If you want to fully understand why bad school leadership is damaging to our children, just consider the lawsuit filed yesterday by a young woman in Indianapolis against the Circle City’s traditional district over her abuse at the hands of a school leader now-convicted of child seduction. When school leaders tolerate — and engage in — educational malpractice, they are putting the academic, emotional, and even physical wellbeing of young men and women at risk.

The young woman, named A.S. in the complaint, alleges in the suit that Indianapolis Public Schools had allowed Corey Greenwood, a former dean and principal at several of its high schools, to continually prey on female students (as well as have affairs with teachers under his charge) at the schools in which he worked over an eight-year period. Even after the district’s police department and human resources department uncovered evidence that he engaged in numerous acts of “inappropriate sexual conduct” with a student on the grounds of Emmerich Manual High School, the district’s human resources chief and other executives allowed Greenwood to keep his job and even allowed him to progress in leadership (including a stint as vice principal) at two other high schools. Only after Indianapolis Metropolitan police officers were informed about one of his man incidents of criminal abuse of A.S. — did IPS finally toss him out of the district. [Greenwood would later plead guilty to child seduction, serving a mere 14 days in prison.]

How did Greenwood manage to stay in school leadership for long? The lawsuit blames his mother, former IPS principal and central office bureaucrat Jacqueline Greenwood, for intervening on his behalf. During those eight years, even as she failed upwards as principal of notorious failure mill Arlington High and as overlord of the district’s middle and high schools, Mother Greenwood would help Corey avoid trouble by helping him gain transfers and promotions. That she was his boss during the last five years of his time working at IPS all but ensured he would be protected from questions about actions such as asking one of the children in his care to send him nude pictures of herself. Mother Greenwood herself was finally kicked out of IPS last year, two years after her son’s criminal abuse of children came to light.

As with any lawsuit, of course, the defendants will have their own side to the story. Indianapolis Public Schools, distancing itself from past leadership, issued a statement declaring that it would “co-operate with the proceedings”.[So far, neither Corey Greenwood nor his mother have anything to say.] But none of the allegations in A.S.’ suit are shocking. Why? Because IPS has long been the epitome of failed school leadership.

Much of Greenwood’s misdeeds took place under Eugene White, whose regime as superintendent was notorious for tolerating nepotism. During his tenure, White himself managed to put two of his own children onto the district’s payroll; this included his son, Reginald, taking a job as dean and coach at Arsenal Tech High School. When White wasn’t hiring relatives (and tolerating the nepotism of his bureaucrats), he was firing more-competent school leaders. Among the ousted: Jeffery White, whose effort to turn around what is now John Marshall Community High School ended abruptly after he ran afoul of the superintendent and his mandarins.

White was also infamous for tolerating educational malpractice by school leaders under his watch. This included Jackie Greenwood, whose 25-year reign as principal of Arlington High was marked by graduation rates of as low as 12.5 percent (according to a 2005 analysis by The Indianapolis Star), as well as a failure to send many of those who did graduate to success in higher education and life. It was White who kicked her upstairs back in 2007 to serve as director of the district’s secondary schools, giving her numerous opportunities to protect her son from his alleged criminal abuse of children. Little wonder why Corey Greenwood could convince a teacher, Melissa L. Jones, to assist him in an attempt to cover up his criminal abuse of A.S. once cops learned of the misdeeds; he learned well from his bosses.

But White couldn’t have fostered this culture of failed school leadership on his own. The district’s own board, long renowned for its incompetence, enabled White’s mismanagement and corruption. When White the Elder wanted to bring his son into the district in 2009, the board amended the district’s anti-nepotism policy so that the Younger would report not to him, but to one of the district’s assistant superintendents. The fact that the executive ultimately reported to White made the entire exercise in fig-leafing both laughable and shameful. [The good news is that most of the school board members who helped White continue IPS’ culture of abuse are now out to pasture.]

White would eventually be forced out as IPS’ chief executive in 2013. But not before his reign of terror damaged the lives of far too many of the district’s children. It includes the 1,632 high school graduates (or 22 percent of the 7,420 young adults who graduated from the district) during White’s tenure allowed to collect counterfeit sheepskins in spite of failing at least one of Indiana’s battery of standardized tests. This includes the thousands of other children who never graduated at all — and have been condemned by White’s malpractice and that of other adults on his watch to poverty and prison. It includes the 6,326 third-through-eighth-graders who didn’t pass the Hoosier State’s reading and math tests during White’s last year overseeing IPS because of his years of incompetence. And as documented by A.S.’ lawsuit, this allegedly includes young women who were preyed upon by Cory Greenwood during his own reign of terror as a school leader.

