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Claims of failure and crisis have occurred every decade public schools have existed, suggesting that whatever the conditions are of our school system, they are simply the status of those schools-not failure and certainly not crisis. The great irony of claims of failure and crisis coming from politicians, reformers, the media, and the public is that these claims mask the genuine problems inherent in our system.

As state after state rewrites their education laws in line with the mandates from Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver process, the teaching profession is being redefined. Teachers will now pay the price - be declared successes or failures, depending on the rise or fall of their students' test scores. Under NCLB it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers to NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label. This revelation came to me as I read the Score Card on Education prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), authored by Dr. Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips. This is a remarkable document. It provides their report on where each of the states stands on the education "reform" that has become the hallmark of corporate philanthropies, the Obama administration and governors across the nation.

What is the responsibility of the state to the education of its children. What should it do in response to continued failure? The debate about privatization-about charters and vouchers and increased aid to private schools-really is a consequence of the failure of what was one thought to be the ultimate school reform: The state takeover of failing schools. One panelist, Michelle Fine of Montclair, an author and professor at City University of New York, called privatization "just an exit ramp for some people.'' Because charters and other forms of privatization don't take in all children, she said, they "cannot be considered a systematic, equitable strategy'' for reform. Just a way to help some children.

But in those communities, there was one set of institutions that remained functioning and intact, and those were the neighborhood public schools. No matter what happened in the surrounding area, their doors remained open and they tried to serve young people whose lives were being turned inside out by a catastrophe of a kind that no one thought could take place in the United States of America. I visited those schools and while they showed serious signs of decay, and often seemed overwhelmed by the problems deeply wounded students brought inside their doors, they were in truth, their neighborhoods most important "safe zones," and at times provided an uplift for everyone through the artistic events they put on and the success of their teams Now flash ahead twenty years later and these very same schools are being blamed for the economic failures of the communities they are located in, and the educational failures of the students they work with. Their teachers are being publicly pilloried as overpaid and selfish, and a drain on a national economy that requires schools to be run with the efficiency of American business.

Across OECD countries, almost one in every five students does not reach a basic minimum level of skills. In addition, students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds are twice as likely to be low performers. Lack of fairness and inclusion can lead to school failure and this means that one in every five young adults on average drop out before completing upper secondary education. Reducing school failure pays off for both society and individuals. The highest performing education systems across OECD countries combine quality with equity. This report presents policy recommendations for education systems to help all children succeed in their schooling.

"If the mission of the education system is to serve the economy, and that means maximizing profits, then those profits will be highest if we have an overabundance of college graduates to do the technical work that must be done to keep the machinery of production running. And we have low wage service sector that is unable to raise its wages because they are unorganized and have no political clout. Those who are unemployed are informed over and over again by the school system that they are inadequate because they cannot pass the tests, and therefore to perceive their status as being the result of their own failure to make themselves useful to employers. They are unemployed not because manufacturing has been outsourced to cheap labor overseas, but because they were not "career ready," as proven by their failure to pass the new, much more "rigorous" Common Core aligned tests. Education reform becomes an exercise in rationalizing the shift of half the nation's workers into "surplus" status. It creates a new meritocracy, based on a false paradigm that defines the ability to do well on tests as merit."

Some may be put off by Superintendant John Kuhn of Texas calling out politicians directly, and flipping the notion of "failure" on its head. But he is right, and his conviction is inspiring.  (See the VIDEO of his speech BELOW.) His points reveal in a timely way an inconvenient truth in education and politics right now. NCLB, Race to the Top, and other policies that use high stakes tests to assign value to students, teachers and administrators do one thing really well: they create an even stronger disincentive for teaching in high needs schools than do the difficult working conditions that have always existed in underresourced schools--the imminent threat of being labelled unacceptable or ineffective by one narrow standradized test given on one day in a year, the results of which correspond more closely nation-wide to socio-economic status than any other factor. They create the same disincentive to learn for such students.

Elementary and high schools are receiving less state funding than last year in at least 37 states, and in at least 30 states school funding now stands below 2008 levels - often far below. These cuts are attributable, in part, to the failure of the federal government to extend emergency fiscal aid to states and school districts and the failure of most states to enact needed revenue increases and instead to balance their budgets solely through spending cuts. The cuts have significant consequences, both now and in the future: They are causing immediate public- and private-sector job loss, and in the long term are likely to reduce student achievement and economic growth.

"Systems like the APPR system in NY mistakenly place an emphasis on human capital rather than social capital and thus are doomed to failure. Rooted in what Michael Fullan categorized as "wrong drivers of change," systems that emphasize individual human capital over social capital and that emphasize the use of accountability data in a punitive way are simply doomed to failure. To replace old systems with similar systems, repeatedly, gets us to the insanity that some other than Einstein, Franklin, or Twain described."

