As you already know, I’ve written a short piece for the New York Times‘ Room for Debate blog on Parent Trigger laws, decrying the mindsets shared by education traditionalists and even many Beltway reformers that families are somehow incapable of making smart decisions on overhauling schools. As one would expect, both examples of this condescending thinking are on display courtesy of once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch and Amy Wilkins, the Education Trust’s otherwise estimable communications czar.

Once again proving that she couldn’t think her way through a simple policy discussion, Ravitch trots out an easy to discredit class warfare argument: That Parent Trigger laws aren’t credible because school reform philanthropists such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have provided support. Because of this, Parent Power groups who support the passage and use of Parent Trigger laws can’t possibly be legitimate — and those families who also support it are also dupes who are serving as fronts for charter school operators.

Of course, she fails to mention fact that two of the leading Parent Power groups, including the Connecticut Parents Union and its allied organization, the State of Black CT Alliance, have never received a dime of such funding. She also fails to mention that charter school operators are generally not all that interested in turning around failure mills and, as seen in Connecticut, haven’t always played well with Parent Power groups (points I made earlier in the Times piece).

On any intellectual level, what would be wrong with charter operators taking over and overhauling failure mills if parents choose them to do the job? After all, one of the most-successful school overhauls so far is the Locke High School effort in Los Angeles, which is currently being overseen by Green Dot Public Schools, one of the nation’s foremost school operators. And given the success of charter operators such as Green Dot and KIPP, (along with some for-profit operators), ditching failed district management for successful, high-quality operators would not be such a bad idea at all.

The fact that some groups are receiving those dollars hardly makes their view illegitimate — or makes parents pawns. Based on her logic, education traditionalists such as her can’t also legitimately fight for their views. After all, Ravitch is an officer of one status quo defender, Leonie Haimson’s Class Size Matters, which collected $25,000 from National Education Association coffers in 2010-2011; the group (along with Haimson) is also a founding member of Parents Across America, whose members also include fellow-travelers such as Rita Solnet. The fact that Ravitch also collects generous speaking fees from NEA and American Federation of Teachers affiliates for peddling what can at best be called her faux Camille Paglia act also makes the argument rather suspect — and the class warfare rhetoric especially rank.

As I always say on these pages, it’s not about having money or even necessarily the sources of it. After all, NEA funding has found its way to school reform outfits such as Center for American Progress while the Gates Foundation also funds the NAACP. What matters more is what is done with it. Last I checked, what Ravitch and her, umm, corporate sponsors among NEA and American Federation of Teachers affiliates do with those dollars is absolutely amoral. They defend a system that restricts the ability of families — especially those from poor and minority households — from helping their kids get the high-quality teaching, curricula, and cultures they need in an increasingly knowledge-based world. From opposing the expansion of charter schools and vouchers, to the intimidation tactics against families demanding reform of failure mills in their own communities, Ravitch and her fellow-travelers essentially say that parents should simply accept mediocrity and educational malpractice. And on its very face, this is morally unacceptable and intellectually dishonest.

Ravitch displays more of the latter in her second argument: That Parent Trigger laws are “terrible” because a majority of families, tired of schools failing their children, dare to use democratic means to force overhauls of schools subsidized by their tax dollars. Given Ravitch’s longstanding pretensions to supporting “democratic processes” in running schools and districts, one would think Parent Trigger laws would be up her proverbial alley. But the reality is that Ravitch doesn’t believe that families should have any meaningful role in school decisionmaking. This is nothing new; Ravitch has made this clear ever since she wrote The Great School Wars: A history of New York City schools, in which she chided families in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville (scene of the infamous Parent Power battle) for rightly demanding the ability to directly hold schools and teachers accountable for student achievement. As with her fellow education traditionalists, Ravitch thinks that families should be rarely seen and never heard except when they admirably parrot her bromides (or when she can blame them for what is really the systemic failures of American public education).

But Ravitch’s intellectual dishonesty is to be expected. This month alone, she furthered damaged her bona fides as an educational thinker with her facts-bereft New York Review of Books critique of Arne Duncan’s tenure as U.S. Secretary of Education. Certainly one can find fault with Duncan’s handling of the No Child waiver gambit; he must also take heat for teaming up with Sen. Tom Harkin on the rather shady targeting of for-profit colleges. But Duncan, along with President Barack Obama, has done an otherwise fine job in pushing systemic reform — especially in pushing for performance-based teacher evaluations and the expansion of charter schools. More importantly, as New Schools Venture Fund’s Benjamin Riley pointed out in his comments, Ravitch’s spectacular errors (including her failing to note Duncan’s derision of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s successful abolition of collective bargaining privileges) prove once again that she cannot support her own arguments with facts.

