That’s where Kenneth Cole now comes in. The clothing designer has just launched a new crusade to tie his expensive clothing and shoes line to the elite’s movement du jour: the fight to demonize public schoolteachers and their unions. In a billboard and Web-based campaign, Cole’s foundation portrays the national debate over education as one that supposedly pits “Teachers’ Rights vs. Students’ Rights.”

“Should underperforming teachers be protected?” asks the foundation’s website.

When asked about the campaign, one of Cole’s spokeswomen insisted the company isn’t trying to insult teachers or unions, saying, “It’s something in the news and being debated, and we wanted to provide a forum where people could discuss it as well.” But with the company using the same loaded language as the conservative political activists trying to undermine public education and teachers’ unions, the corporate P.R.-speak is, to say the least, unconvincing.

No, Cole’s campaign is thinly veiled ideological propaganda, and it comes with myriad problems, not the least of which is the simple fact that almost nobody believes “underperforming teachers” should be protected. That includes the nation’s biggest teachers’ unions, which have been outspoken in backing “accountability” reforms for teacher tenure. So right off the bat, Cole is constructing a straw man, one that has served over the years to pretend that public employee unions in general and teachers’ unions specifically are about nothing more than making sure bad employees get to keep their jobs.

Of course, there is a legitimate debate among state lawmakers and school boards about how to determine what an “underperforming teacher” is. Should a teacher be considered subpar if her students perform poorly on standardized tests? Should any teacher-to-teacher peer review be included in performance evaluations? And should any factors other than tests and grades — say, student poverty levels — be considered when using student achievement to judge a particular teacher?

As evidenced by the language of his new campaign, Cole, like the anti-union activists in the larger corporate-sponsored education “reform” movement, doesn’t want those questions asked, much less answered, for pondering them raises the very queries about power and wealth that Cole’s fellow 1 percenters don’t want to discuss.

For instance, actually taking an honest look at America’s education system brings up queries about why other less economically stratified nations have unionized teachers and far better academic results than here in America. It also forces us to ask why it just so happens that wealthy unionized districts in America do so well — but poorer districts have such problems. All of that consequently compels us to consider issues like poverty and funding disparities between rich and poor districts — issues that inherently threaten the status quo, and thus the interests of the super-wealthy. And so under the veneer of the term “reform” and with the backing of seemingly altruistic philanthropy via foundations like Cole’s, the super-wealthy work to avoid substance and instead define the education policy discourse on reductionist slogans like “underperforming teachers.”

Perhaps the biggest problem with Cole’s campaign, though, is how it forwards the “us-versus-them” notion that teachers’ rights to due process in the workplace are automatically at odds with their students’ interests. This so fundamentally misunderstands how education works that it perfectly underscores why a clothing corporation doesn’t have much credibility on education issues.

Think about it: We need our best teachers to work in the public schools that educate the most at-risk populations. Why? Because with decades of social science research proving that achievement is driven mostly by out-of-classroom factors (poverty, family dysfunction, etc.), those are the schools that need the most skilled pedagogues to overcome comparatively difficult odds for success. But why would a good teacher opt to work in such a school without basic protections — protections designed to make sure the at-risk population’s achievement-suppressing disadvantages aren’t used as a rationale to fire her? She probably wouldn’t.

In this way, “Teachers’ Rights vs. Students’ Rights” is the mirror opposite of how things actually work. Without extending teachers’ rights to, say, be evaluated fairly or to challenge a termination, it would be difficult — if not impossible — for public schools to recruit the best teachers to the specific at-risk schools that need them the most.

Most likely, these inconvenient truths are of little concern to someone like Kenneth Cole. According to Gotham Schools, he sends his kids to private school, making him part of the larger trend of elites who are trying to foist radical policies onto public schools, knowing their own kin won’t be hurt by those policies.

But, you ask, wouldn’t a clothing mogul with no kids in public school be averse to a divisive crusade against teachers, if only to circumvent a controversy? Even if he is a political activist, wouldn’t he refrain from such a campaign for fear of losing customers?

