Alfie Kohn on the state of education reform

I was listening to a panel discussion featuring Stephen Downes, Howard Gardner, Alfie Kohn and Gary Stager on Reforming Education Reform.

Here is a portion of what Alfie Kohn had to say about the state of public discourse around education reform:

The discussion that we have about education is only as good as the way that discussion is framed by the people who have ready access to the means of communication. So if public officials and corporate officials and corporate media have framed the conversation in a particular way, then it's likely that we will ask some questions and studiously avoid others. The default assumptions -- the things we take for granted because we've never been invited to reflect on them turns out to be the limits, the barriers, the boundaries to anything we talk about. So for example, if no one invites most people to rethink whether education could be more than just transmitting a set of facts or skills to passive receptacles, then nobody is likely to look around at schools and say, "how come they are still characterized by worksheets, lectures, quizzes, tests, grades and homework just as they were twenty years ago and fifty years ago." Because we think that is how school has to be. 

And if nobody has said standardized tests tend to measure what matters least and there are more meaningful and less destructive ways to assess individual students as well as whole schools then the public discussion will just be based on a sort of monosyllabic  grunting of "test scores go up that's good", and if the larger public conversation assumes that government is always a bad thing and the free market delivers results then we will be inherently suspicious about the great democratic institution of education in this country and we will look for ways to undermine its public status or be receptive to people who attempt to do that. Which is exactly what we are seeing now in the name of choice. 

Privatizing Public Education

Even though I am a staunch supporter of Public Education, I am very aware of the problems that plague traditional schooling. I believe that school needs to look a lot less like school. Like Sir Ken Robinson, I too am a supporter of a learning revolution where the goal is public schools that provide students with an opportunity to pursue their passions while nurturing competency, creativity and critical thinking.

However, there is more than one revolution afoot.

The promise of technology and personalization is being co-opted by the perils of profiteers and privatization where one goal is "an education revolution in which public schools outsource to private vendors such critical tasks as teaching math, educating disabled students, even writing report cards." Another, more ominous goal is to use technology to cut costs by replacing teachers.

Consider three quotes and a video:

 The first is from Joanne Weiss, Chief of Staff to U.S Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and previously led the Obama administration's Race to the Top program:

The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.

The second is from Rupert Murdoch:

When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching. Wireless Generation is at the forefront of individualized, technology-based learning that is poised to revolutionize public education for a new generation of students.

In her post Privatizing Public Schools: Big Firms Eyeing Profits From U.S. K-12 Market, Stephanie Simon writes:

Traditionally, public education has been a tough market for private firms to break into -- fraught with politics, tangled in bureaucracy and fragmented into tens of thousands of individual schools and school districts from coast to coast. 

Now investors are signaling optimism that a golden moment has arrived. They're pouring private equity and venture capital into scores of companies that aim to profit by taking over broad swaths of public education.

Watch this one-minute commercial:



Look, I'm the first in line to talk about how cool technology is and how it's improved my teaching and learning. However, there are a couple lines from the video's script that concern me. At 0:24, a little girl says, "If you have this (tablet), you don't need this (brick and mortar school)". Then at 0:27, a little boy looks around the classroom and says "this place is dumb". And then at the end, two boys agree that they should "get out of here".

I'm all for a learning revolution but not like this.

This is scary.

I'm the first to criticize elements of traditional schooling but you don't fix public education by destroying it, abandoning it or throwing it to the free market.

You'll notice that the video features children sitting in what looks like a college or university classroom. Can you see how the video implicitly and explicitly undermines both K-12 and post secondary education? Would this video be as successful if they showed the same children in their developmentally appropriate classrooms and playgrounds while saying "this place is dumb, let's get out of here"?

