The Best Education Books of 2015

Here is my year-end list of books that every well-informed educator and public education advocate should read. The list is not all-inclusive; it includes only books that came to my attention and it certainly reflects my personal tastes and biases.  I think, however, you will find these books important, informative and written with heart, passion, style, intelligence and commitment.

Please support these authors and the often small publishing houses who get these books made.

In Praise of American Educators: And How they Can Become Even Better, by Dr. Richard Dufour, Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Former teacher and principal, Rick DuFour, offers both a spirited defense of public school teachers against the slings and arrows of corporate education reformers and a prescription for the continuing improvement of the profession. DuFour's concept of the professional learning community was very influential in my own administrative work over the last 10 years. His faith in teachers and in teacher's ability to improve their own practice through a culture of collaboration seems to me to be a major contribution to the field of teaching and learning.

In his current book, DuFour takes on every criticism of the American public school teacher and shows conclusively through thoroughgoing documentation and evidence, that teachers are not the problem and that indeed the current generation of American educators is the best we have ever seen. After analyzing all the "schools are failing" rhetoric in detail, DuFour concludes that "a fair and balanced analysis of the evidence can only lead to the conclusion that American schools and the educators within them are not failing, and are, in fact, achieving some of the best result's in our nation's history."

DuDour then takes on every proposed reform measure for improving schools (charter, vouchers, test-based accountability, value added measures, merit pay and school closures) and shows how they will not lead to improved learning and how all are doing damage to student learning and the teaching profession. Real improvement is possible, according to DuFour, if we change the scope and frequency of testing, pay the college costs for high performing high school students who enter the teaching profession, establish career ladders with increasing responsibilities and compensation for teachers, establish clear guidelines for what teachers should know and be able to do, provide universal early childhood education, support career and technical education, and ensure that teachers are provided with time for collaboration.

It is through this concept of teacher collaboration and the development of a collaborative culture in schools that DuFour believes real and ongoing improvement can be made. The rest of the book lays out how teachers and their leaders can establish a collaborative structure that leads to improved student learning. In DuFour's collaborative professional learning communities, student learning improves through teachers learning from teachers, through viable curriculum developed and delivered by teachers and through assessment that informs and improves instructional practice.

Rick DuFour's vision of the American school is one that rejects quick education reformer fixes and focuses on the professional educators in the schools collaborating to improve student learning. It is a vision that I believe all of this "greatest generation of educators" can embrace.

Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance, by P.L. Thomas. New York, NY: Garn Press.

Many of you may know P. L. Thomas from his own fine blog, the becoming radical, where Thomas holds forth in his own unique and winning way on issues of public education, pedagogy, literature and social justice. His book, Beware the Roadbuilders, is must reading for anyone interested in these same topics. You can find my full review of the book here. The "roadbuilders" of the title are the education reformers; those plutocrats, politicians and pundits who have seized on urban education as the "civil rights issue of our time." 

But this book is much more than an anti-reform polemic. This is a book for people who love literature and love finding the lessons in literature that help us understand our own lives and the world we live in. In Roadbuilders, Thomas leads us on one reader's journey into critical understanding. It is a journey informed by personal experience and shaped through the reading of great literature. I encourage you to join Thomas on his journey.


The Prize: Whose in Charge of America's Schools, by Dale Russakoff. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.

The Prize is the great cautionary tale of all cautionary tales for education reformers. Russakoff, a long-time Washington Post reporter, tells the story of Facebook entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg's 100 million dollar gift to the public schools of Newark, NJ. This gift was so extraordinary that it was announced on The Oprah Winfrey Show with Newark Mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie sharing the stage with Zuckerberg.

In the end this 100 million failed to make any appreciable differences in the lives of the students of the Newark Public Schools. The reason it did not is a story laced with hubris, arrogance and lack of understanding of the issues. Essentially each of the players wanted to use the money for his own political agenda, Zuckerberg to experiment with teacher merit pay, Christie to damage the teacher unions, and Booker to open more charter schools and advance his own political career. The leaders of the project failed because they ignored the people who would be most impacted by the money: the teachers, students and community members of Newark. This was a failure of top down reform. Reform driven by carpetbaggers from outside the city, including Christie's hand-picked superintendent of schools, Cami Anderson.

