Back in April, I spent a few minutes with one of my professional heroes:  Dick Sagor—whose work on action research has been a direct attempt to raise the professional status and credibility of educators. 

Our conversation was anything but optimistic, though.  Dick was convinced that the teaching profession in America was at a turning point and that our nation was going to head in one of three directions:

(1). We’re going to completely abandon formal teacher preparation programs and rely on TFA style staffing patterns—kind of like Switzerland’s volunteer army or the Peace Corps.

(2). We’re going to completely strip down teaching and script the crap out of it so that we can hire warm bodies instead of professional educators to staff our schools.

(3). We’re going to reinvest in education to make it a true profession, paying teachers richly, but at the same time, expecting them to be well-trained and capable.

Considering the miserable direction that conversations around education have taken in the kill-em-all-right-wing world we live in, which of those scenarios do you think we’re likely to see play out?

Things got worse for me this week, though. 

You see, I ran Dick’s thoughts past an AMAZING teacher and good friend of mine—let’s call her Jill—who happens to live in New York—a state that is sucking hard from the testing teat.

Check out her reply and tell me that our blind faith in testing as a tool for evaluating teachers isn’t destroying educators—but more importantly, education—in America:

Boy, I am living, breathing and eating this thinking right now.

New York's Board of Regents just made it impossible to be an "effective" teacher under its new evaluation system if your test scores are too low.

Districts are now also allowed to count state scores as 40% of a teacher's evaluation. This is using the value-added methodology (25-36% error rate) on tests not designed for growth in the first place.

16 first tier education professors, including Linda Darling Hammond, and 8 former NY State Teachers of the Year, have contacted the Board with their grave concerns.

They were ignored.

I teach the neediest cohort of kids on my grade level in my building.

Fully half of my content is standards-based and crucial to kids-- and untested.

There's a strong argument that the critical thinking skills I *do* teach actually *depress* scores based on multiple choice.

I have been a teacher for 13 years. A year ago, my struggle was "How long should I stay in the classroom in order to make a education Ph.D. worthwhile?"

Now, the danger to my family's security is so great that I'm thinking about getting out of education completely.

How can I, in good conscience, live year to year hanging my pedagogy on my test scores so I don't lose my job?

How can I even justify a doctorate, when all I wanted to do with it was get back into schools? Academia? Where are the jobs there, without dragging my family all over creation?

You know, I'd make a great nurse.

And I'd get paid for my teaching and research in that field. Along with a little damn professional respect.

Too bad we'd go fifty thousand into debt to retrain me and lose my salary for a year.

SIGH. GROAN. HIT HEAD ON TABLE.

Jill’s thinking is at once valid AND heartbreaking, isn’t it.  Systems of teacher evaluation that are built around testing—which the Shanker Blog recently described as “designed to fail”—hold teachers accountable ONLY for content that can be tested.

In subjects like language arts, that leaves out huge swaths of critical skills—crafting persuasive arguments, engaging in collaborative dialogue, making critical judgments based on information—that are included in the required curriculum.

Which forces teachers into an almost untenable situation. 

We can choose to protect our jobs, crafting every lesson around the small handful of simple skills that ARE tested or we can protect our students, focusing our time on the kinds of skills that matter—and that are a part of our curriculum—but will do us no good when it comes to our own evaluations.

I call this walking the moral tightrope.

What choice would you make if you were in Jill’s shoes?

Would you push your principal to fill your classes with easier kids so that you could worry less about test results and more about teaching and learning?

Would you walk away from challenging schools completely, settling in the suburbs where you knew you could count on having kids who have spent a ton of time in museums and on educational vacations with their parents?

Would you strip down your lessons, focusing only on those skills that you knew were on the test even if it meant ignoring the kinds of skills that would matter to your kids later?

Could you live with yourself if you made any of those choices?

More importantly, can we live with ourselves as parents, as community leaders, and as elected officials knowing that OUR choices have forced teachers into these kinds of corners?

Is this REALLY what we want education in America to become?

_____________________________________

Related Radical Reads:

Education Nation, Oprah and the Bigger Picture

Arne Duncan is Just Plain Clueless

Testing is Destroying Our Schools

The Monster You’ve Created

Flush with cash at the turn of the 20th Century, the Royal Geographical Society was funding expeditions to some of the world’s final frontiers—including the Himalayas, Africa, the Arctic AND the Amazon. 