Certainly IPS is no exception when it comes to criminally-abusive school leaders and teachers running amok. Halfway across the country in California, Los Angeles Unified is still dealing with the consequences of school leaders tolerating criminal abuse by former teachers such as Miramonte Elementary’s Mark Berndt. Last month, a Golden State superior court ordered L.A. Unified to pay $6 million to two young men who suffered at the hands of Paul Chapel III, a former teacher at Telfair Elementary who was eventually convicted of criminally abusing 13 children. The district has paid out another $139 million to the families of 70 children abused by the aforementioned Berndt.

But the IPS lawsuit offers this important lesson: When school leaders tolerate educational abuse and neglect of children, they will also accept the kind of corruption that eventually leads to criminal abuse. In such cultures, adults within them will do anything to protect the perpetrators as well as the reputations of the districts in which they work instead of doing the right thing by the youth in their care. And the consequences of the shoddy leadership lingers years after those who oversaw academic and operational failure have moved on.

There’s a lot to be learned from what has happened in Indianapolis — and even more to be done to help all children succeed. Ridding districts and other school operators of failed school leadership is critical to building cultures of genius in which youth can be safe as well as can learn.

I find it bizarre and disappointing to read the constant barrage of commentary that the accountability measures put in place by states and through the No Child Left Behind Act are only about shaming, hurting, or putting the “stick” to teachers and other adults working with our students.

Some, but by no means all, of this moaning comes from traditionalist educrats and their supporters. This includes the National Education Association, the American Federation of School Teachers, and those associations representing suburban and even urban districts. They simply don’t like the pressure of accountability and want to eviscerate it altogether. Many of these folks have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and quite a lot of people power and time over many years to destroy accountability instead of helping teachers, school leaders, families, and communities leverage those tools to help our children. They are what I call the “end, don’t mend” crowd.

Yet there are legitimate complaints from teachers and parents who have never been given the tools needed to help students, who have been victims of accountability practices from school leaders and others that have run amok and implemented poorly to the detriment of everyone else. These complaints deserve attention, merit fixing, and shouldn’t be dismissed by school reformers or anyone else. As powerful as accountability has been in helping more students achieve success, the tools cannot survive if we don’t address legitimate complaints.

What’s most disappointing about much of this is that many of these problems have actually been caused or worsened by inept school leaders who either weren’t trained in the best consequences to apply to improve teaching and learning or cynically chose the path of blaming accountability instead of fixing the problems it identified.

This is unproductive and shameful. Instead of responding with solutions that would actually use accountability to help teachers and improve schools, school leaders and others who run public education systems too often put a bad name on accountability and, at the same time, kept students behind.

I want to illustrate two ways that administrators could respond to a bad diagnosis in a more constructive way. These examples have been mentioned by other Dropout Nation contributors, including André-Tascha Lammé, and even your editor. This was (and still is) the purpose of accountability: to use standards and measurements to help schools improve. It was not to blame or shame, but it was also not to continue to hide problems or neglect to fix them.

The federal Institute of Education Sciences has produced 19 outstanding practice guides that, based on the very best research, show in practical ways how many of our most difficult problems in education can be best addressed. The George W. Bush Institute, with which I am affiliated, has compiled similarly excellent resources to help middle schools become more successful. There is no reason why school leaders don’t leverage those resources, along with the data from accountability, and improve their schools and districts.

My basic question is this: how many school leaders do you know who have turned to these resources and implemented them vigilantly and with fidelity to improve their schools? On the other hand, how many school leaders do you know who have complained about testing and accountability? If you know more of the latter than the former, you now know the nature of the main problem you face.

While watching the sorry spectacle of education policy making in the current session of Congress, we must remember above all else the main lesson of the last 20 years in education in America: Accountability works!

The evidence behind the effectiveness of these policies is now clear and abundant. For me, of all the research that has been presented over these many years, the most convincing are the charts showing student achievement patterns on the Long Term National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Both before and after the peak of the accountability movement, student results were and have become again relatively flat. But the gains between 1999 and 2008 were significant.

For nine-year-olds: African American students advanced more than 1½ grade levels in reading and a little less than 1½ grade levels in math; Hispanic students advanced 1½ grade levels in reading and over two grade levels in math; and white students advanced about a grade level in both subjects. This means all subgroups of students advanced substantially, and, because disadvantaged students advanced the most, the achievement gap narrowed at the same time.

For 13 year-olds, all three subgroups advanced about a grade level in math, with the greater gains for African American and Hispanic students. In reading, where the results have unfortunately been flat over the long term for all students, African American students gained a grade level.