Russakoff does not make the same mistake as the reformers. She goes out and talks to teachers, students and parents in the community and it is their stories that make this book rise above the level of expose' to the level of great reporting and great sociological insight. If Zuckerberg, Christie and Booker had had a little of this insight, this tragic waste of resources might have been avoided.

Preparing the Nation's Teachers to Teach: A Manifesto in Defense of "Teacher Educators Like Me", by Curt Dudley-Maring. New York, NY: Garn Press.

Curt Dudley-Maring is one angry teacher educator. In this book, he takes on the reform minded National Center for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) for defaming the work of teacher educators everywhere through their sloppy and politically driven research on teacher education programs. Dudley-Maring does not let his justifiable anger interfere with a well-reasoned argument, however. In this brief book he systematically deconstructs NCTQ's criticisms of teacher education, while exposing the market driven ideology that underlies their efforts to discredit schools of education.

Dudley-Maring was a hero of mine long before he wrote this book. He is a long-time advocate of "meaning-based reading instruction" and I first came to know his work in this context. Dudley-Maring sees a clear connection between NCTQ's ratings of teacher education and the reformer take on reading instruction in simplistic behaviorist terms where phonics instruction takes center stage to the exclusion of all the other complex factors that make up skillful reading. For my money his section on "A meaning-based perspective on reading" is well worth the price of the book.

The reader comes away from this book with an understanding that teaching and learning, and especially teaching and learning to read, is a much more complicated and sophisticated intellectual enterprise than NCTQ evaluators, driven by a behaviorist ideology, could ever know or imagine. The book is a rousing defense of teachers and those who educate teachers.


The Reading Strategies Book: Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Readers, by Jennifer Serravallo. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

This one is for my readers who teach reading to children in grades K-8. Jen Serravallo, teacher, parent, consultant, has written what is simply the most useful, most comprehensive, best informed handbook for teaching reading imaginable. I wrote a full review of the book that you can read here. If you work with children and literacy you simply must have this book on your shelf. I gave it to my elementary teacher daughter for Christmas.

This book is informed by the best current research in literacy education; it is comprehensive in addressing all aspects of literacy learning K-8, and it is practical, offering specific targeted lessons based on student needs. I can see the classroom teachers reaching for this book everyday while planning their literacy lessons or when looking for just the right instructional approach for a student who is struggling.

So there you have my list. Please feel free to add your own favorites in the comment section. Right now I am reading a book that just arrived in the mail yesterday, A Teacher's Tale, by fellow blogger and defender of the profession John Thompson. It is an early favorite for next year's "Best of" list.

I look forward to still more rewarding reading in 2016. Happy New Reading Year!

The Least of Russ on Reading 2015

This is my second annual year-end compilation of blog posts that attracted very little attention the first time around, but that I think are worthy of a second chance at life. It has been a year of extremes for this blog, with some posts attracting thousands upon thousands of readers and others, like the ones collected here, not so much. So while others in the media present their "Best of..." and "Worst of ... lists, I offer "The Least of Russ on Reading 2015." I hope you find something interesting or informative here that you might have missed the first time around.

From Complex Text to Considerate Text

The Common Core calls for children to read more complex text, I call for writers to write more "considerate" text to aid readers in comprehending text book writing.

Do Children Really Shift from Learning to Read to Reading to Learn?

A common fallacy is that the early grades are for learning to read and after 3rd grade kids shift to reading to learn. I argue that kids are reading to learn from the very beginning of reading instruction and if we don't understand this, we will not provide the instruction they need.

You've Got to Be Taught

Racism is not a natural human condition, but one that is taught. In this post I discuss how if racism is taught in the home, tolerance can be taught in the schools.

Getting the Schools All Children Deserve

If we believe that children's lives matter, than we must recognize that all children deserve to attend clean, safe, well-resourced and fully staffed schools.

A Holiday Gift of Poetry 2015

This is the third holiday season for Russ on Reading and the third opportunity to share some poetry for the holidays. This year, as with every year, I am convinced that the world would be a better place if the people of the world read and shared more poetry. I am also reminded that all cultures and all religious traditions have their poetry and that much of that poetry speaks to what is universal in all of us.

A huge thank you to all of my readers. Thank you for reading and sharing my work. I am pleased to be able to share the work of these great poets with you. Have a peaceful and joyous holiday.

