Welcome to a special Quick & Ed feature celebrating the spirit of the holiday season weekdays during the month of December. Who is this woman? Stay tuned for more information (and pictures!)...
Friday, December 01, 2006
First Day of Christmas...
Welcome to a special Quick & Ed feature celebrating the spirit of the holiday season weekdays during the month of December. Who is this woman? Stay tuned for more information (and pictures!)...
Dropping Harvard
The Civil Rights Project is dropping Harvard to move across the country to its new home at UCLA, where it will focus its efforts on immigrant and Latino issues.
A win for California and UCLA, who picks up not only CRP co-founder Gary Orfield but also Orfield's new wife, UC-Davis professor and associate director of the UC Linguistic Minority Research Institute Patricia Gandara.
A disappointment for CRP co-founder Chris Edley's hope that the CRP would become bicoastal when he dropped Harvard in 2003 to lead Berkeley's Boalt Hall. Edley said he was leaving the project knowing it would continue to flourish at Harvard and would become "bigger, better, and bicoastal" as he moved to develop a Berkeley-based center. It's clearly getting bigger in California, and better for taking on immigration issues, but sadly no longer a bicoastal endeavor. Not all bad..more reason to travel back to California.
A win for California and UCLA, who picks up not only CRP co-founder Gary Orfield but also Orfield's new wife, UC-Davis professor and associate director of the UC Linguistic Minority Research Institute Patricia Gandara.
A disappointment for CRP co-founder Chris Edley's hope that the CRP would become bicoastal when he dropped Harvard in 2003 to lead Berkeley's Boalt Hall. Edley said he was leaving the project knowing it would continue to flourish at Harvard and would become "bigger, better, and bicoastal" as he moved to develop a Berkeley-based center. It's clearly getting bigger in California, and better for taking on immigration issues, but sadly no longer a bicoastal endeavor. Not all bad..more reason to travel back to California.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Culture Club
Over at EdWize, Peter Goodman complains that "the pathology of poverty" makes it difficult to motivate and educate kids like those on The Wire: "Poverty, the culture of the streets is not shed at the classroom door!! As teachers we can’t make the streets safer or construct better housing or more stable family life … we can only teach and nurture and care …"
Whenever I hear sentiments like that, I think of what teachers and principals in high-performing and rapidly improving urban schools have to say. For example, Barbara Adderley, the principal of Stanton Hall Elementary in Philadelphia, made some compelling observations when she accepted an award at the Education Trust's national conference a few weeks ago. She talked about driving to work every day through blighted neighborhoods and seeing the drug dealers on the corners, and dealing with a situation in which children walk to school past crack houses and hear gunfire many nights. (As the Philadelphia Weekly describes it, "On her first day in September 2002 Adderley was greeted with madness: children running and screaming, teachers showing up late if at all, parents cussing and students overwhelmingly failing. Surrounded by drugs, neglect, poverty and violence at 16th and Cumberland in North Philadelphia, Stanton was one of the city’s worst-performing schools.")
Her response, Adderley told the conference crowd, was not to adjust academic expectations downward and focus exclusively on caring and nurturing, but instead to re-build her school around the assumption that its students were destined to become the next generation of business and civic leaders---the future Director of the Education Trust, the future U.S. Secretary of Education, etc. (she was citing the “big names” in attendance at the awards ceremony to add rhetorical flourish)---rather than the next generation of neighborhood drug dealers and addicts. Then she and her teachers began to TREAT THEM LIKE THAT by fashioning a new school culture and a new set of educational practices around that assumption. “Drugs are worse, guns are everywhere,” she told the Weekly, but "We can’t worry about any of that. We can only make this a climate where kids wanna be here, and where they’re learning."
Similarly, when Goodman asks "How do we convince 'corner boys' to pass Regents exams?" I think of June Esserly, principal of the University Park Campus School in Worcester, Massachusetts. At a session hosted by the Alliance for Excellent Education last year, Esserly talked about a three-week long August Academy she and her teachers provide for entering middle school students. (Contrast that with the chaos attending the first day at The Wire's Tilghman Middle School when the doors opened and kids simply swarmed into the hallways.)
