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Locke High School in the Watts area of Los Angeles is one of the worst schools in California: low-performing, high dropout rate, gang-plagued. If any school cried out for drastic reforms, it's Locke. So when the school's principal, Frank Wells, and some brave teachers took steps to turn Locke around, the teachers union and school district bureaucrats naturally did everything they could to stop them. Reason's Lisa Snell has chronicled Locke's struggles, and ReasonTV has told Locke's story in a terrific video.

To hear of Locke's trevails is to understand why throughtout three decades of arguing about school reform, conservative critics have set their sites on weakening the influence of the unions. I don't believe that cutting out the unions is the key to reform, but there is really no way to make necessary changes as long as the unions stand in the way.

Rosemary Kendrick of the American Enterprise Institute writes on a recent conference by AEI and the Mass Insight Education & Research Institute that focused on the need for sweeping systemic changes in public education. Curiously, the word "unions" appears nowhere in Kendrick's piece, but countering the unions' influence is the story:

The hardest question concerns human capital: how can schools attract and retain teachers and leaders who are skilled in carrying out turnarounds? As Mass Insight President William Guenther lamented, “We have spent 25 years in education reform focused first on programs; we need to focus on people first.”

While Andrew Rotherham of Education Sector, a think tank, noted that “the overwhelming majority of educators live and work within 100 miles of where they grew up,” Adamowski emphasized the increasing mobility of the U.S. workforce. “I don’t know if it’s realistic anymore,” he said, “for us to think that we’re going to take a 21-year-old off into the ranks of teaching and somehow keep him for 35 years.” It is time “to build on the front end of the career, the back end of the career, [and] have some type of service that is not lifetime in nature but rather transitional.”

Removing ineffective teachers -- another key element of any turnaround strategy -- is no small task. Turnaround leaders must have the power “to remove the culture-killing individuals,” said Seth Reynolds of the Parthenon Group, a consulting firm. In the education field, this can be a frustratingly slow process.

I don't fully agree. You could outlaw the unions tomorrow and fire every third-rate teacher the next day and schools would still be burdened with lousy curricula, impossible mandates and a dehumanizing bureaucracy. You pick your battles, I guess.

Another word that does not appear in Kendrick's piece is "charter" -- as in, charter schools. Charter schools are public schools liberated from the stifling bureaucracy of the school district and the innovation-killing influence of the teachers' unions. Charter schools aren't perfect -- union partisans will be quick to cite stories like this and this -- but they offer far more opportunities for academic success in poor, crime-ridden and low-achieving areas than the standard model.

After months of battling the bureaucracy, Locke High School will finally join the charter revolution this year. The United Teachers of Los Angeles fought the community's effort to let Locke go charter every step of the way. It's a testimony to the will of Locke's parents, teachers and former principal that they prevailed in the face of such opposition. Watch what happens -- and watch the educrats and union bosses tremble. If the freedom afforded by a charter can turn around Locke High School, that freedom can work anywhere.