Last week’s Dropout Nation commentary decrying Thomas B. Fordham Institute boss Mike Petrilli’s call to subject poor and minority children to the soft bigotry of low expectations certainly generated responses thoughtful and otherwise. At the same time, the piece and the discussion surrounding it is a reminder that far too many adults continue to make artificial distinctions between the knowledge and skills needed for traditional four-year colleges and what is required for technical colleges and internships. More importantly, what is forgotten is that all children need comprehensive curricula that helps them succeed and understand the world in which they live outside of work. In short, there are plenty of reasons why plumbers should be well-versed in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and understand algebra and calculus.

In this Voices of the Dropout Nation, Los Angeles teacher Peter D. Ford III succinctly explains why all children should get high-quality comprehensive curricula — and what it should look like. Read, consider, and offer your own perspectives.

Attending Catholic schools in the 1960s and 1970s, my schoolmates and I received a ‘college prep’ education without realizing it. This education demanded we acquire a body of knowledge and skills that prepared us to seek education and employment opportunities beyond the secondary level. And it is the way it should be.

What we call ‘college prep’ today should be what every child learns from K-12 so as to expand their future academic or occupational options. The goal should not be college and career readiness alone, but to develop knowledgeable, skilled, and participatory citizens in our democracy and marketplace.

From the moment every child enters K-12, they should be reading literature; learning about the history of their community, country, and world; and learning a foreign language (or two). They should be studying and applying mathematics in every grade; studying and applying at least the big three sciences of chemistry, physics, and biology; and participating in art, music, sports, and mechanics. The fundamentals of everything they learn in one course will eventually apply to other endeavors inside and out of school.

We should not just be preparing young people for college, but preparing them to participate and prosper within their community, country, and world.

Our fight is against real, and not imaginary, hardships or, to use the language of the state prosecutor, “so-called hardships”. Basically, we fight against two features which are the hallmarks of African life in South Africa and which are entrenched by legislation. These features are poverty and lack of human dignity, and we do not need communists or so-called “agitators” to teach us about these things… The whites enjoy what may be the highest standard of living in the world, whilst Africans live in poverty and misery… The complaint of Africans, however, is not only that they are poor and the whites are rich, but that the laws which are made by the whites are designed to preserve this situation. There are two ways to break out of poverty. The first is by formal education, and the second is by the worker acquiring a greater skill at his work and thus higher wages. As far as Africans are concerned, both these avenues of advancement are deliberately curtailed by legislation… Approximately 40 percent of African children in the age group seven to 14 do not attend school. For those who do, the standards are vastly different from those afforded to white children. Only 5,660 African children in the whole of South Africa passed their junior certificate in 1962, and only 362 passed matric.

The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy. White supremacy implies black inferiority. Legislation designed to preserve white supremacy entrenches this notion… When anything has to be carried or cleaned the white man will look around for an African to do it for him, whether the African is employed by him or not. Because of this sort of attitude, whites tend to regard Africans as a separate breed. They do not look upon them as people with families of their own; they do not realise that they have emotions – that they fall in love like white people do; that they want to be with their wives and children like white people want to be with theirs; that they want to earn enough money to support their families properly, to feed and clothe them and send them to school…

Children wander the streets because they have no schools to go to, or no money to enable them to go, or no parents at home to see that they go, because both parents (if there be two) have to work to keep the family alive. This leads to a breakdown in moral standards, to an alarming rise in illegitimacy, and to violence, which erupts not only politically, but everywhere. Life in the townships is dangerous. Not a day goes by without somebody being stabbed or assaulted. And violence is carried out of the townships [into] the white living areas…

Africans want a just share in the whole of South Africa; they want security and a stake in society. Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent… Political division, based on colour, is entirely artificial and, when it disappears, so will the domination of one colour group by another. The ANC has spent half a century fighting against racialism. When it triumphs it will not change that policy.