The Academy helps kids bone up on study skills, she said, "But the most important thing is they get to understand the culture of the school. They get to understand that we are serious about education and that we are serious about them going to college. They need to start thinking about it now to get where they need to be." The Academy accomplishes that in ways both overt and subtle. For example, "I wanted the kids to be reading a book they could finish in three weeks, because in my experience a lot of urban kids don't finish what they start, so I want them to learn right from the get go, you start it, you finish it."
Adderley and Esserly recognize that "the culture of the streets" is out there and that their students, for now, must live in it, but also believe they don't have to go to school in it. Excellent schools for poor, urban students (public schools, not just charters like KIPP), purposefully shape the culture inside the school and wield it in very instrumental ways to influence expectations, aspirations, and behavior. In that sense, the culture becomes a tool in the educational toolbox, not something that is accidental or random or---as Goodman seems to imply---something that just inexorably seeps into the hallways and classrooms through the school's doors and windows.
--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald
Whenever I hear sentiments like that, I think of what teachers and principals in high-performing and rapidly improving urban schools have to say. For example, Barbara Adderley, the principal of Stanton Hall Elementary in Philadelphia, made some compelling observations when she accepted an award at the Education Trust's national conference a few weeks ago. She talked about driving to work every day through blighted neighborhoods and seeing the drug dealers on the corners, and dealing with a situation in which children walk to school past crack houses and hear gunfire many nights. (As the Philadelphia Weekly describes it, "On her first day in September 2002 Adderley was greeted with madness: children running and screaming, teachers showing up late if at all, parents cussing and students overwhelmingly failing. Surrounded by drugs, neglect, poverty and violence at 16th and Cumberland in North Philadelphia, Stanton was one of the city’s worst-performing schools.")
Her response, Adderley told the conference crowd, was not to adjust academic expectations downward and focus exclusively on caring and nurturing, but instead to re-build her school around the assumption that its students were destined to become the next generation of business and civic leaders---the future Director of the Education Trust, the future U.S. Secretary of Education, etc. (she was citing the “big names” in attendance at the awards ceremony to add rhetorical flourish)---rather than the next generation of neighborhood drug dealers and addicts. Then she and her teachers began to TREAT THEM LIKE THAT by fashioning a new school culture and a new set of educational practices around that assumption. “Drugs are worse, guns are everywhere,” she told the Weekly, but "We can’t worry about any of that. We can only make this a climate where kids wanna be here, and where they’re learning."
Similarly, when Goodman asks "How do we convince 'corner boys' to pass Regents exams?" I think of June Esserly, principal of the University Park Campus School in Worcester, Massachusetts. At a session hosted by the Alliance for Excellent Education last year, Esserly talked about a three-week long August Academy she and her teachers provide for entering middle school students. (Contrast that with the chaos attending the first day at The Wire's Tilghman Middle School when the doors opened and kids simply swarmed into the hallways.)
The Academy helps kids bone up on study skills, she said, "But the most important thing is they get to understand the culture of the school. They get to understand that we are serious about education and that we are serious about them going to college. They need to start thinking about it now to get where they need to be." The Academy accomplishes that in ways both overt and subtle. For example, "I wanted the kids to be reading a book they could finish in three weeks, because in my experience a lot of urban kids don't finish what they start, so I want them to learn right from the get go, you start it, you finish it."
Adderley and Esserly recognize that "the culture of the streets" is out there and that their students, for now, must live in it, but also believe they don't have to go to school in it. Excellent schools for poor, urban students (public schools, not just charters like KIPP), purposefully shape the culture inside the school and wield it in very instrumental ways to influence expectations, aspirations, and behavior. In that sense, the culture becomes a tool in the educational toolbox, not something that is accidental or random or---as Goodman seems to imply---something that just inexorably seeps into the hallways and classrooms through the school's doors and windows.
--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald
Blogroll Addition
Paradise on the Potomac? Or a State-like Solution?
Commenting on Mike Casserly's Sunday Washington Post op-ed, Andy writes:
I've got to disagree here. If we were having this conversation in, say 1995, the last time Congress considered major legislation aimed at reforming DC schools, I'd probably agree with this analysis. But the problem is that, thanks to the DC School Reform Act of 1995, we don't actually have only one school district in Washington. We've got more than 50, and most of the are public charter schools, which, in DC, are legally their own local education agencies, or LEAs.
