An April Fool’s Day-free zone for reforming American public education.

S-KIPP-ing Around the Facts: Your editor won’t waste your time giving a full analysis of Western Michigan University’s report on KIPP’s finances and student attrition. The flaws in how the study compares the attrition data of KIPP schools compared to traditional public school peers (or apples-to-watermelons, as Robin Lake argues) have already been pointed out by others. On this, I will say that the authors, Gary Miron, Jessica L. Urschel and Nicholas Saxton, are no more wrong for using Common Core data available on KIPP schools to determine attrition than school reformers who do the same thing; Common Core is an accurate data source.

But there are some real issues with the study, and those lie with the interpretation of the data. Miron and his team engage in some sloppy thinking. This is particularly not befitting of a longtime academic.

For one, Miron and company argue that KIPP conducts “selective entry” when the data he cites doesn’t prove any of that. Arguing that attrition is one reason for this is sloppy, especially when they are actually noting an end-of-pipeline issue, not an issue of what KIPP actually does to enroll students. The other basis for the argument — that KIPP schools have fewer numbers of special ed students — fails to consider the reality that in most urban districts, the families of special ed districts are unlikely to leave the traditional district for a charter school because they have already have Individualized Education Plans for their kids in place, are familiar (if not always friendly) with the bureaucracy and are apprehensive about moving to a charter school which may have less capacity to support them. The Miron team’s argument also fails to consider the reality that far too many kids are being diagnosed as special ed cases because of their low levels of literacy (and shouldn’t have ever been placed there in the first place). Given that the data Miron and his crew cite also shows that KIPP schools enroll higher numbers of black students than traditional districts, the selective entry argument falls apart.

What Miron and company also fail to consider is the other side of school choice: That an environment in which parents can choose schools also means that they can choose to opt out of them, even at risk to their kids. As a public charter school of choice, KIPP can’t always control the reality that some of its students also have parents who can walk them out of the school, or don’t want to participate in the hard work of engagement in the school community that it demands. In this regard, urban parents could easily decide that they prefer a Montessori approach or even think the traditional district school may be more nurturing (whether or not the data bears it out) than a KIPP environment. This, by the way, is the flip-side of school choice (and one that all choice supporters must admit and accept). On one level, this may mean school reformers need to do a better job of informing less-knowledgeable parents about the hard work it takes to improve their child’s academic achievement, (a major issue no matter what side of the education debate one might sit) and that we must overhaul all of American public education. Or, as we accept in the case of suburban middle class parents, that some parents want something different for their kids than what KIPP offers.

The biggest problem with Miron’s study lies with its underlying argument that KIPP is successful in improving student achievement because it has more money and raises more of it. His team fails to consider the long history of KIPP schools of raising achievement even before it gained its high profile. They ignore the fact that, by design, charter schools are dependent on outside support and don’t have the capacity to increase taxes to sustain its operations the way traditional districts can (and, from where I sit, it’s the way it should be). Miron’s team even ignores its own flawed data, which shows that KIPP gets high quality results despite spending less on instruction and support than traditional districts. (By the way, Miron and his team do a terrible job of actually breaking out administrative expenses; one can’t tell if the study is looking at school administrative costs or general administrative costs).

And Miron and company don’t understand that the ability of KIPP to raise so much money is a sign that it is successful in its ultimate goal of improving student achievement for kids in urban communities. As an operator of charter schools (which gets less state and local tax revenue than traditional districts), KIPP must go out and prove its success each and every day in order to get philanthropic support. If it doesn’t perform, it won’t continue to get financial support. This concept may be difficult for Miron — a charter school skeptic —  and his colleagues to understand. But folks familiar with that thing called economics completely get it. It’s called serving your market (and your students) well and reaping the benefits.

There are areas this study could have explored that would have been of value. One is what are the limitations of the KIPP focus on middle school students, many of whom have spent five or more years suffering through academic neglect and malpractice. Given the need for intensive reading remediation and math instruction in the early grades, Miron and his team could have actually dug into existing data to figure out some of KIPP’s  instructional methods, curriculum development efforts and school leadership techniques are useful for overcoming those issues. Such data could help traditional districts improve the odds of graduation for students on the path to academic failure. But this didn’t happen. Instead, what we have is well, something that contributes little to education discussions.