The data for students with disabilities show sizable gains as well.

One would think, in a rational world, that intelligent policy makers, looking at these charts, would quickly conclude that something good is going on, and it ought to be preserved. Even if there were problems associated with the policies, one would at least expect an approach of “mend, don’t end.”

But, amazingly, this is not the case. Educrats who have been pressed to change and improve under accountability policies never liked the pressure. So, they organized a ferocious campaign and poured millions of dollars into tarnishing and destroying the reforms.

If results mattered, the reforms would be preserved, improved, and extended. Instead, in today’s sad political environment, the reforms are deemed “much maligned,” and are in jeopardy of being tossed.

Ironically, perhaps, it is the Democrats, who count teachers and other education special interests among their strongest constituents, who are responding positively to the appeals of civil rights groups to preserve at least basic elements of accountability policies.

But, what’s with the Republicans who control the Congress? Are they insisting on real and significant parental choice? Are they standing behind their traditional position of refusing to borrow and spend on a function some believe can best be performed by the states? Are they supporting the honorable and sound conservative position from the early 2000s that accountability and choice ought to be the condition for federal dollars that are spent? No, no, and no.

Here’s the current prevailing Republican view at the federal level, and it’s one their sponsors are very proud of: Let’s continue to tax and borrow billions of dollars, ship them in large part to local bureaucrats and unions to spend without any requirement they prove results or to expand parent choice, and spout to the world that all of a sudden every child in America will now be well educated.

Even more stunning than all this is how these Republican leaders can feel so very proud of themselves as they jump into bed with the very folks who do more than virtually all others in money, organization, and nasty campaign rhetoric to taint, destroy, and defeat not only education reformers, but also Republican candidates for office at every level.

How very ironic that NEA and AFT stand poised to win their biggest political victory in 20 years — money without accountability or choice – delivered to them on a silver platter by a smiling Republican Congress.

Maybe it’s just quaint to think results should matter in the making of policy. Maybe it’s become quaint, too, even to think that common sense ought to matter in the making of policy. But as the Congress crawls back, even in the midst of a huge budget deficit, to “revenue sharing” as the model for this generation’s contribution to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, I can only shake my head.

We waited seven years of an overdue reauthorization for this? I hope to wake up and find it’s all been a bad dream.

Your editor doesn’t have much to say about President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address — outside of praising him for calling for criminal justice reform after the outcry over the state-sanctioned murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice. Oh, and that zinger about having no more campaigns to run because he won them both.

For one thing, your editor has already explained why his proposal to subsidize community college attendance for any student with a 2.5 grade-point-average — the most-important proposal his administration is pushing this year on the education policy front — will not help children from poor and minority households (as well as not pass congressional muster). There’s also the fact that the Obama Administration’s other proposals — including the consolidation of several tax credits geared toward promoting higher education attendance along with rolling back the tax benefits for 529 college saving plans and Coverdell education accounts — will also be opposed by congressional Republicans and even some Democrats) mindful of the affluent constituencies that benefit from them.

The fact that Obama knows that his education agenda won’t get passed means that he will likely focus more on preserving his legacy as School Reformer-in-Chief. So you can expect the administration to effectively kibosh efforts by House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline and Senate counterpart Lamar Alexander to eviscerate the No Child Left Behind Act and the president’s waiver gambit. You can also expect the president to use his executive authority — along with spending in the current omnibus spending law — to craft new rounds of Race to the Top and the School Improvement Grant competitions. Obama did this two years ago when he took $100 million in U.S. Department of Labor funds to develop another edition of Race to the Top targeted towards high school reform. And as I noted a few months ago, congressional Republicans have little leverage to stop him.

But there is plenty of action happening outside of Capitol Hill and the White House in the nation’s statehouses — and numerous opportunities to advance systemic reform. This will depend on how governors lead on this front. Which is why reformers must embrace strong gubernatorial leadership — and  call out weak leadership from chief executives too willing to retreat or take small-ball measures on behalf of our children.

In Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal kicked off his second term last week by announcing a proposal to take over and restructure failure mills. As part of the plan, the Peach State would launch a school overhaul authority similar to the successful Recovery School District in Louisiana that would take over dropout factories that have failed for three years or longer, and in some cases, transform them into charters. Expect plenty of sparring over the plan from districts such as Atlanta and DeKalb County, which operate 23 of Georgia’s 78 worst-performing schools. As Deal noted last week in his State of the State Address, high-quality education is key to breaking the cycle of poverty.

