If the city wants to make itself a desirable educational partner for the municipalities, it cannot legislate its way there. Parents care about their children, and the parents with more economic power will wield more political influence than their less powerful counterparts, full stop. The burden is on the educators to make up that gap, to use a minimum share of economic power to develop in students significant gains in political power (for which the skills taught in school serve as a proxy).

We’ve got to heal ourselves and our own practices before we begin any sort of complaining. What lessons are we teaching students when we reduce them to data, when we spend outside of our means, when our school leaders are forced to resign in shame, when one out of four African-American students are suspended from school.