This then is what the ANC is fighting. Their struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Former South Africa President Nelson Mandela, in a speech during his 1964 trial for attempting to bring freedom and liberty to Africans living under the nation’s apartheid racial segregation regime. The words spoken by the freedom fighter, who died today at age 95, are ones that school reformers should embrace in their efforts to build brighter futures for all of our children no matter the color of their skin or content of character.

The reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, now overdue and overpoliticized, took another baby step in June when the Senate education committee passed a bill without any Republican support. In July, the House of Representatives managed to pass a version of a bill that received exactly no Democratic support. And for 16 days in October, we witnessed partisanship at its worst with a government shutdown that doesn’t portend good things for the children of America.

What makes these episodes so discouraging, beyond legislators’ feigning seriousness about what should be a national priority, is that NCLB—the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—is the most progressive development in K-12 education since Brown v. Board of Education. Within its reauthorization rests the fate of 50 million students…

There is a disquieting truth about policy, which is that is does not achieve what it intends; it achieves what it allows. And the simple truth is that education policy prior to No Child Left Behind allowed schools to be evaluated in the aggregate. In this shameful holdover from the separate-but-equal doctrine, the performance of subgroups—including minorities, students with disabilities, students of lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and girls—was largely ignored. NCLB requires a disaggregation of assessment data and measures improvement not just of the school as a whole, but also of subgroups, heretofore invisible in many schools across the country.

Fast forward to Rancocas Valley Regional High School today—a one-time NCLB school “in need of whole-school restructuring,” the federal label for “failing,” in Burlington County, N.J. In 2013, its 2,200-student enrollment reflects the growing diversity and poverty level in America: Approximately 48 percent of the students are nonwhite, 23 percent receive free or reduced-price lunch, and 19 percent receive special services. In 2005, we received that federal label because of our inability to demonstrate adequate yearly progress for the subgroups on the state’s High School Proficiency Assessment…

To turn this situation around, the school’s leadership team adopted an empirical, data-driven approach to its work, and the faculty redoubled its efforts to reach every child. The faculty created an individualized educational experience for every child, believing in each student’s ability to be successful—as our school, our state, and the federal government define it. And so we evolved. We became a standards-based school, not rhetorically, but holistically. From daily lessons to course maps to common end-of-course assessments, the gap between what was taught and what was measured diminished greatly.

The administration partnered with the faculty to raise standards by eliminating course offerings that lacked rigor, a process known as “detracking.” On-level courses were set at a college-prep level. The career-and-college-prep level, where our faculty and counselors had guided students with academic difficulties, was eliminated. Those same students can now share demanding curriculum alongside stronger students with better parent advocacy… We committed ourselves to equalizing the learning experiences for our regular and special education students. No Child Left Behind’s requirement for highly qualified teachers motivated us to send our special education teachers back to school. They learned subject-area curricula equal to the knowledge of any content-area expert. Our classrooms are co-taught by educators with subject-area and pedagogical expertise…

The result? In 2013, more than 96 percent of our students achieved proficiency in language arts literacy on state assessments. Our students with disabilities achieved 73 percent proficiency. By comparison, in 2008, these numbers were 80 percent and 36 percent, respectively. We narrowed the achievement gap dramatically in the same subject. Our African-American students achieved 96.6 percent proficiency, compared with 68 percent in 2008. Our white students achieved 97.4 percent proficiency compared with 93 percent in 2008. The jump in math was also significant. We reached 93 percent proficiency overall, compared with 72 percent in 2008. Our economically disadvantaged students achieved 78 percent proficiency, compared with 42 percent in 2008.

Rancocas Valley Regional High School District Superintendent Jerry Jelig, in Education Week, explaining how the No Child Left Behind Act’s strong accountability measures helped drive the district to transform education for the children in its care. Such successes show why the Obama Administration’s effort to eviscerate No Child will end up damaging all children, including those from poor and minority backgrounds who have benefited (and need the benefits) the most.