It's ironic that "this place is dumb, let's get out of here" is precisely what children tend to say when they enrol in virtual classrooms that make those smart and bright computers and tablets the end rather than a means to an education. Simone Harris writes:

Online or virtual schools typically have high withdrawal rates, and that’s not surprising. It makes sense, doesn’t it? It must be very tempting to drop out of a “school” when there are no human beings there in person to make you feel connected to a real community, no gym, no playground, no student art on the walls, and no teacher to get to know you, to care, to see who you are and who you might one day become. 

The bitter irony is that these online schools are marketed to English learners who need the exact opposite of isolation, who benefit most from cooperative strategies in natural, not virtual, settings. 

Or they are preposterously promoted as beneficial to low income students as though it were a good thing to get education at a discount, off the rack. As Diane Ravitch warns of the educational dystopia that is fast gaining on reality, “the poor will get computers and the rich will get computers and teachers.”

Public education is not a business and it's not a private venture -- it's a public good. I have no doubt that some very crafty entrepreneurs will profit from all this but I'm not convinced that our children and our society will.

It's one thing to suggest that students should be encouraged to become entrepreneurial but it is quite another to unleash entrepreneurs to profit off of children and public education.

Like democracy, public education is reserved only for those who are willing to fight for it.

Are you fighting for either?

Diane Ravitch speaks to American Federation of Teachers

Diane Ravitch is an important voice in the fight to save public education. She blogs here and tweets here. Here's a talk she gave to the American Federation of Teachers.

Innovation and Emerging Technologies: Perspectives and Provocations

This was written by Dr. Phil McRae, an executive staff officer with the Alberta Teachers` Association. Dr. Phil McRae’s Biography, Research, Writing, Scholarship and Presentations:www.philmcrae.com, and you can follow him on Twitter here. This post first appeared here.

by Phil McRae

The world’s education systems are in the midst of change (aka informed transformation) unlike any other time over the past century. It’s a historical moment where governments, teachers, parents and school communities are exploring visions of an education system that would embody innovation (technologies and pedagogy), increased flexibility (curricular and otherwise) and more individualized and self-directed approaches to student learning. Within this 21st-century tsunami of change, innovative teaching and learning practices that employ emerging technologies are sweeping into our collective imaginations with the broader goal to transform education. Too often, however, the space for dialogue about the truly innovative practices that learning and technology can enable is non-existent, superficial or uninformed, and thus more thoughtful considerations and questions remain unasked or answered. This blog post is meant to share some of the perspectives and provocations around innovation, emerging technologies and educational practice.

Innovative teaching and learning with technology is a dynamic, challenging and creative act. In assessing how digital technologies might be used appropriately to engender more innovative learning experiences, educators might consider using the well-conceived Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model (Koehler and Mishra 2009). TPACK tries to reconcile the complexity and dynamics of student learning as it relates to technology and the multifaceted nature of teachers’ knowledge. Rather than conceptualizing content knowledge (CK), pedagogical knowledge (PK) and technology knowledge (TK) as isolated entities, TPACK focuses on the interplay between these knowledge sources. TPACK asks educators to consider how the various knowledge sources apply to a particular learning situation. No single pedagogical approach applies to every teacher or every student. The teacher must traverse the elements of content, pedagogy and technology and understand how they interact in the context of learning. A more thorough explanation of TPACK can be found in the thoughtful work of Koehler and Mishra (2009).

Technology should not, however, be considered the principal driver of innovative educational transformation (as technological determinists would argue), nor just a neutral and innocuous tool (as technological instrumentalistsmake claim). The reality is far more complex and it serves the profession of teaching well to dig deeper into the dialogue around innovation and emerging technologies in education.