The stars in the Royal Geographical Universe were people like Ernest Shackleton, David Livingstone, Charles Darwin and Edmund Hillary—and with each new achievement, the Society cemented a well-deserved reputation for successful adventure and scholarship.

Look a little closer at the Society’s history, however, and you can find the story of an unmitigated disaster—a disaster that started with the Society’s concern for one of their quirkiest explorers, Percy Fawcett.

Fawcett—trained as a surveyor and mapmaker by the RGS—fell in love with the Amazon Rainforest on his first expedition there in 1906. 

The hitch was that Fawcett’s men were rarely in love with him.  He was a difficult and demanding leader, expecting his men to keep up and to carry their own weight in the almost unimaginable conditions of the remote jungle. 

Mutiny was never far away on a Fawcett expedition.

Concerned about Fawcett but determined to continue funding Amazon explorations, the RGS decided to pair the difficult leader with noted Arctic explorer James Murray on a 1911 expedition near the Bolivian-Peruvian border.

Murray—a leader in the relatively new field of microscopic research—had already made a name for himself on Ernest Shackleton’s 1907 expedition to Antarctica, where he had done groundbreaking research on everything from marine biology to meteorology. 

To put it simply, he was an accomplished explorer with a resume that could easily rival that of Fawcett.

Here’s the hitch: the skills and behaviors necessary for successful exploration in the Arctic are NOT the same skills and behaviors necessary for successfully exploring the Amazon. 

As David Grann explains in his 2009 book The Lost City of Z:

A polar explorer has to endure temperatures of nearly a hundred degrees below zero, and the same terrors over and over:  frostbite, crevices in the ice, and scurvy. 

He looks out and sees snow and ice, snow and ice—an unrelenting bleakness.  The psychological horror is in knowing that this landscape will never change, and the challenge is to endure…

In contrast, an Amazon explorer, immersed in a cauldron of heat, has his senses constantly assaulted. 

In place of ice, there is rain, and everywhere an explorer steps some new danger lurks: a malarial mosquito, a spear, a snake, a spider, a piranha.  The mind has to deal with the terror of constant seige. 

(Grann, Kindle Location 1724-1734)

Needless to say, Murray struggled—both with the demands of Fawcett AND the demands of the Amazon. 

He was appalled by the living conditions—hauling heavy packs on foot through hip deep mud, peeling maggots from under his skin and being attacked nightly by ravenous vampire bats were new experiences for him—and he bristled at the expectations of Fawcett, who simply didn’t tolerate weakness in others.

After weeks of essentially dragging Murray—a man who completely lost Fawcett’s respect after being caught stealing food from the party’s reserves—kicking and screaming through the Amazon, Fawcett came to a point of decision:  To keep moving forward with a weak, disgruntled Murray would leave the rest of the members of expedition in jeopardy. 

He had to be abandoned.

While no one was surprised by Fawcett’s decision—all were informed of Fawcett’s abandonment policy before the expedition began—none were comfortable with leaving this accomplished RGS explorer to die in the jungle either.

Instead, they diverted their mission and hauled a dirty, puss-filled, infected, gangrenous and discouraged Murray to a frontiersman who promised to lead him to safety. 

Murray’s story is an interesting one, isn’t it? 

Think about it:  He was already an accomplished explorer when he stumbled into Fawcett’s camp in the fall of 1911.  He’d learned from some of the best, experienced—and even thrived—in demanding circumstances, and been recognized at the highest levels of the exploring world.

But while they were valuable, his experiences didn’t automatically translate to success in the jungle. 

Exploring the Amazon was just too different than exploring the Arctic had been. While he was talented, he didn’t have the unique set of talents necessary for succeeding in a NEW challenging environment.  

Now don’t get me wrong:  Murray probably had a better chance at succeeding in the Amazon than you or I would—and I’m sure that with a bit of persistence, time and training, he probably could have become a successful Amazonian explorer.

But he didn’t have that time and training.  Instead, he was thrown into a demanding situation for which he was unprepared by a group of under-informed society bureaucrats sitting safely at the RGS in London.

And he failed. 

Miserably.

That’s an important lesson for educational policymakers who believe that accomplished teachers should be automatically recruited and/or assigned to high needs schools. 

Sure, accomplished teachers share common traits regardless of where they are working. 