Because DCPS has both state and local education agency roles, it actually has to carry out state-level responsibilities--such as distributing some federal grant funds and running the "statewide" accountability and assessment system--that impact charters as well as traditional schools, including charter schools authorized by the Public Charter School Board (PCSB), over which DCPS, as an LEA, ought to have no authority. This can create serious conflicts of interest, because DCPS as an LEA competes with charter schools. The controversy over Supt. Clifford Janey's suggestion, earlier this year, that he wanted to use his authority as State Schools Officer to intervene in low-performing charter schools , including those authorized by the PCSB, is a good recent example of how the combined state/school district role for DCPS is problematic when charters are involved. There are also legitimate concerns that it's a conflict of interest for DCPS to have state responsibilities for holding itself accountable as a local school district.
Making DC a single state/school district like Hawaii would only exacerbate these problems. While Hawaii has charter schools, its charters are substantively different from those in DC: They are authorized by the Hawaii LEA/SEA, not an independent authorizer like the Public Charter School Board, and they do not have the legal and financial autonomy that DC charters do. And because of a relatively low charter cap in Hawaii, that state's charters are not currently the competitive threat to existing public schools that they are in DC.
In 2000, Mayor Williams established the State Education Office under his control to help deal with some of the new complexities that emerged in public education in DC as it moved from a single LEA system to one offering both DCPS and a host of public charter schools. The SEO monitors enrollment for both DCPS and charters, develops the uniform student funding formula used to allocate funds to the schools, oversees school nutrition programs, and also carries out some state-level higher education functions. But the combination of programs it carries out is rather eclectic, and it doesn't have most of the powers of a regular state education agency.
Based on some of the discussions floating around town right now, I wouldn't be surprised if what we saw happen with DC school governance in the next year or so would be creation of a real , separate State Education Agency, under the control of Mayor Fenty, that would have the responsibilities of a typical SEA with regard to both charters and DCPS. (This is pretty similar to what Casserly's op-ed is calling for.) Such an arrangement would have a number of benefits. It could give Mayor Fenty a significant role in holding DC's schools accountable and influencing education in DC without creating the huge operational and political disruption that shifting the day-to-day management of DCPS schools to the mayor would do. A smart plan to create a Mayor-controlled SEA would shift traditionally problematic areas in DCPS, such as out-of-district special education placements for high-needs students, and facilities, to DCPS. Legislation could also be written to give the Mayor, as SEA, power to take over chronically low-performing schools, with or without the Board of Education's consent. And, considering the vacuum created by the Board of Education's recent decision to surrender its role as a charter school authorizer, a Mayor-controlled SEA would be a great potential replacement for the board as a charter school authorizer. Although relatively few Mayors have chartering authority, those who do, like Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, have a promising record. DC could benefit from following this lead.
It's also increasingly looking like this is an idea most of the key parties could get behind politically, possibly avoiding the "donnybrook" Casserly fears a bid for full-out mayoral control would spark. There's already legislation in the U.S. Senate that would require the Board of Education to develop recommendations to shift its state-level functions to another entity, which observers seem to think in practice would most likely be the SEO. The Council's held hearings on the idea. At the same time could also been framed as a token step towards making DC more like a "real state," which might appeal to DC-statehood advocates. It would preserve a role for the elected school board, mitigating home rule concerns, but still give Fenty much greater control. It would give newly-elected reformist school board leaders like Robert Bobb and Lisa Raymond a chance to work for reform, while also building a foundation for a mayoral role that could be more easily expanded to full control if reform efforts on the board fail.
Update: Andy clarifies his comment a bit. I'd just like to add that, despite my skepticism a Hawaii-like model per se makes sense for DC, if anyone would like to fund some research travel for me to go to Hawaii this winter, investigate the state/district model in practice, and bring back recommendations for what DC can learn from it, I'd be all over that.
...The redundancy in education governance in Washington is almost comical. D.C. could do a lot worse than look to Hawaii for some ideas on having a unified state/school district structure since there is only one school district in Washington in the first place.
I've got to disagree here. If we were having this conversation in, say 1995, the last time Congress considered major legislation aimed at reforming DC schools, I'd probably agree with this analysis. But the problem is that, thanks to the DC School Reform Act of 1995, we don't actually have only one school district in Washington. We've got more than 50, and most of the are public charter schools, which, in DC, are legally their own local education agencies, or LEAs.
