Your editor hasn’t spent much time on the efforts of suburban white families along with opponents of Common Core reading and math standards as well as affiliates of National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, to push families into opting out of state standardized tests. As Alexander Russo and others have pointed out, there is slim evidence that families are actually heeding any of the messages. The fact that outcry in many states — notably New York — is driven by AFT and NEA (to neuter the use of test score growth data in teacher evaluations) and Common Core foes (in order to stifle implementation of the standards) also makes the entire effort more of a traditionalist tantrum than real concern from families over supposed overemphasis on testing. And besides, reformers such as Andy Rotherham and Chris Stewart have devoted plenty of words to the issue, likely more than it deserves.

Yet reformers cannot simply dismiss the arguments for opting out by suburban families and cannot just dismiss the opt-out efforts. If anything, the opt-out efforts are another reminder to the school reform movement that they must continually make the strong case for advancing systemic reform. This means both reminding those opposed to reform why they must live up to their moral obligations to all of our children regardless of whether they gave birth to them or not — and explaining to them why transforming American public education will be beneficial to their own children, who deserve better than what they are provided now.

Prompting your editor’s consideration of the issue is a piece from Andy Smarick of Bellwether Education Partners, who proclaims this week that opt-out efforts are “testing education reform’s humility.” From where Smarick sits, reformers who argue against the opt-out efforts, including those pointing to how their efforts damage the futures of poor and minority children, are engaging in “condescension”. As far as he is concerned, reformers shouldn’t view the opposition to standardized testing from white suburban families and others “with skepticism or antipathy”, and that it is “untoward to suggest they don’t care about other kids or are insensitive to issues of race and income.”

Declares Smarick: “We could disparage them. But that would only serve to insult and incite. Or we could humbly listen, respectfully argue our case, and make the necessary course corrections.”

Certainly your editor can appreciate Smarick’s desire to ignore the racialist aspects of the opt-out efforts. Either out of naivete or discomfort, he and other conservative reformers want to believe that everyone is a person of good will. But for Smarick to not consider that racialism is as much an underlying force behind the opt-out efforts as organized efforts by teachers’ unions and (occasionally legitimate) concerns of suburban white families is to be intellectually unserious.

Racism is America’s Original Sin, one that pervades the political, economic, and social fabric of the nation. While state-sanctioned discrimination (and enslavement) is no longer tolerated, issues within and outside of education (along with actions such as last November’s New York City grand jury decision to not indict a police officer for the murder of Eric Garner) are constant reminders that racial bigotry have only become more-subtle and, because of social stigma, less explicit.

Just as importantly, Smarick and other conservative reformers keep making the error of thinking of racism in binary terms, that is, you can only argue that a policy or practice is racist if it explicitly targets a race or ethnicity, or if the person authoring or administrating it is explicitly and consciously racialist. As demonstrated in studies of the overuse of out-of-school suspensions and other forms of harsh school discipline — including one by Stanford University professor Jennifer Eberhard and graduate student Jason Okonofua published this month in Psychological Science — the consequences of policies and practices can be as racialist as overt acts by those engaged in explicit racial discrimination.

This is a stubborn fact neither conservative reformers nor the rest of the movement can ignore. This is because school reformers, like all social reformers of past and present, have to constantly remember that their efforts often run counter to human nature. Sometimes people are capable of great good. Other times, even greater evil. Most of the time, though, humans, being imperfect creatures of the Creator, are naturally tribal, concerned first with the protection of our kin, then with the preservation of those who look like us and share our background. Those who do not look like us, don’t live in our neighborhoods, or aren’t even part of our social class are looked upon with either contempt or indifference. They are merely the other.

On a practical basis, this means that as many people are unconcerned about the futures of other people’s children as those who are, even when it is clear that the collective success and survival our children (and that of society and civilization in which they will be adults) is clearly at stake. Anything that challenges the primary concerns for one’s own — be it the recognition of the life and liberty of others, or social reforms that improve other communities alongside our own — will always be greeted with look askance and worse.

Yet as earlier generations of reformers outside of education have shown (and as the school reform movement has demonstrated), reforms and social improvements are possible. The very existence of modern civilization demonstrates this, as does the end of Jim Crow segregation and the peculiar institution that was American slavery. This results from strong, persistent efforts in activism, policymaking, and practice-developing. It doesn’t end when victory is won because all victories against human nature are temporary without it. And it involves calling people on the carpet for their immoral thinking as well as appealing to their nobler instincts (including their obligations as children of God and members of the family of mankind).