All in all, the study will be mishandled, as always, by folks who oppose the expansion (and the existence) of charter schools. But it’s a shoddy piece of work that will just aid and abet even more-slovenly thinking.

DIY Schools Redux: Dropout Nation‘s report on the concept of DIY schools garnered a lot of attention this week. What is particularly heartening is that more families and communities are embracing this idea of doing-it-for-ourselves in reforming American public education.

In Naperville, Ill., for example, parent have come together to form Covenant Classical School, which offers classes in Latin and logic as part of its curriculum. The 91-student school opened this past August after parents spent eight months putting together a curriculum, forming a board and doing all the kind of school-building work that districts and charter operators such as KIPP do every day. As the Chicago Tribune reported last year, fellow parents in Joliet have formed their own independent Catholic school, St. Joseph Academy, to replace the now-shuttered diocesan school that served their community.

Another opportunity for DIY education may come courtesy of the departure of New York City Department of Education honcho Joel Rose from the nation’s largest district to expand upon his School of One initiative. The program has garnered attention and acclaim for giving middle-school teachers the ability to customize math for middle-school students based on their success in mastering goals and tasks. But even in New York City’s more-innovative-and-reform-minded-than-usual school district, there are still political and bureaucratic obstacles to fostering this innovation. One can imagine a School of One-style concept that gives parents the tools they need to handle instruction, bring rigor to curriculum and measure performance.

With so many tools available for families and communities to start their own schools, the real problems lie with money, mobilization and information. The first can be solved by reforming school funding, making it a fully state-financed affair; this would then allow for the creation of a system of publicly funding the best educational options for all children — including DIY schools. The second will be solved by expanding the reach of Parent Power groups and other grassroots-based school reformers (something that the Beltway crowd and philanthropies such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation should do). And the development of more-robust school data systems can deal with the third, providing parents with better data that they can use to make the best decisions for their children.

Families can no longer wait for systemic reform to happen slowly. We need to help them make the overhaul of American public education happen as immediately as possible.

The School Reform Battles to Come: Michigan in Action: Dropout Nation noted last month that the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers weren’t going to take Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s successful move to abolish collective bargaining lying down. And with the NEA doubling the dues dedicated to political efforts, using its foundation arm to raise more money to beat back the most-aggressive school reform efforts (and the possibility of stepping up its donations to think tanks and other groups theoretically willing to do its bidding), it isn’t shocking that its affiliates would mobilize its rank-and-file to engage in the kind of mass-strikes that are typically found in France.

This is certainly a possibility in Michigan, where the bellicose NEA affiliate there is threatening to launch a series of what they laughingly call “crisis activities” this month ostensibly in opposition to spending cuts contained in Gov. Rick Snyder’s proposed education budget. The real issue, however, is the move by Snyder and the state legislature to give the state’s school finance czars — including Robert Bobb, the commissar of Detroit’s public schools — the ability to essentially render contracts with their AFT and NEA affiliates null and void. That, along with the possibility of Snyder taking up the kind of efforts to banish collective bargaining pursued by fellow governors Walker and John Kasich in Ohio, is rallying the NEA affiliate to take up arms. The union is asking its locals and members to vote on taking up these strikes by April 15, then will take action once members decide which way they will go.

As one would expect, Salters’ call hasn’t had the effect on Snyder or the state legislature that she expected. Last week, statehouse Republicans introduced a bill that would add even more sanctions to the state’s anti-strike law; this includes allowing state education officials to suspend the licenses of striking teachers for as long as two years. And even in a union-heavy state such as Michigan, the NEA local may not gain much sympathy from taxpayers vexed about the state’s low-performing schools and decades of fiscal fecklessness that the union aided and abetted. As Detroit News columnist Frank Beckmann points out: “Public employee benefits come from the pockets of their neighbors and it’s hard to imagine many outside of other public employee union members who are going to feel sympathy for state teachers, who earn an average of about $58,000 a year, according to the National Education Association, or for union leaders like Salters who reportedly is earning just south of $300,000 per year.”

As usual, Michigan will be fun to watch. It may be the NEA’s own air traffic controllers strike moment.