These are fair questions, and they highlight how Cole’s campaign may say something hugely important — and troubling — about the long-term future of education politics in America.

Recall that Cole is in a zeitgeist industry that is all about lashing branded chic to the popular fad of the moment. That means his move probably reflects what he believes to be an ascendant cause célèbre — one that he thinks he isn’t joining in spite of his company, but in support of its profit-making objectives. Put another way, he probably believes he will gain customers if he ties his company to anti-teacher, anti-union themes.

Sure, that gamble could be wrong — and I hope it is. I hope America sees just how wrongheaded and ideologically extreme the crusade against public schools, teachers and unions is.

But as a successful mogul, Cole’s clearly got skill as a cultural seer; and if someone like him sees mass profit potential in not-so-subtly bashing teachers and unions, it’s a scary sign that such unhinged anti-teacher sentiment could be going more mainstream than ever.

Update: After a mass outcry from teachers, Kenneth Cole announced on Twitter Monday that it is removing the billboard. In its statement, the company said “We misrepresented the issue – one too complex for a billboard – and are taking it down.” It has also taken down the campaign on the accompanying website.

The answer hinges on a classic case of unintended consequences. But first, cue President Obama.

On Friday, Obama continued his efforts to keep education front and center during his reelection campaign. This time around, the focus was on the military: specifically, the abusive, bordering-on-fraudulent practices employed by for-profit “diploma mill” colleges to boost military enrollment.

From the Associated Press:

The Obama administration wants to trademark the term “GI Bill” in an effort to shield veterans and military families being swindled or misled by schools that target their federal education benefits.

President Barack Obama is signing a wide-ranging order on Friday that partially addresses growing complaints about fraudulent marketing and recruiting practices aimed at military families eligible for federal education loans under the GI Bill.

And therein lies an interesting story. As Salon reported last week, the for-profit college industry generates the vast majority of its revenue from federal student loans. Indeed, if it weren’t for a law passed in 1998 requiring that at least 10 percent of a for-profit college’s revenues come from sources other than federal loans — the so-called 90/10 rule — the percentage might go all the way up to 100. And that’s exactly what makes military students so attractive to the for-profit sector. Military educational benefits do not fall under the same category as federal loans under the 90/10 rule.

As Holly Petraeus, the assistant director for service member affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and wife of retired general David Petraeus, explained in a New York Times Op-Ed last September ,the law creates a huge incentive for for-profits to enroll military veterans:

For every service member or veteran (or spouse or child, in the case of the post-9/11 G.I. Bill) enrolled at a for-profit college and paying with military education funds, that college can enroll nine others who are using nothing but Title IV money.

This gives for-profit colleges an incentive to see service members as nothing more than dollar signs in uniform, and to use aggressive marketing to draw them in and take out private loans, which students often need because the federal grants are insufficient to cover the full cost of tuition and related expenses.

One of the most egregious reports of questionable marketing involved a college recruiter who visited a Marine barracks at Camp Lejeune, N.C. As the PBS program “Frontline” reported, the recruiter signed up Marines with serious brain injuries. The fact that some of them couldn’t remember what courses they were taking was immaterial, as long as they signed on the dotted line.

Abuses such as these explain why the Obama administration has been attempting to increase oversight and accountability in the for-profit college sector, against Republican opposition every step of the way. But they also raise a larger question.

Right now, Republicans and Democrats are squabbling about how to pay for an extension of low interest rates on student loans. As I write these words, House Republicans have barely passed a bill, 215-195, that will pay for the extension by taking money from Obamacare. The White House has threatened to veto the GOP maneuver. It’s a classic political squabble, with both sides reluctant to raise interest rates on student loans during an election year, but each determined to squeeze as much political advantage as possible out of the bickering.

But the real problem with student loans goes much deeper. When the government subsidizes the private sector, which is what is happening when federal student loan money flows straight to for-profit colleges, it not only creates incentives for fraud, but also encourages the for-profit schools to keep raising their tuition prices.