Holidays
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows;--
The happy days unclouded to their close;
The sudden joys that out of darkness start
As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart
Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!
White as the gleam of a receding sail,
White as a cloud that floats and fades in air,
White as the whitest lily on a stream,
These tender memories are;--a fairy tale
Of some enchanted land we know not where,
But lovely as a landscape in a dream.

The Boy at the Window
By Richard Wilbur

Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a God-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear. 

Burning of the Old Year

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds,

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems,

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn't,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,

only the things I didn't do

circle after the blazing dies.

     from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, OR: Far Corner Books, 1995)

Meaningful Work in the Literacy Classroom

In my last post I discussed the concept of meaningful work and how it is essential to the recruitment,
development and retention of teachers. In this post I would like to address how meaningful work is essential to student learning. As teachers we have every right to demand the autonomy, complexity and rewards that are necessary to making our work meaningful. At the same time, we have the professional obligation to provide meaningful work for our students, so that we may help activate student motivation to learn and the students may optimize their learning.

As Malcolm Gladwell has discussed in his 2009 book, Outliers, meaningful work is one major component of achieving success in life. It is meaningful work that drives people to master a complex craft, whether it be in the arts, as with The Beatles and the hours upon hours of practice they got in Hamburg, Germany strip clubs before they hit it big; or in the sciences, as with Bill Gates, who spent thousands and thousands of hours writing computer programs before he achieved success with Microsoft; or in sports, where Michael Jordan couldn’t even make his high school basketball team and yet through hard practice went on to become the greatest player of all time. To learn something well takes time and commitment (and yes, talent. But many talented people have not achieved greatness).

How do we get this type of commitment to hard work from our students? One possible answer is by providing them with meaningful work. The work that The Beatles, Bill Gates and Michael Jordan did was personally meaningful to them, so they were willing to make the commitment and put in the effort. What can teachers learn from this?

In an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, Gladwell defined meaningful work this way:

Meaningful work is one of the most important things we can impart to children. Meaningful work is work that is autonomous. Work that is complex, that occupies your mind. And work where there is a relationship between effort and reward — for everything you put in, you get something out…

So meaningful work involves autonomy, complexity and direct relationship between effort and reward. It may seem a daunting task to provide every individual in our class with meaningful work as Gladwell defines it. But let’s take a close look at this through the discipline that I know best – literacy.

By definition, literacy is meaningful work. Whether we are reading or listening, writing or speaking, we are in the business of making meaning or communicating meaning. Too often, however, the way we teach these skills obscures the meaningfulness of the work. What would a meaningful approach to literacy instruction look like? A look at Gladwell’s three elements of meaningful work might be helpful.

Autonomy

In order to provide students with autonomy in reading and writing, we need to insure that students get a considerable element of choice in their reading and writing. In reading this means time is given over in class to independent reading. Students need to be encouraged to explore their passions through reading and teachers need to be knowledgeable about a broad range of reading choices and student interests to guide children toward reading they may be passionate about. As students read independently, teachers are available to assist students over bumpy patches, confer with students about their understanding of what they are reading and suggest other books on similar topics.

As a 9^th grader in Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in 1961, I, along with everyone else in my English class, was assigned to read Silas Marner, by George Eliot. I am sure Silas Marner is a great book, but as a fourteen year-old mainly interested in baseball and girls, I hated that book. I could not make sense of it and eventually gave up reading it and tried to fake my way through the class and the subsequent test. The back of the edition of Silas Marner I was given, however, contained a short novel by John Steinbeck, The Pearl. Sitting in class one day trying to avoid being called upon, I stumbled across The Pearl, and started reading. I loved it. I was transported from my classroom to coastal Mexico and I was transfixed by the graceful sentences wrought by Mr. Steinbeck. I read it during class, on the bus on the way home from school, and finished it that night in bed. I quickly became a Steinbeck aficionado and by the end of high school had read virtually everything he had written (Steinbeck wrote a lot of short novels that I found great for book reports). My choice to read Steinbeck unleashed a previously untapped passion to read. If we are to develop life-long readers, we are going to have to provide students with some choice.

In writing, autonomy means providing children with choice in their topics, real purposes for writing and genuine audiences to receive the writing. Students often aren’t very good at identifying the topics they are passionate about and that is where the teacher comes in, helping children identify a passion, a concern, an area of expertise and helping them find their voice to communicate about these things. I think of the book Black Ants and Buddhists, by teacher Mary Cowhey, that shows how an entire classroom of children was activated to read, write and think critically about issues of social justice through a discussion of a troop of ants that invaded the classroom one day. Kids feel passionately about many things, rather than assigning writing topics, we would do better to help students find those topics of passion and guide them to write about them.

