Showing contempt for a half-century of unrefuted research, public policy now assumes that teachers alone can close the achievement gap between disadvantaged and middle class children. In this challenging climate for public education, teachers and other public school leaders have three tasks, each of which must be pursued simultaneously. First, educators must resist the reduction of expectations to improved performance on low-quality, high stakes standardized tests. Second, they must direct what resources they can to the provision of high quality early childhood, health, social service, and after school programs that can improve the readiness of disadvantaged children to learn, and to the mobilization of available resources for these purposes from other community institutions. And third, educators must become more outspoken about social and economic conditions that limit children’s ability to take advantage of public education, and about the imperative to fight politically to ameliorate these conditions.
