the Connecticut Parents Union (on whose advisory board your editor serves) had sprouted up throughout the country, and, along with long-established groups such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options, were agitating for the enactment of Parent Trigger laws, pushing for the expansion of charters and vouchers, and weighing in on such issues as overhauling teacher evaluation systems.

This year, Parent Power efforts, along with initiatives to advance school choice, have faced some challenges. Families of kids attending Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, Calif., are now likely to file a civil suit against the school district after it rejected its Parent Trigger petition. Efforts to pass Parent Trigger laws in Florida were defeated on the floor of the Sunshine State’s senate while Colorado legislators put the kibosh on a similar proposal. Meanwhile National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates, along with their fellow-travelers among traditionalists such as once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch, have worked furiously to proclaim that Parent Power groups are somehow mindless dupes and “AstroTurf” fronts for supposedly evil school reform philanthropists; the fact that Parent Power groups are still greeted with skepticism among Beltway reformers (along with the fact that the unions use their vast funds to prop up groups such as Leonie Haimson’s Class Size Matters and its affiliate, Parents Across America), doesn’t seem to factor into their thoughts. And even as they badmouth families, they also engage in intimidating families daring to speak out on the ground, and are working together with traditional districts to push back against Parent Power and choice initiatives in states such as Mississippi and Alabama.

But for every setback, Parent Power activists are making clear that they are here to stay. The Connecticut Parents Union has managed to make waves throughout the Nutmeg State with efforts such as teaming up with Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst on a rally on behalf of Gov. Dan Malloy’s school reform efforts; while Buffalo ReformED has shed light on the continued efforts of the AFT local to oppose the modest teacher evaluation overhaul being mandated by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Then there’s Louisiana. Even as NEA and AFT affiliates rallied rank-and-file members to the state capital in order to remind legislators that they will attempt to make them pay for opposing the union’s will, Parent Power groups such as Black Alliance for Educational Options rallied members to call state senators and  made clear that  families would no longer sit on the sidelines. The efforts of the Parent Power groups paid off as the state senate not only passed the voucher and charter school expansion bills, but even passed an overhaul of the state’s teacher performance management system that effectively ends near-lifetime employment privileges that have left far too many low-quality teachers in classrooms.

The upcoming victory in Louisiana won’t sit well with NEA and AFT officials in either Baton Rouge or at the respective national headquarters in the Beltway. Nor will it sit well with either education traditionalists, old-school “family engagement” groups, or even among old-school civil rights groups who aid and abet them. After all, they have managed to essentially render all but a few families nuisances and afterthoughts within American public education. From where they sit, allowing families to actually choose the schools their kids attend offends their adherence to the traditional district model in existence since the days of Horace Mann. For traditionalists, Parent Trigger laws are even more an affront because it violates their belief that only supposed “experts” such as themselves can actually what kids can learn and who should teach them. From where they sit, families should barely be seen and almost never heard, except when they are called upon to help their kids with homework, staff field trips, run bake sales to fund school budgets, and be the scapegoats for the failures of teaching, curricula, and leadership.

This is nothing new.  The traditional structure of district-run schools and centralized bureaucracies that has been at the heart of American public education since the 1840s has always been driven by an inherent distrust of families (especially Irish Catholic immigrant households of the 1840s, and black, Latino, and other minority and immigrant families of the last century). As Temple University Professor William W. Cutler III illustrated in Parents and Schools: The 150-year struggle for control in American education, teachers unions, school boards, superintendents and administrators considered parents and the groups that represented them to be little more than tools for their co-opting. The fact that many of the early groups that arose to represent parents were run by middle-class women whose desire to improve the lot of poor kids were mixed in with their own disdain for their parents also played a part in this co-opting.

This was particularly made clear in the 1968 when mostly-black families overseeing the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board dared to fire 13 teachers (along with administrators). This aroused the ire of the AFT’s New York City local, which, under the leadership of future national AFT president Albert Shanker, had earlier rendered the district servile; by the time the decade was over, the union, with the help of New York City and Empire State politicians, effectively squashed this pre-Parent Power movement effort. And in many ways, this disdain of families — as much driven by class and race as it is by pure and amoral power considerations — remains as inherent in the viewpoints of teachers’ union bosses, school superintendents, ed school professors, and even a large number of teachers.  It is why parent-teacher conferences are inconveniently scheduled, why parents don’t learn about their kid’s progress until it is far too late to help them succeed, why parents of kids in special ed find themselves filing lawsuits just to make the district come up with individualized learning plans, and why there are battles between families and gatekeepers over whether kids can take A.P. courses needed to prepare for success in college.

