The most recent racial justice movements sparked by the police killings
is a reminder that even the most blatant forms of racism have not gone away.

And as significant as they are, what worries me is that we’ll focus only on the most extreme examples of racial injustice and ignore the ways in which racial injustice is baked into the system. The Supreme Court in 1954 said,”Separate and unequal is blatantly wrong, unconstitutional, we need to stop it.”

We never stopped it. But we pretended we did. And I would say that in the No Child Left Behind period, we acted as though schools were operating on a level playing field, and therefore we could hold every school, every student accountable to standardized tests, even though we hadn’t done the work of extending equal educational opportunities to all kids and in all schools.

While we like to celebrate the exceptional individuals who are able to use education to improve their lives, help their families, that’s not the norm in America. What is the norm is that there are lots of people out there with talent and ability who haven’t had the opportunity, and because of that, they are in low wage jobs permanently and stuck in a cycle of poverty.

And that should trouble all of us because the whole idea behind the American dream, is that we want a society that doesn’t reward birthright and privilege, but rewards effort and talent, and we’re very far from that, and the data shows.

An affluent student with a C average has a much better chance of graduating from college and earning a good job than at a low income student with an A average.

Imagine if as a society we said, “Look, we are seeing the inequities. Let’s do something to reduce them.” That would lead to a massive reorganizing of the way we deliver instruction for example, moving away from talking at kids to much more interactive, much more applied learning, because that’s the way kids actually learn.

We’d make them schools that are developmentally focused on the needs of children.” We would emphasize relationships. You can look at schools that serve poor children well, Black children, Latino children, Native American children,
and then you know, “Oh, what you have to do is change the conditions in schools.”

And that produces better outcomes for large numbers of kids. You don’t have to change the kids or their culture.