opportunities that schools could provide. Health care: Children and families in poverty tend to avoid needed preventative health care, and then are forced to seek out the least economically efficient avenues for receiving basic and urgent care, emergency rooms. If public education is to transform society and the lives of children, all children must be guaranteed the health (and nutrition) that children in affluence experience. Stable work with rewarding salaries: Children and families in poverty often experience instability in the work of the parents and their homes since impoverished workers are competing with each other for entry-level and transient jobs. A stable workforce and increasing full-time jobs with benefits provide the basis upon which education can succeed where it has traditionally failed

Policymakers and the general public embrace the broad goals of education, includ-ing civic responsibility, democratic values, economic self-sufficiency, cultural com-petency and awareness, and social and economic opportunity.• Policymakers ensure that all schools have the fundamental educational resources they need to promote student success: effective teachers and principals, appropri-ate class sizes, challenging and culturally relevant curriculum and supportive in-structional resources, sufficient quality time for learning and development, up-to-date facilities and a safe environment.• Policymakers expand the scope of schools in high-poverty neighborhoods to pro-vide wrap-around services including nutritional supports, health clinics, parental education, extended learning time, recreational programs, and other services need-ed to meet the social, physical, cognitive, and economic needs of both students and families.• Policymakers promote a policy context that is supportive of equal opportunity: fo-cus testing on formative rather than high-stakes purposes, prevent or repeal poli-cies that allow for school resegregation, and renew the public commitment to pub-lic education.

Extended time for learning and development: The summer academic loss of less affluent children is a clear indicator of the difference in the quality of informal learning experiences. “Students from more affluent backgrounds are exposed to learning resources including books, computers, museum visits, and other social, cultural, and academic experiences.”14• High quality early childhood education and services: Perhaps the highest return on investment in education comes from universal, publicly funded, high-quality preschool.• Community schools and wrap-around services: “School-based programs that offer medical and dental care, psychological support, recreational activities, and social services for all children have long been shown to significantly impact students’ abil-ity to benefit from educational offerings.

test scores will make the nation strong, and those scores can be improved by pedagogy and driven by punishments, regardless of the vast differences in student circumstances. This approach faile

The income gap between families in the top and bottom 20 percent of the income distribution has increased in 2011 dollars from $59,324 in 1947 to $177,844 in 2010—an increase of nearly 300 percent.”8

Unfortunately, with the ascendance of test scores and international economic com-petitiveness as education’s most loudly proclaimed purposes, the nation has forgotten that universal public education was established primarily for the benefits it provides to the com-mon good

now no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people them-selves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their controul (sic) with a wholsome (sic) discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to in-form their discretion by education

illustration. There a large cluster of “parents and com-munity” members are pictured prominently on the sidelines, outside the turn-around schools circle with no path by which they can gain access to the turnaround schools. Though perhaps intended to look like a cheering crowd, instead, given the genuine lack of attention to parent involvement throughout the turnaround reports, the figures take on the appearance of demonstrators protesting for greater participation in the school improvement process

Although there is an occasional acknowledgement that students in low-achieving schools often live in poverty, there is no attempt to understand what it means for students’ learning experiences. Similarly, there is no atten-tion given to the importance of understanding developmental stages of child-hood and adolescence and how this impacts learning

hat is, although common factors such as high-levels of student poverty may frequently be present in persistently low-performing schools, every school also has an individual history and evolution that has resulted in a unique set of strengths, liabilities, opportuni-ties, and weaknesses

For example, a study by Birman, Aladjem, and Orland (2010) found that 262 schools out of an initial sample of 1,098 schools were able to significantly improve their achievement in 1 year. Unfortunately, of these 262, only 12 were able to sustain their improve-ment for more than 1 year. Indeed, slow and steady growth schools had a higher percentage of sustained improvement than did turnaround schools who had seen sudden and drastic improvement for 1 year

There is no evidence of widespread success of turnaround schooling (indeed, emerging evidence indicates extremely limited success at best), yet it receives high priority in federal education policy

She explained that, through application of drastic personnel maneuvers, turnarounds “engender the exact conditions . . . linked with persistent low performance—high turnover, insta-bility, poor climate, inexperienced teachers, and racial and socioeconomic segregation”

Entertainments, spectacles, service jobs and manual labor will keep the masses busy and in debt

he mechanism proposed for measuring teacher performance was assessing the performance of their students on standardized tests

