Not in a million years should anyone give credence to the fears and anxiety being conjured up because of recent legislative and political setbacks at the state level, which have not been too favorable toward school choice and reform efforts. This turn of events was surely expected when you consider how deeply systems and structures must be overhauled in order to expose the root of the problems in schools and districts. We’re talking about messes that have lain dormant for decades. We can be almost certain that the plan was for none of the fraud, negligence, and mismanagement to ever be discovered. After all, it has been business as usual for a very long time and no one asked hard questions or offered workable alternatives to the status quo until the real school reformers stepped up a few decades ago. The traditionalists and their cronies are going to fight hard to avoid being exposed for their decisions and actions that can truly be described as criminal when you consider the permanent damage that has been done to the lives and potential of this generation of young people. The millions of dollars being dedicated to the policymaking and political arenas is essentially a testament to the growing strength of the larger school reform movement. If some people could have their way, public education will never return to its glory days, because their primary concerns are basically job security, padding their pockets, and promoting their agendas, never mind educating the students.

We’ve known for a very long time, that real, substantive, and lasting transformation of public education would be a very long and arduous fight. Some people have the scars to prove how tough the fight has been. There are far too many constituencies in K-12 education, and most of them have their own hidden and self-serving agendas. They are not about to allow change to take place without a serious fight to save and protect what they perceive as theirs. Too many education stakeholders are threatened in their psyche and in their careers by reform that they didn’t create or can’t shepherd. In their minds, they have too much to lose. What they are failing to acknowledge is that it is the students who have too much to lose if we maintain the status quo. People are not going to sit back and watch their ideas, pet projects, influence, and financial and career stability be replaced by innovation and creativity, even if it has been proven to benefit students.

At the end of the day, those of us who care deeply about American public education can’t be deterred or distracted by temporary legislative and political defeats. We cannot allow eleventh hour strategies to derail progress, whether it is big or small. Our eyes must stay on the prize, because we are already witnessing the dawning of a new day in K-12 education. The range of success stories is all the evidence we need to gain the public’s confidence in our intentions and our results. The reform genie has been out of the bottle for a long time and the train left the station two decades ago. America’s schools are on their way to something much greater than what we’re witnessing today. It’s going to take endurance to withstand the opposition, fear, and rhetoric whose goals are to distort and confuse the success stories that are emanating from all corners of the landscape. This is the battle that we have chosen to participate in and we must maintain our patience, perseverance, and positivity, because the day of reckoning is closer than we think.