While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms…

Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here I am here because I have organizational ties here.  But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds…

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people… There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust…Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself… So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love… Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel… And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be…. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, explaining why civil rights activists of that time had to be “creative extremists” demanding the end of state-sanctioned bigotry. Five decades later, school reformers must embrace King’s call for creative extremists to transform American public education — and help all children succeed

Hustlers and hysterics come in all shapes and sizes. Democrats, Republicans and independents, believers, non-believers and agnostics, and whoever else needs representation to make sure the gang is all there.

What counts, and what can’t be faked, is what we’re investing in our strongest natural resource, our young population. That will carry us through world competition, market loss or dominance. Since all of this is easily proven and quite obvious, we might think that we would have bipartisan agreement on the importance of education. Not quite.

The big sin that I see on both sides of the aisle is the mutual refusal to seriously look at what is inarguably being achieved in our most fruitful charter schools and our public schools. The record, which is indifferent to all distinctions other than ability, has no expression of prejudice against anything; it is entirely objective. That is the great virtue of technology and statistics…

It’s not enough to support choice, but we need to discuss what really works. Neither so-called progressives nor hard-core conservatives have actually addressed what has worked in this town – what has been done and is available to be expanded…

Performance records never impress unions. Their preference is emotion and sociological jargon. Money is what is needed always and in all situations. If the children come from poor or crime-ridden circumstances, you should not fault the teacher for them not teaching them well. Teachers might work hard, but are not God. Hogwash

Here in New York, both the Success Academies run by Eva Moskowitz and the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, or HEAF, a non-profit supplemental education and youth-development organization, have shown what teaching can do… Here are those of the Success Academy, where 77% of the students are poor: Eighty-two percent of scholars there passed math, putting it in the top 1 percent of all schools in the state. In English Language Arts, 58 percent passed, in the top 7 percent. In science, 100 percent passed. And for HEAF: One hundred percent of their 2013 class graduated high school. One hundred percent of their 2012 graduating class returned to college for their sophomore year. Thirty-five percent of their students went on to graduate studies in law, medicine and other disciplines. That is three times the national average.

Inspiring students is central to getting them to consistently engage. Inventive inspiration comes from the relationship of the teacher to the student. Those committed to inspiring can move through all barriers. There it is — the hard truth. These aren’t numbers from the Upper East Side or some suburban community. These are from Harlem and the Bronx and available to be disputed, if one can.

Read those numbers and weep, victims of the unions. When the public learns that this kind of success is actually possible, maybe our political leaders will be next. No holding breath allowed

Stanley Crouch, in the Daily News, pointing out another reason why expanding school choice matters. All families should have a wide range of high-quality schools available for their children. And all of us should embrace those schools, regardless of whether they are traditional public, public charter, private, online, or even run by families out of their own homes.

Bill Keller has a column in The Times this morning about Common Core. It’s the kind of column that shows up in your inbox a dozen times before your second cup of coffee because everyone is sending it around so happy that it righteously makes their case. It should be circulated for a different reason: It’s illustrative of the political jam the Common Core is in and highlights the problem rather than the way out.

For starters, the barely hidden argument is that many conservatives are ignorant, or at best favoring policies that foster ignorance. That’s feel good partisan stuff but a lousy way to win an argument. In this case, New York Times columnists telling them they’re stupid merely refinforces Tea Party opposition to the standards. Politically, if you want to convince people that the Common Core isn’t some Washington-hatched plan then it would probably be helpful if you had examples of support that were not basically the Washington chattering class, most of whom don’t move the needle within the Beltway, let alone around the country. Substantively, it might be useful to point out that some of the critics are thoughtful and make points worth considering, even if you don’t agree with them (in general I don’t)…

The column that Common Core supporters should want to see is the one highlighting examples of how local civic and business leaders have decided that educational mediocrity is a problem and that while neither perfect nor a stand-alone reform, the Core represents an important step toward better schools. It might even have examples of local chambers of commerce or civic leagues stepping up to hold local and state officials accountable for not only supporting the standards but supporting implementation efforts as well (training, curriculum , evaluation and so forth).*  That column would be worth emailing all over the place as evidence of progress.

Andy Rotherham, in Eduwonk, reminding fellow Common Core supporters that they need to do better in advancing the standards against opposition from the movement conservatives and hard-core progressives in traditionalist camps opposed to implementation. This is a point Dropout Nation has made (even as it supports the standards). Perhaps Common Core supporters should go to Hawaii, where the Kamehameha Schools, a private school that focuses on Native Hawaiian children, is working with public schools in the Aloha State to implement the standards as well as take advantage of how the standards allow for Native languages and cultures to be incorporated into them.

Chicago’s current pension crisis may have been a long time coming. It’s a “dark cloud that’s coming ever closer,” as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently described it. The city’s substantial credit-rating downgrade, on the heels of Detroit’s bankruptcy filing, suggest that the pension storm is making landfall. One often overlooked reason for the large size of state pension obligations is the fact that school administrators — aka management — have a lot to gain from generous teacher pension plans.