Under the terms of the current incarnation of the GI Bill, veterans who attend an in-state public school get their full tuition paid free and clear. Wouldn’t it be smarter to take a leaf out of that book on a much more systemic scale? America’s system of public universities is still one of the wonders of the world, even as state funding support has steadily declined. Think how much better it could be with meaningful federal support, and a GI bill that covered all Americans, and not just the military.

Of course, to pull something like that off, we’d  have to raise taxes and mobilize real bipartisan consensus. So that’s not happening anytime soon. We’ll have to content ourselves with picking at the margins — trademarking the name “GI Bill” for example, or fighting life-or-death struggles over interest rate adjustments.

“Dear New York City. We the students of public education are here to inform you of the injustice that is taking place in our school system,” he begins, surrounded by members of the school’s student leadership, some staring defiantly into the camera with arms crossed. After listing student grievances including the privatization of the public school system, budget cuts, school closures against community wishes and over-policing in schools, the young man announces the May Day walkout to nearby Fort Greene park in Brooklyn.

It would be easy to dismiss high-schoolers’ plans to participate in May Day actions — which included calls for “No School” alongside those of “No Work” — as an excuse to skip class. But the video from Paul Robeson High shows a politically aware and angry student body, which is keenly drawing connections between educational policy and broader political issues — most notably the production of racist systems. Their announcement connects the criminalization of schoolchildren to the institutionalized racism displayed in the case of Trayvon Martin’s killing.

“We believe that trying to control our schools is just another symptom of the blatant racism in our country similar to the government’s response to the senseless killing of Trayvon Martin,” the young man reads from the walkout announcement, while symbolically pulling up his hood over his head, referencing the hoodie marches in response to Martin’s murder.

Combined with a college student population fighting back against budget cuts, fee hikes and crippling student debt, these high school students are an indication that today’s young adults — cresting the Occupy zeitgeist and facing precarious futures — are fast becoming a political force with a taste for direct action.

Students from Paul Robeson and several other large high schools facing closure under New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s education administration (which has seen 140 struggling schools shuttered since 2003) participated in a protest walkout and converged with Occupy supporters in February. Indeed, across the country protests organized under banner of Occupy the Department of Education have brought students, teachers, parents and allies together to speak out against growing school privatization (much of which has been based on model legislation from right-wing policy group and Occupy bête noire, ALEC). The walkout tactic in particular was also recently employed in South Florida, when hundreds of young people left their classrooms in a coordinated protest to demand the arrest of Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman.

The importance of young students autonomously organizing against perceived injustices — be they overbearing cellphone policies to heavy police presence in schools — should not be underestimated. Kids not yet of college age are prepared to act in defiance of institutions they see as oppressive; their anger comes from a place not of empty youthful rebellion but an awareness (far belying their years) of the harms of privatization and systematic racism. Only recently, as writer Alexander Zaitchik pointed out this week in Salon, has the student debt crisis and the corruption behind it become a front for protest in this country. Meanwhile, in Quebec, currently more than 165,000 college students are on strike (this from a total student body of 495,000) — an underreported student strike against proposed fee hikes that is now in its third month.

College student protest is nothing new, but has often in history been quixotic and merely a passing phase for campus dwellers — “radical until graduation” as the saying goes. But now college graduates entering a world of underemployment and precarity no longer see radical political action as the preserve of students. And now, it seems, we can add a growing number of high school students to these ranks of the politicized and radicalized. As the student leaders from Paul Robeson High note, the May Day walkout is just their “first action” against injustice.

“With these laws Gov. Bobby Jindal has sold our kids out for his political aspirations,” said Karran Royal Harper, a Louisiana parent activist and education advocate.

The bills all sprinted through the state legislature. Committee hearings were conducted at a breakneck speed, Democratic lawmakers complained, and members were asked to vote on amendments they didn’t actually understand. When the House took up a bill changing teacher-tenure rules, it ran the session past midnight, refusing to break until they called for a vote.