Deal is used to battling for reform — and winning. Two years ago, after the state supreme court ruled that the state’s charter school commission couldn’t authorize any schools, Deal successfully beat back traditional districts by convincing voters to approve a constitutional amendment giving the state’s charter school commission authority to oversee new schools. Within the last year, Deal has also battled against efforts by movement conservatives within the state to halt implementation of Common Core reading and math standards. To beat back opponents of the standards such as Supt. Richard Woods, Deal’s allies on the state board have stood by Common Core (albeit with some tweaks) while the state legislature are proposing to make the chief school officer job a position the governor’s successor will appoint after the end of Wood’s tenure.

Up north in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is stepping up his efforts to advance reform with plans to finally eliminate restrictions on the number of charter schools allowed to operate as well as push for the launch of a voucher-like tax credit initiative. The charter school expansion will likely pass with little opposition from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is still licking his wounds from earlier battles with Cuomo over charters and control of state government, as well as needs the governor’s support to keep mayoral control over the Big Apple’s traditional district.

The tougher effort will be his plan to revamp the Empire State’s teacher evaluation regime, which has been criticized for using too little objective state test score growth data and letting too many laggard teachers off the hook for poor performance. This means a battle with the American Federation of Teachers’ state affiliate, NYSUT, which finds itself in an even weaker position, politically and otherwise, thanks to its failure last year to back Cuomo’s re-election bid along with its campaign with de Blasio to give Democrats full control of the state legislature. This isn’t the first time Cuomo has beat back the AFT unit on evaluations; two years ago, Cuomo overcame teachers’ union opposition to ensure that state test growth data would account for 20 percent of evaluations.

Deal and Cuomo aren’t the only reform-minded governors aggressively pushing systemic reform. From New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (who continues to take on traditionalists on expanding school choice, overhauling failing districts such as Camden, and teacher evaluations), to Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, many governors have figured out that standing against the ancien regimes who have long controlled public education is critical to economic and social development as well as reducing long-term fiscal burdens.

But Deal and Cuomo have stood out for their steadfast commitment to the job. Even as onetime reform-oriented counterparts in statehouses such as Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and Tennessee’s Bill Haslam have either fully or partly retreated on critical aspects of transforming public education, Deal and Cuomo have continued their efforts even amid criticism from allies within their own respective parties, often risking their political fortunes. Unlike governors in 15 states, Deal and Cuomo don’t even appoint or approve appointments of chief state school officers. Yet they have emerged from those battles with victories that are helping more kids gain brighter futures.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s retreat on implementing Common Core haven’t helped children or his other reform efforts.

What both Deal and Cuomo have in common is a willingness to use their considerable reserves of political support to advance reform. They used their bully pulpits effectively, framing the need for transforming education in the context of the economic and fiscal challenges facing their respective states. They are both unwilling to be accommodating just to win compromise. And from their offices, they successfully worked with coalitions of reformers, business and civic organizations, and grassroots activists on the ground.

As your editor noted two years ago, such traits, typical of strong and effective leaders regardless of the issues they undertake on other issues, are especially important in reforming American public education. This is because traditionalists often strike for false collaboration that does little more than help them preserve the failed policies and practices from which they benefit at the expense of the futures of children. More importantly, strong leadership is as much about advancing a positive vision for the future that positions states and communities for changes in an increasingly knowledge-based economy as it about dealing with the challenges of the present.

Meanwhile strong reform-minded governors don’t play small ball — and don’t retreat on advancing systemic reform. This is because they realize that any step back on one aspect of reform will encourage traditionalists and others to fight even harder on others. Children don’t benefit when reform-minded governors and their allies give ground.

This is a lesson that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is starting to learn the hard way.

Two years ago, the freshman governor essentially rolled back a key aspect of predecessor Mitch Daniels’ school reform efforts when he agreed to halt implementation of Common Core reading and math standards. Last month, as he began pulling together a new set of reforms on school funding and putting the state board of education fully under his control by removing traditionalist-oriented Supt. Glenda Ritz as its chair, Pence took another step backward by shutting down the Center for Education and Career Innovation, an agency he formed back in 2013 to help reformers on the state board overcome Ritz’s efforts to roll back moves made under Tony Bennett’s tenure as chief state school officer.

Opponents have not repaid Pence in kind. Earlier this week, Common Core opponents managed to convince State Sen. Mike Delph to introduce Senate Bill 501, which would require Indiana to revert districts and other school operators to the last set of academic standards the state crafted on its own nine years ago. Why? Because they are annoyed that the state board of education crafted reading and math standards that were similar yet slightly inferior to Common Core, and thus, are the standards in all but name. The Delph plan would go further by banning Ritz and the state board from seeking renewal of its No Child waiver –and, in their minds, keep the Obama Administration from supposedly meddling in state education policy.