What about the skills you ask? What about grammar? What about spelling? What about vocabulary? I would argue that when kids are reading deeply and writing thoughtfully based on a level of autonomy in the classroom, we can teach any of the skills within that context, either through directly instructing through mini-lessons or through individual conferences.

Complexity

Both reading and writing are, of course, complex processes. The trick here is applying Gladwell’s complexity principle to teaching and learning. Students are capable of complex work and complex thought, but this complexity must be mediated by a teacher. Where we want students to be working is in their “zone of proximal development”, that is, at a level of thinking that is just above where they can function easily and comfortably, but not so far above their level that they cannot make meaning of the material. Writing provides an ideal medium for this type of instruction, since when children are writing on their own chosen topics and are writing for their own chosen reasons, the work is uniquely individualized and children are working in their zone. Teachers can then work with students to move that zone forward through conferences where suggestions for extending, refining and reorganizing thought can be conducted.

Reading creates some different kinds of challenges when it comes to complexity. If a text is too complex for a particular reader, meaning will be lost and the reader may lose interest. On the other hand, if the child is particularly interested in a topic, she may struggle through a “too difficult” text through shear will. As the teacher our job is to advise students on reading choices, let them try reading things we may think are too difficult sometimes, and support their growing understanding of the texts, again through conferences or mini-lessons.

We will also want to provide the students with exposure to complex texts through read-alouds. Since most children have a listening comprehension about two years above their reading level and since the teacher can provide mediation of the text while reading aloud, high quality challenging books should be chosen for classroom read-alouds. By asking students to grapple with more complex texts in the safety of the read-aloud environment, we can help insure both growth in reading comprehension and an interest in reading more difficult text.

Relationship between effort and reward

In the business world, the relationship between effort and reward is pretty clear: You work hard and well and you make more money. In school this relationship is more complex. A few education reformers have actually tried paying students for attending school and working hard with disappointing (for them) results. When we think in terms of effort and reward for school students we might think of grades, and hard work should, I suppose, be rewarded with good grades, although you will find many who say that grades should be based solely on achievement and not include effort.

To me, money or grades are false rewards. I would prefer to de-emphasize the grade as the reward and focus the rewards on what all real readers and real writers want – an audience for their thoughts and ideas. A writer wants to know what a reader thinks of the work. A reader wants to share thoughts on the reading with others and hear what others think. So as teachers we must read our students’ writing and listen to our students talk about their reading and provide genuine feedback that acknowledges what the student has done well and constructively suggests what the student needs to focus on next. We need to reward our students with respect for their efforts by being a knowledgeable audience for their efforts. I don’t think any monetary rewards or stickers can ever replace a few moments of rapt attention from the teacher. Students respond to teachers who are good listeners. Reward your students with the gift of your attention.

If this all sounds to you like a recommendation for a reader’s/writer’s workshop approach to literacy instruction, you would be correct. The workshop structure provides the opportunity for independent reading, personal choice writing, targeted mini-lessons and teacher conferring that will make the hard work of learning to read and write well meaningful work.

Teaching as Meaningful Work

In his terrific 2009 book on the complexity of success, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell identifies “meaningful work” as one necessary component of a fully successful life. Gladwell defines meaningful work as work that provides a person with autonomy, complexity and rewards that equal the effort put forth. Gladwell identifies teaching (and medicine and entrepreneurship) as meaningful work.

I went into teaching because, even as wide-eyed, idealistic, eighteen year-old entering college, I had a sense that teaching was meaningful work. In my years as a human resources director for a school district, I encountered literally dozens of adults who were in the midst of a career change from the business world into teaching because they were looking for more meaningful work. I believe the vast majority of us who are teachers chose teaching as a career because we wanted meaningful work.

And yet today as I talk to teachers and prospective teachers, I hear a great deal of frustration. Many are leaving the profession by either retiring early or seeking jobs out of the field. Prospective teachers I work with at Rider University are wondering aloud if they have made a good career choice. As Education Week has reported, enrollment in schools of education at colleges around the country is plummeting.