“There’s just so much more here than what our group can handle,” said Minh Nguyen, executive director of the Vietnamese American Young Leaders Association of New Orleans, a community advocacy group. “We don’t even have the capacity to handle all the bills that are being proposed right now and it’s been really challenging to us.”

ALEC’s 2010 “Report Card on American Education” (PDF) suggested that lawmakers overwhelm their opposition in exactly this manner. “Do not simply just introduce one reform in the legislature—build a consensus for reform and introduce a lot,” the report authors told ALEC members.

“Across the country for the past two decades, education reform efforts have popped up in legislatures at different times in different places,” the report authors wrote. “As a result, teachers’ unions have been playing something akin to ‘whack-a- mole’—you know the game—striking down as many education reform efforts as possible. Many times, the unions successfully ‘whack’ the ‘mole,’ i.e., the reform legislation. Sometimes, however, they miss. If all the moles pop up at once, there is no way the person with the mallet can get them all. Introduce comprehensive reform packages.”

One new law Jindal moved in this fashion will make Louisiana among the most aggressive states in the nation for pushing charter schools and publicly funded vouchers for private institutions. It also includes a “parent trigger” provision, where parents whose children are enrolled in a failing school can hand the school over to Louisiana’s Recovery School District if a majority choose to do so. However, the key provision expands New Orleans’ current pilot voucher program so that now, students from high-poverty families enrolled in schools that have been rated a C, D or F by the state may move to a private school at the state’s expense.

More than half of Louisiana’s student population, or around 385,000 students, are expected to qualify for the voucher program, according to Tulane University’s Cowen Institute. Only 4,000 vouchers will be available in the first year, experts estimate, but the law makes Louisiana’s program the most expansive in the nation.

Jindal’s set of reforms hews closely to the model reform legislation set out by ALEC, which advocates for the privatization of traditionally public services, like health care, prisons and education. ALEC and Jindal’s school agenda is driven by a conservative ideology that believes private markets can help introduce efficiency and healthy competition into public institutions. As ALEC’s education report card in 2010 laid out, “Families need a market for K-12 schools. The market mechanism rewards success, and either improves or eliminates failure.”

ALEC and Jindal have kept close ties for some time now, education watchers in the state say.

“This is really ALEC at work. It’s a feather in Gov. Bobby Jindal’s cap—he has spent a lot of time traveling around the country lining up donor money and now he can say Louisiana is one of the few states that has a large choice environment,” said Harper, who pointed out that many of the key committee members who supported the legislation are ALEC members or have received campaign contributions from groups with ties to ALEC. Indeed, at its annual meeting last August, ALEC recognized Jindal with its coveted Thomas Jefferson Freedom Award for “outstanding public service.”

“It was a huge defeat for us,” said Damekia Morgan, the statewide educational policy and campaign director of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children.

Public “Accountability,” Private Free-for-All

Critics say the rushed process hampered conversation on the bills. The voucher bill in particular is still light on specifics about implementation. The state has yet to create a plan for evaluating the private schools that take public vouchers. Evaluation wasn’t even mentioned until a vague amendment that calls for “an accountability system for participating students at participating schools” to be hammered out by the state board of education by Aug. 1.

The lack of an accountability plan is telling, says Morgan. The standards that are devised don’t need to come again before the public before they are codified. “This is all supposedly about demanding accountability for public schools and here we’re handing off our students to private schools without any checks,” Harper also said.

In addition, the parent trigger provisions are also too vague, education advocates say. In California, the lack of specificity around that state’s parent trigger law led to protracted court battles when a community first made use of the law.

These sorts of bills have an undeniable appeal for parents, especially poor parents of color who’ve been locked out of decision making circles and feel like their concerns have often gone ignored by public school administrators. Yet education advocates say that these bills provide only the veneer of choice for parents, while removing parents’ avenues for demanding accountability via collective action.