Most of the time, they care deeply for kids AND for their content areas.  More importantly, they almost always have a firm grasp of content-specific pedagogy—the instructional practices that are most effective at delivering content to kids.

But there are unique demands in high needs schools that accomplished teachers in the suburbs aren’t automatically prepared to handle.  

The Fawcetts of our neediest schools are culturally competent, understanding how students and families from diverse backgrounds see schooling.  They are also highly skilled at pairing students with services that can address the challenges of living a life in poverty. 

Finally—even in the face of resource limitations that their suburban colleagues couldn’t possibly dream of—they are outstanding at creating differentiated lessons designed to help students struggling to succeed academically.

Simply hoping—as so many of our current educational policies do—that we can pack high needs buildings with enough Murrays to close the achievement gap between students of poverty and wealth is a narrow-sighted choice at best and a downright ignorant one at the worst.

Unless we are ready to start pairing proposals to draw—or force—accomplished teachers from the suburbs to the inner-city with ongoing, job-embedded professional development designed to prepare new recruits for the unique demands of their new environments, our ‘expeditions’ will fail miserably too.

_________________________________

Work Cited:

Grann, D. (2009). The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. New York, NY: Doubleday.

A friend of mine who teaches in a high poverty school dropped me a really discouraging email today. 

She told me that a training specialist assigned to her school had dropped in to one of their faculty’s vertical articulation meetings to offer feedback on the school’s attempts to integrate annotation into their reading instruction. 

Her message was less than inspirational, though.  Here’s the most disturbing quote:

"I tell kids this is not fun…This is work, and most of the reading you'll do in life will not be for fun."

My first reaction was to load up the digital bazooka and blaze this woman. 

Not only can annotating text be fun when teachers decide to tap into the social nature of today’s students and integrate  shared annotation tools like Diigo into their work—something I’ve written extensively about before—but what kind of failed thinking leads any teacher to tell kids that “most of the reading you’ll do in life will not be for fun.”

Then, I just plain felt bad for the woman. 

As a guy who is literally consumed by reading—I probably finish 60 books a year and damn near all of them are fun even when they are tied to my profession—I want everyone to feel the same rush that comes from getting lost in a new title for a few hours. 

More importantly, I want every student to know a teacher who loves reading more than most anything.  That modeling matters.

But then I started to think that maybe—just maybe—this woman might be right.  Maybe reading—especially in high-poverty schools—ISN’T fun.

I mean, here’s just a FEW reasons why reading isn’t fun—for teachers or for students—anymore:

Reading is used as a school-quality indicator in almost every building on earth. 

That means the stakes are high and the pressure is on reading teachers—and their principals, and their staff developers, and their superintendents—all the time.

Holy heck:  In California, they’ve gotten to the point where newspapers publish teacher ratings based on reading and math scores—a move that may have led one educator to end his life.

No wonder teachers have a hard time spreading the word that reading is fun.  When public humiliation is the consequence for poor test scores, it’s hard to see reading as anything other than a chore.

And more importantly, when public humiliation is the consequence for poor reading scores, it’s hard to inspire a true love of reading in your students.  That professional resentment has got to have an impact on the message our teachers are sending our kids about reading, don’t you think?

Reading is used as a promotion gateway in almost every building on earth. 

That means the stakes are equally high for every student every time that they step into a reading classroom.  The pressure in many places is so great that struggling students see elective classes and recess periods replaced with reading remediation sessions until their eyes bleed.

Worse yet, struggling students are often exposed to drill-and-kill, uber-scripted reading lessons that no one could ever enjoy—and if they attend the neediest schools, they are far more likely to have under-qualified teachers delivering those lessons.

Are we having fun yet?

Kids don’t have the background knowledge necessary to succeed in content area reading classes.

One of the points that has sat in the back of my mind ever since spending three days studying Readicide with author and reading expert Kelly Gallagher is that every time we cut minutes for science and social studies instruction from the school day—a common occurrence in Accountability Nation—we kill a reader.

Here’s why:  As students get older, nonfiction reading plays an increasingly important role in their lives.  Having been raised in schools that cut nonfiction classes from the curriculum, however, our kids have no background knowledge to draw from when they’re trying to tackle content-heavy text.

That DOES make reading in science and social studies classes a complete chore for kids. 