Certainly your editor, no fan of the Obama Administration’s waiver gambit, doesn’t exactly mind this step since the Hoosier State would revert to No Child’s accountability provisions. But for the former congressman-turned-governor, the Delph plan may prove to be distraction from his other efforts on reform, weaken other reform efforts before the legislature, and embolden traditionalists to push for rolling back initiatives on other fronts. Given that Pence will likely run for a second term next year, along with his likely ambitions for the presidency, his weak stand on systemic reform isn’t doing him any favors, much less helping Hoosier children.

What Pence should do is what he should have done in the first place: Embrace the bold approach to advancing reform exemplified by counterparts Deal and Cuomo, as well as by Daniels. Incoming governors such as Greg Abbott in Texas and Gina Raimondo in Rhode Island should do the same.

But strong reform-minded governors can’t do it alone. They need support from reformers who prominently back them and at the same time, hold them accountable for achieving results. This means reformers must work hard in the political arena, backing gubernatorial candidates regardless of party affiliation who are strong on transforming public education. It also means building coalitions of support — from chambers of commerce to churches and community groups, to the single parents, grandparents, and immigrant families more than ready to support their efforts. And once those candidates take office, reformers must continually encourage them to stay the course by supporting their efforts as well as criticizing them when they run astray.

There isn’t much that reformers can do on Capitol Hill to advance reform. But they can support strong reform-minded governors on the ground. And that time is now.

You shouldn’t be surprised that American Enterprise Institute education czar Rick Hess and Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute took aim at centrist and progressive Democratic reformers such as Stand For Children’s Jonah Edelman (along with others in the movement) today on the pages of National Review for their opposition to the efforts of House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline and Senate counterpart Lamar Alexander to eviscerate the No Child Left Behind Act and its sensible accountability provisions. Nor should you be shocked that Hess and Petrilli use a “shopworn parlor trick”(as they would call it) that anyone who opposes the effort are engaging in race-baiting by arguing that rolling back the federal role in advancing systemic reform — including requiring states and districts to account for how they are improving achievement for children from poor and minority backgrounds — will hurt our most-vulnerable.

After all, both men have long ago for various reasons (including pressure from a new generation of movement conservative activists unconcerned with education issues as well as donors to their respective outfits) to serve as two-man Amen corner for Kline, Alexander and fellow congressional Republicans looking to scale back the much-needed federal role in advancing systemic reform. Petrilli, in particular, revealed his allegiances three years ago in a virtual Valentine praising Alexander’s plan for reauthorizing No Child even as Dropout Nation and others detailed how it would do little more than go back to the bald old days of the old Elementary and Secondary Education Act,when states spend federal money as freely as they so choose without any accountability. [The very fact that Hess and Petrilli stand against the federal government holding states to account for the subsidies they receive, an important principle of modern movement conservatism since the days of Reagan, shows that they are as much fair-weather ideological adherents as they are erstwhile reformers.]

Nor should you should be surprised that their critique actually neglected to make any case whatsoever for their argument that No Child and other federal efforts on matters such as ending the overuse of harsh school discipline have caused “very real harm”. This isn’t shocking because this is an argument they have made numerous times in various ways (and even, on occasion, either misusing data as well as drawing conclusions that don’t fit the evidence they use) that have been proven false by their colleagues (including yours truly).

Hess and Petrilli can’t argue that No Child hasn’t spurred an array of reforms that have helped more children, especially those black and brown, receive high-quality teaching and curricula. This includes a seven percentage point decline in the number of fourth-graders reading Below Basic between 2002 and 2013 (according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress) — and especially a 10 percentage point decline in the number of functionally-illiterate black fourth-graders. With a four percentage point increase in the number of fourth-graders reading at Proficient and Advanced levels (along with those kids continuing scale score increases similar to those by struggling peers), they also can’t argue that No Child’s focus on stemming achieving gaps have short high-achieving children.

When you consider the three-fold increase in the percentage of high school seniors graduating after taking at least one Advanced Placement exam between 2003 and 2013, as well as the expansion of public charter schools and other forms of choice, there is no way to argue that the aggressive federal role in advancing systemic reform hasn’t been on balance a net positive for children.

Hess and Petrilli also can’t prove their argument that No Child and other federal policies have led to schools being hamstrung by “stifling, rule-driven culture”. The nation’s high-quality public charter schools, including those operated by KIPP, Green Dot, MATCH, and Uncommon Schools, prove lie to that contention, as do the successful efforts of reformers such as former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein and Boston’s Tom Payzant in overhauling traditional districts. They can’t even prove the corollary argument that they could proffer (and has been offered up by Petrilli) that curricula has been narrowed (and classes outside of reading, math, and science have been crowded out) because of the expansion of standardized testing by states and districts prompted only in part by No Child’s accountability provisions.