What’s going on? Clearly, nearly two decades of education reform policies, from No Child Left Behind to Race to the Top and from the Common Core to the Common Core aligned standardized tests, have taken their toll. I believe there is a general sense that teaching is somehow less “meaningful” than it once was. A look at Gladwell’s components of meaningful work might help us understand why.

Autonomy

For teachers autonomy means the ability to make critical curricular and instructional decisions based on our content knowledge, our professional judgement and our unique knowledge of the students in front of us. Education reform has undermined this autonomy unnecessarily through a regime of imposed standards, standardized tests and unreliable accountability measures. Standards in and of themselves don’t undermine autonomy. Most teachers feel the need for some guidance in what to teach and when and appreciate reasonable learning targets. But when standards are developed and imposed without their input and then tied to standardized tests and when schools and teachers and students are labeled as failing based on the results of those tests, teachers rightly feel their autonomy is being undermined.

When I started teaching, I had plenty of autonomy. Too much, in fact. I pretty much closed the door behind me and taught what I wanted the way I wanted. I wrote the curriculum; I chose the textbooks and I designed the assessments. As long as the children were not disruptive, as long as I wasn’t sending kids to the office, as long as my blinds were straight at the end of the day, all was ok with the school administration.

This level of autonomy is not what teachers want. The job is too complex to be successfully navigated in isolation. What teachers want, and need, is a level of autonomy that respects their professional judgement and allows them to design instruction for the particular needs of their students. To the extent that education reform has undermined this, the profession is endangered and more and more teachers will leave and fewer and fewer will enter.

Complexity

Teaching children has always been an intellectually complex activity. It takes time and effort and ongoing personal reflection and professional development to master the craft. I have been teaching for 47 years and I am still learning new strategies for reaching students. Gladwell says it takes, on average, about 10,000 hours of concerted practice to master really complex work. Research suggests it takes teachers at least 3-4 years under the best possible scenarios to master the craft. As with all intellectually complex activities, there are no naturals. Both talent and hard work are required.

Education reform seeks to deny this complexity and reduce teaching and learning to a simplistic construct based on tests and punishments. Teaching is defined as preparing children to perform on tests and to comply with rigid behavior demands (so they learn to be compliant employees). Children in KIPP and Success Academy schools are expected to keep their noses to the grindstone, their eyes on the teacher and their ideas to themselves, and teachers are expected to enforce these draconian policies.

As Henry Giroux has put it, the educational reformers are focused on the “commodification of knowledge.” Education is no longer a social right, but a vehicle to support the immediate needs of the economy. With such a view teachers are reduced to the level of technician, a delivery system for information and a conduit for data collection.

As award winning New York teacher Matthew Rozell asked on his blog, “Am I a teacher or a technician?” Safe to say that Mr. Rozell and thousands of other teachers did not go in to teaching to be a technician. Safe to say that a failure by politicians and reformers to recognize, embrace and cultivate the complexity of the human endeavor of teaching and learning will mean more teachers leaving the profession and fewer entering.

Direct connection between effort and reward

In the free market the reward for hard work is defined in monetary terms. Work hard and you’ll make lots of money. Education reformers seeking to define education in market terms, think that teachers should be rewarded similarly, so we hear about merit pay schemes to reward teachers for achieving higher student test scores. This is a gross misreading of teacher motivation. Sure every teacher would like to make a decent living wage, but beyond that teachers seek very different kinds of rewards. Rewards that for the most part cannot be commodified.

The teacher’s reward comes from seeing students grasp a new concept. From finding the key to helping a recalcitrant student become motivated to learn. From reading a student essay that is well-crafted and well-argued. From having a student rush up to you breathless to tell you about a good book she has been reading.  From having a student come back years later to say thanks for some kindness you showed that you cannot even remember.

In a test and punish world, these rewards become harder to find. If you have little voice in what and how you are teaching, you will not feel rewarded for student success. The relationship among teacher and student and content and attitude towards learning can be richly rewarding, but not when that relationship is reduced to a number on a test and to instruction based on those tests. Teaching is too nuanced to yield to a reductionist view of its value.

A successful teacher is a teacher who does hard and meaningful work every day. By making that work less autonomous, less complex and less personally rewarding, education reformers are driving good teachers away from the profession and guaranteeing that it will be harder to find committed young people to fill the teaching positions of the future.

