I’m not sure that it stands alone, however, on the top of my rankings. Though I am tempted to include this seemingly unrelated article about a recent Lindsay Lohan gaffe because of its symbolism for how much our schools are in need of improvement, I think the real article that can give Mr. Tough’s story a run for its money is this Nov. 25 item from the Washington Post on student organizing that has taken place over the past twelve months in Chile, which we've been covering for quite some time. In fact, I think the two articles go hand-in-hand in laying out a clear picture for where we are with school reform in America today, where we can be in ten or twenty years if we dedicate ourselves properly, and—this is where the Post article comes in—how we might go about getting there.

To recap the articles for you briefly, I’ll start with the Paul Tough’s piece, which was published in the New York Times Magazine. In it he talks about the confluence of two bodies of research and practice that are coming together, one on the causes of the academic achievement gap and the second on potential cures for it. The causes, he notes, are as disconcerting as they are unsurprising: by and large, low income and minority children are exposed to fewer verbal stimuli and receive less parental attention and positive feedback than middle-class and white children, with the result that the achievement gap starts building almost at birth. However, there is hope: these gaps are not inexorable, as is being shown by a number of high-achieving schools that are educating disadvantaged youth to excel, in many cases scoring higher on standardized tests than their more fortunate peers. The schools that Tough cites—eighty or so that are part of the KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools networks—are raising the achievement levels of children who enter their classrooms well below grade-level with a common recipe: extra time on task (as much as 60% more time each year with six-day weeks, one-month summers, and teachers who work fifteen hour school days); a rigorous pedagogical style that stresses measurable outcomes and frequent testing to show what is being learned and what needs further review; and character education to encourage hard work, teamwork, and positive outlooks among students.

Tough concludes his article by saying that these schools have shown us that the principal goal of the No Child Left Behind Act—the complete elimination of the academic achievement gap by 2013—is indeed possible because some schools are doing it now. But it won’t be easy; it will take an incredible amount of dedication to provide dramatically higher quality education to all low-income and minority children in the same way that the KIPP schools and others are doing with thousands of children today. The other edge of the sword, however, is that if we fail to make progress in eliminating the gap, we will have only ourselves to blame: the successful schools prove to us that should we continue to falter, our failures will be a reflection of a lack of public will, not educational know-how.

Which is where the second article I referenced, the Washington Post piece on Chile’s student movement, becomes important. When government fails to live up to is end of the bargain and provide important services to some portion of its citizens in an adequate fashion, only one strategy has succeeded time and time again in bringing the necessary changes about: social movements. In Chile, it took hundreds of thousands of students—with groups of as many as 800,000 students attending rallies in Santiago and elsewhere—to force the national government to guarantee basic educational resources and services like books and desks. In America, the problems facing children in our schools may be of a different magnitude (although in some cases, it’s not that different at all), but the basic statement is the same: a country that does not place the education of its youth first is sowing the seeds of its own destruction. And it’ll take a social movement of concerned youth, parents, and citizens to ensure that our nation’s leaders learn from what KIPP and other high-achieving schools are showing us: it truly is possible to educate all children, but it’ll take much, much more than we’re giving them now.