On the more mechanistic side of the conversation related to innovation resides the technological deterministic view that envisions technology as the primary determinant of human experiences. As Selwyn (2011) notes, technological determinism has influenced discussions about innovative educational change for many years. In their day, filmstrips, radio and televisions were characterized as having the power to radically transform public education and offer the most innovative solutions to educational challenges. In the early 1920s, for example, Thomas Edison predicted that the motion picture was “destined to revolutionize our educational system and … in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks” (Oppenheimer 1997). This prediction was followed 40 years later with psychologist B. F. Skinner’s assertion that the dawn of the machine age of education had finally arrived and that “with the help of teaching machines and programmed instruction, students could learn twice as much in the same time and with the same effort as in a standard classroom” (Oppenheimer). In our contemporary setting the buzz is around the iPad or the ‘holy grail’ of digital textbooks vaunted as pedagogic panacea. The proliferation of motion pictures has not fully withdrawn the desire for educational print, and the teaching machines (whatever you imagine those to be) have not yet displaced the will for teachers and students to gather together to learn in inquiry oriented classrooms. History offers perspective and provides us with at least two important insights: (1) there have always been, and always will be, strong and weak educational practices and (2) technologies in education, as Selwyn (2011) establishes, rarely live up to the utopian forecasts of their most enthusiastic advocates. Rarely is the imagined future of innovation accurate; more often than not the predictive space tilts heavily in either an overly optimistic or a deeply pessimistic direction.

More commonly, at the other end of the spectrum, lives the technological instrumentalists deception; technology is just a “tool”; an innocent object; value-free and in the service of whatever subjective goals we chose to ascribe the device. According to this view, technology is culturally neutral and innocuous (Kelly 2005; Levy 2001). Such a view ignores Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) caution that, just as we shape our technologies, so they subsequently shape our habits of mind and physical selves. As educators champion the visible promise of technology to engage students and enhance their learning experiences, we must also recognize that technology is not neutral, nor is it “just a tool”. The more invisible perils of pervasive media exposure and its psycho-social and physiological impacts are beginning to surface in the research on public health. With the developing minds and bodies of children and youth there is an increasing need to be cautious of the impact of online digital activities for offline health and mental wellbeing. When implementing technology, teachers, as pedagogical leaders, should take into account such factors as the age, gender and education level of students, the socioeconomic status of the community and the beliefs that a student’s parents and peers hold about the value of technology both in and outside a school setting (McRae 2011).

School leadership, an important part of the visioning for how technology lives within a learning context, is constantly being (re)shaped in an era full of contradictions and paradoxes around emerging technologies. A sea of questions are constantly ebbing and flowing for school leadership (broadly defined) around how to engage students with the innovative uses of digital technologies. Some of the most pragmatic questions emerge for school leaders around how to effectively and efficiently navigate the costs, complexity, access and supports required to place information and communication technologies into the numerous imaginative learning scenarios put forward by parent communities, superintendents, students and teachers. The most challenging systemic issues, however, reside in the larger context and include poverty and inequity, a lack of parental engagement (or conversely hyper-parenting), large class sizes and complex compositions that impede more personalized learning experiences, and student readiness to learn bound up in the numerous digital and popular culture distractions impacting society.

As we swim in a sea of emerging technologies and envision their power to transform our public education system we must not forget to ask ourselves what it is that we ultimately hope to achieve. Here are two questions related to innovation and emerging technologies as a force of educational transformation that I hope you may take up in professional conversations, at the Destination Innovation conference or perhaps even on this blog.

1) How might educators engage with digital technologies so that students can become empowered citizens rather than passive consumers?

2) What technological innovations will help to create a society where people can flourish within informed, democratic and diverse communities, as opposed to a culture of narcissists that are fragmented by a continuous partial attention?

Note: This blog post is drawn from a new chapter I recently published in book entitled Rethinking School Leadership: Creating A Great School for All Students available at www.lulu.com (http://tinyurl.com/85xvrdq).

References

Kelly, K. 2005. “We Are the web.” Wired Magazine (8)13. Available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html(accessed March 20, 2012).

Koehler, M J, and P Mishra. 2009. “What Is Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge?” Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education 9(1): 60–70.

Levy, P. 2001. Cyberculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McLuhan, M. 1964. Understanding Media. New York: Mentor.

Oppenheimer, T. 1997. “The Computer Delusion.” Atlantic Monthly 280, no 1 (July): 45–62.