And every time that students struggle to understand the content-heavy text that they’re asked to work through in classes where they have no background experience to draw from, they’re turned off from nonfiction reading.

It’s one of those vicious-cycle-thingys.

We’ve spent the better part of a decade bribing kids to read.

I’m sure that someone, somewhere meant well when they started reading reward programs like Accelerated Reader and Book It.  After all, what could be better than motivating kids to read?  And what better motivator than earning points to spend towards prizes or pizza!

Every kid loves prizes and pizza, right?

Sure they do.  But—as I explained in a recent Radical post—as soon as you start to incentivize any kind of behavior, you’re screwed.

See, once you start incentivizing behaviors, your intended targets—young readers, in this case—shift from working on social norms to working on market norms.

Translation:  Students go from reading for fun to reading for stuff—and if they’re not sufficiently motivated by the stuff you’ve got to give, they stop reading completely.

Sound familiar?

Does any of this make sense? 

Is it possible that schools—working with the best of intentions in a high stakes world where paranoia over struggling readers has reached a fever pitch—have inadvertently ruined reading for a generation?

What other factors make reading no fun in your buildings and in the lives of your students? 

More importantly, what can we do—if anything—to save it?

Memo

To:  NBC, Education Nation, Oprah, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, and Bill Gates

From: A classroom teacher.

CC: Anyone who will listen—which is likely to be a short list.

Date: September 25, 2010

RE: Your Stranglehold on American Education

______________________________________________

The defining moment in my 17-year teaching career—a moment I’ve never chosen to write about because it was so hurtful—took place in the conference room of an ineffective principal who had decided to reprimand me. 

While there were lots of tense moments between us, the tipping point came when she’d hired extra gym teachers to get the numbers in our PE classes down to a more manageable size.  The result:  I was trying to teach 36-38 kids—dozens with special education needs—in my language arts classes. 

I pushed back.  She got pissed.  I was written up. 

In the course of our meeting, I asked for the logic behind placing 38 kids in my language arts classroom when there were only 18-20 in most of our gym classes.  Her response:

“Bill, you’re just a teacher.  You don’t see the bigger picture.  If you need more desks, let me know.”

I vowed, then and there, to NEVER let her accusation that I couldn’t possibly understand the ‘bigger picture’ because I’m ‘just a classroom teacher’—an accusation that you seem to share, considering your very public choices to leave teachers out of the important conversations you’ve started on education—to be true. 

I promised myself that I’d study damn near everything there was to know about education beyond the classroom.

And I have. 

Here’s a list of just a few of my experiences:

• I studied the impact that teacher working conditions have on student learning, first with the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ) and then with the New Teacher Center.
• In the course of that project, I worked with CTQ to research and develop a series of action steps that teachers, principals, policymakers, and community leaders could take to improve school leadership and professional development.
• I’ve moderated conversations between our state’s National Board Certified Teachers on the kinds of incentives that would attract teachers to high needs schools.
• I’ve co-authored a policy document with Barnett Berry—CTQ founder—on the challenges of recruiting teachers to high needs schools. 
• I’ve spoken on Capitol Hill alongside Linda Darling-Hammond on the challenges of recruiting teachers to high needs schools. 
• As a part of a team of teachers assembled by CTQ, I’ve studied the issue of redesigning professional compensation for teachers, learning from the likes of Eric Hanushek and Brad Jupp.
• I coauthored a policy document with that team of teachers offering best strategies built from research and our knowledge of schools for redesigning teacher compensation. 

Convinced that I’m credible yet? 

Remember—I haven’t even mentioned my classroom accomplishments.  I’ve been certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, I’ve written two books—one on restructuring schools as professional learning communities and one on teaching for tomorrow—and I’ve presented at the state and national level dozens of times.

Oh yeah, and remember that I AM still ‘just a teacher.’ 

That means I can translate the learning I’m doing about ‘the bigger picture’ back to my school and my classroom, something that NONE of your ‘educational experts’—including that guy from Netflix—can do.

In the course of all of this work, I’ve learned a ton of lessons about your beloved “bigger picture.” 

They include:

Publicly humiliating schools and teachers serving high needs communities is failed policy:  While I’m ashamed to admit it, I’ve purposely avoided working in schools of poverty because of the never-ending criticism they receive in the press and the never-ending pressure they’re under as a result of ignorant state and federal policies.