If anything, what Hess and Petrilli loathe to admit is that No Child and other federal policymaking over the last decade has essentially reaffirmed the role of states as the overseers of public education. No Child, for example, allows states to figure out their own ways to provide high-quality education, especially to poor and minority children as well as those in the nation’s special ed ghettos; if anything, as I noted two years ago, the very flexibility in the law is the key reason why its success was limited. The Obama Administration’s Race to the Top initiative merely required states to compete for additional federal funding by implementing reforms such as overhauling teacher evaluations; that some were already making such moves even before the first round of the competitive grant effort began further exposes the fallacy of the Hess-Petrilli position.

Meanwhile Hess’ and Petrilli’s can’t even effectively argue against the contention of Edelman and other reformers that a strong federal role in education policymaking is key to holding states responsible for providing all children with high-quality education. This is because history and data have long ago proven that without strong federal action, state governments will rarely do the right thing by poor and minority children. Especially when it comes to black children and communities, who along with those from American Indian and Alaska Native backgrounds, have been historically condemned to the lowest expectations by American public education. As Ilya Somin of the libertarian Cato Institute pointed out last year, the underlying reality is that without federal intervention, states would have continued policies such as slavery and state-sanctioned segregation within American public education.

When it comes to poor and minority children, Rick Hess has never shown much concern.

What Hess and Petrilli fail to acknowledge that the federal government actually serves an important role in spreading reform efforts initiated by governors and legislators in the few states that initially undertake them. It was the Reagan Administration, through its release of A Nation at Risk  in 1983, that coaxed other states to undertake the initial efforts at addressing teacher quality and curricula first undertaken by southern state governors and chambers of commerce. Without the passage of Improving America’s Schools Act in 1994 and No Child eight years later, the steps taken by Florida and Texas to launch accountability regimes would have never been implemented by other states.

Meanwhile Hess and Petrilli fail to admit this important reality: That the federal government is constitutionally charged with protecting the civil rights of everyone, especially children from poor and minority backgrounds who are often subjected to educational abuse and neglect by traditional districts and states. This includes addressing Zip Code Education policies such as zoned schooling, restrictions on the expansion of charter schools, and limits on accessing college-preparatory courses that prevent children and families from accessing high-quality education. It also includes stepping in to address how far too many districts and charters are meting out-of-school suspensions to black children at higher levels than white peers — and often for minor behavioral offenses for which white peers would only receive lower level penalties.

Addressing how black and poor children are often shortchanged educationally by districts (often with the blessing of states) is the main reason why the original Elementary and Secondary Act (along with other civil rights legislation) was passed 59 years ago. It is also why No Child, the latest version of ESEA, was passed 36 years later. For Hess and Petrilli to deny the federal government’s important role on the most-important long-term civil rights issue of this time is to demonstrate stunning depths of historical illiteracy, intellectually unseriousness, and moral ignorance.

But no one should be surprised that Hess and Petrilli, men who claim themselves to be school reformers, penned this jeremiad. After all, both men have shown long ago that they have little concern with building brighter futures for the poor and minority children who have been damaged the most by the nation’s education crisis (and its roots in the racialism that is the nation’s Original Sin).

These days, Hess takes the position that school reformers are overly concerned with addressing the needs of poor and minority children. He began arguing this four years ago when he declared that his fellow school reformers were gripped by an “achievement gap mania” because they dared to actually focus policy efforts on helping poor and minority kids receive high-quality education. Despite evidence supports this focus, along with that showing that stemming achievement gaps helps white kids from both poor households (especially in rural communities), Hess hasn’t changed his stance. In fact, he has doubled down on this thinking. Last year, he argued on the pages of NR that efforts to expand school choice does little more than allow poor and minority families to evade personal responsibility for properly raising their children. And as seen late last year in discussions over the role of school reformers in addressing matters such as the aftermath of Ferguson and the Eric Garner verdict, Hess’ lack of concern for poor and minority kids extends beyond discussions about systemic reform.

Meanwhile Petrilli has often been deliberately ignorant about the adverse consequences of policies he defends– including traditional school discipline, ability-tracking, and even the idea that only some kids merit college-preparatory learning — on the futures of poor and minority kids. This has often been driven by stubborn adherence to theories unsupported by data. For example, Petrilli’s argument against the Obama Administration’s effort to reduce use of harsh school discipline is driven by a belief that out-of-school suspensions are meted out more-often to minority children than white peers because of “pathologies” such as single motherhood and poverty. This in spite of three decades of evidence from researchers, including University of Pittsburgh’s John Wallace, that black children are more-likely than white peers to be given harsher penalties for even the most minor offenses.