John Kline’s Policy Obtuseness: As your editor, I could point to the policy disconnect between House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline’s declaration yesterday that “it is time we reconsidered the role of the federal government in our schools”, and his effusive praise later in the day for efforts by his congressional Republican colleagues to expand the reach of federal policy by reviving D.C. Opportunity school voucher program. But that’s just too easy and besides, on the latter, he’s right to support it. Instead let’s consider the revisionist history of the role of federal policy being parlayed by Kline and some of the majority staff on the committee and how it doesn’t square with reality.

From where Kline sits, the No Child Left Behind Act (and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1966, upon which No Child is built) has done little more than burdened school districts with regulations that restrict them from improving education while also wasting federal money. From the perspective of some less-thoughtful movement conservatives, suburban Republicans such as Kline, and even some libertarians, this narrative is incredibly simple and seductive because it proclaims that American public education was in great shape before the feds appeared like gremlins in a World War II fighter plane. If only the federal government would just get out of education, the districts would successfully educate the kids in their care.

But as with so many ideologically-driven simplifications, it isn’t exactly so. For one, the federal government has long had a role in education policy beginning with the Morrill Act of 1862 — which helped foster the formation of much of the nation’s public universities — and formation of the Office of Education (a predecessor of what is now the U.S. Department of Education) five years later. That role expanded first expanded in 1914 with the Smith-Lever Act (which created cooperative extension outfits within land-grant universities) and in 1917 when the Smith-Hughes Act required high schools to create vocational education programs (and thus fostering the development of the comprehensive high school model).

By 1946, the federal role was expanded thanks to the National School Lunch Act, which funded school meals and fostered the creation of the free- and reduced-lunch economic standards used today in measuring poverty in schools. The Impact Aid Act of 1950 would further expand federal policy and funding by requiring national funding of schools in areas in which feds were buying property and taking it off the tax rolls. Then came the Cold War-prompted National Defense Education Act of 1958, which fostered the first major wave of standardized testing in the 20th century; by 1966, nearly all high school students were taking some form of standardized aptitude test, versus just one-third of students in 1958, according to a 2006 report by the Institute for Defense Analyses. Then came ESEA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (which kept student data under lock-and-key) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1975 , which expanded special education funding. And during the 1980s, the Reagan Administration’s A Nation At Risk report would further the federal role (even as congressional Republicans at the time gave lip service to scaling things back).

But the story is a mixed one. Federal policy and regulations have been on a slow and steady expansion and it has certainly been a mixed blessing. From FERPA rules that can complicate the efforts of states to build effective data systems, to unclear “supplement-not-supplant” rules that restrict the use of Title 1 dollars from uses for innovative instruction and curricula, the feds have spent a lot of the over the past decades on compliance. But the very states and districts Kline argues will do well all by themselves are also to blame. As education lawyer Melissa Junge pointed out this morning at a Title 1 conference held by the Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute, a district could actually propose a program that would meet guidelines and still get stonewalled by state education departments interpreting federal supplement-not-supplant rules differently from U.S. Department of Education guidance. As I reported in A Byte At the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era, the penchant for states to tie up their own dollars in categorical programs and the byzantine structures of education governance also means even more compliance-based regulations.

Congress should ditch the compliance models within federal education policy. It would help spur some innovations. But let’s also be clear about this: One can get rid of all the federal compliance rules and school districts would still complain of burdens, largely because of what states do and their own penchant for perpetuating bureaucracy, waste and ineptitude. As the Center for American Progress pointed out earlier this year in its own report on educational efficiency, the spending done by districts rarely correlate with high-quality results.

On the other hand, what hasn’t been in place over the past decades until now is what really matters: Holding districts and states accountable for spending money wisely and improving student achievement. The lack of accountability was a concern for Robert F. Kennedy when ESEA was initially passed in 1966; it became  a greater concern as Southern governors, big-city mayors and Reagan administration officials who helped foster the school reform movement once they realized that state and federal dollars were going down proverbial drains.