That means you should be ashamed of your efforts to encourage and promote people and/or programs that believe public ridicule is an effective reform strategy because you’re only driving good teachers away from the students who need them the most.

Tying individual teachers to test scores is failed policy:  I’ve spent the better part of my teaching career in the reading and writing classroom—a logical choice considering that I’m a published writer, don’t you think? 

But those years—particularly since y’all decided that tying teachers to test scores made sense—have left me bitter and angry at my colleagues in untested subjects who don’t equally share the burden of your coercive accountability efforts. 

They’ve also forced me to question and to walk away from practices that I know are responsible in an effort to make sure that my students’ test scores ‘make the grade.’

Heck, I’ve even left the tested subjects this year, choosing to teach science for the simple reason is that it isn’t tested.

That means you should be ashamed of your efforts to put test scores first in your work to reform America’s schools. 

Doing so has not only dumbed down the instruction that our students are receiving, it’s chasing good teachers from the classrooms where you need them the most. 

Using compensation as a cudgel is failed policy:  Like most of the people drawn to our nation’s classrooms, I’ve never been too motivated by money.  Instead, I’m drawn to the classroom out of a commitment to serve. 

And while I think I should be paid a professional wage for the professional work that I do, the cockamamie merit pay programs that you continually promote turn my stomach. 

You see, the best work that I’ve ever done has been when I reflect with a team of colleagues who are equally passionate about improving their practice.  That collaboration enriches me and exposes me to ideas that I may have never considered on my own.  

That means you should be ashamed of your efforts to pit teachers against one another in some sort of sick competition to be compensated fairly. 

Not only are such plans cop outs—giving you the chance to ignore the larger issue that our nation doesn’t compensate ANY teachers fairly—they serve as a disincentive to the kind of collective investigation necessary for spreading effective practices across buildings and communities. 

Do you REALLY think I’m going to share what I know with those I’m competing against for your pot of performance cash?

Mostly what I’ve learned, though, is that ‘bigger pictures’ are really nothing more than tools used by those in power to exclude those perceived as weak from important conversations. 

You don’t want me involved in your television programming or the most important panels of your national summits because you know that I’d strip the thin varnish off of the truth that you’ve been hiding for almost a decade: 

Educational reforms never work in America because they’re not designed by practicing educators.

Instead, you’re content to patronize the American schoolteacher.  You’ll celebrate the mythology well enough—praising the matronly, apple-wielding women who you learned from—and then ignore the reality that your unwillingness to believe that we might just know something about how to save our schools has destroyed any chance that our schools will be saved.

Where does that leave us?

You’ll keep blowing smoke up each other’s skirts—over power lunches in important places like DC, Chicago and New York, mind you—about how brilliant you are while overlooking the fact that NOTHING YOU’VE DONE HAS WORKED.

I’ll keep hating you for it.

And our kids will keep falling farther behind.

One of the greatest shames that I carry with me is the one year that I spent working outside of suburbia.  Needing a professional change, I transferred from a school where less than 10% of my students were living in poverty to a school where just over 30% were living in poverty.

Now, I know what you're thinking:  "This guy's lost his mind if he thinks that a school where 30% of the students living in poverty is a difficult place to work."

But even working in a school that many of my peers in more challenging buildings would describe as "easy," I knew that I'd made a mistake from the day that I walked in the front door.  You see, we had a faculty meeting where the results of our state's testing program were announced and my new staff celebrated wildly over the fact that they'd met---rather than exceeded---the state's testing expectations for their students.  That meant every teacher would earn a $750 bonus.

For me, though, that meant a $750 pay cut because the students in the affluent suburbs where I'd spent the previous 10 years of my career always exceeded the state's testing expectations, earning teachers a $1,500 yearly bonus.

It didn't take long for naive little me to figure out why meeting expectations was such a cause for celebration in my new school. 

The work was HARD.  My classes were full of small handfuls of students struggling through the social wreckage that poverty inevitably causes.  I had kids who were homeless or whose parents were imprisoned.  I had kids who'd never been to museums or to libraries.  I had kids who came to school hungry on a regular basis. 

Life was a fight for each of them---and that fight constantly spilled over into my classroom. 

Having fallen behind their peers academically, an all-too-common pattern for students living in poverty, many of the kids in my classes struggled to draw from background knowledge to understand new topics, to apply basic skills to new situations, or to produce sophisticated final products. 