The parent trigger portion of the new Louisiana laws, for instance, allows for public schools to be converted only to charter schools. The laws give parents no avenue for re-triggering a failing charter school, of which there are many. And while lawmakers hope that parents feel empowered by school vouchers, their options for where they can place their children will be limited to the private school options on the table.

“Clearly these options are not full choice for parents,” said Andre Perry, associate director of Loyola University’s New Orleans’ Institute for Quality and Equity in Education. Perry said his concern was that these reforms, while bold, don’t get to the heart of how educational inequity is created in the first place. Instead, what lawmakers are voting for, Perry said, “is a belief in a philosophy that’s being applied in the name of choice.”

“It’s a catch-22 for parents,” said Damekia Morgan, the statewide educational policy and campaign director of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children. “Parents are desperate for change. But as a parent myself, I know that the more money we take away from public education systems to go to private entities, the less control I have over what public education looks like.”

Hijacking Obama’s Agenda

These days, the push to deregulate public education is a popular, bipartisan issue. Many of the states that have passed school reform overhauls in recent years did so to become eligible for the Obama administration’s $4.3 billion competitive grants program Race to the Top.

“Republican governors, shrewdly, jumped all over it and packed on their version of choice,” Perry said. “That’s how you see what we have now, where many different political bedfellows are coming together in a strange way.”

Indeed, Jindal spoke the language of the Obama administration last Wednesday when he touted his reform package as a way to help Louisiana children better compete in the global economy.

“[Louisiana children] are going to be competing with kids not only from Texas, Georgia, and other states, but they’re going to be competing for jobs with kids in China and other countries around the world,” Jindal said. “That is why it is so important we give every child in Louisiana a great education.” It could have been a line out of one of President Obama’s own education speeches.

This is one of the reasons why Perry says the presence of ALEC in the school reform policy arena isn’t reason enough for an outcry. Not only is ALEC not the only conservative group pushing for a free market approach to public education, but “there are pillars of each party that push the agenda.”

“The question is more about: what is so compelling about their arguments that is helping advance their agendas? Again, Jindal has been able to usher this through partly because the traditionally based system has failed in many ways. And that’s just the reality.”

But after a decade in the tween trenches, Kilpatrick (with the help of co-writer and former Salon.com contributor Whitney Joiner) is sharing the secret life of girls with the people who often seem the most blindsided by it – their parents and educators. “The Drama Years,” published this week by the Free Press, is a plainspoken set of dispatches from the front lines of tweenhood, culled from three years of interviews with girls around the country and framed in their own quirky, authentic voices.

As the mother of one middle school-aged daughter (and a younger one who’s careening toward her own tweenhood), I know all about drama — and the ways that stony silences can erupt into tears, or that blossoming maturity can go hand in hand with exasperating stubbornness. Case in point: When a copy of “The Drama Years” arrived at our house, my daughter rolled her eyes at the array of tween archetypes on the cover and huffed, “Which one is this supposed to be me? I don’t know anybody who looks like this.”

Yet the “dramas” of the book — defined by chapters on body image, materialism, friendship, the intense pressure to succeed and more — do look familiar. And the fact that we as parents are struggling through this unique time in our children’s lives right along with them is new and challenging territory in and of itself. As my friend Louis, a Bay Area artist with an 11-year-old daughter, says, “In my house we let the kids say whatever is bothering them and we try to help them fix it. My parents didn’t give me this kind of platform. I can see why they said, ‘We’re not doing this.’ It’s exhausting to live with this shit over and over.”

And even my daughter, wielder of drama though she is, acknowledges her growing pains can be rough on the family members in her warpath. “Everybody says you’re supposed to live in the moment. Well, when you’re in the sixth grade, everything is all in the moment, all the time. That’s why when I can’t figure out my homework or the outfit I wanted to wear today is in the laundry, it feels the most important thing in the world. ”

Salon spoke recently with Kilpatrick about Girl Talk, the new book and what our tweens want us to know about their drama years.

You’ve been doing Girl Talk and working with middle-schoolers for a decade. Why did you decide to do something now addressed to adults?