Through the AYP provisions, No Child finally began exposing the systemic problems of school districts — especially suburban systems long-considered to be high-performing — and fostering the teacher quality reforms, curriculum standards overhauls and school choice initiatives Kline claims he supports. Because No Child is the final iterations of what states began doing in the late 1980s, the law (along with the Race to the Top effort) also gives reform-minded governors the tools they need to push through reforms that would otherwise be resisted by suburban districts and teachers unions. As a group of authors led by No Child architect Sandy Kress points out in the Harvard Journal on Legislation, AYP has helped spur efforts that are improving student achievement. The gains aren’t enough — systemic reforms are critical to closing achievement gaps for the long run — but AYP is one of several elements of federal education policy (alongside the competition model ushered in by Race to the Top and family engagement efforts) that should be kept in place and expanded.

One wishes Kline would offer such nuanced arguments. But he doesn’t. He hammers upon accountability that actually works and ignores the compliance mentality that is actually worth eliminating. But then, Kline would actually have to spend some time studying the history of federal education policy.

The Blueprint for Ending Accountability: During Dropout Nation‘s interview with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, his point person on reauthorizing No Child, Carmel Martin, declared that AYP ” just doesn’t have any credibility”. Of course, it doesn’t help when the agency releases such questionable estimates as this week’s proclamation that four out of every five schools will be considered academically failing under the provisions. But I’ll let that go. What Duncan and the Obama administration want to do is replace AYP with a model that won’t hold any schools accountable.

Under the administration’s blueprint for reauthorizing No Child, AYP will be replaced with a series of measures focused on tracking whether schools are getting all students ready for college and career. But instead of subjecting all schools receiving Title 1 funds to stringent accountability, it would be limited to the five percent of the nation’s schools (about 5,000 dropout factories and failure mills) that are abject failures. The merely poor-performing schools — including suburban districts that are failing to properly educate poor and minority kids — would be listed, but largely be left alone.

But what if those districts continue to fail in educating poor and minority kids for three years or more. that are failing poor and minority students? In theory, it will be placed in the hands of state education departments. But those agencies barely do a good job of holding districts accountable as is. In fact, No Child already gives states a set of prescriptive measures to pursue — including turnarounds and shutting down schools — to fix perpetual academic failure. But currently many states rarely force districts to undertake such drastic measures.

Certainly one can understand why Duncan and Obama would propose this. Suburban districts have been complaining that their failures are being exposed. The fact that states spent so much time slowly putting AYP in place and now ratcheting up the standards for academic success is also creating havoc. But as a former school system boss, Duncan should know by now that districts will do as much as they can to avoid taking responsibility for student achievement and failure. Just replacing AYP — a system that has worked well, if not perfectly — for nothing is not good enough.

Let’s be clear: Duncan and the Obama administration have largely done a fine job in pushing for systemic reform. But in pushing to gut AYP, they are essentially undercutting their own efforts. It’s time to sit down and rethink this part of the blueprint. And perhaps, just leave No Child alone.

Photo courtesy of AP

Race to the Standstill: For the past couple of months, there has been plenty of talk about the possibility of some sort of detente between President Barack Obama and House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline on the former’s school reform agenda. But Obama’s proposed budget for the 2011-2012 fiscal year — and Kline’s response to it — shows that there will be more debate than detente when it comes to federal education policy.

In requesting $900 million more to continue Race to the Top (and focus it on spurring reforms in school districts), and asking for more money to fund the School Improvement Grant program and other initiatives, Obama has declared that he is sticking to his approach of competitive grant programs focused on spurring teacher quality reforms, expansion of charter schools, turnarounds and innovation. In turn, Kline has essentially declared that he wants to return to the mythical concept of local control and scale back any further expansion of federal education policy.

The real battle, however, won’t be between Obama and Kline as much as it will be between the two men and their respective camps.

Kline is going to end up tangling with his fellow Republicans, especially among school reform-minded governors, many of whom have successfully used Race to the Top and the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act to push their own like-minded initiatives. Kline’s fellow House Republicans — including Speaker John Boehner — aren’t exactly all for local control, and the chairman knows this. For all of Kline’s bluster about opposing the expansion of federal education  policy, he all but gave his blessing to the effort by Boehner and Sen. Joseph Lieberman to revive the D.C. Opportunity voucher program. And Kline himself is likely excited by Obama’s proposal to boost federal special ed subsidies by $200 million.