Schools are failing.  At least that's the consensus if you've read any school reporting or heard any politicians promising much needed school reform since, well, approximately the beginning of American public education. But … is it true?  Washington Post reporter and columnist for the American Journalism Review Paul Farhi explains to Bob why the story doesn't add up.   

My first reaction when hearing that we should be more businesslike in our approach is, "You can"t be serious! You want to use the model that for the last 30 years has driven people out of the middle-class, has foisted imperialism on large parts of the world, and created the worst economic catastrophe in eighty years? You want to use that failed model? Are you BSC?" One of the reasons for the failure of this model is the focus immediate profits rather than long term results.

"The Washington, D.C. school system's failure to hold higher-ups accountable for their 2008-2010 test cheating scandal has led to more speculation that some are intentionally stonewalling attempts to get at the truth."

"In the Michael Bloomberg era of school reform, we hear a lot about rising educational standards. "When Dennis Walcott became chancellor," Josh Thomases, a deputy chief academic officer in the city's Department of Education, tells the Voice, "one of his first acts was to say the correct bar was no longer a high school diploma, but career and college readiness." Put another way, New York City officials openly admit that a high school diploma earned in our public schools today does not mean that a student is ready for college. In fact, 80 percent of New York public school graduates who enrolled in City University of New York community colleges last fall still needed high school level instruction-also known as remediation-in reading, writing, and especially math. Despite the department's proclamations, that percentage is up, not down, from 71 percent a few years ago."

One pattern of failure in education reform is that political leadership and the public focus attention and resources on solutions while rarely asking what problems we are addressing or how those solutions address identified problems. The advocacy of charter schools is a perfect example of that flawed approach to improving our schools.

State lawmakers have introduced legislation that would repeal mayoral control of the city school system - a move that would undo one of Mayor Bloomberg's crowning achievements, The Post has learned. Sen. Velmanette Montgomery (D-Brooklyn) and Assemblyman Keith Wright (D-Harlem) claim that the 10-year experiment giving City Hall sole power over educational matters has been a failure. And Montgomery has won the support of the ranking Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, Suzi Oppenheimer (D-Westchester), who has signed on as co-sponsor to the measure.

As I prepare to send my youngest child off to a state university, recent Congressional kerfuffles over student loan interest rates have left me wondering when our nation abandoned our core values. When conservative pundits like George Will actually call student loans "entitlements" and Cal Thomas of the Baltimore Sun says student debt problems are simply a failure of the students themselves, something distinctly un-American is happening. Here's a dose of truth for those so-called conservative values types: Public education paid for by all citizens was one of the core values our Founding Fathers named as fundamental to a free, democratic society. In April 1776, John Adams put his Thoughts on Government in writing in response to a resolution by the North Carolina Provincial Congress. He begins by making a case for the purpose of government, writing "the happiness of society is the end of all government" which naturally follows his belief that "the happiness of the individual is the end of man." Using these as guiding principles, Adams then sketches an outline of what he believes good government should be. After outlining a legislative framework, Adams moves on to specifics. After a well-armed militia, Adams wrote, "Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a human and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant." To a human and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant. Imagine waking up to a 21st century in the United States with that core value. Imagine.

The single greatest bi-partisan success of NCLB, the argument has been, is that the federal government began forcing all schools to address the achievement gaps among subgroups of students, impacting significantly how schools identified, tested, and displayed test data related to English language learners, African American students, and special needs students. Here, though, the use of the term "achievement gap" has never been challenged or examined for what agenda it fulfills or how it positions our entire national view of students, teachers, and schools.

"There has been a shift from the belief that we as a nation benefit from higher education, to a belief that it's the people receiving the education who primarily benefit and so they should foot the bill," concludes Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a trustee of the State University system of New York and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. A more accurate description, I think, is "Failure by Design," the title of a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has long been a major source of reliable information and analysis on the state of the economy. The EPI study reviews the consequences of the transformation of the economy a generation ago from domestic production to financialization and offshoring. By design; there have always been alternatives.

The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure. As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools. The Civil Rights Project has been issuing annual reports on the spread of segregation in public schools and its impact on educational opportunity for 14 years. We know that choice programs can either offer quality educational options with racially and economically diverse schooling to children who otherwise have few opportunities, or choice programs can actually increase stratification and inequality depending on how they are designed. The charter effort, which has largely ignored the segregation issue, has been justified by claims about superior educational performance, which simply are not sustained by the research. Though there are some remarkable and diverse charter schools, most are neither. The lessons of what is needed to make choice work have usually been ignored in charter school policy. Magnet schools are the striking example of and offer a great deal of experience in how to create educationally successful and integrated choice options.

The Obama Administration's approval last week of 10 state applications for waivers from NCLB was another missed opportunity to learn from a decade of policy failure. Instead of changing the disastrous direction of federal education policy, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's waiver process allows states to reproduce some of the worst aspects of NCLB's "test and punish" approach while continuing to ignore real issues, like reducing concentrated poverty or providing equitable funding and high quality pre-K for all schools.