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One big idea animates virtually all of today's earnest education reformers: the conviction that great schools can spur social mobility. Voucher supporters, charter advocates, standards nuts, teacher-effectiveness fanatics-we all fundamentally believe that fantastic schools staffed by dedicated educators can help poor kids climb out of poverty and compete with their affluent peers. And then Charles Murray comes along and throws cold water all over the idea.

Since the early 1970s, the rich, corporate power brokers and right-wing cultural warriors realized that education was central to creating a viable populist movement that served their interests. Over the last 40 years, the financial elites and their wealthy accomplices have not only mobilized an educational anti-reform movement in the name of "reform" to dismantle public education and turn it over to hedge-fund managers and billionaires; they have also taken a lesson from the muckrakers, critical public intellectuals, left-wing journals, progressive newspapers and educational institutions of the mid-20th century and developed their own cultural apparatuses, talk shows, anti-public intellectuals, think tanks and grassroots organizations. As the left slid into organizing around mostly single-issue movements since the 1980s, the right moved in a different direction, mobilizing a range of educational forces and wider cultural apparatuses as a way of addressing broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of government, the crisis of education, family values and the economy, to name a few issues, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social contract.

The fractious debate over how much schools can counteract poverty's impact on children is far from settled, but a recently published collection of research strongly suggests that until policymakers and educators confront deepening economic and social disparities, poor children will increasingly miss out on finding a path to upward social mobility. The achievement gap between poor children and rich children has grown significantly over the past three decades and is now nearly twice as large as the black-white gap, according to Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. He examined data on family income and student scores on standardized tests in reading and math spanning 1960 to 2007.

A growing body of research has examined how cultural capital, recently broadened to include not only high-status cultural activities but also a range of different parenting practices, influences children's educational success. Most of this research assumes that parents' current class location is the starting point of class transmission. However, does the ability of parents to pass advantages to their children, particularly through specific cultural practices, depend solely on their current class location or also on their class of origin? The authors address this question by defining social background as a combination of parents' cur- rent class location and their own family backgrounds. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement, the authors examine how different categories of social back- ground are related to parenting practices and children's academic achievement. The results offer novel insights into the transmission of class advantage across generations and inform debates about the complex processes of cultural reproduction and cultural mobility.

Instead of serving as a springboard to social mobility as it did for the first decades after World War II, college education today is reinforcing class stratification, with a huge majority of the 24 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 currently holding a bachelor's degree coming from families with earnings above the median income.

In response to the question, 'Are teachers activists?' my answer is: No. Not inherently. Teaching brown kids math, helping recent immigrants master English, or even making an occupational commitment to public education, are none of them inherently radical acts, though they are often characterized as such. This is not to say that choosing education as a profession is in dissonance with struggling for social justice. It is when we believe that it is enough-that simply being a teacher by trade is activism-that we enter into dangerous territory. For this belief is complicit with a plethora of assumptions detrimental to justice, including the notion that learning is inevitably about competition, class mobility and community escape.