Wilkins’ argument, on the other hand, is less one based out of any intellectual deception. Instead, Wilkins exhibits a failing typical among Beltway reformers (and one that I’ve criticized over the past few weeks): The idea that parents are too unsophisticated to make smart decisions. Declaring that “the trigger seems promising”, Wilkins then goes off to offer an argument similar to that of Ravitch: That Parent Trigger laws may serve as stalking horses for for-profit charter school operators. From where she sits, “these companies will use the trigger to exploit desperate, frustrated families” while offering low-quality education.

Certainly there are charter school operators who shouldn’t be allowed to control schools of any kind. But that’s not necessarily a problem of for-profit operators alone. Considering that some of the most-spectacular failures within the charter school movement have happened with nonprofit outfits such as a credit recovery-driven program run by Indianapolis’ Flanner House social services nonprofit (which was shut down after discovery of alleged fraud and misspending of public funds), one can easily say that low-quality education isn’t just a problem of for-profits alone. Wilkins also indulges in a logical fallacy: That somehow profit is a bad thing. If anything, modern society and all of the wonderful technologies, services, and improvements in life and health that we have experienced is largely due to the efforts of companies that both pursue profit (because their first obligation is to repay creditors and shareholders who finance their efforts) and innovation (which keeps them around as going concerns). EdTrust and its fellow reformers, for example, are quite dependent on the beneficence of philanthropists and foundations which earn their money in the for-profit world.

If Wilkins really wants to do something about improving the quality of charters, she would start by demanding that states do a better job of selecting charter school authorizers charged with selecting and overseeing the schools. This would include getting school districts out of the business (they shouldn’t be in charge of authorizing charters in the first place). Another solution lies in expanding the pool of potential charter operators to include families and community groups, both of which can use digital tools to launch their own schools.

Meanwhile, the bigger problem with Wilkins’ argument is that it assumes that parents aren’t smart enough to make good decisions in structuring school operations. As I made clear earlier this month in my critique of similar statements from Andy Rotherham, this is hardly the case. The Parent Trigger efforts attempted so far have involved both a mix of families teaming up with charter school operators, and families such as those at Adelanto, Calif.’s Desert Trails Elementary School (which want to operate schools on their own). Families aren’t going to be perfect in making decisions. But that’s a given: Human beings aren’t perfect at doing anything. But to argue that families can’t run schools (and cannot figure out ways to reach common ground with those families who may not support the effort) ignores the reality that this is done every day by families in every aspect of life.

One can argue that Wilkins’ suggestion for a Parent Trigger process — allowing families to decide to pursue a takeover, and then choose from a group of high-quality operators with proven track records — isn’t such as a bad idea. At the same time, Wilkins and other reformers need to remember what they are supposed to be: Men and women who believe that families should be the lead decision-makers in education, and can make smart decisions so long as they have high-quality information and some guidance of their choice. In short, the very opposite of Ravitch and her ilk.

Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times

To understand why Parent Trigger laws are critical parts of expanding school choice and Parent Power, consider P.S. 45 in my home neighborhood of South Ozone Park in New York City and its strong ties to the families who send their kids there. Better-known these days as the school that hip-hop star Nicki Minaj attended long before she found inexplicable fame (and the onetime grounds of a certain editor and education columnist), P.S. 45 isn’t exactly one of the Big Apple’s finest schools. While it garnered a ‘B’ overall among its peer group of elementary schools in the Big Apple, just 64 percent of its students scored at level three or four on the math portion of New York State’s standardized tests while a mere 52 percent scored at the top levels on the reading portion. It has also not done well in closing achievement gaps, especially among young black and Latino men.

One can imagine the parents of kids attending P.S. 45 would send their kids to other traditional, charter, or even private schools if choice was available. This could include the better-performing P.S. 97 in the Woodhaven section of Queens, or St. Clare’s School in the Rosedale section of the city. But for those families, especially single mothers and blue-collar households, choice sounds great in the abstract until one thinks about the high cost of transporting their kids out of their own neighborhoods just so they can get a high quality education. This is especially for a community (part of the zip code of 11436) in which 69 percent of residents own their homes (higher than the national average of 66 percent) and (along with apartment tenants, through their rents) pay hefty Big Apple property taxes to finance district operations.

