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It’s easy to get angry at banks and CEOs, especially as more Americans slip below the poverty line while the rich keep getting richer. But if the goal of Occupy Wall Street is improving social mobility in this country, then the movement really needs to focus as much on educational inequality as it does on income inequality. There is perhaps no better example of how the system is rigged against millions of Americans than the education our children receive.

Public schools are obviously not to blame for the mortgage crisis, over-leveraged investment banks or the other triggers of our current economic woes. But when it comes to giving Americans equal opportunity, our schools are demonstrably failing at their task. Today zip codes remain a better predictor of school quality and subsequent opportunities than smarts or hard work. When you think about it, that’s a lot more offensive to our values than a lightly regulated banking system.

What do I mean by educational inequality? We’re all familiar with achievement gaps between white kids and minorities. But here’s the income-based gap: just 8% of low-income students get a college degree by the time they are 24, while three-quarters of affluent students do. This has little to do with corporations, hedge funds or any of the other villains du jour. But make no mistake, outcomes like this kill economic mobility in this country.

So why are our schools, which should be an engine of opportunity, barely sputtering along?

Depending on whom you ask, you’ll hear that the problem is too little money. Or it’s too much money and too little performance. Or poverty. Or a lack of standards. Or lousy curriculums. Or teacher effectiveness. Or archaic rules and regulations. Or a lack of innovation. Or a lack of choice. Or too much power in the hands of the teachers’ unions. Or too little power in the hands of teachers.

In fact, in different places around the country, it’s all those things and others. But our tribal politics leave no room for that sort of nuance. Meanwhile, our politicians are either too skittish to take on special interests or too wrapped up in ideology to acknowledge that no single solution — e.g., school choice, ending the federal role in education or just addressing poverty — will fix our education system.

So rather than take aggressive steps to create fairer funding systems for schools to give poor kids a shot, weed out bad teachers or jettison policies that have clearly outlived their usefulness, we have phony wars about teacher pay or No Child Left Behind that dance around the real issues. Just this week, a new report about New York highlighted how the state’s budget cuts will hit low-income schools almost three times as hard (losing $843 per pupil) as the wealthiest districts (losing just $269 per pupil). And earlier this month, the Chicago Tribune highlighted how the poorest school districts in Illinois spend just 30% of what the most affluent ones do. Many localities, including really poor ones, are still left to come up with much of the funding for their schools; in other places, the unfairness is due in part to state-funding formulas that actually favor affluent communities over low-income ones. Occupy that.

As people across the country struggle to find jobs in this economy, consider how public schools factor into unemployment rates in two states. In September, unemployment in Michigan was 11.1%, the third highest in the nation. In Massachusetts, it was 7.3%, below the national average of 9.1%. Those two states have both experienced substantial disruption to their economies. Massachusetts watched textiles and industry move south, and in Michigan the automobile industry has contracted. But the superior public schools in Massachusetts, which outpaces Michigan on a variety of measures, have no doubt been a key factor in that state’s ability to attract technology companies and other new industries. Good public schools not only create a competitive workforce but also create the kinds of communities where people relocate to work and where entrepreneurs can launch businesses.

In any event, here’s my humble suggestion to all the protesters who are getting kicked out of Zuccotti Park and other places across the country: take your posters and your outrage and go occupy the central office of your local school districts and teachers’-union headquarters. Then demand the kind of radical change we need to create school systems that live up to our values rather than mock them. Our schools are a more sympathetic target than corporate CEOs, but for many Americans, they are a larger cause of economic injustice.

By Andrew J. Rotherham, co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education, a non-profit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students, and more) http://ideas.time.com/2011/11/17/forget-wall-street-go-occupy-your-loc
al-school-district/

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Ah, the achievement gap. So much trouble to fix, so why bother trying? That seems to be the attitude in Washington, where pundits have spent the last several months ripping the current focus on improving the low end of student performance in our nation’s schools. In September the Obama Administration put forward a plan to offer waivers to states that want more flexibility — i.e., less ambitious targets — under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Last week the bottom really fell out when the Senate committee that handles education passed a rewrite of the No Child law basically leaving it to states to figure out how (and probably, in practice, even whether) to close the gaps. In other words, a decade after an overwhelmingly bipartisan effort to get serious about school accountability, it’s open season on a strong federal role in education. How did we get here?

Let’s start with the pundits. Leading the charge is the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess, who, in the fall issue of National Affairs, launched a contrarian broadside against NCLB’s focus on low-achieving students. “The relentless focus on gap-closing has transformed school reform into little more than a less objectionable rehash of the failed Great Society playbook,” Hess wrote. Next came a September report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, another conservative think tank, claiming that the current focus is shortchanging high-achievers. Yet the data in the Fordham report didn’t support its alarmist conclusions that high-achievers were being hurt by today’s policies. The truth is, according to Fordham’s own data, that high-performers didn’t fare that badly overall. Other evidence bears this out. None of that slowed down the pundits.

Then we should move to the suburbs. No one is surprised when test scores show that urban and rural schools struggle a lot, but it’s in the suburbs where NCLB’s spotlight is most uncomfortable. Its emphasis on accountability for the performance of all students has revealed that poor and minority students are not doing very well in many of our nation’s most vaunted school systems. And since American politics are suburban-driven, policymakers seem eager to help sweep this unpleasantness under the rug. It’s the see no evil, hear no evil approach to school reform.

The administration’s waiver plan would give states more leeway in how they set performance targets for schools. It’s not as strong a policy as current law, but groups that support gap-closing efforts — for instance, the Education Trust — have signed onto the administration’s plan because it’s better than the solutions that Congress is offering up. The legislation under consideration in the Senate pretty much scraps efforts to close achievement gaps at all schools and focuses mostly on the bottom 5% of schools.

In a classic case of strange bedfellows, the education establishment and Congressional conservatives can all agree — albeit for different reasons — that these federal rules should go. Teachers’ unions and other special-interest education groups dislike the heavy pressure for school improvement from Washington. (And conservatives just dislike Washington.) This accounts for the sudden enthusiasm for states’ rights among Democrats, who generally favor an activist federal role in public policy. It’s also one reason Washington insiders think the Senate plan could get a favorable reception in the more conservative House.

Now comes the hard truth. No matter how many people try to argue that focusing on closing achievement gaps is a bad idea, it’s not. It’s still the right goal. And not merely for social reasons — although the crushed dreams, diminished opportunities, and the violence that today’s educational system does to communities and any semblance of equality should not be underestimated. Closing the gap is the right goal for economic reasons, too. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimates that closing the racial and ethnic achievement gaps would increase national gross domestic product by hundreds of billions of dollars, or 2% to 4% of our overall GDP. The cost of not addressing these gaps will obviously rise as America’s Hispanic population grows.
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In no small way, it’s the same argument we’re having about taxes, Wall Street and the American social contract more generally. Unfortunately for minorities and poor kids in America’s public schools, no one is occupying parks or packing town hall meetings to demand much of anything for these children. Instead, at the one level of government that has looked out for them over the years — the federal level — policymakers are simply walking away. http://ideas.time.com/2011/10/27/whos-minding-the-gap/

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The righties are actually much more on your side than the lefties

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