When my colleagues Shawn Ni and Cory Koedel and I took a close look at teacher pensions in Missouri — which are determined by rules similar to those in pension plans across the country — we found that school administrators (superintendents and principals, who participate in teacher pension plans) reap much larger benefits from the plans than teachers do.

Because they earn more than teachers, school principals can expect to contribute 14 percent more to the pension plan than a senior teacher would contribute over the course of a career. A school superintendent can expect to contribute 53 percent more. However, when it comes to benefits, the principal can expect to receive 37 percent more than the senior teacher, and the superintendent 89 percent more.

What explains this gap? Why are the administrator benefits so much larger than contributions? It turns out that this is the natural result of the most common type of teacher pension plan, known as final average salary defined-benefit plans. In a final average salary plan, your retirement check is based not on your career average salary, but rather, on the average of several years of your highest salary (typically earned in your final years). Since school administrators work for many years as a teacher and then receive a substantial boost in pay at the back end of a career as they move into administration, they fare much better than a senior teacher.

Michael Podgursky, in the Washington Times, explaining a key problem with the defined-benefit pensions that are now putting more virtually-insolvent districts on the brink of real financial collapse, a subject of this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast.

This week is a watershed moment in the history of public schools in New York City and state. This morning, the state will release the results of the math and English exams administered to students this past spring. While end-of-year testing isn’t new, the knowledge that was tested last spring is. For the first time, students across the state were assessed based on the new, more rigorous Common Core standards.

For years, states around the country dummied-down standards to make it look as if students were more prepared for success after graduation than they actually were. This may have made some politicians look good, but it has been a terrible disservice to our kids.

Raising standards will mean we now have a more true measure of how well our students are learning. In the near term, it will also mean that previously inflated test scores will drop.

While some may confuse lower scores as a negative development, the fact that we’re finally being honest about academic achievement is a very positive sign.

For decades, states and local school districts have been responsible for their own education standards; the quality varied widely. A student deemed highly successful in one state could fail in another. The lack of uniform expectations didn’t do our students any favors. In fact, it doomed many to mediocrity.

Anyone who cares about giving all students a fair chance to succeed must be troubled by a terrible truth: The majority of America’s high school students aren’t graduating with the knowledge and skills they need to compete in the global economy… The scores will tell us what we already know, and what NAEP has told us for decades: Only about 30 percent of our students are ready for college and careers.

Kentucky has already taken new, Common Core-aligned state assessments and has seen its scores drop as much as 33 points, or 50 percent. New York leaders have said repeatedly that they expect similar results here.

This may be hard to stomach at first, but we must see it for what it is: a necessary hardship on the path to academic excellence. As a parent, I’d much rather find out that my child has fallen behind in third or fifth grade, when there’s still time to intervene, than when she gets to college and can’t do the work.

Former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein, in the New York Post, explaining why the implementation of Common Core reading and math standards is the important next step in providing our kids with comprehensive college-preparatory curricula that they deserve. We must be honest about how poorly American public education has served generations of children.

Common Core standards in math and English/language arts are widely adopted, high quality and transparent. They’re obviously not a silver bullet. But if implemented properly, they can help parents and teachers better educate the low-income children that are part of the tax credit scholarship program.

The reason? Academic stability and continuity are essential for these kids. When they apply for scholarships, they tend to be the lowest-performing students in the lowest-performing district schools. They face extraordinary personal and academic obstacles. Within the scholarship program, they tend to change private schools frequently.

And all too often, here’s what happens: They’re told by their current school that they’re excelling in Algebra, for instance, only to be told when they transfer to another school that they’re a year behind. We hear this complaint regularly from parents. We know this discontinuity is an issue for them.

My guess is, as more of them learn about these new multi-state standards, they will increasingly choose private schools that are using them. This consumer pressure, in turn, will spur more private schools to adopt the common standards, so they can successfully compete in Florida’s robust school choice market.

Private schools that adopt all or parts of these new standards will not sacrifice independence, flexibility or creativity, although assessments do guide curriculum and instruction. There are many ways to teach students how to, for instance, understand and solve polynomial expressions employing multiplication and division. Students who move from a New Age Montessori school to a fundamentalist Southern Baptist school will still be exposed to different curricula, teaching methods and school cultures, even if both schools are using the same content and performance standards in math and reading…

Twenty years ago almost every computer was using the Microsoft operating system, but that wasn’t caused by a government mandate. For practical reasons, most consumers decided using Microsoft software was in their best interest. Likewise, scholarship parents are embracing the common standards to address pragmatic concerns. The voluntary alignment of the SAT and ACT to the new standards will also spur tax credit scholarship parents to pick private schools that are using them.