“Strategic philanthropy” became their modus operandi. I doubt the world has ever produced such a large pool of rich education “visionaries,” “disruptors,” and “revolutionaries.”

these reforms had an appreciable effect on student achievement or that they mitigated inequality[20] didn’t deter the Gates, Walton, and Broad Foundations, among others, from aggressively selling their basket of favored neo-liberal reforms.The successes of these reforms were not found in systemic improvements in educational outcomes.Instead, what these measures actually succeeded at was concealing under a veneer of idealism and public service the power relationships responsible for the misery of students in working class and im-poverished communities; establishing efficient mechanisms for leveraging public capital investments in school facilities, and capturing public funding for instruction and student services; and launching a private education sector large enough to export American educational products and services to a world ready and waiting, thanks to the framework provided by the WTO agreement

reality that the specter haunting public education was poverty and inequality

The “remedy” for the economic dislocation of blue-collar workers was re-training.Future workers would need schools that trained them for success in a transformed labor market. The alleged “failure” of public education to prepare students for the high-skilled global economy was the focus of Berliner and Biddle’s The Manufactured Crisis.[14] The result of their close examination of the central arguments made about the so-called education crisis and its impact on the U.S. economy is captured in the book’s title: the “crisis” had been manufactured.

I could not imagine that to preserve their pow-er and wealth, the moneyed elites would seek to dismantle redistributionist New Deal policies. The New Deal was built on a system of progressive taxation and public investment. If U.S. elites were to retain their relative wealth and power as the rest of world began to compete with the U.S. economi-cally, then the progressive edifice that Roosevelt had constructed would have to be set aside, taxes on wealth and profits reduced, wages suppressed, and a greater share of government costs shifted to the working class

How do we explain the contemporary re-ality that in the U.S. more and more people are working more and more hours for less and less money, and are doing so with less and less economic security in a world that is vastly richer than the world in which I grew up?

was born into and grew up in a world dominated by New Deal redistributive social policies, and by the economic advantages of being a citizen of the dominant economic, political, and military power on the planet

The world being called into existence is based on the belief that anyone, but not everyone, can succeed—a world of winners and losers, each of whom has earned his or her fate

he symbols change and the societysometimes even accepts standards like “equal opportunity” that civil rightsadvocates have urged on it, but in practice, somehow such standards serve tostrengthen, not weaken, the subordinate status of African-Americans.

he law describes residents of Inner City as “incidental beneficiaries,”those who a contract may have benefitted even though the contracting partiesdid not have them in mind. This is precisely the condition in which blackpeople find themselves in racial policy-making. Given that they have oftenworked hard in seeking remedies for varying forms of discrimination, they arecertainly interested in the contracting or policy-making process, but as far asthe law is concerned, they are only “incidental,” or fortuitous beneficiaries.That is, white policy-makers adopt racial policies that sacrifice black interestsor recognize and provide relief for discrimination in accordance with theirview of the fortuitous convergence of events.

he Justice Departmenturged invalidating segregation as a means of improving America’s image asthe country competed with Russia to influence mainly non-white peopleemerging from colonialist domination.

The real motivation for Lincoln’s action, as his advisors had predicted,was that the Emancipation Proclamation:—disrupted the Southern work force;—served to prevent France and England from entering the war on the side of theConfederacy, and;—opened the way for the enlistment of blacks; by war’s end more than 200,000 blackswere serving in the Union Army

Actually, as a legal matter, the Proclamation freed no slaves. Its termswere specifically limited to those areas still under the control of theConfederacy, and thus beyond the reach of federal law.Slaveholdingterritories which had sided with the Union were carefully excluded. ButLincoln’s dramatic action had a symbolic effect that far exceeded its legalforce. Blacks made no distinction between the areas covered by theProclamation and those excluded from its impact

the Brown decision in 1954 is thetwentieth century equivalent of the Emancipation Proclamation in thenineteenth. Both had symbolic value for black people, promising racialjustice;andneither provided substantive government enforcement to eliminatethe oppression blacks suffered—first from abject slavery and then from racialsegregation.

while we must be true to ourselves, the only way to really do so is in rdation to others, in taking into ac-count our historicaL cultural, and social contexts

As Taylor (1991) contends, "modern freedom and autonomy centres us <)D ourselves, and the ideal of authenticity requires that we discover and articulate our own identity" (p. 81). This is crucial in order to attain conHdence in one's self-worth and ability to reach one's life goals--self-respect, which Rawls (1971) called "perhaps the most important primary good" (p. 440). We must define ourselves not just within the smnetimes dantaging cate-gories society might have assigned to us, but within a secure personal and cultural structure. Without such a structure, people's cultural identi-ties are undermined or even denied, and yuung people especially often lose the opportunity to have solid role models and lile goals

First, one's feeling of authenticity stems from the inside, fron1 inner reflection upon one's personal iden~ tity. Second, it stems from one's relations with others

The key, as 1 will address Jn the next section, is that although the framework may be unchosen, it should not be unjustly limited constrained social contexts of choice.