Meanwhile Obama will have to worry about his own re-election campaign. This means playing a little nicer with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, who are still among the biggest players in Democratic Party politics. As seen in Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s remarks at this week’s summit on collaboration between school districts and teachers unions — and Obama’s own response to the efforts of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to end public employee collective bargaining — the president knows that he must walk a fine line between battling the NEA and AFT and ensuring that they continue to provide union dues to congressional and presidential campaigns.

All this likely means that, for the moment, there will be lots of talk and little congressional or presidential action of real substance.

Gray Matters on School Reform: Anyone who truly thought that D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray was going to somehow pursue any form of school reform during his tenure should have paid close attention to the pronouncements of his education transition committee on the IMPACT teacher evaluation program. The hallmark of former chancellor Michelle Rhee’s tenure, IMPACT is a prime (if not perfect) model for the kind of performance management systems states and school districts will need to put in place in order to improve teacher quality.

But from the perspective of the transition committee, IMPACT is particularly flawed because it doesn’t have a strong professional development regime attached to it. Given that professional development for teachers in general is rather weak, that argument is a failure. The other argument — that teachers don’t trust it — also falls apart largely because it hasn’t been in place long enough. More importantly, considering that longtime veterans weren’t previously subjected to any sort of performance management, it is going to take time for them to get used to the reality that rigorous evaluation will be the norm and not the exception.

Let’s be clear: This was a review that had a predetermined result. Or, to be more clear, the fix was in from the get-and-go. Gray has always opposed IMPACT and has not been a fan of performance-based evaluations, largely because it was opposed by his allies, especially the city’s American Federation of Teachers local (which opposes any use of student data in evaluating teachers). More importantly, given Gray’s own poor relationship with Rhee — and his dependence on Rhee critics for political support — he couldn’t possibly keep all that she wrought. This isn’t to say that Rhee’s tenure was a stunning success (it wasn’t).

But given that Rhee did the hard work of finally subjecting teachers to more-robust performance management, overhauling IMPACT, the key to that effort, means going back to desultory evaluation systems that all but guarantee that laggard teachers keep their jobs. Given the politics involved and Gray’s unwillingness so far to fully embrace school reform, any overhaul of IMPACT will be more like a gutting and a trashing.

If the verdict on IMPACT isn’t disconcerting, then the decision by Gray to put Nate Saunders, the new president of the AFT’s D.C. local, on the search team for Rhee’s full-time replacement ought to realize that the Gray theme on education is back to the status quo with some sprinkling of charter schools to placate reformers in his own camp. No respectable reformer would argue for essentially granting a teachers union boss a vote on who will be the person with whom they will negotiate on the other side of the table. It is an absolute conflict of interest on every level.

If Gray wants to be taken seriously on school reform, he shouldn’t have given Washington a seat at the search committee table. Nor should he allow the AFT local’s own critique of IMPACT to be included in the final report that the transition committee will release. He should then tell Interim Chancellor Kaya Henderson to appeal the recent decision by an arbitrator to put 75 laggard teachers back onto the payroll — and fully declare that IMPACT will stay in place as is.

Certainly there are folks who argue that Gray deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt. Andy Rotherham declared as much this week. Rick Hess argues otherwise (albeit with less calm). I’ll have to largely agree with Hess on this one. Gray can talk all the game on school reform he wants, but past history and recent moves shows something different and more ominous.

National Association of Scholars Gets It Wrong on High Expectations: Dropout Nation’s commentary earlier this month about Harvard’s Pathways to Prosperity claptrap garnered some attention from the National Association of Scholars, the higher education reform outfit. From its perspective, Pathways “makes a needed case for not restricting the American dream to college graduates” and dovetails with its view that not every student should attend college.

But NAS doesn’t actually consider the underlying reason why so many aspiring collegians end up in remedial ed classes and flunking out in the first place: The low quality of curricula and instruction in elementary and secondary schools. Nor does NAS consider the reality that the same high level of reading, math and science skills needed for community college and four-year college completion are also needed for getting into apprenticeships and technical schools. Essentially, the problem isn’t that colleges are admitting kids unable to handle college-level work, it is that American public education doesn’t provide the kind of high-quality instruction and curricula that would allow students to choose any path in the first place. The Pathways report ignores the reality of what is actually happening in K-12 — a point made clear over the past few months thanks to the American Institutes for Research and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in its reports on curriculum standards — and falsely argues that students are actually getting college prep education.NAS didn’t factor any of this into its arguments.