Selwyn, N. 2011. Schools and Schooling in the Digital Age: A Critical Analysis.London and New York: Routledge.

Working with children when they are at their worst

I teach explosive children in a children's psychiatric assessment unit. There are 8 beds on the unit and I have a very small classroom. Here's an example of how I work with children when they are at their worst. Jasper is an explosive 11 year old boy who is verbally offensive and physically abusive. He's hard to like. Let me be crystal clear. He's very hard to like. But does that change how I treat him? Absolutely not. I had a couple days to develop a relationship with Jasper before this incident.

Here's what happened.

I was quickly finishing my lunch in my classroom before taking my 5 students, who are inpatients on a children's psychiatric assessment unit, swimming. As I scarfed down the last bite of my sandwich, I heard some yelling.

When I walked towards the crowd of students and staff, I could hear one of the staff yell at Jasper to go to his room. Jasper yelled back, stating that no one could tell him what to do. As I walked closer, Jasper spotted me. He walked straight at me and reported in a mostly calm and collected manner that, "Curtis made a joke about me wearing speedos and that was mean". He then promptly walked to his room and sat on the floor in his doorway.

I walked to the nurse's station where most of the staff was collecting when someone told me that Jasper had hit Curtis. As I polled the crowd, their expressions all said the same thing: "There's no way Jasper can go swimming now." I stated that I needed a minute to work with Jasper and Curtis before all of us would go swimming.

I walked over to Jasper who was still sitting on the floor sulking. In order to talk with him (rather than down on him) I sat on the floor with my legs crossed, just like him and said, "You look sad, what's up?"

Jasper looked up at me and barked, "If he ever makes fun of me like that again, I'm going to fucking kill him. I mean it. I'll fucking kill him."

My response was three simple words, "I believe you." It is tempting to argue with Jasper and tell him that he isn't allowed to kill anyone, but I knew this wasn't the hill I wanted to die on right now -- there was a more important problem that I need to address so I prioritized my attention and mostly ignored this threat. (If you are familiar with Ross Greene's approach than this is what Plan C looks like) It's also important to note that while it is true that I did believe Jasper felt like killing Curtis, I did not believe for one second that he could or would actually do it.

"Do you remember what you said to me before you came to sit over here?"

"No."

"Jasper, I was impressed."

He looked up at me and was surprised to hear me talking about something I was impressed with. He stopped crying, wiped a tear and asked, "What do you mean?"

"Jasper you came over to me only moments after the heat of the moment and with a very calm tone, no swearing or yelling, you gave me an accurate description of what happened. I am impressed."

He looked down again but didn't say anything.

"Jasper there's one other person in this unit that you should have said that to."

"Joe, there's no other adult here that I could have said that to. You are the only one who helps me instead of giving me trouble."

(Now this isn't exactly true, but it is Jasper's perception so it is his reality. And again, this isn't the problem I wanted to address right now, so I chose to use Plan C and ignored it).

"Jasper, I wasn't talking about an adult. Jasper, I'm going to say something really strange. Are you ready?"

He looked up and said, "Sure".

"I think you should have said it to Curtis."

He stared at me.

I waited.

He stared some more.

I waited.

He still just stared at me.

I waited longer. I could tell he was thinking, in fact I could almost see the smoke coming out of his ears. He was really perplexed by my suggestion. I'm usually pretty good at wait-time, but even I couldn't take this staring contest any longer, so I broke the silence. "What do you think about that, Jasper?"

"Well... huh... that's an interesting idea."

His reaction told me that he honestly had never even considered this as an alternative to hitting. "How can we fix this problem?"

"He could say sorry, but sorry won't make the pain go away. You know for me words hurt a thousand times worse than physical pain. I have a swing at home and none of my friends can swing on it because it hurts their nuts, but I can swing on it all day because I have an abnormal tolerance for physical pain, but words stab me in the heart. They hurt so bad."

