Today at school, our staff decided we needed to press pause and create a space for kids to share their thoughts and feelings in response to the killing of Mr. Crutcher. I was part of facilitating three small group discussions throughout the day: a fifth grade group, a sixth grade group, and a seventh/eighth grade group. I want to share what I experienced with the kids today, because I am convinced that if you can put yourself in the shoes of a child of color in Tulsa right now, you will have a clearer understanding of the crisis we’re facing and why we say black lives matter.

I tell [the fifth-graders] we will read a news article about the shooting together so we can all be informed. As I read, the students busily highlight and underline parts that stand out to them: Fatally shot. Hands raised. “Bad dude.” Motionless. Affected forever. I finish and I ask them, “What are your thoughts?”

They answer with questions. Why did they have to kill him? Why were they afraid of him? Why does [student] have to live life without a father? What will she do at father daughter dances? Who will walk her down the aisle? Why did no one help him after he was shot? Hasn’t this happened before? Can we write her cards? Can we protest?

As the questions roll, so do the tears. Students cry softly as they speak. Others weep openly. I watch 10 year olds pass tissues to each other, to me, to our principal as he joins our circle. One girl closes our group by sharing: “I wish white people could give us a chance. We can all come together and get along. We can all be united.” Let me tell you, these 10 year olds are more articulate about this than I am…

The sixth graders are quiet. The tragedy lives and breathes among them. It could have been their father. Boys are scattered across the cafeteria with their heads buried in their shirts. A girl who just moved to Tulsa from New Orleans because her father wanted to “escape the violence” is choked up as she speaks in the group next to mine. When we come back together whole group, one boy is still crying as another rubs his hand on his back soothingly…

[The seventh- and eighth-graders] are hardened. They are angry. Some students refuse to hold or look at the article. The speak matter-of-factly. One says she feels like punching someone in the nose. Another student says, “I used to read about this happening and think, oh that’s sad, and then kind of forget about it. But this happened so close to home. It feels real now. I take 36th St N to and from school everyday. It happened right by my house.”

“What made him ‘a big bad dude?'” a boy asks. “Was it his height? His size–” I look at the boys in my circle, all former students of mine. They have grown inches since their first day in my class. Their voices have deepened. Their shoulders broadened. They all nod their heads in agreement at the student’s last guess– “The color of his skin?”

I share this story, because Mr. Crutcher’s death does not just affect the students at my school. I share this story, because we are creating an identity crisis in all of our black and brown students. (Do I matter? Am I to be feared? Should I live in fear? Am I human?) We are shaping their world view with blood and bullets, hashtags and viral videos. Is this how we want them to feel? Is this how we want them to think?

Rebecca Lee, a teacher at KIPP Tulsa College Prep, the charter school attended by the daughter of Terence Crutcher, on the reactions of the children to the news of the father’s murder at the hand of a Tulsa police officer. Another sad reminder of the reality that what happens to the children on our streets also affects them in schools.

It is my wish that throughout my visit the family should be a recurrent theme. How essential the family has been to the building of this country! And how worthy it remains of our support and encouragement! Yet I cannot hide my concern for the family, which is threatened, perhaps as never before, from within and without. Fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family. I can only reiterate the importance and, above all, the richness and the beauty of family life.

In particular, I would like to call attention to those family members who are the most vulnerable, the young. For many of them, a future filled with countless possibilities beckons, yet so many others seem disoriented and aimless, trapped in a hopeless maze of violence, abuse and despair. Their problems are our problems. We cannot avoid them. We need to face them together, to talk about them and to seek effective solutions rather than getting bogged down in discussions. At the risk of oversimplifying, we might say that we live in a culture which pressures young people not to start a family, because they lack possibilities for the future. Yet this same culture presents others with so many options that they too are dissuaded from starting a family.

A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did, when it fosters a culture which enables people to “dream” of full rights for all their brothers and sisters, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton.

In these remarks I have sought to present some of the richness of your cultural heritage, of the spirit of the American people. It is my desire that this spirit continue to develop and grow, so that as many young people as possible can inherit and dwell in a land which has inspired so many people to dream.

Pope Francis, in his speech today before the United States Congress, reminding all of us of our obligation as Children of God and members of Family of Man to build brighter futures for all children. This includes transforming American public education in order to help every child gain the knowledge they need to bring home their own “daily bread” in adulthood.

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
en the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bier crop.

– Abraham Meeropol’s Strange Fruit, a poem-turned-song inspired by a lynching in Marion, Indiana, whose lyrics of state-sanctioned murder of black men resonate as much now as it did when it was written nine decades ago. Dropout Nation prays for — and stands in sympathy with — the family of Eric Garner, whose murder at the hands of a New York City police officer was not given justice by a grand jury today. And reminds all reformers that they have no right to be silent about either the crises of injustice that affect the communities of the children we serve — or how American public education helps perpetuate them through practices such as the restraint of children condemned to special ed ghettos.