The lack of thoughtfulness on the topic isn’t all that surprising. After all, NAS admirably focuses on such critical issues in higher ed as the weakening of academic freedom and Great Books curricula that has been the hallmark of college education in this country for most of the past four centuries. But the association also seems to reflect a bent among some conservatives — most-notably Charles Murray — that not all kids are deserving of a college preparatory education, an argument that is also implicitly at the heart of the Pathways report (and an echo of the early 20th century view that blacks and immigrants were incapable of college-level work that led to many of the problems at the heart of American public education’s failures today). This school of thinking runs counter to the reality that higher education (be it college, technical school or apprenticeships) are critical for poor and minority children to move into the economic middle class. It is also a viewpoint that condemns these young men and women of all races to low-quality education and low expectations.

NAS would do well to read Dropout Nation and learn more about the underlying problems that also complicate the otherwise laudable goal of improving the quality of higher education that they also seek.

1) Obligatory State of the Union Thought: If you expected President Barack Obama to spend much time discussing education during last night’s State of the Union dog-and-pony show, then you didn’t get your hands on the copy of the speech released earlier in the day. And what he said didn’t signal much of anything. At the end of the day, the President and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have already signaled what they are going to do on school reform front through Race to the Top, the I3 initiative and in their bully pulpit efforts. Which means that the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers can’t count on the White House to advance their defense of status quo ideas.

The real questions lie with the House Republicans. On one hand, House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline is opposing any further expansion of federal education policy, argues for a return to that myth that is local control, and wants to trash the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. But Republicans aren’t united on this perspective.  Republican governors who have successfully used No Child and Race to the Top to advance their own overhaul efforts. Kline’s boss,  House Speaker John Boehner, helped usher No Child into existence. There are even some divisions within Kline’s Republican majority on the committee. And Boehner (along with other House Republicans and Sen. Joseph Lieberman) are pushing to expand federal education policy by agitating for the revival of the now-shuttered D.C. Opportunity school voucher program. In any case, whatever the House Republicans will do depends on coming up with some sort of unanimous position on the role of federal education policy (if they have time to do so, a major question given their focus on fiscal matters) and whether they can get Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to go along (equally questionable).

2) A School Reform Mayor Emerges in San Antonio: When he embarked on his successful campaign to become mayor of San Antonio, Texas, two years ago, Julian Castro declared that he would make school reform one of his top priorities. This past week, he has made some baby steps by pledging to support a former city councilwoman in a San Antonio Independent School District race against one of the more-entrenched school trustees. He also wants to introduce a report card of sorts, measuring the success and failure of the district and its 16 counterparts in improving student achievement.

There is plenty for Castro to campaign against when it comes to San Antonio’s school districts, many of which poorly serve the 395,852 kids in their care. Just 53 percent of the eighth-graders in San Antonio Independent’s original Class of 2008 graduated on time while South San Antonio’s graduation rate is a mere 54 percent; the Edgewood district only graduated a mere 57 percent of its students. Even the relatively high-performing Judson district only graduates 73 percent of its eighth-graders; the Northside district does have an 89 percent graduation rate. When one digs deeper and looks at the poor black, Latino and white students being ill-served by the districts, the need for reform becomes even more apparent.

But the fact that San Antonio’ is served by 17 traditional districts means that Castro will have limited ability to directly influence their operations. Running slates of school board candidates — an approach taken with various degrees of success by Los Angeles mayors Richard Riordan and Antonio Villaraigosa, would be an expensive, time-consuming affair. Directly taking over San Antonio Independent or another district — the approach of such mayors as Chicago’s Richard Daley and New York City’s Michael Bloomberg — would still mean Castro would touch only a smattering of the city’s students. Fully consolidating the districts under Castro’s direct control is also likely to be a non-starter; Texas politics wouldn’t exactly countenance that anyway.

But Castro could take a page out of the playbook of former Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson and get the power to authorize charter schools; he could even follow the path of former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist and launch a school voucher program. Both moves would likely win favor with the Texas state legislature and Gov. Rick Perry (especially given that Castro is popular for the moment) and would allow Castro to avoid the pitfalls of directly running an urban district (you know, that Adrian Fenty thing). More importantly, it would be a critical step away from the traditional district model, which has proven to be as obsolete as it is a failure in delivering instruction and curricula.

