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I thought testing would help diagnose the problem and help teachers identify kids' needs and that charters would serve the underserved and collaborate with public schools. I was wrong on all accounts, said Diane Ravitch in her Friday keynote speech at the Opportunity to Learn Summit, in Washington, D.C.

I always cringe when I hear so-called reformers say poverty is "no excuse" for lack of student achievement. It is not because I don't subscribe to that belief, but because I know politicians will use that message as an excuse for not "leveling the playing field" for poor children. To believe that you can treat and fund all schools in the same way meets what many call the definition of insanity--doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. From collective bargaining contracts to federal law, poverty has to be a factor in every decision that affects the education of poor children and those who educate them.

If it weren't tucked into a forest more than 4,000 miles from Wisconsin, Vesala Comprehensive School could stand in for a public school in Milwaukee. The industrial-looking building from the 1960s serves 365 students, most of whom live in nearby public housing projects. More than half come from single-parent households, and 70% are low-income. Twenty-two percent qualify for special-education services. About 30% are immigrants or students who speak a first language other than the official languages of Finnish and Swedish. But unlike in Milwaukee and Wisconsin, where the achievement level of a school can generally be predicted by its ZIP code and student poverty rate, Vesala is part of a national system where the performance gap between the lowest and highest achieving students is one of the narrowest among developed countries, according to a respected international exam.

We describe changes over time in inequality in postsecondary education using nearly seventy years of data from the U.S. Census and the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. We find growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families. Among men, inequality in educational attainment has increased slightly since the early 1980s. But among women, inequality in educational attainment has risen sharply, driven by increases in the education of the daughters of high-income parents. Sex differences in educational attainment, which were small or nonexistent thirty years ago, are now substantial, with women outpacing men in every demographic group. The female advantage in educational attainment is largest in the top quartile of the income distribution. These sex differences present a formidable challenge to standard explanations for rising inequality in educational attainment.

The rules under which charter schools operate - Federal, state and local - are supposed to ensure equal access to charters and to prevent discrimination.  In theory preference should be given to those in the local area, which then in theory should provide a student body with demographics very much like those of surrounding neighborhood schools from which their students are drawn.

The American Federation of Teachers, vilified by critics as an obstacle to school reform, is leading an unusual effort to turn around a floundering school system in a place where deprivation is layered on heartache. The AFT, which typically represents teachers in urban settings, wants to improve education deep in the heart of Appalachia by simultaneously tackling the social and economic troubles of McDowell County. The union has gathered about 40 partners, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cisco Systems, IBM, Save the Children, foundations, utility companies, housing specialists, community colleges, and state and federal governments, which have committed to a five-year plan to try to lift McDowell out of its depths.

Claims of failure and crisis have occurred every decade public schools have existed, suggesting that whatever the conditions are of our school system, they are simply the status of those schools-not failure and certainly not crisis. The great irony of claims of failure and crisis coming from politicians, reformers, the media, and the public is that these claims mask the genuine problems inherent in our system.

Children from high-income families start school with skills that are already five months ahead of their middle and low-income classmates.

No one seriously disputes the fact that students from disadvantaged households perform less well in school, on average, than their peers from more advantaged backgrounds. But rather than confront this fact of life head-on, our policy makers mistakenly continue to reason that, since they cannot change the backgrounds of students, they should focus on things they can control.

Tucson's Mexican American studies program remains in violation of state law, Arizona's public schools chief ruled Friday, ordering that millions in state funding be withheld from the school district until the program is dismantled or brought into compliance.

The articles in this issue are designed to do exactly that: to defend the hope that public education (an education truly controlled by the public) provides, while promoting the goal of all true education-the emancipation of human creativity, i.e., of human beings themselves.

The phrase "education reform" has been co-opted to mean a narrow party program advocated by the reform establishment (mainly billionaires and their designees) that includes a barrage of testing, charter schools, and taking experienced educators out of the classroom. None of these measures have a track record of success, but the actual facts get obscured by Hollywood films and connected charter groups. It's hard to get into the conversation when the corporate side of education reform uses the term as a bludgeon against anyone who questions its agenda -- even when the concerns are supported by research.

The following open letter from UFT President Michael Mulgrew to New York City parents ran as a full-page ad in the New York Daily News on Jan. 9.

Look at those numbers above. Think about how many of the Hispanic kids speak Spanish at home. Look at the economic statistics. Think about how this may affect test scores. Charter schools have freedom, all right - the freedom to exclude the most difficult-to-teach students from their rosters. This, apparently, is Christie's great new vision for schools: economic segregation.

Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system, including No Child Left Behind, test-based evaluation of teachers and the promotion of competition, are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school than those from more advantaged families. Because these policy initiatives do not directly address the educational  challenges experienced by disadvantaged students, they have contributed little -- and are not likely to contribute much  in the future -- to raising overall student achievement or to reducing achievement and educational attainment gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Moreover, such policies have the potential to do serious harm. Addressing the educational challenges faced by children from disadvantaged families will require a broader and bolder approach to education policy than the recent efforts to reform schools.

"We have a parenting problem, not a poverty problem," Mike Petrilli writes at Flypaper. I agree that parenting matters greatly to a child's academic success or failure, and in fact may be the single largest determining factor. But Petrilli concludes that the best way to solve the "parenting problem" is through cultural messaging promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce, so that kids benefit from growing up in two-income households. This ignores, I think, the concrete reality of life in many low-income neighborhoods, where many women are making a rational choice when they remain single.

We're never going to significantly narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor unless we narrow the "good parenting gap" between rich and poor families, too.

Still, there's no question that the movement is upending Chilean society. True, it is centered on a policy question, namely reforming an educational system that disproportionally favors the children of wealthy families.

Diane Ravitch poses a dozen piercing questions on education and school policy. Some of them turn conventional thinking on its ear, and each could be a starting point for reporting on elections, from the presidency on down to local school boards.