It grew out of behind-the-scenes conversations with adults around Girl Talk. They’d ask, “Are there things they’re not telling me? How can we help them? I felt obligated to put together a document that would be a resource for them.

Tweenhood feels like such huge terrain to tackle in a book. How do you stay specific about it? Can a seventh grader in one set of circumstances, in one part of the country, really grasp the issues that another in a very different environment might be facing?

When I started this 0 years ago to help my sister, I just wanted to make a difference in my hallways. It turned out that whether it was inner-city schools or elite private schools, there are so many things girls have in common. That’s how we defined the nine core issues in the book we wanted to address.

We have programs in boarding schools in Connecticut and the slums of Cabrera; we have girls from upper-middle-class families and we have girls in foster care and shelters. It doesn’t matter if you live in a rural area or a city. There’s a horizontal line that goes right through middle school. Girls everywhere need to feel validated by their peers, to feel like they’re making their parents proud, and to know that it’s OK to change. There’s so much stigma that peers put on each other. They say, “Oh, she’s changed.” Well, everything changes in middle school. You’re supposed to change. What I want to see is girls of all different backgrounds coming and laying the tracks for how they’ll treat each other through high school and womanhood, and break the cycle of some of the negative things women do to each other.

One of the things that I thought was admirable about the Girl Talk model and the book is that it teaches younger girls that older girls can be their allies instead of enigmas.

Not having an older sister, I was completely intimidated by older girls when I first got on the school dance squad. I was terrified of them. But if you expect older girls to have good behavior and you say, “You would be an amazing leader and role model,” there’s something about that that flips the switch in high school girls’ minds. They’re someone to look up to. That’s a great thing for girls — learning though teaching each other.

And it takes some of the pressure off parents. It seems like so many parents spend their daughters’ lives being overprotective, and they get to the tween years and the girls don’t know how to fend for themselves.

I think it’s important for parents to remember that girls are going to make mistakes and get hurt. If you’re not going to experience pain, you’re not going to experience growth.

How are things different for tween girls now than they were even a few years ago, when you were in middle school?

The one line that sums it up is that there’ve been more technological changes in the past decade than ever in human history. Now girls feel so much pressure, knowing that anything they say or do can be something that hundreds — even thousands — of people can see. There’s a fear of being judged and it’s creating a huge social anxiety disorder. Girls are nitpicked from head to toe, and that pressure to look beautiful and feel perfect is relentless.

Meanwhile, parents are scared of this unknown world their kids are in, and the long-term effects of what they’re doing there. You have to know your child and how they’re affected by things people say. I see schools now trying to establish norms to prepare kids, because the way we’re communicating with each other is not a way that’s respectful. We give attention to the bullies and the mean girls. But if we focus on kindness, that will become the norm.

What do middle-school girls most want their parents to understand about their lives?

Remember their brains are still developing. Adults see the world and their problems vertically. They prioritize them. Middle-school girls see their problems on a horizontal line. It all has equal weight. We asked every girl, “What is stressful in your life?” And girls would say, “I’m stressed because I don’t have the right clothes and I’m nervous about school and I had a fight with my friend and my brother is sick.” That’s really how they see things. That’s why the word they keep coming back to is “drama.” So don’t think she’s an alien or she can’t prioritize.

The greatest gift you can give her is your presence. It’s so hard to be completely present in conversation, but challenge yourself when you want to move ahead to the million other things you’ve got going on. Engage in a conversation, ask for an update, ask what’s causing stress. You know those days when she’s hysterical? Please refrain from just saying, “Don’t worry.” She wants you to listen to her, to say it’s OK and know you’re there and sympathize at that very moment. Put a note in her lunch, get a dry erase board and write her a message. Remind her that you’re there and you care and you’re listening.

You daughter wants you to understand that she’s going to fall and she’s going to mess up. You can’t walk the tightrope with her anymore. All you can do is let her know you’re there for her with the net, cheering her on.