There’s plenty that Castro can do. But he will need to go full bore and be ready to take on the school districts and defenders of traditional public education in the district to make it happen. This means calling out school board members by name, taking aim at the woeful statistics, and devoting his bully pulpit to explaining why school reform must be a reality for the Alamo city. He will also need to mobilize parents and grassroots activists in order to create the conditions for school reform. In any case, Castro may be worth watching.

3) The Next Step for Indianapolis’ Charter School Movement: The Circle City struck a blow for the nation’s school reform movement a decade ago when then-Mayor Bart Peterson became the first mayor in the nation to get the power to authorize public charter schools without being tied to controlling a traditional school district. In that time, the city’s effort has proven to largely be a boon for kids who would otherwise become dropouts while offering mayors throughout the nation an important example of how to approach school reform.

But as the Hechinger Report notes in a report this week, the effort hasn’t exactly pushed districts towards reforming their own operations.  Certainly the fact that traditional districts are hamstrung by state laws and collective bargaining agreements — the result of teachers union lobbying — is part of the problem. So is the fact that the cultures and leadership within the districts — especially the woeful Indianapolis Public Schools — stubbornly clings to woeful approaches to instruction and curriculum.  But the limited impact of charters also has to do with that fetish of school reformers and traditional educationalists everywhere: Scale. In this case, scale actually does matter. Neither Peterson nor his successor, Greg Ballard, has authorized enough charter schools (or enough of the high-quality variety) to make the impact needed on traditional school operations.

The approach to charter authorizing embraced by Peterson (and by Ballard for want of interest or a better idea) was to provide Indianapolis parents with alternatives to traditional schools that serve segments of the student population that IPS and its sister districts ignored. Given that charters were still novel concepts for the Hoosier State, the cap on the number of charters that could be authorized, and the matter of avoiding some battles with either the school district or the state’s National Education Association affiliate, this made sense. But this approach also meant that Peterson and Ballard would never add enough charters to serve as competitors to the established order. Charters would nudge IPS  in the right direction, but not necessarily force it to fully embrace reform. As for districts such as Washington Township and Pike Township? Their growing enrollments (fed by the flight of residents from the heart of Indianapolis that is served by IPS), and the lack of charters in their areas insulated them from  addressing the low performance of their black, Latino and male students.

Meanwhile the city hasn’t exactly done a good job of luring high-quality charters into the city. Even before Peterson was forced to hand over the reins to Ballard in 2008, the city did little to close down low-quality charters. Peterson only shuttered one operation, a high school serving dropouts operated by the nonprofit Flanner House, was only shut down after evidence of financial mismanagement (which led to the ouster of the parent organization’s executive director). While the Knowledge is Power Program has become a key player in Indianapolis, Ballard hasn’t exactly brought in Green Dot, Aspire or any of the other big-name  high-quality charter operators.

The result has been sort of a slow-mo towards reform. While charters are generally offering higher-quality curriculum and instruction, there still aren’t enough good-to-great options. There still aren’t enough charters throughout the city; only three are located in the city’s suburban townships. Meanwhile IPS can make noise about how charters are peeling off students from its enrollment (an argument that doesn’t hold water) while still operating the worst concentration of dropout factories in the Midwest outside of Detroit. And the other districts rest on their respective laurels, declaring that everything is fine even if that isn’t so; they’re not going to embrace any sort of meaningful reform unless they are forced either by the Indiana state government, economic necessity or the presence of charters in their midst.

Ballard and his charter school czar, Marcus Keraga Rausch (who cut his teeth working with education scholar Russ Skiba on studying American public education’s overuse of suspensions and expulsions), need to step up their authorizing efforts by adding at least 10-to-15 high-quality charter schools over the next few years. This advice also holds true for Peterson acolyte Melina Kennedy, who is running against Ballard this election year. The small roll-out has been nice, but not necessarily impactful. And the kids need more than just slow mo.

As the editor of a magazine dedicated to coverage and advocacy of school reform, I have to balance the line between fiery rhetoric and thoughtful analysis. After all, while passionate argument will rally like-minded people, it is clear, data-driven reporting and editorializing that will win over people who may be sympathetic to one’s positions, but aren’t ready to commit to one side or another. Data is great for shedding light on what is happening on the ground and can even generate anger and indignation.

