Barack Obama, in a pre-election speech, told the story of a teacher he encountered who complained of a "these kids" syndrome - the tendency to explain away the failures of our education system by suggesting that "these kids" don't want to learn or "these kids"are just too far behind.
They're not "these kids," the teacher said, they're "our kids." And we need to see to the needs of "our kids," Obama said, all of them.
As Washington Post education columnist Jay Matthews pointed out in a recent piece http://boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/10/26/grade_change/, we spend too much time obsessing about how many young engineers we're turning out in some never-ending race against China and India - a race, by the way, that is a lot closer than news reports would have us believe - and not enough time focusing on the real problem: the failures of the schools serving our most vulnerable students.
"For those who look carefully at the performance of our schools, the real problem is not that the United States is falling behind, or that the entire system is failing," Matthews writes "It is the sorry shape of the bottom 30 percent of US schools, those in urban and rural communities full of low-income children."
The nation, he argues, should be looking at charter schools that have succeeded in reaching low-income children in areas like Harlem, Oakland and the Anacostia neighborhood in Washington D.C.