Then there are the ties that bind P.S. 45 to the neighborhoods surrounding it. The school has been around since the first days of the 20th century, just when the South Ozone Park neighborhood was transitioning from farming into one of the earliest New York City suburbs; there is a plaque dedicated to World War I veterans who attended the school right at its front door. Its doors have been open for the community’s myriad transitions, from farming to suburbs for up-and-coming German and Jewish households, to comfortable bedroom neighborhoods for blue-collar black families, to the current mecca for Caribbean and Latino families. It’s officially named the Clarence E. Witherspoon School after a local community leader and contemporary of my dearly departed grandmother. In short, P.S. 45 is as much a part of the lives of the people who live in it as nearby Baisley Pond Park and John F. Kennedy International Airport.

As one of the two generations of my family who attended P.S. 45, I can understand why those who live in the neighborhood don’t simply want to walk away from it. But they aren’t going to just want to keep the status quo in place either. More than likely, these residents — many of whom are first-generation middle class residents, entrepreneurs, and blue-collar workers — would use a Patent Trigger law to remove control of P.S. 45 from the New York City Department of Education, and lead an overhaul so that all families and their kids have a wider array of choices. It is why Parent Power groups in four states have successfuly passed Parent Trigger laws — and why Parent Power groups in Florida will fight to revive a Patent Trifger Bill defeated this week thanks to cowardly Republicans in the Sunshine State’s upper house.

This reality that Parent Trigger laws are as much a critical element of choice as vouchers and charters is something that my otherwise more thoughtful friend, Andy Rotherham, fails to consider in his latest Time column. Proclaiming that Parent Trigger laws are akin to “handling real firearms”, the proprietor of Eduwonk argues that they aren’t as sustainable as other forms of choice preferred by the Beltway crowd. Why? Because, in his mind, it could fuel too much “chaos” and “disruption” when a majority of families manage to take over a school, displeasing those families in the minority who would prefer to keep the school in traditional district hands. More importantly, Rotherham doesn’t see how families can succeed in overhauling schools when traditional districts have only a 1 percent rate of success (and charter school operators would rather control their own schools).

Yet Rotherham fails to remember that turnarounds of failing schools rarely succeed because they are handled by equally failing districts. The cultures that breed failure in the central bureaucracy tend to extend into schools, especially since collective bargaining agreements and state laws essentially render principals mere figureheads stuck with useless roles as “instructional leaders”. The fact that the principals (many of them former teachers) may not have the leadership skills to do the job and have become part of the dysfunctional culture within districts also plays a part.

This isn’t exactly true with a parent-operated school turnaround because they would be in charge of managing the school (if they used the Parent Trigger law to take full control from the district). Certainly families will need to pick up their copies of Anthony Bryk’s Organizing Schools for Improvement and learn from the experiences of Green Dot Public Schools in its conversion and turnaround of Locke High School; they’ll even have to become savvy in management strategy. But it isn’t exactly impossible for a group of dedicated parents to turn around schools. Thanks in part to digital learning tools, families taking over a school can bring high quality instruction to classrooms. And there are other resources, especially within communities, that can be brought to bear in revamping a school.

More importantly, Rotherham embraces a far more limited idea of school choice, mostly that it is one of escape from failure. But school choice isn’t just about families moving their kids out of failure mills and dropout factories. It is also about the ability to choose the very structure of education for the kids they love, and the ability to push for reforms directly in their communities. And why not start with the school in their own backyard.

This isn’t simply about holding on to romantic notions about the buildings. Even if choice fully flourishes, families are still going to want real choices in their neighborhoods. After all, there is the high cost — both in time and transportation costs — of sending kids outside of neighborhoods. As Dianne Piche of the Leadership Council for Civil and Human Rights noted last year in a Center for American Progress forum, single mothers, in particular, have to also think about childcare, especially since they must pick up their kids from school and daycare. It just makes sense for families to take charge of neighborhood schools from central bureaucracies and teachers’ union affiliates distant from their concerns for their children, or at the very least, use Parent Trigger laws to become lead decision-makers in the school with the district paying heed.

Meanwhile, in declaring that “Schools should teach about the French Revolution, not have their parents act it out”, Rotherham reinforces a conceit found far too often found among Beltway reformers (and, as evidenced from Teach For America President Wendy Kopp’s thoughtless piece on releasing teacher performance data, even among some operator-oriented reformers): That families — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — just aren’t equipped to make smart decisions when it comes to school operations. Generally Rotherham is more thoughtful (and less glib) about the role of families in education than many of his counterparts. But in evaluating the efficacy of Parent Trigger efforts, Rotherham fails to realize that parents can actually make smart decisions, especially when they have high-quality information and some guidance available to them. This isn’t to say that they will always make the best choices; they will make mistakes along the way. But to argue that families can’t run schools (and cannot figure out ways to reach common ground with those families who may not support the effort) ignores the reality that this is done every day by families in every aspect of life.