What these education traditionalists fail to realize — or admit — is that many families are no longer willing to accept this bargain. Poor and middle-class urban families long ago recognized that education is critical to revitalizing communities and helping their kids be prepared for successful futures in an increasingly knowledge-based economic future — and have long-concluded that traditional public education practices such as zoned schooling and ability tracking no longer work (if they ever did in the first place). Thanks to data on student, school, and teacher achievement unleashed as a result of developments such as Value-Added Assessment and the passage of No Child, a larger number of middle-class suburbanites realize this too. The very technological changes wrought in the rest of society that have helped people become their own news media outlets, curate their own music choices, even create their own encyclopedias (and have crippled the traditional gatekeepers in those realms) is also reshaping the way families want to engage in shaping education.

More importantly, families are recognizing that  the “experts” really don’t know what they are doing, that it is the very practices championed by traditionalists — from near-lifetime employment for teachers regardless of their ability to help kids succeed;, to the overuse of the overdiagnosis of learning disabilities (especially among young black men, whose reading deficiencies are often diagnosed as being special ed problems) — are the underlying reason why schools fail to improve student achievement. The fact that American public education spends $591 billion abysmally, resulting in long-term pension and retired teacher healthcare burdens that families must bear as taxpayers, also weighs on their thoughts. As a result, more families are demanding their rightful positions at the adult table of education as lead decision-makers, and are unwilling to go back to the little table and obediently go along with whatever their counterparts working in education demand.

They want to be able to not only choose schools for their schools and not be restricted by Zip Code Education practices. Even more, they want to actually shape what and how their children learn. This means the expansion of vouchers, tax credit plans, and charters, as well as the passage of Parent Trigger laws, the embrace of homeschooling, and the creation of DIY schools that serve their children and those of their neighbors and even fellow parishioners. As seen in Adelanto, where the Desert Trails parents have eschewed handing over the school to a charter school operator, more parents are willing to do the hard work of running schools so they can help their kids achieve better lives. And they are going to demand more information, including on how teachers perform in the classroom, so that they can decide for themselves what is best for their kids.

This certainly doesn’t make education traditionalist comfortable. Nor does it comfort Beltway and operator-oriented reformers, who are concerned that families will somehow muck things up. But the reality is that families can serve as powerful players in transforming failure mills and warehouses of mediocrity into cultures of genius that serve all children well. Why? Because choice implies both power and responsibility. As James Guthrie of the George W. Bush Institute has pointed out, the only real way that families can really be engaged in schools is if they actually have the ability to actually shape the education their kids receive. At the same time, this choice and power requires families to think through their decisions carefully, which means weighing all available information.

Even if families don’t get things right, these reformers must accept Parent Power because to not do so is the height of moral and intellectual hypocrisy. After all, reformers (along with traditionalists) go on an on about the importance of “teacher’s voice” in shaping the transformation of American public education — even though the reality of how teachers work (in silos, out of sight of one another, often without the strong subject-matter competency needed to help kids succeed) makes them far less expert on education than they may think. That is all well and good. The reality is that for all the talk from the NEA and AFT about how they represent teachers, the reality is that their defense of seniority- and degree-based pay scales, reverse-seniority layoff policies, and near-lifetime employment privileges through tenure do little for the younger, more reform-minded teachers who realize the damage these policies do to their profession and, ultimately, to the children in their care. And we need all voices in order to transform this failed system.

So if the voices of teachers are important, why aren’t the voices (and power) of parents even more so? After all, they are the taxpayers supporting American public education. More importantly, the children served by American public education are the young men and women these mothers, fathers, grandparents, and guardians love and will ever have. It is absolutely immoral and unacceptable to tell these families that they shouldn’t do everything they can to help their kids succeed — and absolutely repugnant to keep these families from exercising power on their children’s behalf.

What these reformers should do is expand Parent Power and help these families by pushing the development of comprehensive, longitudinal, easy-to-understand data systems that can help families get the data they need to smartly exercise power. They should team up with grassroots and community players on the ground and work with families. And they should work with education entrepreneurs to create high-quality online systems that families can use to do what they want (from providing their kids with tutoring to starting their own schools).

Whether traditionalists or some reformers like it or not, Parent Power is here to stay. And our kids will likely be the better for it.