For reformers, this means that they must continually make the case for advancing systemic reform. Because of the baseness of human nature, no social improvement remains eternal. Because tribalism in all its forms is foremost in the human psyche, unifying people to do better for each other is always a challenge. Because it is easy for people to deny the humanity of others — including and especially children — there will always be a fight for equality and justice, especially when it comes to education.

So reformers must both be the conscience of men and women who should know better — and remind people that it is in their enlightened self-interests to both be concerned about providing high-quality education to their own children alongside those of other people.

As legendary social activists such as Salvation Army founder William Booth would say, reformers are moral scolds. There is nothing wrong with that. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was no more wrong for calling out white suburban parents over their opposition to Common Core than Martin Luther King was for calling White America on the carpet for perpetuating Jim Crow segregation five decades ago or Abraham Lincoln was for opposing slavery 100 years earlier.

Certainly you should make a case based on data and evidence. But evidence has never been enough to convince people to do the right thing. As civil rights activists and abolitionists of the past have shown, calling out immoral and intellectually dishonest thinking is a foremost obligation of every school reformer. Simply sidestepping that role, something for which Smarick implicitly argues under the guise of “humility” cannot ever be done. More importantly, the actions we take emanate from our moral concerns; so morality cannot be excluded from policy and practice. Calling things as they are (or as some with less backbone call it, demonizing) is a necessary part of highlighting that which is wrong, immoral, and should no longer be acceptable.

At the same time, reformers cannot simply shame people into embracing its tenets. This is what Smarick does get right, though not necessarily for the correct reasons. Moral scolding alone doesn’t work because of realities of human nature. The other? The fact that people will always be convinced of the rightfulness of their views even when they are demonstrably wrong. So is important for the movement to offer a positive vision that both builds brighter futures for other people’s children and appeals to the desire of families to do the best for their own kin. Or as some would say, enlighten people’s natural self-interest on behalf of the children whose futures we are aiding.

This means explaining how standardized tests provide critical data on how schools and the adults who work in them are serving their children as well as those from different backgrounds. It involves demonstrating over and over again how suburban districts are subjecting children from white middle class households to mediocre teaching and curricula while condemning kids black and brown to educational abuse and neglect. Finally, it includes honestly and sensitively addressing legitimate concerns about testing and the other solutions for which we advocate.

The school reform movement shouldn’t overstate the possible impact of opt-out efforts. At the same time, it shouldn’t consider any victory for systemic reform eternal. Constant activism — from moral scolding to appeals to goodwill — are key to sustaining the reforms we implement to help all children succeed.

Fifty percent of high school seniors who express no interest in any form of higher education eventually end up in traditional colleges, community colleges, and technical schools within eight years of graduating. This finding, courtesy of a released this week by the William T. Grant Foundation, offers another important reason why we must provide all of our children with the college-preparatory curricula they need so they can choose their own path to lifelong success.

As Dropout Nation has documented over the past few years — especially in critiques of the Pathways to Prosperity report offered up by Harvard University as well as the arguments of Andrew Hacker and Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Michael Petrilli — many traditionalists and even some reformers think that providing all children with college preparatory learning (or what they derisively call college for all) is somehow unnecessary. From where they sit, providing all middle-schoolers with Algebra 1 courses and every high school student with Advanced Placement courses is harmful to them because students struggling in school (including dropouts and those who will barely graduate from high school) aren’t going to head to college. Those kids, they say, aren’t college material and probably don’t want higher education anyway.

They think those children they don’t consider to be college material should be shunted into vocational high school programs. Your editor has pointed out numerous reasons why their thinking is so shortsighted. One of the most-important: The fact that few high schoolers really don’t know what careers suit them until they enter the workforce; what may be an ideal fit in theory (or based on a brief internship) often turns out not to be in the bright light of day. This is why only 30 percent of kids in vocational courses spend any time working in their chosen fields, according to education policy consultant Richard C. Seder. Sooner or later, they will end up seeking higher education; so it is a mistake to assume that those who don’t immediately enroll in college won’t eventually do so.

This is the reality the Grant Foundation highlights in its latest study. Looking at data for high school sophomores followed in the federal  Educational Longitudinal Survey who graduated in 2004, a Grant Foundation research team led by James Rosenbaum of Northwestern University found that 86 percent of high school graduates eventually attends some form of higher education. This includes those high school grads who expressed no interest in any kind of higher education — the very children that the likes of the Pathways to Prosperity crowd (along with Hacker and Petrilli) argue don’t need college-preparatory curricula.