Because DCPS has both state and local education agency roles, it actually has to carry out state-level responsibilities--such as distributing some federal grant funds and running the "statewide" accountability and assessment system--that impact charters as well as traditional schools, including charter schools authorized by the Public Charter School Board (PCSB), over which DCPS, as an LEA, ought to have no authority. This can create serious conflicts of interest, because DCPS as an LEA competes with charter schools. The controversy over Supt. Clifford Janey's suggestion, earlier this year, that he wanted to use his authority as State Schools Officer to intervene in low-performing charter schools , including those authorized by the PCSB, is a good recent example of how the combined state/school district role for DCPS is problematic when charters are involved. There are also legitimate concerns that it's a conflict of interest for DCPS to have state responsibilities for holding itself accountable as a local school district.
Making DC a single state/school district like Hawaii would only exacerbate these problems. While Hawaii has charter schools, its charters are substantively different from those in DC: They are authorized by the Hawaii LEA/SEA, not an independent authorizer like the Public Charter School Board, and they do not have the legal and financial autonomy that DC charters do. And because of a relatively low charter cap in Hawaii, that state's charters are not currently the competitive threat to existing public schools that they are in DC.
In 2000, Mayor Williams established the State Education Office under his control to help deal with some of the new complexities that emerged in public education in DC as it moved from a single LEA system to one offering both DCPS and a host of public charter schools. The SEO monitors enrollment for both DCPS and charters, develops the uniform student funding formula used to allocate funds to the schools, oversees school nutrition programs, and also carries out some state-level higher education functions. But the combination of programs it carries out is rather eclectic, and it doesn't have most of the powers of a regular state education agency.
Based on some of the discussions floating around town right now, I wouldn't be surprised if what we saw happen with DC school governance in the next year or so would be creation of a real , separate State Education Agency, under the control of Mayor Fenty, that would have the responsibilities of a typical SEA with regard to both charters and DCPS. (This is pretty similar to what Casserly's op-ed is calling for.) Such an arrangement would have a number of benefits. It could give Mayor Fenty a significant role in holding DC's schools accountable and influencing education in DC without creating the huge operational and political disruption that shifting the day-to-day management of DCPS schools to the mayor would do. A smart plan to create a Mayor-controlled SEA would shift traditionally problematic areas in DCPS, such as out-of-district special education placements for high-needs students, and facilities, to DCPS. Legislation could also be written to give the Mayor, as SEA, power to take over chronically low-performing schools, with or without the Board of Education's consent. And, considering the vacuum created by the Board of Education's recent decision to surrender its role as a charter school authorizer, a Mayor-controlled SEA would be a great potential replacement for the board as a charter school authorizer. Although relatively few Mayors have chartering authority, those who do, like Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, have a promising record. DC could benefit from following this lead.
It's also increasingly looking like this is an idea most of the key parties could get behind politically, possibly avoiding the "donnybrook" Casserly fears a bid for full-out mayoral control would spark. There's already legislation in the U.S. Senate that would require the Board of Education to develop recommendations to shift its state-level functions to another entity, which observers seem to think in practice would most likely be the SEO. The Council's held hearings on the idea. At the same time could also been framed as a token step towards making DC more like a "real state," which might appeal to DC-statehood advocates. It would preserve a role for the elected school board, mitigating home rule concerns, but still give Fenty much greater control. It would give newly-elected reformist school board leaders like Robert Bobb and Lisa Raymond a chance to work for reform, while also building a foundation for a mayoral role that could be more easily expanded to full control if reform efforts on the board fail.
Update: Andy clarifies his comment a bit. I'd just like to add that, despite my skepticism a Hawaii-like model per se makes sense for DC, if anyone would like to fund some research travel for me to go to Hawaii this winter, investigate the state/district model in practice, and bring back recommendations for what DC can learn from it, I'd be all over that.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Unwarranted Pessimism on the Achievement Gap
Matt Yglesias is too pessimistic about the prospect of closing the achievement gap.
Referring to Paul Tough's recent NYTimes article, which concludes that the gap can be closed if we put disadvantaged students in schools that are better-run and have more money, he says:
Suburban voters tolerate and in many cases support these policies, because (A) they're the right thing to do, and (B) wealthy suburban kids are still getting into good colleges, because they come from privileged backgrounds and go to good schools. You can have less money than a high-poverty school and still have enough money to teach your students well. The point of closing the achievement gap is not completely erasing class differences, it's giving disadvantaged students what they need to graduate and succeed in college, the workplace, and life. It's not a zero-sum game; nearly everyone can be well-educated if we give schools enough money--given whom they're educating--and spend it wisely.