At the same time, Rotherham fails to remember that for all the preening of Beltway reformers, the most-successful school reform efforts have been — and continue to be — done by folks who didn’t know much about education until stumbled into reform. This includes mothers and fathers spurred to take action and become what former National Urban League president Hugh Price calls impromptu leaders by concerns for the futures of their children.

It was a mother, Virginia Walden Ford, whose activism forced the reforms that are slowly improving D.C.’s traditional public school system and bringing high-quality options into the poorest neighborhoods. It was Gwen Samuel, a mother from Connecticut bereft of shiny public policy credentials, who led the passage of the nation’s second Parent Trigger law and has spurred the current efforts at reforming teacher quality and expanding school choice happening in the Nutmeg State. Then there is the work of Shree Medlock, the National Advocacy Director for Black Alliance for Educational Options, who began her work as mother concerned about her own child’s progress in school. And then there is the work of Parent Power groups in Buffalo, N.Y., and in other parts of the nation, who are challenging district bureaucracies and affiliates of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers to transform education for their kids.

Certainly not all families are going to want to attempt to overhaul schools (much less start their own); this is why we must also expand all other forms of choice and Parent Power, from open enrollment within districts to vouchers and voucher-like tax credit plans. At the same time, families who want to overhaul the existing schools within blocks of their homes should be able to do so. And more than likely, they can do a better job for their children than dysfunctional district bureaucracies that have failed generations of children for far too long.

No mother or father should go to prison for doing everything they can their child get the high-quality education they need for success in school and life. And yet, this is what is about to happen to Tanya McDowell, the Bridgeport, Conn., mother whose case has been covered by Dropout Nation since it made headlines last year. Last week, McDowell plead guilty to the ludicrous charge that can only be called stealing education; she will now spend five years in prison on those charges alone, essentially removed from the life of her son as he grows into manhood. It also means that once she leaves prison, she will have a conviction, essentially condemning her to the very poverty that she was trying to avoid for her child.

Now let’s make this clear: McDowell is no saint. After all, she also faced separate charges for other crimes. As I noted last year, McDowell was certainly doing right by her son in a good number of regards. But as I wrote last year, we cannot simply gloss over McDowell’s shortcomings no more than we would forget those of poor-performing teachers and incompetent principals. All are responsible for the lives of children — and none of them can afford to fail them.

At the same time, the reality is that McDowell was being used by Norwalk city and district officials as an example to other families willing to do anything to help their kid succeed. If McDowell was found guilty by trial for what can laughingly be called theft of educational services, she was going to spend 20 years in prison and repay the district back tuition. That was about as much time as she would have gotten for the three other charges.

Which leads to the heart of the matter: No parent should have to fight so hard to help their kids get a high-quality education. Far too many parents, especially those from poor and minority backgrounds (and even many from the middle class) can’t access high-quality teaching and curricula for their kids. Contrary to what education traditionalists and the organizations and people that abet them want to proclaim, the problem isn’t choice, but the Zip Code Education policies — from intra-district zoned schooling policies, to restrictions on the existence and expansion of charter schools, vouchers, and other choice — that limit the ability of families to give their children what they deserve.

When it is far easier for poor and middle class households to get a wide array of high-quality options in areas of life in which the stakes are low such as dining, than it is for them to provide their child with good-to-great teachers and schools, we are dealing with a moral, intellectual, economic, and existential crisis that damages individuals, families, communities, in fact, this entire nation. Even worse, it is utter hypocrisy. Teachers, school leaders, and other players who defend the status quo in American public education have no right to blame parents for the academic problems facing their kids when the policies they defend effectively keep families from actually taking proactive action for them.

Tanya McDowell is no saint. She is also no different than Kelley Williams-Bolar, Annette Callahan, Marie Menard, your mother, or mine. Like all mothers, Tanya fought fiercely to provide her child with a life better than her own. She didn’t necessarily mother her son the right way. But she also doesn’t deserve prison time for doing what any parent should do when it comes to providing her child with a school fit for his genius and his future.