But bomb-throwing, bombast, even plain and blunt talk — such as Virginia education czar Gerard Robinson’s statement that American public education has an “achievement crap problem”  — is also needed. In fact, it may be needed even more. As former National PTA CEO Byron Garrett once pointed out, people already have a sense of what is wrong. What people need are statements that showcase the nation’s educational crisis in uncompromising, light-shedding terms. Same with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s declaration yesterday that “teaching can no longer be the only profession where you have no rewards for excellence and no consequences for failure to perform”. But Liam Julian of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute declares that Christie’s rhetoric, along with that from former D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee (and quite likely, Robinson’s own harsh words) is “abrasive”, “unsettling” and “Manichean”. From where he sits, the language should be toned down lest teachers union publicists use it to rile up their own troops.

Certainly it is interesting that Julian himself used some pretty harsh language to describe Christie and Rhee (ironic, don’t you think?). More importantly, Julian misses the importance of rhetoric in crystallizing a debate and in forcing issues that need to be out there for all to see.

Julian makes a demand for less zealotry as if defenders of traditional public education — including the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — are somehow going to be won over by meek talk (and will respond in kind). This isn’t exactly so. Status quo defenders hold the positions they do not because they can be convinced, but because their vision of what education should be, along with their self-interests, directly conflicts with the aims of the school reform movement. They are defending their positions fiercely, with as much fiery talk from their side as reformers get from the Rhees and Christies. In a political and ideological battle, there is going to be harsh rhetoric and it is to be expected.

School reformers are not likely to reach common ground with traditionalists when it comes to this conflict of visions. It isn’t worth the time. So reformers can’t simply talk calmly; they must talk with fire, with a little bombast and with fire. This is in the best tradition of past movements, including the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s (when the smooth rhetoric of Martin Luther King came together with the fiery oratory of Malcolm X to advance liberty for African-Americans) and the abolitionist movement of a decade earlier. There is, in fact, no reform movement that was ever won with a pitcher of sweet tea.

Julian also fails to consider the urgency of this moment. With 1.3 million kids dropping out every year, and millions more suffering from educational malpractice and neglect, the time for niceties is over. When the kids suffering are your own — or kids coming from the same neighborhoods, sharing the same skin tones and emerging from the same economic backgrounds — then this whole anti-zealotry argument doesn’t fly one bit. Julian can easily argue against zealotry because it isn’t his kin that are subject to low-quality education.

Let’s be blunt: As a player within the Beltway with greater access to data on school and teacher quality than the average person (and who rubs shoulders with some of the players on the other side) Julian has a few more options than the rest of the child-bearing adults who are or will become parents. To parents whose kids are doomed to attend dropout factories and for taxpayers looking at billions spent on education for little gain — neither of whom will actually meet a teachers union president in their lifetimes — Christie’s “unsettling” words sum up the problem point blank. They’re in no mood for the cool talk Julian desires; these are the only kids these parents have, they want the best for them, and they want all that opposes their efforts to get their kids a high-quality education to get out the way.

The reality is that it is as haphazard for a child to get a high-quality education now as it was during my grandmother’s childhood during the Great Depression.  This is especially true for our poorest kids who have few options in escaping the worst public education has to offer. When the quality in teaching instruction can change simply based on the classroom in which a child lands or the zip code in which they live, you can’t react to it with calm When a system of compensation and performance management continually keeps low-quality teachers in classrooms while failing to recognizing the work of high-quality instructors, you can’t offer milquetoast bromides. And when you have folks such as Diane Ravitch, Randi Weingarten and Dennis Van Roekel opposing any meaningful use of data to improve teacher quality because it may make their colleagues and allies uncomfortable, smooth talking won’t suffice.

We need a revolution, not an evolution, in American public education. And you don’t get a revolution just by talking calmly to the opposition; even William F. Buckley Jr. (and Thomas Paine) would tell Julian that. You use all the rhetorical, political and idea-based tools at one’s disposal and go hard, deep and strong. In short, you need a little bit of Christie’s zealotry and you need some nice research papers.  The battle won’t be won with just the latter.