It took every ounce of self-control not to laugh at his explanation, but I was able to hold back. "I believe you, Jasper. I can see that Curtis's words hurt you. And you're right, an apology won't take away the hurt. But an apology will do something different. It will plant the seed of a new feeling called forgiveness that, if you let it, will grow larger than the hurt. But remember, 'sorry' is not a word -- it does not come from your mouth, it comes from your heart. People also like it when others ask if we are ok. It's kind of weird, but even when we are hurting, it makes us feel better to know that other people care. Have you ever noticed that?"

"Yeah, I have."

"Jasper, if Curtis apologized to you and you could tell that he really meant it, would that help to solve this problem?"

"Yes, and I think I would like him to ask me if I'm ok."

"Cool. Let's do that in a minute, but first, we have one more problem that we need to solve."

I could see some of the excitement rush out of Jasper's expression as he hung his head again. It looked like he was preparing himself for trouble.

"Jasper, you hit Curtis."

"Actually, I hit him twice." (I find this fascinating because when an adult yelled at Jasper that he wasn't allowed to hit others and that he needed to go to his room, he denied hitting anyone. And yet when Jasper sees the adults less like punishers and more like teachers he is prepared to correct me and admit that he hit Curtis not once but twice).

"How do we make this right?"

"I could apologize... but remember words hurt way worse than physical pain. They aren't the same."

"Jasper, do you remember your friends on the swing? What if Curtis is less like you and more like your friends? What if he is the opposite to you and he has an abnormal tolerance to words but physical pain hurts a thousand times worse?"

He stared again, but this time I could really tell that a light bulb had just turned on. "Well, I suppose that could be possible. I think I should say sorry."

"Remember, 'sorry' isn't a word."

"Actually, at this point, I'm feeling pretty bad about what I did. I want to apologize and mean it."

"What else could you do?"

"I could ask him if he's ok."

"I bet he would like that. You ready to try it?"

"Yes."

"Ok. You wait here and I'll get Curtis."

I walked over to Curtis where he was talking with another adult and still rubbing his head. "Curtis, can I talk with you about how we can make things right?"

"Sure." Curtis was quite calm. He's a little more reasonable and a little less explosive than Jasper.

"I think we have a couple problems here."

"Yeah, I shouldn't have made that joke."

"No, you probably shouldn't have, but Jasper shouldn't have hit you, either."

"No, he shouldn't have. You know I was just kidding around. I see Jasper joking around with others all the time and I just thought he could take it, but I guess I was wrong."

"Yeah, it's tough isn't it. I know that I've had times where I thought someone would appreciate my jokes but then realized they were hurt by them. It's not easy getting a read on how others will respond. So how can we make this right?"

"I could apologize."

"Really? That's interesting, because I was talking to Jasper and he's feeling really terrible about hitting you and he wants to apologize, too."

"Really?"

"Yeah, really. You want to go talk with him with me?"

"Sure."

When we came together I asked who wanted to go first and they both tried to start. Noticing that they cut each other off, they both offered to let the other go first. It was pretty cute.

Curtis started, "Jasper, I'm sorry about that joke I cracked. I thought you were a jokester so I thought you would take it."

Jasper replied, "Yeah, I am a jokester but there's a funny thing about me, I can give jokes but I can't seem to take them very well."

At this point, I actually laughed a little because of how accurate Jasper's self-reflection truly was. I said, "Looks like you found something we need to work on together."

"Yeah, I guess I did," answered Jasper.

"So are you ok?" asked Curtis.

"Yeah. And I'm sorry for hitting you, Curtis. Are you ok?"

"Yeah, I'll be ok."

I could tell that both boys meant it and that both had planted the seeds of forgiveness. I could tell that we were ready to move on so I asked, "you boys ready to go swimming?"

Both boys said yes, and we all went swimming.