This must be made right. It starts with Gov. Dan Malloy, who now has an important opportunity to live up to his determination to be the School Reformer-in-Chief for the Nutmeg State, by immediately granting her a pardon, and declaring that it is time to expand school choice in his state. He should also back the efforts of the Connecticut Parents Union to abolish and revamp school residency laws in order to expand choice and Parent Power — and should also show up on March 14 for the rally on school reform the group will be holding. (You can sign the petition asking Malloy to pardon McDowell, if you so choose.)

Meanwhile legislators should join Malloy by moving immediately on revamping those rules, and begin the long-term overhaul of the state’s school funding system. This means the state taking over full funding of education, essentially turning those dollars into vouchers so they can follow a child to the best school opportunity for their needs.

But it’s not just time to end Zip Code Education in Connecticut. It is time for it to end in every state throughout this nation. This will take more than just petitions. As I made clear in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, it will take armies of families and school reformers, playing for keeps, tackling education traditionalists (especially school district bureaucracies) with bare knuckle tactics, just to end Zip Code Education and overhaul American public education. It cannot be incremental change either. Each day, we must commit to radically-yet-patiently transforming these systems. And it will mean hard battles day after day, both in rhetoric and in political action, in order for our children to get what they deserve.

Where a child lives should not determine the quality of teaching and instruction they must have in order to be successful educationally, socially, and economically.

You wouldn’t think that the governance of the nation’s Baptist churches would offer a direction on how to revamp American public education and make parents lead decision-makers in schools. But a closer look at how congregations run their own churches shows why families can — and must — be trusted with information needed to make smart decisions for their children.

This observation comes courtesy of a sermon on the fundamental aspects of the Baptist faith given yesterday by Rev. Dr. Howard-John Wesley, the pastor of the Alfred Street Baptist Church, one of the nation’s most-prominent African-American religious institutions. Part of a series he is giving on the underlying reasons why Baptists conduct religious services and pursue evangelism as they do, Wesley focused on why Baptist churches “elect” pastors, don’t have (and aren’t supposed to have) bishops that govern their affairs, and operate autonomously (save for their affiliations with a particular convention, or group of Baptist churches) at the direction of the membership. This autonomy differs greatly from the episcopal hierarchies of priests, bishops, and prelates that dominate Catholic, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, and Presbyterian denominations.

At the heart of the differences is the interpretation of Matthew 16: 13-19, in which Jesus singles out the Apostle Peter for saying what his other colleagues did not: That Jesus is the Son of God and our Lord and Savior. Among Catholics and other hierarchy-dominated denominations, the interpretation of that scripture suggests that Jesus chose Peter to be the “rock” or the leader of the church on earth. In turn, every cleric claims to be Peter’s successor and has a special relationship with God and Christ that others do not. As a result, the average person can only have, at best, something of a personal relationship with God; even in many Protestant faiths, they must go through intermediaries as part of their worship. And, in turn, the hierarchies of clerics are in charge of churches; congregations can’t choose their own pastors or govern their churches without intercession from the array of bishops and other clerics in the Vatican or Canterbury Cathedral.

But among Baptists, whose denomination is shaped by the strict reading of the Bible (along with its birth as a reaction of English Separatists to the Church of England’s continued embrace of Catholic hierarchical structures), the scripture reads differently. It wasn’t that Jesus singled out Peter, but singled out his confession of faith in God and belief in Christ’s role as savior. In short, one’s status as being born again is not based on hierarchy, but on one’s own faith in the Creator and His Son alone. More importantly, because Jesus alone is leader of the church on earth, there can be no priestly hierarchy. Essentially, Baptists believe that anyone can have a personal relationship God and don’t need to access priestly intermediaries. And because every Baptist can know God and only needs to confess their faith (both through baptism and their testimony), every member can be trusted with governing the church on behalf of Jesus Christ.

What results is a different and, what Wesley implies, a more mature form of religious faith. Members are responsible for keeping their churches on an even keel, from developing the structure of leadership within churches (outside of the Biblical-mandated pastor and deacons ordained by the church from the congregation), to determining which ministers should be ordained and, thus, allowed to be the servant leaders of other churches. Pastors must interview for their positions instead of being brought in by an outside hierarchy; they retain their jobs at the pleasure of the congregations they lead. Congregants can split off from each other if they disagree on the direction of the church. And being a Baptist is no birthright; unlike in other faiths, in which babies are baptized soon from birth, Baptists only allow those children and adults who have chosen to confess their faith in God to do so.