The percentages of high school grads attending higher ed doesn’t vary based on their academic performance: Seventy-three percent of high school grads who performed at low levels on their 10th-grade exams eventually took up some form of higher education within eight years as did 87 percent of peers performing at average levels and 95 percent of those who were top-performing. This was also true regardless of socioeconomic status, with 75 percent of low-income high school grads, 86 percent of middle-income peers, and 95 percent of higher-income counterparts eventually going to college.

Yet there are clouds in these silver linings. Most of those high school grads will end up with a workforce certificate, associate degree, baccalaureate, or graduate credential. But 46 percent of those first enrolling in community colleges and 23 percent of those first enrolling in four-year universities attained no credential at all. While their economic prospects are certainly better than high school dropouts, Rosenbaum and his team found that they were less likely to be employed than those who left higher ed with credentials. The earnings of a high school grad with some higher education, on average, was at least 10 percent lower than that for peers graduating with a certificate, associate degree, baccalaureate or graduate-level degree.

The lack of completion is especially problematic for high school grads from the poorest homes who proceeded on to higher education. Thirty-six percent of low-income high school grads who first attended a four-year university failed to attain a higher ed credential; this is only true for 26 percent of middle-income peers and 15 percent of counterparts from wealthier homes. It is also quite troublesome for any high school grad who first starts out their higher ed path in a community college, with one out of every two high school grads from poor and middle-income households, along with two out of every five wealthier peers, failing to attain a higher ed credential. And it can be an arduous challenge for high school grads who are the first in their families to attend some form of higher ed: Just 51 percent of those kids eventually attain a higher ed credential.

Certainly one problem lies with the challenges faced first-generation higher ed students, many of whom come from poor and minority households, is part of the problem. Because they lack parents and caregivers familiar with navigating the complexities of staying in college (including annually filling out federal financial aid forms) and lack the financial cushion to deal with emergencies such as when Pell Grants come in too late to pay for room-and-board, these students often find themselves struggling to survive in environments for which neither school nor home ever prepared them. That community colleges, which are the higher education institutions of choice for most students (and the key lynchpins in workforce training efforts for nearly every industry), fail mightily at both supporting low-income students and in providing high-quality higher ed is also a problem. This, by the way, is another reason why the Obama Administration’s plan to subsidize community college tuition for those with a 2.5 grade-point-average should probably go back to the drawing board.

Yet the biggest problem lies with failure of American public education to provide college-preparatory curricula and guidance to kids so they can be successful after they leave high school.

College-preparatory curricula is critical to helping kids graduate from high school and complete higher ed. Yet few children, especially those from poor and minority households along with first-generation collegians of all backgrounds, are provided academically-nourishing curricula. Just 13 percent of American high school students of all socioeconomic backgrounds were taking comprehensive college-preparatory courses while the rest were taking less-rigorous curricula, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ 2009 high school transcript study. As Dropout Nation reported in its analysis of federal data, just 21 percent of middle-schoolers in seven states that mandate Algebra 1 in seventh and eighth grade were provided those courses in 2009-2010. The consequences can be seen when kids enter higher ed, especially community colleges and public universities that devote little to supporting students in college completion. Just one out of every 10 community college students in remedial ed programs graduate within three years, according to Complete College America in a 2012 study.

The problem begins long before secondary education. As a team led by Amy Claessens of the University of Chicago determined in a study released last year on the effects of academic content on the learning of kindergarteners, “all children benefit from exposure to advanced content in reading and mathematics”. In this case, advanced mathematics for kindergarteners included advanced number concepts, and basic arithmetic such as addition and subtraction usually taught in first grade. Yet few children are provided high-quality content in math. And as your editor continually points out, the low quality of reading curricula and instruction in the early grades all but ensures that far too many kids are functionally illiterate or reading at just basic levels by the time they walk into high schools.

Another problem: Traditional school discipline and the overuse of out-of-school suspensions. As Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins University determined in his studies, sixth-graders who are marked unsatisfactory for behavior (and likely suspended) have little chance of graduating high school. But the consequences of overusing suspensions — along with the fact that they hide the failures of traditional districts to address underlying literacy and other learning issues — extends even to those few kids who do graduate from high school. Just 31 percent of high school grads who get in trouble three or more times as high school sophomores attain a certificate, associate degree, baccalaureate or graduate credential according to Rosenbaum and his team. This is likely because of the misbehavior that manifests in kids by fifth grade as a result of literacy and other learning issues that are almost never addressed.

But it isn’t just about academic failures. As Dropout Nation detailed four years ago in a profile on the efforts of the See Forever Foundation’s Maya Angelou charter schools to help ex-dropouts complete higher education, traditional districts fail mightily in helping students stay on the path to success in higher ed. The very scale that should allow districts to help children stay on the path to educational and economic success is of little use in an age in which ensuring all children get a high-quality education is more-important than how many students attend in the first place.