Such sophistry would be less-disconcerting if it came from the likes of once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch (whose myopia on race has been on display since chastised black parents in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community in The Great School Wars: A history of New York City schools, for their efforts to hold schools and (mostly-white) teachers accountable for student achievement. But Hess and Petrilli are supposed to be reformers, who fully understand that helping poor and minority children succeed (along with their white and middle class peers) is at the heart of the movement’s mission. For them to accuse their peers of race-baiting because they have raised honest concerns about rolling back No Child and the federal role makes you wonder if they believe themselves to be reformers at all.

Perhaps Hess and Petrilli should deal seriously with the concerns raised by their fellow reformers instead of engaging in old-school sophistry.

One of the key concerns Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Michael Holzman raised earlier this month in his piece on Cleveland’s failures to provide high-quality education was that the plan developed by Mayor Frank Jackson to expand the number of charter schools serving kids in the city was fatally flawed. Why? Because Ohio’s failures on the authorizing and oversight front meant that the charter schools throughout the state were doing an even worse job of improving student achievement that even the worst traditional public schools.

These issues were raised once again last week when Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes released its latest review on the subpar performance of Buckeye State charters. It is high time that reformers, both in Ohio and across the nation, force politicians and others to overhaul the monitoring of charter authorizers, take steps to shut down failing charters, and build the conditions for expanding high-quality charter schools that can help all children succeed.

Let’s start with one of the few bits of good news: Cleveland’s charters are actually performing well compared to traditional district schools. As CREDO reports, the average Cleveland charter school student attending school between 2008-2009 and 2012-2013 experienced two-hundreds of standard deviation gains (or 14 days of additional learning progress) in both reading and math over a traditional district counterpart. Given the Cleveland district’s woeful performance in improving student achievement, it makes sense for the district to proceed with its efforts to move away from the traditional district model.

But the success of Cleveland’s charters is the only good news to be found in CREDO’s latest study. The reality remains that Ohio’s reputation as the Wild West of charter school authorizing, as coined earlier this year by Alex Medler of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers in an interview with the Plain Dealer, remains intact. And it is doing damage to the children attending the state’s woeful charters.

The average student attending a Buckeye State charter between 2008-2009 and 2012-2013 trailed behind a traditional public school peer by an average 14 days in reading and 43 days in math. This means that the average charter school is doing worse in improving student achievement for the children in their care than a mediocre traditional district. Even worse, charters in Ohio’s big cities are doing worse by kids than the already-woeful urban districts, In Dayton, where outfits such as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are engaged in charter authorizing, the average charter student did no better than a traditional district counterpart in reading and fell behind in math by 7.2 days. Even worse in Columbus, the average charter school student made no progress in reading and fell behind a traditional district counterpart by 21.6 days (or more than a full month of school).

The woes of Ohio’s charters extend beyond big cities outside of Cleveland. The average charter school student in suburbia trailed behind a traditional district peer by 7.2 days in reading and 21.6 days in math, while a charter school student in a rural district trailed behind a traditional district peer by 36 days in reading and 100.8 days (or nearly more than half a school year) in math. While the Buckeye State’s charters focused on middle school did spectacularly for kids — with the average charter middle-schooler making 36 days of learning gains in reading and 43.2 days of gains in math, neither charters focused on elementary school kids or those working with high-schoolers improved student achievement for the average kid compared to traditional district counterparts.

When you break it down by both how well schools are improving performance over time (or growth) as well as on overall achievement, the numbers are just plain dismal. Forty-four percent of Ohio’s 147 charters surveyed by CREDO — that is, 65 of them — are doing abysmally in improving achievement over time as well as having less than half of students reaching the 50th percentile of absolute achievement statewide. These are schools that have been performing poorly for at least five years and likely longer than that. They should be closed. And yet, like failing districts such as Cleveland, remain open for business, damaging the futures of children.

Put simply, Ohio’s charters are performing atrociously. One can dare say the Buckeye State’s charter school sector performs worse than those in the rest of the country (including Louisiana, the latter of which where the average charter school student is making 50 more days of gains in reading and sixty-five more gains in numeracy than traditional district counterparts). Which is absolutely, positively shameful and unacceptable. We can’t help children, especially those from poor and minority households as well as to families in rural communities and suburbia, escape from woeful traditional district schools to charters and other providers who do even worse by them.