Other states, obviously, still have inequitable funding systems. But there's plenty of precedent here, a significant number of states have done the right thing. And when the politicians won't do it voluntarily, disadvantaged districts have been able to go to the courts to forced their hand, as happened in New York just last week, when the state's highest court ordered the legislature to give New York City schools an extra $2 billion per year.
Moreover, there's an awful lot you can do without more money. While some of the reforms mentioned in the article are resource-intensive, many aren't. They have a lot to do with strong leadership, high expectations for all students and staff, and a disciplined focus on increasing learning results.
And these things, in turn, help tremendously with recruiting staff. The best way to induce good teachers to leave the suburbs and come into the cities is to create good schools that they would enjoy working in, schools that respect them as professionals and give them an opportunity to succeed at a job they really believe in. More money obviously helps, but there's a lot more to it than that.
So while poor kids could undoubtedly use an assumed can opener or two, in education and elsewhere, we don't need them to give those students a much better education than we're giving them today.
Referring to Paul Tough's recent NYTimes article, which concludes that the gap can be closed if we put disadvantaged students in schools that are better-run and have more money, he says:
This seems to me to involve assuming a can opener. Schools full of poor kids could do just as well as schools full of middle-class kids if they had more resources at their disposal than the middle-class schools had. But why would they have more resources? It's hard to imagine suburban homeowners voting for a politician who promises to raise their taxes in order to pay their kids' best teachers to go teach in inner city schools, thereby making it harder for their kids to get into selective colleges and reducing the value of the homes they own.It's not hard to imagine, because it's happened in a number of places already. High-poverty school in Massachusetts get substantially more money than low-poverty schools, based on funding reforms implemented over a decade ago. The Maryland legislature implemented similar reforms a few years ago, also with broad support.
Suburban voters tolerate and in many cases support these policies, because (A) they're the right thing to do, and (B) wealthy suburban kids are still getting into good colleges, because they come from privileged backgrounds and go to good schools. You can have less money than a high-poverty school and still have enough money to teach your students well. The point of closing the achievement gap is not completely erasing class differences, it's giving disadvantaged students what they need to graduate and succeed in college, the workplace, and life. It's not a zero-sum game; nearly everyone can be well-educated if we give schools enough money--given whom they're educating--and spend it wisely.
Other states, obviously, still have inequitable funding systems. But there's plenty of precedent here, a significant number of states have done the right thing. And when the politicians won't do it voluntarily, disadvantaged districts have been able to go to the courts to forced their hand, as happened in New York just last week, when the state's highest court ordered the legislature to give New York City schools an extra $2 billion per year.
Moreover, there's an awful lot you can do without more money. While some of the reforms mentioned in the article are resource-intensive, many aren't. They have a lot to do with strong leadership, high expectations for all students and staff, and a disciplined focus on increasing learning results.
And these things, in turn, help tremendously with recruiting staff. The best way to induce good teachers to leave the suburbs and come into the cities is to create good schools that they would enjoy working in, schools that respect them as professionals and give them an opportunity to succeed at a job they really believe in. More money obviously helps, but there's a lot more to it than that.
So while poor kids could undoubtedly use an assumed can opener or two, in education and elsewhere, we don't need them to give those students a much better education than we're giving them today.
A Case of Cognitive Dissonance
The op-ed by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post this morning (“A Slide Toward Segregation) would likely stoke serious debate around any water cooler in the country. It talks about the legacy of Brown and the current Supreme Court cases in Seattle and Louisville America
Monday, November 27, 2006
NYTimes on the Achievement Gap: What To Think
Paul Tough went long--really long--on the achievement gap in yesterday's New York Times Sunday magazine. While I'll quibble with some his conclusions and interpretations, on the whole I think he got the story right.