Benjamin L. Castleman of the University of Virginia and Lindsay C. Page of the University of Pittsburgh determined in a 2013 study that simply sending students text messages reminding kids to fill out college applications and other forms increases the likelihood of attending college by seven percentage points. Yet traditional districts, with their struggles on the technology front, are unlikely to undertake such efforts or partner with organizations that can. Districts barely keep tabs on where students go after they graduate high school; offering the kind of alumni services to graduates (including helping them apply to college a few years after they finish high school) almost never happens.

Guidance counselors can help kids think through their career paths; particularly for first-generation collegians, counselors can help them go through the college application and financial aid processes as well as figure out what resources are on campuses they can use once they go to college. Yet because of the bureaucratic scale-oriented nature of the traditional district model, and collective bargaining agreements with affiliates of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, few districts hire enough guidance counselors to do the job — and almost always lay them off first during periods of belt-tightening. Nor do districts hire enough mental health workers — or even contract and partner with organizations that can do such work — to help either traditional students or ex-dropouts get ready for the emotional challenges of higher ed.

Yet there is no reason why we don’t help all children gain the knowledge and support they need to choose their own paths to success in adulthood. In fact, there are a number of critical steps that reformers can take to help our children to get the high-quality education they need and deserve.

This starts with implementing high-quality curricula standards, especially continue putting in place Common Core reading and math standards. But this isn’t enough. Providing kids with college-prep curricula that aligns with the standards is key to making the promise of high-quality content a reality. It also means ending the rationing of learning — including gatekeeping gifted-and-talented classes that are key to children getting on the path to higher ed completion — that are a legacy of early 20th-century thinking that only some kids (namely those who are white and middle-class) deserve college prep learning. This means reformers must build upon efforts such as Project Bright Idea in North Carolina as well as the work of the St. Charles Parish district in Louisiana, who are essentially declaring that every class for every child should be a gifted-and-talented course.

The work of providing kids with high-quality education must begin early. This includes providing intensive reading remediation to the 40 percent of children who will enter K-12 with literacy issues regardless of what parents do at home. It also means using tools such as Response to Intervention to identify those struggling kids and providing them with such remediation. Meanwhile kindergarten classes must provide intensive math instruction, especially on helping kids understand that numbers represent quantities, as well as basic arithmetic, in order to get them on the path to success. This certainly means overhauling how we train aspiring teachers as well.

Then there is stemming the overuse of the harshest school discipline, which is especially important given that few suspensions are ever meted out for violent behavior. Addressing the underlying literacy and learning issues, along with implementing restorative justice approaches to discipline that would help children understand the consequences of their behavior, would go a long way toward helping them become college graduates.

The final step lies with moving away from the traditional district model. Moving to what Dropout Nation calls the Hollywood Model of Education, in which a variety of schools — including independent public schools, public charters, private schools, online outfits, DIY schools launched by families and communities, parochial school operations, and charter management organization-managed schoolhouses — can help all kids. This means expanding school choice — from high-quality charter schools to voucher programs and tax-credit initiatives — as well as passing Parent Trigger laws that allow families to take over and overhaul failing schools in their own communities.

The Grant Foundation study once again shows that is a mistake to think that only some children deserve college-preparatory learning. Which means we must continue transforming American public education to help all of them gain the knowledge they need and deserve.

There were plenty of responses to last week’s pieces tearing apart Rick Hess’ and Michael Petrilli’s op-ed accusing fellow school reformers of race-baiting for raising concerns about efforts by congressional Republican powers John Kline and Lamar Alexander to eviscerate the No Child Left Behind Act’s accountability provisions. Certainly many of them were supportive of your editor’s argument — as well as that of other reformers — that the two erstwhile reformers failed to make their case against their colleagues in the movement.

But a few were annoyed with the essays. Why? Because I had essentially claimed that the arguments Hess or Petrilli have offered on No Child reauthorizaions and other issues displayed their myopia on race and lack of concern for the futures of children from poor and minority backgrounds. From where they sit, your editor failed to show mutual respect and goodwill to them and their arguments. And this view extends to my treatment of the proposals offered up by Kline and Alexander (the latter of whom is holding hearings today on No Child reauthorization).

Certainly your editor understands why they make this argument. After all, folks within Beltway policy and educational research circles tend to embrace what I call the Goodwill Presupposition of Debate. That is, the assumption in any discussion, especially those related to battles over the reform of American public education, that everyone involved are men and women of goodwill, whose ideas and policy positions reflect their desire for to provide children, along with the families and communities in which they live, the best they deserve. Based on that theory, we should be less-strident in our criticism of those with whom we disagree, and in fact, give their ideas the benefit of doubt.