Ultimately implicit in Baptist doctrine is trust in the ability of congregants to continually develop in the walk with God, Christ and the Holy Spirit; constantly improve their understanding of the Bible; and participate in shaping decisions within their congregations. A pastor may be highly respected (and in African-American communities, where racial bigotry has made leadership roles outside of church a rarity, almost elevated to the level of cultish adoration); but he is no more an expert on understanding the Bible (even when he has a doctorate before his title) than the average congregant in the pews. This trust and inherent liberty is one of the reasons why the Baptist denomination is the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination (claiming 15 percent of all church-going Americans); and one of the few denominations that has resisted declines in congregants — and has actually experienced growth in the past three decades. It is also why the Baptist denomination remains the most-prominent among African-Americans regardless of economic status.

And this trust in congregants to master their understanding of their faith is the kind of f trust American public education must show when it comes to the role of families as lead decisionmakers in education.

One of the most- fascinating aspects of the latest discussions over releasing teacher performance data — especially the release of Value-Added data on some 18,000 teachers released by last week by New York City’s Department of Education — is that education traditionalists, education commentators, and even many school reformers essentially think that families can’t possibly use thoughtful judgement in reading results and don’t even have the ability to master it. From where they sit, such data should be restricted to experts such as themselves, who have the higher education credentials and other expertise as education players to think things through. In short, they look at parents as being  no different than their children: Infantile and incapable of smart decision-making even when given good guidance.

This isn’t surprising. Education has long been the most expert-driven sector in education, with ed school professors, teachers, and principals share the conceit that only they have the knowledge needed to run schools. In fact, as much of traditional structure of district-run schools and centralized bureaucracies that has been at the heart of American public education since the 1840s is 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 by the desire to create a Unitarian-driven civic religion. Instead, families are supposed to trust the experts because they have some secret knowledge about education that parents can’t learn. It is one reason why Zip Code Education practices such as zoned schooling remain in place, why ability tracking and the comprehensive high school model remain popular among so-called experts, and why teachers and guidance counselors (using such tools as IQ tests) are the gatekeepers to gifted-and-talented programs. It is also a key reason why so many school leaders and teachers’ unions oppose all forms of school choice  (except in the form of magnet schools which are mostly-geared toward satisfying desegregation orders and thus, choice is still restricted).

This expertise conceit can be seen every day in the way families –especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — are treated in schools. From inconveniently-scheduled parent-teacher conferences, to the lack of meaningful communication about student progress until it is far too late to help kids succeed, to the battling between families and gatekeepers over whether kids can take A.P. courses needed to prepare for success in college, far too many teachers and school leaders do so much to disengage families from playing active roles in education (even as they complain about a lack of “parental involvement”). As grassroots school reformers such as Gwen Samuel of the Connecticut Parents Union, AJ Kern in Minnesota, and the legendary Virginia Walden Ford can attest, this disdain becomes hostile opposition once parents step up and advocate on behalf of their child.

Such condescending thinking fails to consider the reality that the “experts” really don’t know what they are doing. After all, it is the decision by experts to push ability-tracking and the comprehensive that have led to the low-quality teaching and curricula to poor and minority students that is a culprit behind the nation’s education crisis. It is the work of experts that has led to such practices as the overuse of suspensions and expulsions, and the overdiagnosis of learning disabilities (especially among young black men, whose reading deficiencies are often diagnosed as being special ed problems). Thanks to experts, we have a system of teacher training that, as both former Teachers College President Arthur Levine and others have pointed out, has been ineffective in recruiting and preparing aspiring teachers for classrooms.  And because of so-called experts, families in cities such as Detroit and even the toniest suburban communities are stuck sending their kids to abysmal and mediocre schools.

Meanwhile the expertise mentality fails to consider the reality that it will take more than experts in American public education to transform it from its sclerotic, child-damaging state. This means that families are key to expanding opportunities for high-quality education for all children — especially their own. It was Ford who forced the reforms that are slowly improving D.C.’s traditional public school system and bringing high-quality options into the poorest neighborhoods; while it was Latino parents in Los Angeles, aided by Green Dot founder Steve Barr that has led L.A. Unified to undergo its (albeit fitful) overhaul. And it is the work of parent-led reform groups on the ground — including Parent Power activists in Buffalo, N.Y., and states such as Connecticut — that are making the strong pushes for reform that allow for other reformers to successfully advocate for their own solutions.

