(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
I was struck by Joel Klein’s statement in introducing the latest McKinsey & Company report on the impact of achievement gaps.
Klein stated:
People have said to me ‘Chancellor, we will never fix education in America until we fix poverty in America.’ Now I care about fixing poverty, but those people have got it exactly backwards folks. We are never going to fix poverty in America until we fix education in America, and this report shows that it is entirely doable.
Klein has both his theory of causality and priorities correct. It is perfectly idiotic to wallow around in helplessness claiming that education cannot radically improve in the absence of the vanguard of the proletariat seizing the commanding heights of the American economy and creating the New Jerusalem.
It should be painfully obvious even to the most ardent collectivist that this is never going to happen even if it were true, which as it happens, it isn’t. Welfare programs won’t change the fact that we recruit too few of the right people, and too many of the wrong people into teaching. It won’t change the fact that we distribute the limited supply of high quality teachers as if we are out to get poor inner city children. For that matter, it won’t change the fact we still don’t measure teacher effectiveness, and that when we do, we don’t do much of anything with the information.
Parental choice can be seen very much through this same lense. If you draw the short stick and grow up in an inner city area with terrible schools, why should anyone stand in your way of accessing a different group of educators for the same or less funding?
It is absurd to sit in the wealthiest major nation on the planet and have to listen to people claim that $10,000 a year is not enough to teach children how to read. Anyone who actually cares about the plight of the poor would do well to listen to Klein, not Rothstein.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
There was an allegedly true story at one point about a professor of Marxist theory and his grad student who were walking down a sidewalk and encountered a beggar. The grad student started to give him some money but the professor stopped him, saying: “You idiot! You’ll delay the revolution!”