Getting the Schools All Children Deserve

Monday's New York Times carried an opinion piece by Charles Blow on the Laquan McDonald murder in Chicago. McDonald, a 17 year-old African American, was shot down by a white police officer in a horrific incident captured on video by a police car's dash cam. The incident is, of course, another in the ongoing horror of police violence against young Black men. Blow's main point is that if we are to understand why these police killings keep happening, we have to accept that it is because our society tacitly approves or willingly tolerates them. The problem is systemic. If America wanted this to end, says Blow, it would end. He feels that the majority of Americans have turned their backs on this issue, refusing to take a strong moral stance.

The clear implication of what Blow is saying, for me, is that in the end in this country, Black lives really do not matter. I think Blow has an important point and I think it is a very short leap to apply this insight to public education.

In our inner cities, once beautiful public school buildings schools stand crumbling from age and disrepair as mute testimony to our systematic neglect . Children attend schools without nurses, librarians and guidance counselors. Teachers lay out their own money for basic instructional supplies, while many students are without textbooks and other tools of learning. Just walking to school can be a harrowing experience for young children navigating the mean streets of the inner city. Can we really say that this is not directly connected to the color of the faces of the vast majority of children who attend these schools?

Inner city children are forced to learn and their teachers are forced to teach in these conditions because our society, you and me, don't care enough to do something about it. So what if some inner city kid has to attend a crumbling school, my school district just built a state of the art high school and my taxes are high enough. So what if some inner city kids don't have the basic tools of learning, my school district is providing for all that my children need. So what if inner city schools don't have nurses or guidance counselors, I have made sure that my kids go to schools that have all these things.

If we truly cared about the school children of the inner city, wouldn't we do everything we could, spend the money necessary to insure they had access to the same quality education we all want for our own children?

But does money really matter that much in education? Is it the lack of funds that has led us to this point? Didn't New Jersey pour lots of money into so-called "Abbot Districts" without much improvement in outcomes? Well yes, money does matter and yes, increased spending did not yield much in the way of improved outcomes in many New Jersey districts. Rutgers University researcher, Bruce Baker has this to say about the impact of money on schooling:

     money matters, resources that cost money matter, and more equitable distribution of school funding can improve outcomes. Policymakers would be well-advised to rely on high-qualityresearch to guide the critical choices they make regarding school finance.

Clearly it is about money, but it is also about a consistent and reliable source of money over time, so that real changes can be made. In New Jersey a cycle of increased funding followed by funding cuts has undermined any progress that might have been made. It is also about spending the money wisely and where it may have the most impact and in the inner city that may mean spending money on health services and early childhood education and other services nt ordinarily associated with the schools.

What can I do about these things, you say? Plenty. Five years ago the President of the United States was opposed to gay marriage. Now gay marriage is the law of the land. Why? Because most people decided it was time. If most people decided that it was time for the police to stop the killing of Black children in the streets, these killings would end. A few hundred people closing down Chicago's "Magnificent Mile" won't do it, but hundreds of thousands of people armed with the truth, and the energy and the vote could stop it if they wanted to.

It is our elected representatives that have systematically denied urban schools the resources they need. A system based primarily on property taxes is sure to put urban schools at a disadvantage. If we wanted our representatives to actually spend the money to make our urban schools look like our suburban schools, they would do it. The truth is, we don't want it because it would cost money and would require effort. So as long as things are good for our own kids, we don't really care.

But what if all moms and dads came to realize that when even one child is forced to attend a school that is in poor repair and poorly staffed and poorly equipped, it darkens the future for all our children? What if everyone acted on that realization by voting for representatives who would take their responsibility to all children seriously. What if we were all willing to close down not just the Magnificent Mile, but every local shopping mall and clog the hallways of school boards and legislatures until all children had a clean, safe, well-staffed school to attend. What if we did that? Do you think that we could end the scourge of educational discrimination then?

Another New York Times columnist, Joe Nocera, recently ran his last column for the paper. In it he cited Paula McEvoy, the program director for the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. McAvoy says, "The place where you learn matters." If you go to a broken down school society is telling you it doesn't care about your education. McEvoy has a message for the education reformers. Rather than spending money supporting charter schools, "Why not spend your money on infrastructure instead. How about setting a goal of putting every kid in a state- of-the-art school by 2025."

Now there is a good idea. Philanthropists can help us build worthy buildings for all students and then let the professionals provide the instruction. I could march for that.