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Poverty limits opportunity in all senses.  It restricts career paths, as policymakers recognize.  But it also denies young people equal time, resources, and exposure to discover their interests and foster their passions.  It constrains lives.

Schools, of course, did not create this problem.  But they do exacerbate it.  Over the past decade, well-intended policymakers concerned with closing the achievement gap have promoted policies and practices that reduce learning to something easily quantified.

Reformers need to understand that their narrow efforts to close the quantifiable “achievement gap” are creating another kind of educational inequity.  In other words, as they seek to close one gap they are opening up another.

Concerned only with the cultivation of ostensibly job-oriented knowledge and skills, they have neglected everything else that makes schools great. 

Our best schools are places where children gain confidence in themselves, build healthy relationships, and develop values congruent with their own self-interest.  They are places of play and laughter and discovery.

For contemporary education reformers, improving test scores is the only measure of school quality that matters.  And they have had some modest successes in this regard.  Yet they have merely reshuffled the deck.