***

When I got back from swimming, I had a couple staff members who were a little unsure as to why I let Jasper go swimming. Here are some of the arguments I made for why punishing Jasper would have been at best unhelpful and at worst harmful towards our ultimate goals for him:

• It was a lot of work to get Jasper to think about more than just himself and to empathize and apologize. Can you see how all this hard work would have been destroyed had I then punished Jasper by not letting him go swimming? Invoking the punishment would have encouraged Jasper to revert to thinking only about how this situation affected him. I'll put it another way: Punishing Jasper by taking away swimming forcibly isolates him from his peers, in front of his peers, and isolating a child who struggles with social skills is like banning books from a child who struggles to read.

• Punishment ruptures relationships.There is a very good chance that Jasper would grow to resent Curtis because had Curtis not cracked the joke, Jasper could have gone swimming. There is also a good chance that Jasper would resent me for invoking the punishment. Can you see how rupturing relationships with punishments is one of the last things Jasper needs? He already has very few meaningful relationships, let's not make things harder for him than he already has it.

• Punishment teaches Jasper a lesson: You can get your way with people who are weaker than you are by hurting them. Can you see that Jasper understands this lesson already all too well? Can you see that Jasper's working model for relationships is already built on a foundation of coerciveness, manipulation and power? Can you see how punishment would only perpetuate this vicious cycle? It's time to drop the archaic strategy that says when kids do bad things, we should do bad things to them.

• Jasper doesn't have a lot going for him. He tells us that he hates himself and that he wants to die. He's already in a psychiatric assessment unit. Jasper experiences life as punishment everyday. How will taking more things away from him help?

• Some people fear that by letting Jasper go swimming, we are teaching him and others that hitting is ok. This is a fear that is mostly fabricated by a deeply disturbing, distasteful and distrustful view of the nature of children. Not one of the children who witnessed Jasper hit Curtis would have said that going swimming made hitting Curtis right. Not one. They all understood that Jasper has difficulties working with others and that he is still learning how to navigate his day without explosions. If I punish Jasper, it does indeed teach everyone a lesson, and that is that you are only accepted when you are acceptable, and this is a recipe for disaster for children who have learned to see themselves as unacceptable on a daily basis. 

What REALLY determines student performance

Paul Thomas, Associate Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. Follow him on twitter here and read his blog here. This post first appeared at Truthout here.

by Paul Thomas

"After several decades of rigorous effort, it is fair to say that the majority of our attention in political science has been given to interstate war and civil war," explains Christian Davenport, adding:

"I would say that it would be interesting to count the number of articles over the last five years on terrorism and compare it to the number of articles on repression but regardless, I stand by the claim that most of our attention has been focused on those activities that challenge political authorities. Actually, it's probably not even close. 

"Why is this the case? Why do governments get a pass? Well, it's not because of the actual number of deaths associated with different forms of violence.... 

"I would argue that scholars, especially those in political science, who study challenges to governments do so because this is what governments want us to study. In many ways the targets of political scientists' gaze has been shaped by those whom we examine. This is what governments and foundations pay for — mostly."

While this is a powerful and much needed commentary on the inadequate and disproportionate critical work in political science, I believe the exact same charge can be leveled at the current education reform debate.

Why do the power elite—from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to corporate charter chains (KIPP) to self-promoting edu-celebrities (Michelle Rhee) and to billionaire education hobbyists (Bill Gates)—overwhelming champion "no excuses" ideologies behind their claims about public schools and needed education reform?

Primarily because the "no excuses" mantra focuses the public and political gaze where the powerful want it—on the families, children, and institutions overburdened by poverty andnot on the powerful who have the resources and influence to shape the inequity upon which they feed.

No Excuses: "Tragic and Unacceptable" Distraction

The "no excuses" ideology triggers deep-seated commitments in the U.S. to myths about rugged individualism and the Puritan work ethic. Americans not only believe we should aspire to a meritocracy, but also trust we live in a meritocracy.

Thus, those in power claim that all children should be succeeding in public schools and then follow up by saying children trapped in poverty should simply try harder (often conceding twice as hard) and that school failure is primarily the fault of the "adults" not trying hard enough as well:

"'These schools are failing, and failing persistently,' [SC Superintendent of Education Mick Zais] said. 'And it's not the students who are failing in these schools. It's the adults on the boards, in the districts and in the schools who are failing the children.'"