The ACT and SAT are currently based on content and performance standards, but these standards are not transparent or easily accessible. The curriculum in all K-12 schools loosely correlates to current ACT and SAT standards, but this degree of alignment varies from school to school… That the ACT and SAT have both announced their intentions to base their content and performance standards on the new common standards is potentially a big plus for low-income students. It will make the ACT and SAT standards more transparent and help private school teachers better prepare scholarship students for them. This tighter alignment should also level the playing field a bit for students who can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on ACT and SAT preparatory courses.

RedefinED‘s Doug Tuthill, countering the arguments of fellow school choice activists opposed to Common Core that implementation of the standards is counterproductive to expanding options. Dropout Nation will offer its thoughts on this view being spun by Common Core foes on this front later this week.

I will have to give it to Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz’s staff and the opponents of meaningful education reform. They got what they wanted a second time around. Not only did they defeat Republican Tony Bennett in last November’s election, but through a “release” of nearly year-old emails, they managed to get Bennett to step down from his job as Florida’s commissioner of schools. From a political perspective, I will give credit where credit is due. However, there is an old proverb that kind of goes something like this: Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.

With Bennett stepping down, Ritz and opponents of reform have lost their foil. In case you don’t know what that is, a “foil” is a character used in literature who contrasts with another character, usually the good guy, in order to highlight particular qualities of the other character. Bennett represented everything the establishment hated. He was pro-children, pro-results, anti-excuses. Was Bennett loud, boisterous and could be considered overbearing at times – damn skippy! And God love him for it. Indiana’s education system was treading water in a sea of mediocrity and now it is a model for the nation.

So what does it mean now that Bennett is gone? Well, I, for one, hope it means the current occupant of the superintendent’s office on second floor of the Statehouse might finally start answering a question or two. Here are some to get us started:

Are you still opposed to “high stakes testing” now that an independent audit by a firm you hired showed that the April glitch in ISTEP+ testing had a negligible impact on scores? You were opposed to IREAD-3. Did that have anything to do with your office not promptly putting out information regarding the improvement in test scores?

Why does your office continue to fail to comply with state law by providing lawmakers with the reports you are required to generate by state statute?

When you were on the board of the Indiana State Teachers Association, what role did you have, if any, in the administration of funds overseen by the Indiana State Teachers Association which is now in settlement talks with the Secretary of State’s office regarding the mismanagement of insurance trust funds?…

Glenwood School in Evansville is in year five of failure. At this point, none of the public hearings have been held. Will there be any in the near future?

You frequently criticized your predecessor for not having enough teachers on his senior staff. How many of your 12 top advisors have teaching credentials?

Did your office really get so far behind in approving federal grants for Indiana schools that a number of them were passed through with a rubber stamp?…

Oh well, Ritz and the anti-reform crowd won’t have Tony Bennett to kick around anymore and that is a decision they may come to regret.

Indianapolis radio personality Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, in Nuvo, pointing to the current Hoosier State superintendent’s failures so far in her first year of office.

When we talk of the equality of man, we find, also, a challenge and an opportunity; a challenge to breathe new life into the ideals enshrined in the [United Nations] Charter, an opportunity to bring men closer to freedom and true equality…

The goal of the equality of man which we seek is the antithesis of the exploitation of one people by another with which the pages of history… speak at such length. Exploitation, thus viewed, has many faces. But whatever guise it assumes, this evil is to be shunned where it does not exist and crushed where it does…

As a free Africa has emerged during the past decade, a fresh attack has been launched against exploitation, wherever it still exists. And in that interaction so common to history, this in turn, has stimulated and encouraged the remaining dependent peoples to renewed efforts to throw off the yoke which has oppressed them and its claim as their birthright the twin ideals of liberty and equality… In the United States of America, the administration of President Kennedy is leading a vigorous attack to eradicate the remaining vestige of racial discrimination from this country…

Last May, in Addis Ababa, I convened a meeting of Heads of African States and Governments… On the question of racial discrimination, the Addis Ababa Conference taught, to those who will learn, this further lesson:

that until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned;

that until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation;

that until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes;

that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race;

that until that day, the dream of lasting peace… and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained…

until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil…

We must look, first, to Almighty God, Who has raised man above the animals and endowed him with intelligence and reason. We must put our faith in Him, that He will not desert us or permit us to destroy humanity which He created in His image.

And we must look into ourselves, into the depth of our souls. We must become something we have never been and for which our education and experience and environment have ill-prepared us. We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit…owing our ultimate allegiance…to our fellow men within the human community.

Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, before the United Nations in 1963, explaining the difficult struggle of that time against colonialism, apartheid, and Jim Crow segregation around the world, a struggle that still goes on today. The school reform movement is engaged in much the same battle, this against policies and practices that damage the futures of children, especially from poor and minority backgrounds. And the words Selassie spoke five decades ago are ones we must echo in our time.