The reality is that families can and should no longer just trust the “experts” behind districts and schools that are failing their children and have failed at least two previous generations. Instead, they must become active players in shaping education for their children. They must ask tough, thoughtful questions about what is being taught in classrooms, demand information on the quality of the teachers working in classrooms, play stronger roles in shaping the overhauls of traditional district schools (and in the operations of charter schools serving their kids), and even start their own schools and literacy programs.

As in understanding Biblical scriptures, learning how to be powerful players in education isn’t an insurmountable activity. If families are given high-quality information, offered some guidance, and allowed to actually exercise choice and power, they can serve as powerful players in transforming failure mills and warehouses of mediocrity into cultures of genius that serve all children well. This can be seen from the slow, fitful expansion of school choice. As it turns out, choice begets engagement, action, and expansion of knowledge. 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.

When families exercise power and responsibility, they can do plenty for their children. University of Michigan researcher Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgen of Brigham Young University noted in their 2005 study, minority families and parents in high-poverty districts were more likely than middle-class parents to request a teacher for their child based on how teachers improved student achievement. Meanwhile a report on the open enrollment effort in Charlotte-Mecklenburg  County, N.C.’s school district released last October by the National Bureau of Economic Research also shows that parents with school choice options are quite capable of steering their kids to the kinds of school options that help them succeed in school and in life.

We must stop treating parents as if they are incapable of making smart decisions in education. Instead we must trust them with all the information needed to understand and solve the problems within public education. This means publishing teacher performance data and offering guides on how to analyze those numbers. It means giving them the power to choose high-quality school options and working with them to shut down and overhaul failure mills. And it includes improving data systems, and starting family information centers where they can seek out information and assistance in decision-making.

Essentially, American public education must become more like Baptist churches and ditch Catholic-style hierarchical and paternal thinking. It would do all of our children much good.

Back in August, Dropout Nation revealed the American Federation of Teachers’ presentation on how its Connecticut affiliate unsuccessfully attempted to “Kill” (and eventually watered down) the nation’s second Parent Trigger law. The presentation, the blatant admission that the AFT did so much to keep Parent Power and school reformers out of behind-the-scenes conversations with state legislators, and the retaliatory tactics the union took against legislators who pushed the law proved so embarrassing to the union that AFT President Randi Weingarten issued a series on non-apology apologies. She also met with Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel, state legislators, and former state representative Jason Bartlett (who lost re-election as a result of the AFT’s desire to enact “Karma” on those who dared to support weakening its influence).

Back then, your editor wrote and (discussed in a Dropout Nation Podcast) that this was a teachable moment for the school reform movement and Parent Power activists, who must learn from those hardball tactics and repay education traditionalists in kind. And this past month offers more lessons from which reformers should learn.

Example number one is in Connecticut, where the Connecticut Parents Union’s new alliance with Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst has aroused the ire of education traditionalists and their fellow travelers. After one of them, a former Connecticut state representative and Democrat operative decided to sling a little mud at the group, the Nutmeg State’s ethics agency (under the guise of learning of “media reports) issued a warning that both groups had to register as lobbyists under his interpretation of Nutmeg State law.  (Of course, the infamous RheeFirst, which was started with the aid of the AFT’s national offices, joined in on the fun.) The fact that Connecticut’s own lobbying law doesn’t cover the parents union or other volunteer citizen advocates of its kind — along with the lack of a formal complaint — makes the ethics agency’s complaint rather suspicious.

But the Connecticut affair is nothing compared to what happened in Adelanto, Calif., where parents at Desert Trails Elementary School were thwarted in their attempt to use the state’s Parent Trigger law to force the overhaul of one of the state’s most-persistent failure mills. On Tuesday, the Adelanto district tossed out their Parent Trigger petition, declaring that 93 parents who had originally signed the petition decided to withdraw their support. While the fact that the petition fell by just 12 signatures makes it appear to be a mere close loss, L.A. Weekly writer Simone Wilson reports that the NEA affiliate there, with the help of a city planning commissioner and a sister NEA local in nearby Hesperia, engaged in a scare tactic campaign, with flyers proclaiming that “DESERT TRAILS CHILDREN WILL LOSE THEIR TEACHERS”. (That some of those teachers, along with its principal, are responsible for the school being mired in academic failure for six consecutive years never seems to come to mind.) Within two weeks, the union and its allies managed to garner 90 more signatures than they had before their drive.

