(originally posted on Politico’s The Arena blog)

Unpopular positions? Tough love? The teachers unions want you to believe they are being punished by the president’s policies. It makes for great copy and provides cover for both the unions and the Education Department as they manipulate Capitol Hill for a second multi-billion dollar bailout. But the truth is, it’s all in the family.

The administration’s education policy, including the “Race to the Top” initiative, has been easy on unions and their members. States have received money for saying they are going to factor performance into evaluations, when in reality to make meaningful performance pay work, you must either require performance to trump local union contract provisions or change the contract itself. Additionally, districts have been paid money for saying they will turn around failing schools. No one in the status quo is hurting or being forced to change very much because of what the president is saying. The talk is good and strengthens reformers’ hands, but the teachers unions won’t feel any discomfort until someone or something cuts into the lock they have on how schools operate and how policy is crafted.

Read the entire post over at The Arena…

(originally published @ National Journal’s Education Experts blog)

You want to know a secret? Parents and community leaders have spent decades talking and pressuring and begging for changes to our country’s education system until they are blue in the face. Want to hear another one? The education system, to a great extent, has spent as much time - though far less energy - ignoring them.

Why? Because it’s easier. Easier than admitting there is a problem. Easier than figuring out a solution. Easier than making a change that might be uncomfortable for a few adults.

Parents have always been the true warriors (and disrupters) in education. They’ve gotten charter school laws passed, demanded real options to failing schools, been teacher watchdogs where union bargaining agreements hogtie school leaders, and pushed curriculum changes when their kids were being cheated.

True, this brand of education reform came about through community engagement and participation in forums and meetings, but it also took grassroots organizing and camping out in legislative offices - blood, sweat and tears.

Parents already know what’s working and what’s not, and they’re out in droves every single day. Requiring their input as a condition of ESEA reauthorization is, quite frankly, silly. Requiring districts and states to make changes based on their input or risk the loss of funding, now that would make a difference.

There is no more dedicated charter school foe than Gwinnett County Schools in Georgia. For years, they have targeted Ivy Preparatory Academy, a unique all-girls school in Norcross educating more than 300 students.

First they denied Ivy its charter. Then they fought the state board which overruled their rejection. Then they fought the constitutionality of the state board. Then they cried foul over a funding allocation process they say robs their kids of a quality education. That’s a lot of billable hours, no matter how you look at it. No big loss for a district with a $2 billion + annual budget, I guess.

But in this battle, David just keeps getting one up on Goliath. On the latest round of state tests, every girl at Ivy Prep passed the reading and language exams. To add a cherry on top of that, no traditional public school in Gwinnett County had multiple grade levels ace the tests, but its other charter school, New Life Academy of Excellence, did.

(Overheard at a recent New Orleans confab…)*

- Hey. Have you heard about all those new films talking about about what’s wrong with schools? They’re all failure, and teachers asleep at their desks, and dropping out, and bleak futures and kids who can’t read at 16. I mean, I haven’t seen any of them, but, seriously, I am sick of all of this “schools are broken” crap. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even take my kids to the movies anymore.

- Yeah. Where do these “reformers” come up with this stuff? Do they just go out and take pictures and whatnot of the same school for all these sob stories. Really! Must they put that filth on the screen? Anybody could just walk into that theater and see it and think it was true. Schools aren’t like that where I’m from. No sir.

- It’s downright offensive. And what’s with all the charter stuff? It’s like those schools are the holy grail or something. What have they got that’s so special? Long hours and constant evaluations, that’s what. And cherry picking kids in their “lotteries”. I wish we could do that.

- True. The union should totally go after those liars. We have enough muscle to make sure people don’t get exposed to their evil brainwashing. They’ve even gotten to the President. He was our best friend in ‘08. Where is he now? And Duncan with his “we need to identify bad teachers”? Whatever.

- I’m definitely in favor of nipping those films in the bud. I wonder if everyone here knows about all this craziness.

- Haven’t you seen the guys from California passing out those flyers about us blowing these things out of the water?

- I’m all for that.

- Hey, maybe we should make our own movie…

.

*(Not really.)

Garden State Governor Chris Christie doesn’t mince words, and doesn’t suffer fools. His reaction to a compromised school choice bill, watered down to allow for swift passage in the legislature:

“If you gut the purpose of the program to begin with, what good is it?…

If you compromise yourself away to nothing, then I don’t know what you’ve won…

(Legislators) are irrelevant in this in comparison to the children in 200 plus failing schools in New Jersey who are being stripped of hope…

People wonder why there is violence in our cities. Violence is commited, in the main, at least in my experience, by people without hope.

They wonder why there is drug abuse in our cities. People who turn to drugs are generally people with out hope.

They wonder why families are disintegrating in our cities. Families disintegrate because of the poison of a lack of hope.

And the greatest antidote to a lack of hope is a world class education“.

(Watch his complete response.)