Like the dynamic posed by Davenport about political science research, the power elite using the "no excuses" mantra to focus the public on families, children, teachers, and schools trapped in poverty gives the powerful a pass. The "no excuses" ideology places the burden of poverty on the people, children, and schools experiencing poverty—suggesting and sometimes directly stating that the people, children, and institutions trapped in poverty are the cause-agents of the poverty (notably because of lack of effort, a failure to take advantage of the opportunities in the meritocracy that doesn't exist).

"[R]egardless of what you think about the current mix of government programs, educational outcomes are too tightly linked to parents' economic status," explains Trina Shanks, adding:

"Many children start out school eager to learn and wanting to achieve. But as it seems that no one cares about their efforts and their basic needs are not being met with each passing grade, they start to become less engaged in school and search for other ways to survive. This is tragic and unacceptable."

Inequity, Not Merit, Reigns in U.S. Society and Schools

Recent studies have unmasked the tremendous disadvantages children from impoverished communities face. The truth is that achievement and the likelihood anyone can rise above her/his station at birth are powerfully linked to the coincidence of any child's community.

U.S. society is tremendously inequitable, and our public schools' primary failure is that due to bureaucratic policies schools more often than not reflect and perpetuate that inequity.

Shanks has shown that the future of a child living in poverty is a function of that child's race and class, not effort:

"Even children with proven academic ability fall behind if they grow up in families that are poor. By the age of 3, one study showed, poor children already have half the vocabulary of higher-income children. Another study showed that children in high-risk social and economic environments can start in the top 25% academically at the age of 4 but fall to the bottom by the time they are in high school. 

"In a similar example, only 29% of the highest-achieving eighth-graders complete college if they come from low-income families. 

"In contrast, 30% of the lowest-achieving eighth-graders and 74% of the highest-achieving eighth-graders complete college if they come from high-income families. Until we get to a point where ability and effort predictably lead to greater educational attainment and improved outcomes, many kids will stop trying because the obstacles become too daunting."

Shanks' Diverging Pathways: How Wealth Shapes Opportunity for Children details the same patterns of race-based inequity:

"Racial disparities in households with young children are dramatic 

• In 2007, 32% of white households with young children were income-poor and 14.2% had no assets. In sharp contrast, 69% of Latino and 71% of blacks were income-poor, and 40% had no assets. 

Racial disparities in child outcomes start early and grow over time 

• At nine months, all children start out with fairly similar scores on a standard child development test, but by two years of age, racial disparities emerge. 

The wealth gap widened for households with children 

• Between 1994 and 2007, the wealth gap between white and black households with children increased by $22,000 -almost doubling from $25,000 to $47,000.
• In 2007, black households with children held only 4% of the wealth of white households.
• From 2005 to 2007, black households living with zero or negative net worth (debt) grew from 35% to 39% while it stayed constant at 15% for white households. 

Maternal education matters, but alone cannot eliminate racial wealth disparities 

• For every dollar of wealth owned by a white mother with a bachelor's degree or higher in 1994 a black mother owned 64 cents. By 2007, it had fallen to 13 cents. 

• The wealth gap between white and black mothers with a bachelor's degree or higher grew five times larger between 1994 and 2007 to an astonishing $128,000."

Davenport argues that as long as scholars look where government wants, "...we end up knowing much less about governments and repressive action than we do revolutionaries and revolution, protesters and protest, rebels and rebellion, and terrorists and terrorism."

And thus, we sit in the same predicament in terms of how those in power are framing the education quality and education reform debate.

As long as we allow those in power to focus our gaze on people, children, and schools trapped in poverty, "we end up knowing much less" about the powerful people and institutions who create and tolerate that inequity.

As Shanks expressed, that is "tragic and unacceptable," and I would add inexcusable.