Thus one can criticize another's conception of the good only on grounds of inconsistency with her or his overall life plan, not because it is somehow ·wrong or misguided

. contemporary liberals bc-Heve that in the name of justice we should focus on people's autonomy and free choice, but always within the context of their and cul-ture, not detached from them

I contend that race-conscious education policies are defensible because they play a central role in the develop-ment of self-determination of students who otherwise are left with a deficient education.

People adept at logical reasoning who lack moral character are sophists of the worst sort: they rationalize their self-interest, by cleverly using moral arguments to serve whatever ends they happen to chose for themselves. They do not take morality seriously nor are they able to distinguish between the obvious moral demands and the agonizing dilemmas of life. But neither can we find democratic citizens among people who possess sturdy moral character without a developed capacity for reasoning

he most relevant result of such courses from the perspective of democratic education is not an increase in political knowledge, cultural literacy (in the narrow sense), or even political trust or efficacy, but an increase in the willing- ness and ability of students to reason and argue about politics, collectively and critically, respectful of their reasonable differences, a willingness and ability that is distinctively democratic.

). Further, in addition to smaller classes, children in high-poverty settings should be exposed to teachers of at least equal qualifications and effectiveness, but numerous studies indicate substantial gaps in teacher-quality measures between higher- and lower-poverty schools

Our direct income transfer policies do less to redistribute overall and to lower income persons than do the policies in other nations. America began the last quarter of the 20th century with higher inequality than in any other nation and our inequality increased by more than in any other nation over this period, through expansion and contraction of the economy. (p. 97

The wealth of the top 7 percent rose from an average of $2.5 million in 2009 to $3.2 million in 2011, an increase of 28 percent. The wealth of the lower 93 percent decreased from $139,896 to $133,817, a drop of 4 percent. These wide differences were likely driven by rallying stock and bond markets and flat home prices (

Wealth differences are seen in groups defined in terms of family structure, education, racial or ethnic background, occupation, etc. While these differences mirror differences in income, the wealth differences tend to be larger. For example, the mean family net worth for White non-Hispanics in 2010 was $654,500, compared to $175,000 for non-Whites or Hispanics. The comparable medians are $130,600 and $20,400, respectively.

Although White Americans comprise the largest number of people in poverty in the United States, the poverty rate for Hispanics and Blacks is significantly higher. More than one-fourth of these populations meet the official definition of poverty.

teachers worked no more than six hours a day and took no work home with them (Bourne). The idea was that teachers, as exemplars, ought to enjoy the time an energy necessary to attend town meetings and participate in the larger civic life.

is the force of ourideology that it prevents us from seeing that unemployment is no disease; rather it is the healthy and blissful functioning of an advanced technological society.Our jobs an

Moreover, while students from wealthy districts will not likely suffer greatly when they graduate in the bottom half of their classes or score below the 50th percentile on the SAT, the success of all those fortunate children comes at the expense of children from other schools, in other communities, where academic achievement is rarely enough to help them escape the meaty consequences of poverty.

be logically uncontroversial to say that, within capitalist institutions, the finest individuals are those who best serve the needs of capital: productive and efficient workers, congenial but ultimately competitive, habituated to subordination, and ethically quieted regarding thecasualties and larger purposes of the enterprise.Deriving from John Locke, who lived and wrote during a time

Rendered at worst invisible, or at best secondary,were qualities such as honesty, cooperation, and imaginatio

rvice, whose tests today perpetuate and proliferate the same malign divisions and discriminations.

he task of social engineering in the name of Progress.

Taylorism and the consolation prize of consumerism amidsta proliferating commodity culture as salvefor the wound of castration inflicted by the wage contract

ortantly, schooling helped break young proletarian boys and girlsaway from the ethics and ambitions of their peasant parents.The Indu

re is, however, another horizon of opportunity,once widely shared by all who called our nation “the last, best hope of Earth.”In sharp contrast to Europe, America offeredordinary (white) folks, peasants,and artisans,the