There is no denying the extraordinary rise in the incomes of the top one percent of American households over the past three decades. Between 1979 and 2012, the share of all household income accruing to the top percentile of U.S. households rose from 10 percent to 22.5 percent. To get a sense of how much money that is, consider the conceptual experiment of redistributing the gains of the top one percent between 1979 and 2012 to the bottom 99 percent of households. How much would this redistribution raise household incomes of the bottom 99 percent? The answer is $7107 per household…

Now consider a different dimension of inequality: the earnings gap between U.S. workers with a 4-year college degree and those with only a high school diploma… the earnings gap between the median college-educated and median high school–educated among U.S. males working full-time in year-round jobs was $17,411 in 1979, measured in constant 2012 dollars. Thirty-three years later, in 2012, this gap had risen to $34,969, almost exactly double its 1979 level. Also seen is a comparable trend among U.S. female workers, with the full-time, full-year college/high school median earnings gap nearly doubling from $12,887 to $23,280 between 1979 and 2012…

To put the numbers on the same footing, consider the earnings gap between a college-educated two-earner husband-wife family and a high school–educated two-earner husband-wife family, which rose by $27,951 between 1979 and 2012 (from $30,298 to $58,249). This increase in the earnings gap between the typical college-educated and high school–educated household earnings levels is four times as large as the redistribution that has notionally occurred from the bottom 99 percent to the top one perrcent of households. What this simple calculation suggests is that the growth of skill differentials among the “other 99 percent” is arguably even more consequential than the rise of the one percent for the welfare of most citizens… Wage inequality has risen throughout the earnings distribution, not merely at the top percentiles…

How much does the rising education premium contribute to the increase of earnings inequality?… Goldin and Katz found that the increase in the education wage premium explains about 60 to 70% of the rise in the dispersion of U.S. wages between 1980 and 2005 and, similarly, Lemieux calculated that higher returns to postsecondary education can account for 55% of the rise in male hourly wage variance from 1973–1975 to 2003–2005. Firpo et al. found that rising returns to education can explain just over 95% of the rise of the U.S. male 90/10 earnings ratio between 1984 and 2004. That is, holding the expanding education premium constant over this period, there would have been essentially no increase in the relative wages of the 90th-percentile worker versus the 10th-percentile worker…

Let us assume for the sake of argument that the rise of income inequality is entirely a market phenomenon. Would this imply that there is no role for public policy? A moment’s reflection suggests otherwise. As the economist Arthur Goldberger once famously observed, the fact that nearsightedness is substantially a genetic disorder has no bearing on whether doctors should prescribe eyeglasses. What is relevant is whether the benefits of addressing myopia exceed the costs. In the case of myopia, the availability of eyeglasses make this an easy call.

Although there is no “remedy” for inequality that is as swift or cheap as eyeglasses, prosperous democratic countries have numerous effective policy levers for shaping inequality’s trajectory and socioeconomic consequences. Policies that appear most effective over the long haul in raising prosperity and reducing inequality are those that cultivate the skills of successive generations: excellent preschool through high school education; broad access to postsecondary education; and good nutrition, good public health… Such policies address inequality from two directions: (i) enabling a larger fraction of adults to attain high productivity, rewarding jobs, and a reasonable standard of living; and (ii) raising the total supply of skills available to the economy, which in turn moderates the skill premium and reduces inequality.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor David H. Autor, in Science, explaining why providing all children with high-quality education is critical to stemming income inequality.

I get asked a lot about how I got involved in this, in education, and advocating for school choice. And the answer for me is pretty much the same as Lisa (Leslie, the former WNBA star who spoke earlier) and Faith (Manuel, the mother of a tax credit scholarship student, who also spoke earlier): I became a mother… And that’s probably the same answer a lot of other people in this room would have. Like every mother, like every other parent, I remember holding my son Eli in my arms for the very first time and looking at him and realizing that the life I knew was over. (laughter) And going forward, my life would be dedicated to caring for this child, and protecting this child, and trying to ensure that he had every opportunity possible to be all that he could be. And Number one on my list, in thinking about this, and thinking about both my kids now, I have two boys, is and was their education.

And I was thinking how fortunate I had been in my life. I had this career in television. And I lived in New York City. And my kids were going to have so many options available to them. I had so many choices and they would throughout their lives have so many opportunities because of this. And I think with that comes the recognition that that’s not the case for most people. And those choices and those options are not available to mothers who care about their kids just as much as I do, and have the same hopes and dreams for their children that I have for mine. And who want their child to have every opportunity in life just like I did. If we believe that education is a fundamental right, then everyone should have that choice.

It never ceases to amaze me that this very simple idea, that a parent who wants to try to find a school, a better school to try to give their child a better life, should have that choice. The idea that this is somehow controversial is amazing to me.

Campbell Brown, at the American Federation for Children’s annual conference, discussing why expanding school choice and Parent Power for all families should be the norm, not the exception, in American public education.

In the end, while [Andy] Smarick and [Juliet] Squire identify a serious roadblock to education reform, they may not have been completely transparent about what is at stake here – exactly the shift away from direct public control that has the critics of the “education reformers” so excised. SEA’s may not be the most efficient, nimble agents of change in education policy – but perhaps that’s the point: they are not supposed to be… This fact constantly frustrates critics of our school system, of course: they want more change, more quickly – and that is really at the heart of this report’s recommendations.

Given this frustration, the major flaw in Smarick and Squire’s proposal is not identifying the agent of change for their recommendations or the constituency that will lobby for a still-powerful but stripped down SEA. But this flaw in turn is connected to another:  what Smarick and Squire propose is a curious hybrid that has neither diminished powers nor fewer responsibilities for the SEAs. The risk of implementing the reforms the authors call for is that the result would be a still more complex structure of management and implementation that far from promoting efficiency, would result in endless friction between public and private organizations.

Peter Meyer of City University of New York’s Institute for Education Policy on why a Thomas B. Fordham Institute proposal for revamping state education governance isn’t exactly as sensible as it should be.