While many had the potential to do well, it took high levels of commitment and determination to complete tasks that students living in middle or upper middle class neighborhoods worked through easily.

The result:  Complete frustration. 

I'd have students who could quickly calculate just how much effort it was going to take to get through assignments and then quit, not seeing the value in killing themselves to learn about geology or space.  I'd have students who would flip their desks or curse me out instead of looking foolish and slow in front of their more advantaged peers. 

I'd have students who simply couldn't believe that there was ever a chance for them to be taken seriously as knowledge creators, so they'd start punching the time clock, just waiting for the bell to ring at the end of every day.

Not being a guy to give up easily, I worked hard for my students.  I turned in to this weird hybrid professional:  Part cheerleader, part social worker, part cop, part guidance counselor, and part teacher. 

I'd create a thousand variations of every assignment, trying to find some way to motivate my students and to give them a different avenue to approach new content.  I'd design remediation lessons designed to build the background knowledge that was missing because of missed opportunities. 

I'd counsel kids after blow-ups in the hallways.  I'd try to pair kids with other school professionals who might be able to provide support.  I'd reach out to parents, trying to explain the routes that they could take to help their students reengage with school. 

But these efforts carried real costs:  I'd go home every single day completely discouraged and exhausted.  For every small step that I took forward, I'd have to expend more mental, emotional and professional energy than I had to give.  I felt like a modern day Sisyphus. 

My relationship with my wife suffered, my health suffered, and my ability to be fully present with my family suffered.  I'd crossed the line between a "career" and a "calling," and that wasn't a sacrifice I was willing to make.  And that's why I'd decided by January to make my way back to the 'burbs.

Maybe I SHOULD be ashamed of myself.  After all, I gave up.  Walked away.  Took the easy route.  Threw in the towel.  Raised the white flag.  Quit on my kids.

Heartless, huh? 

Being an accomplished teacher, though, I knew just how impossible the circumstances were in the building where I was teaching. 

No one gave me any extra time to plan with colleagues or to contact parents even though both of those tasks were far more time-consuming for me than they had been when I was working in the suburbs. My classes were as large as ever, making it difficult to provide the kind of focused and targeted attention that students with a huge range of strengths and weaknesses needed to be successful. 

Compounding the problem, I had no extra training opportunities in working with students who had learning disabilities or who came from communities struggling with poverty.  There were no extra resources in my building---textbooks, trade books, remedial collections, digital tools---that I could use to reach my low-income students, and there were no extra people----nurses, guidance counselors, social workers, police officers----that could help me to pair families with the kinds of supports that the kids back in Neverland never really needed.

Which is why I'd almost certainly be one of the 50+ percent of teachers on this year's Met Life Survey of the American Teacher who questioned whether every student really can succeed academically.  

Now don't get me wrong:  It's not that I think students of poverty have limited potential.  There are far too many examples of students and families who have overcome their life's circumstances to succeed regardless of the challenges that they face. 

I am convinced, however, that those examples are the exception rather than the rule simply because the schools children of poverty attend are often places where teaching and learning is nearly impossible. 

Yet in spite of mountains of evidence that high poverty schools are struggling to provide a sound, basic education for every child, policymakers and influential parents continue to march through life believing that with a bit more determination and a commitment to holding teachers accountable and setting high expectations, every child---regardless of how challenged their circumstances are---can succeed. 

Sounds beautiful, don't it?  Almost too good to be true?

That's because it is too good to be true. 

The truth is that success is often dependent on opportunities----and students living in poverty just don't have the same educational opportunities as students from middle and upper middle class homes.  Their teachers are overworked and under appreciated, causing all but the most committed to flee to easier schools. 

Their classrooms are so full of students with huge ranges of abilities that delivering targeted instruction is impossible.  Their schools are understaffed, unable to provide the kinds of professionals necessary to support families and students in crisis.  

Nope.  I don't think every student can succeed academically. 

But instead of being the result of unmotivated or incapable children, that's a direct result of the callous and under-informed approach that policymakers take towards addressing the challenges of students living in high-poverty communities. 

Their unwillingness to invest tangible resources---dollars, people and time---equitably instead of equally is evidence of our unwillingness to care for other people's children as much as we care for our own. 

Maybe I'm not the only one who should be ashamed.