First, the quibbles. Tough frames the story by discussing the latest NAEP data, which is fine since there's no better source of info about national trends. Reading scores are relatively flat, math scores are up. But in tying NAEP data back to a discussion of the NCLB goal of 100 percent student proficiency by 2014, he says:
Tough also critiques 2001 research from my former employer, The Education Trust, that pointed out that there are thousands of high-poverty, high-minority schools that have above average test scores in some grades and subjects. As Tough notes, critics responded that many of these schools weren't high performing in all grades and subjects, or were high-performing in some years and not others. But Ed Trust has followed up since then with many reports and searchable databases, unfortunately not mentioned in the article, that addressed these criticisms, showing that there really are schools out there that succeed for many students in many subjects for many years. For a list of schools in New York that outscored most other schools statewide for three years running in math, despite having students who are mostly poor and mostly minority, click here.
Tough also oversimplifies the political dynamics at work, making it sound like belief in the ability of schools to close the achievement gap is primarily a conservative position promoted by the likes of the Heritage Foundation. It's not, and it's an odd mistake to make in an article that references work from obviously non-conservative groups like Ed Trust, as well as self-described "liberal" education reformers running schools for disadvantaged students, as often as it does.
But all in all the article does a pretty thorough job of summarizing the extant research on why low-income and minority students come to school behind academically and what can be done to help them. KIPP schools feature prominently, as is often the case in these debates. Tough's conclusion, which I think is the right one, is that while the achievement gap is caused by a lot of deep-seated inequities that occur outside of schools, really good schools can go a long way to mitigating those problems--but only if they're really good schools.
It's not enough to stop giving disadvantaged students less money, worse teachers, and fewer educational resources, which is what we're doing now. We have to give them more of all of those things than we give other students, which is difficult and expensive--but not nearly as hard as managing the consequences of the inequitable school system we have today.
UPDATE: More from Matt Yglesias here, AFT here.
First, the quibbles. Tough frames the story by discussing the latest NAEP data, which is fine since there's no better source of info about national trends. Reading scores are relatively flat, math scores are up. But in tying NAEP data back to a discussion of the NCLB goal of 100 percent student proficiency by 2014, he says:
The most promising indications in the national test could be found in the fourth-grade math results, in which the percentage of poor students at the proficient level jumped to 19 percent in 2005, from 8 percent in 2000; for black students, the number jumped to 13 percent, from 5 percent. This was a significant increase, but it was still far short of the proficiency figure for white students, which rose to 47 percent in 2005, and it was a long way from 100 percent.The implication is that while we've made some progress in closing the gap in math, we're still far, far short of 100 percent proficient. But the 100 percent goal isn't based on the stringent NAEP proficiency standard, it's based on individual state standards, a fact that Tough doesn't mention until the very end of the article. The typical state puts 4th grade math proficiency at around 75 to 80 percent, a whole lot closer to 100. One can argue whether they've set the bar high enough (I think many have not), but it's an important distinction to understand in discussing whether NCLB is realistic, or working.
Tough also critiques 2001 research from my former employer, The Education Trust, that pointed out that there are thousands of high-poverty, high-minority schools that have above average test scores in some grades and subjects. As Tough notes, critics responded that many of these schools weren't high performing in all grades and subjects, or were high-performing in some years and not others. But Ed Trust has followed up since then with many reports and searchable databases, unfortunately not mentioned in the article, that addressed these criticisms, showing that there really are schools out there that succeed for many students in many subjects for many years. For a list of schools in New York that outscored most other schools statewide for three years running in math, despite having students who are mostly poor and mostly minority, click here.
Tough also oversimplifies the political dynamics at work, making it sound like belief in the ability of schools to close the achievement gap is primarily a conservative position promoted by the likes of the Heritage Foundation. It's not, and it's an odd mistake to make in an article that references work from obviously non-conservative groups like Ed Trust, as well as self-described "liberal" education reformers running schools for disadvantaged students, as often as it does.
But all in all the article does a pretty thorough job of summarizing the extant research on why low-income and minority students come to school behind academically and what can be done to help them. KIPP schools feature prominently, as is often the case in these debates. Tough's conclusion, which I think is the right one, is that while the achievement gap is caused by a lot of deep-seated inequities that occur outside of schools, really good schools can go a long way to mitigating those problems--but only if they're really good schools.
It's not enough to stop giving disadvantaged students less money, worse teachers, and fewer educational resources, which is what we're doing now. We have to give them more of all of those things than we give other students, which is difficult and expensive--but not nearly as hard as managing the consequences of the inequitable school system we have today.
UPDATE: More from Matt Yglesias here, AFT here.
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