Mathematics education in the United States is broken. Open any newspaper and stories of math failure shout from the pages: low international rankings, widespread innumeracy in the general population, declines in math majors. Here’s the most shocking statistic I have read in recent years: 60 percent of the 13 million two-year college students in the U.S. are currently placed into remedial math courses; 75 percent of them fail or drop the courses and leave college with no degree.

We need to change the way we teach math in the U.S., and it is for this reason that I support the move to Common Core mathematics. The new curriculum standards that are currently being rolled out in 45 states do not incorporate all the changes that this country needs, by any means, but they are a necessary step in the right direction…

In mathematics education we suffer from the widespread, distinctly American idea that only some people can be “math people.” This idea has been disproved by scientific research showing the incredible potential of the brain to grow and adapt. But the idea that math is hard, uninteresting, and accessible only to “nerds” persists.  This idea is made even more damaging by harsh stereotypical thinking—mathematics is for select racial groups and men. This thinking, as well as the teaching practices that go with it, have provided the perfect conditions for the creation of a math underclass. Narrow mathematics teaching combined with low and stereotypical expectations for students are the two main reasons that the U.S. is in dire mathematical straights…

An important requirement in the Common Core is the need for students to discuss ideas and justify their thinking. There is a good reason for this: Justification and reasoning are two of the acts that lie at the heart of mathematics. They are, in many ways, the essence of what mathematics is.  Scientists work to prove or disprove new theories by finding many cases that work or counter-examples that do not. Mathematicians, by contrast prove the validity of their propositions through justification and reasoning.

Mathematicians are not the only people who need to engage in justification and reasoning. The young people who are successful in today’s workforce are those who can discuss and reason about productive mathematical pathways, and who can be wrong, but can trace back to errors and work to correct them. In our new technological world, employers do not need people who can calculate correctly or fast, they need people who can reason about approaches, estimate and verify results, produce and interpret different powerful representations, and connect with other people’s mathematical ideas.

Stanford University Professor Jo Boaler, in the Atlantic Monthy, explaining how Common Core’s math standards can help children develop the habits of mind needed to both master algebra and think through the abstractions that underlie daily life. This is a point made by Dropout Nation last month in the second podcast in the series on Common Core. Listen to the third Dropout Nation Podcast in the series.

My son, William, is a young man whose direction in life changed because of school choice. [School choice works]… our entire family benefited.

Virginia Walden Ford, whose proto-Parent Power activism in Washington, D.C., spurred reforms that are benefiting kids in the District three decades later, on Twitter, explaining why expanding school choice and Parent Power helps children and the families who love them.

I wrote the nation’s first parent-trigger law. I acted because I understood that education is the civil rights issue of our time and the key to the American dream. I’m the daughter of a mother who attained only a 6th grade education, but who understood that education is what lifts us out of poverty. As a Democratic senator representing the diverse, heavily Latino East Los Angeles-eastern Los Angeles County community and the chair of both the state Senate’s education and prison oversight committees, I understood that if we do not educate, we will incarcerate. California locks away a disproportionate number of Latino and African-American youths, and, nationwide, nearly 70 percent of inmates are high school dropouts.

For years, California’s education department routinely released data on schools with disturbingly high—indeed, morally shameful—percentages of children who fail to score at even basic levels of academic proficiency. These are schools identified as chronically underperforming and in need of intervention, but all too often they were simply ignored, forgotten on bureaucratic lists. Nothing was ever done for them. Ironically, many of these schools were named for civil rights heroes, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. Nonetheless, they were left to languish year after year, most parents unaware of their status. In the 15 years since I was first elected to the legislature, some of those same schools have appeared on the lists again and again.