It isn’t just about Ohio’s children, of course. As your editor noted earlier this year — and has done so for the past three years — poor-performing charters do damage to efforts to expand the array of high-quality school choices our children need and deserve. It is bad enough that bad studies (such as one that CREDO issued a few years ago) and worse scandals involving charter school operators such as Family Urban Schools of Excellence (which earned infamy this year for financial mismanagement of the Jumoke charters in Connecticut) cast the movement in a bad light. The real damage of failing charter schools have even greater consequences for the expansion of choice everywhere. Those reformers who justify keeping such failure mills open by saying that they are better than unsafe traditional district counterparts are just making excuses — and that’s just as bad as the rhetoric offered up by traditionalists.

At the heart of the problem starts with Ohio’s charter school authorizers — including traditional districts — who have been far too willing to allow shoddy charters to remain in operation long after it is clear that they should be shut down. Just 18 of the Buckeye State’s 355 charters were shut down in 2011-2012, according to CREDO’s data; a mere 93 were shut own between 2008-2009 and 2011-2012, while another 104 were opened in that same period. Considering the low quality of charters in the state, authorizers should focus on shutting down more charter schools than less.

One reason why authorizers are so unwilling to shut down failing charters: The money. In addition to collecting three percent of a charter’s per-pupil funding, authorizers can also provide services to charters and collect a fee for them. This doesn’t align with the standards for high-quality practice set out by National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and others looking to improve the quality of charter school authorizing. Because authorizers have greater incentives to keep laggard charters around in spite of their woeful performance, they aren’t shutting them down.

But the problem doesn’t lie with authorizers alone. The fact that Ohio allows for 69 outfits (including districts along with nonprofits such as Fordham) to engage in authorizing means that there are too many players overseeing charters. In fact, nearly a third of the authorizers (20 altogether) are so lowest-performing that they aren’t being allowed to authorize new operations. [They are still allowed to oversee the existing charters.] In Cleveland alone, nine authorizers (including the traditional district) are in charge of charter school quality. This allows for charter school operators to engage in forum-shopping, hooking up with the authorizer most-likely to engage in shoddy oversight.

Meanwhile the Buckeye State’s education department doesn’t do a good job of weeding out the worst authorizers. While it is required to rank authorizers based on their performance and collect annual reports from them, state law doesn’t actually compel the agency to shut down the worst of the lot on an annual basis in order to improve quality in the long run. Even the rankings are useless: Thirty-nine of the authorizers are excluded from the annual quality rankings because they authorize dropout recovery charters and other specialized charters, or because of other exceptions.

Certainly the Buckeye State has taken some steps within the last year to address the low quality of charters and authorizers. But those steps aren’t enough. Gov. John Kasich should immediately push for the legislature to pass a law allowing for the immediate shutdown of the worst-performing charter authorizers as well as close down the worst 65 charters throughout the state. Putting an end to authorizing by traditional districts — which is akin to giving McDonald’s permission to decide whether a Wendy’s can open next door — should also be done. At the same time, Kasich should also propose the creation of a statewide charter school authorizing agency that can approve schools from existing high-quality charter school operators that can replace those that are being shut down; this will east the transition for those families who will be affected by those closures.

Reformers both in and outside Ohio must step up the pressure on politicians and authorizers alike. This includes shaming authorizers who don’t shut down failing schools quickly enough as well as those who are more-concerned about making money off failing operators at the expense of children. At the same time, reformers must address another reason why so many charters don’t make it: The lack of capacity, both operational as well as academic; this is important because we must continue to encourage families, community groups, and educators to launch charters alongside large-scale operators. There’s no reason why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation cannot launch as charter school fund that assists new start-ups in building the capacity they need to succeed for the long haul.

These steps don’t apply to Ohio alone. As the Center on Reinventing Public Education has exhaustively pointed out over the last month, Michigan is also struggling mightily on the charter school and authorizer quality front. In Detroit alone, the shoddiness of authorizing has led to a wide array of unconscionably low-quality choices for children and families who need high-quality education the most. Reformers must also put pressure on politicians and the Wolverine State’s charter school sector to shut down shoddy schools and authorizers; charter school players should follow the example of the California Charter Schools Association, which has continually called for the shutdown of failing charters. More importantly, we have to move away from the less-than-thoughtful idea espoused by hardcore school choice players such as Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas that we should just leave charters and choice players alone. Strong accountability is critical to sustaining the expansion of school choice, in building an infrastructure for choice that helps all families, and in moving away from a traditional district model that fails our children.

Ohio’s shoddy charter school oversight must come to an end. The Buckeye State’s children deserve better than this. As do all of our children in failing schools everywhere.