The Desert Trails parents, with the help of Parent Revolution, will likely challenge the Adelanto decision and probably make another push for taking control of the school. As they should. The schools at the center of the lives of the children they love should offer high-quality teaching and curricula. And in the case of Desert Trails, where 32 percent of the students scored Below and Far Below Basic on the reading portion of the Golden State’s standardized tests last year (and another 25 percent barely hit Basic levels of proficiency), those children are clearly being poorly served.

But once again, parents in Adelanto and elsewhere are learning some hard lessons about the need to play tough and hard in helping their children get the culture of genius and high-quality education they deserve. After all, the NEA and AFT spent $167 million in their respective 2010-2011 fiscal years just to maintain their influence. From lobbying in the statehouse, to contributing generously to fellow-travelers such as Parents Across America founder Leonie Haimson’s Class Size Matters (which counts Diane Ravitch as an “officer” and picked up $25,000 from the NEA last year), to even co-opting progressive groups in order to challenge reform-minded Democrat politicians, the two unions have all but proven willing to play all the angles in order to preserve their influence and defend failed practices that condemn 1.2 million children every year to poverty and prison before they even reach high school.

This year, NEA and AFT affiliates are stepping up their tactics. In New York City and Connecticut, AFT and NEA affiliates are engaging in ad blitzes in order to remind legislators that they will need their cash for re-election bids. (Whether NEA and AFT dollars, along with their armies of rank-and-file members working the polls, can serve as effective sources of support is a different story.) As more states adopt Parent Trigger laws, one can expect NEA and AFT locals to devote more dollars to the kind of door-to-door campaigns (and accompanying scare tactics) already seen in Adelanto.

But it isn’t just the NEA and AFT. Traditional district bureaucracies have proven far too willing to perpetuate failure and resist reform. As I noted in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, it is the bigoted low expectations for poor and minority children held by so-called school leaders that is as much a culprit for the nation’s education crisis as the woeful system of teacher training. And as seen in Compton, Calif., (the site of another Parent Trigger effort), the oft-servile relationships between districts and teachers’ union locals can prove to be real valuable to bureaucrats when it comes time to resist calls for systemic reform.

From where the two unions sit, families are to be barely seen and almost never heard, and this has been the norm even before 1968, when the legendary AFT President Albert Shanker successfully crushed the effort by families and reform-minded administrators in New York City’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood. And as evidenced by both the AFT’s anti-Parent Trigger presentation (and a statement earlier this month by the executive director of the NEA’s New Jersey affiliate defending the union’s opposition to choice), Parent Power activists, along with other school reformers need to learn from tactics used by the two unions on the ground and in statehouses, and apply them in their own advocacy.

In short, it’s going to be the political equivalent of brass knuckle street-fighting. As the Connecticut Parents Union is showing this week, it means directly raising questions about the underlying motives behind actions. That’s just the start. Both Parent Power activists and other school reformers must take on advocacy as masterfully as a K Street lobbyist and a Change.org activist. This especially means using e-mail, Twitter, and even video. As Dr. Steve Perry, the CNN commentator and Hartford, Conn., principal, pointed out last year in his book, Push Has Come to Shove, no school board or politician is equipped to handle a series of well-timed messages from a small group of parents.

It will take a lot of politics for families, especially those from poor and minority households, to push for overhaul of schools, expand school choice, and revamp how teachers are recruited, trained, evaluated, and compensated. That’s how it is with a government financed- and -operated system. But it shouldn’t be this way. Contrary to the argument made yesterday by the usually-sensible Adam Emerson of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (which was sadly seconded by the usually-savvier-about-politics Andy Rotherham), it should actually be much easier for parents to overhaul failing schools or escape failure mills and dropout factories that are perpetuating educational neglect and malpractice.

But thanks to Zip Code Education practices, four out of every five children in this country don’t have any option other than attending a failing zone school. Meanwhile there are parents such as Annette Callahan — who has success helped three of her children succeed in elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education — that are threatened each day with arrests for doing all that they can to get their children into anything resembling a high quality school.

It’s all well and good for Beltway reformers (who, along with their education traditionalist counterparts have the resources available to avoid the worst that American public education has to offer) to talk all about “imbalance of power”. But when you are a poor family in, say, Birmingham, Ala., or even a suburban black household in Fairfax County, Va., all this talk of power shifting too far in their favor is rather academic. As the guardians of the lives, souls, and health of their children — and, just as importantly, as the taxpayers who finance American public education — they shouldn’t have to scrap with either teachers’ unions or district bureaucrats in order to do what’s best for their children.

Families should be the lead decision-makers in education. Parent Trigger laws don’t mean power imbalances, but the rightful restoring of parents to their place in schools.