I am a product of the civil rights movement. I graduated from a high school where I was “counseled” that college was beyond my reach—after all, I lived in one of those zip codes, at the end of a dead-end road in a mostly rural county. But with a mother who had faith and inspiration drawn from the late John F. Kennedy, a farmworkers’ movement, and an intense love of learning, I rose to become the Senate majority leader of the state of California…

In no other part of American life do we tie parents to the land, define them by zip code, and empower government officials who are strangers to families to make fundamental, life-altering decisions on behalf of their children based on five digits of geographic identity. The zip code has become the definitive great divide, a profound separation between high-poverty, minority youths and the American dream.

Undoubtedly, if sweetheart contracts didn’t enable effective teachers to bypass struggling neighborhood schools, and if bureaucrats actually used the federal laws at their disposal to transform such schools, I never would have had to write the parent-trigger law. But that was not the case. Lists of failing schools, representing hundreds of thousands of kids in California, were simply released and promptly ignored. Few people even knew about the lists, and those who did weren’t outraged. So I looked back to the foundations of our democracy and gave parents the right to take on their own government when it refused to act on behalf of their children.

Former California State Senator Gloria Romero, who now runs the Foundation for Parent Empowerment, reminding all of us why Parent Trigger laws and other Parent Power measures are critical to breaking the cycle of educational abuse and neglect heaped upon so many of our children.

A few years ago I sat with a group of urban district leaders in a noisy L.A. restaurant, leaning forward to hear every word from the new Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent, John Deasy. Deasy had, admirably, given up a comfortable job at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to get back into the fray to try to tackle one of America’s most impermeable school districts. Deasy had the support of the mayor and a couple of years of opportunity. He was optimistic about the task ahead: creating hope, erasing inequity, professionalizing teaching, holding adults accountable, giving families choice.

In nearly any other sector, a man like Deasy—who is able to articulate a strong vision of change and pursue it relentlessly—would be able to get people to follow him and accomplish most anything. But this was LAUSD, where for decades strong leaders were eaten alive by the politics of race and unions and poverty and rampant district dysfunction.

Deasy came out strong in his new position, making aggressive moves toward a new teacher evaluation system that included value-added measures of effectiveness… But more than anything, it was impossible to make challenging policy decisions and maintain the support of LAUSD school board members, who—as in other cities—are influenced by community politics and stakeholder interests, rather than acting like they should, as a governing body that oversees a long-term civic vision and strategic plan…

If you are honest with yourself (and older than 20), you may find yourself believing that if a leader like John Deasy can’t make real progress, the urban superintendency truly is an impossible job. We need to stop relying on heroism and instead start dismantling special interest-captured school boards and other governance structures that get in the way of school improvement for urban students. We need civic leaders to commit to a long-term vision of institutional change that will weather the leadership shift of the moment.

I’ve seen the L.A. story often enough now that it’s starting to feel like a bad video game that you play over and over, always with the same result… If and when Deasy, yet another promising superintendent, leaves, the conversation should not be—as it usually is—about the man. It needs to be about the systems that stood in his way.

Robin Lake of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, noting a point made by Dropout Nation this weekend about the need to move away from the traditional district model. It’s better to move away from old-school models that breed dysfunctional bureaucracies than to keep them around to do further damage to children.

“I’m just not a math person.” We hear it all the time. And we’ve had enough. Because we believe that the idea of “math people” is the most self-destructive idea in America today. The truth is, you probably are a math person, and by thinking otherwise, you are possibly hamstringing your own career. Worse, you may be helping to perpetuate a pernicious myth that is harming underprivileged children—the myth of inborn genetic math ability.

Is math ability genetic? Sure, to some degree. Terence Tao, UCLA’s famous virtuoso mathematician, publishes dozens of papers in top journals every year, and is sought out by researchers around the world to help with the hardest parts of their theories. Essentially none of us could ever be as good at math as Terence Tao, no matter how hard we tried or how well we were taught. But here’s the thing: We don’t have to! For high school math, inborn talent is just much less important than hard work, preparation, and self-confidence…