All of this is well and good if you want to believe it. But there are myriad problems with the Goodwill Presupposition as a guiding principle in rhetoric and debate, especially when it comes to matters that affect the futures of children.

The first is that the Goodwill Presupposition assumes that all ideas and policies as morally equal. This isn’t true. As with intellectual consideration of issues, some ideas and practices can be proven as morally inferior to others based on the historical record, on data and evidence, and on the moral codes, Judeo-Christian-Muslim as well as humanist and atheist, that are at the heart of our world.

Outside of education policy discussions, for example, we would not assume that state-sanctioned segregation — from America’s Jim Crow, to South Africa’s Apartheid, to the separatism practiced in Israel against native Arabs — is morally equal to equality for all people under law. This is because history, along with the Golden Rule, has shown us that no law that treats some people as inferior to others has any moral standing to the idea that all men are granted inalienable rights by God and mankind.

The second problem with the Goodwill Presupposition is that it assumes that the consequences of ideas, policies, and practices are morally equal and valid. If ideas can be found invalid intellectually based on empirical evidence, why can’t they be found morally unsound?

As we have learned over the past century, practices such as ability-tracking have been proven to do little to improve the quality of education for children, especially for those from poor and minority backgrounds Just as importantly, decades of evidence has shown that the consequences of ability-tracking have been dire for the futures kids already denied opportunities for high-quality teaching and curricula. There is no more reason to treat ability-tracking as an morally- and intellectually-equal practice to expanding school choice.

Thirdly, by assuming that everyone involved in debates and political battles all share the same good intentions, the Goodwill Supposition demands that we ignore evidence that shows otherwise. Certainly you can’t know the heart and mind of an opponent. But to assume that all are people of goodwill, even amid evidence otherwise, is to give some people greater credence than they deserve — especially if the morality and moral consequences of that for which they advocate are inferior and in fact, damaging to their fellow men and women.

For example, I don’t know American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten’s heart and mind. But I can argue that her defense of near-lifetime employment and teacher dismissal policies that keep criminally abusive teachers in classrooms to harm children is morally as well as intellectually indefensible. As both a moral being and an intellectually-reasonable person, there is more than enough evidence for me to be skeptical of Weingarten and her advocacy.

Finally, the Goodwill Supposition is a form of moral relativism that neither Jesus nor Socrates would find tolerable. If some ideas and their consequences are immoral and their consequences violate all codes of morality, then you cannot regard them as equals to those which are morally valid both in theory and result.

If we give all ideas, policies, and practices equal moral footing regardless of evidence and precept, we are essentially saying that lies are equal to honesty, fabrication is akin to objective facts, and that propaganda is no different than evidence. What is the point of scholarly inquiry or discussion if everything has validity?

But the consequences of this thinking extend beyond debate: What is the point of doing the right thing when doing wrong is just as good? Why should you advocate for bending the arc of history toward progress when regressive ideas and practices have equal validity? Particularly for reformers, unquestioned practice of the Goodwill Presupposition can harm the movement’s moral mission.

Put simply, neither the plans to eviscerate No Child offered by Kline and Alexander, nor the defenses of them by Hess and Petrilli, deserve to be given equal moral or intellectual weight to either the current law or the arguments defending it. This is because the policy proposals of the former are morally, as well as empirically, inferior to the latter. This isn’t to say that any of these men are terrible people. It is to say this: The call by Kline and Alexander (along with Hess and Petrilli) to end subgroup accountability measures that expose how poorly states, school operators, and those who work within them are educating our most-vulnerable children, who are the least of us Christ called us to look after is a violation of our moral obligation as Americans and as human beings.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be principled and respectful in our debates and disagreements with our opponents. Such decorum is not only necessary, but demanded of us as children of God and members of the family of man. It also doesn’t mean that we can’t get along; after all, as Jesus would command, we can hate the argument and still love the people who make it, especially since we are all fallible. It doesn’t even mean that every debate involves moral considerations; this is certainly true when it comes to discussions over what policies will be most-effective in expanding choice or improving teacher quality. Any belief otherwise is an embrace of thoughtless and counterproductive dogmatism.

But it does mean in those debates that do involve moral issues, giving all arguments equal weight is absolutely senseless. Especially because public policy is a clear communication of our moral expectations as citizens. Just as importantly, expecting people to not call things as they are based on both evidence and morality is simply unacceptable.