Do we have an "achievement gap" in schools in the United States or an "educational debt" that we owe many of our children and communities? This is the question that Forum Convener Gloria-Ladson Billings puts before us in her featured piece in this edition of The Forum's newsletter. It is a question that challenges us to revisit our nation's oft-repeated but yet-to-be realized commitment to equal educational opportunity—a commitment fundamental to our future as a democracy.

Repaying the Educational Debt is the third in a series we have sent out asking for your comments. (See earlier essays from Conveners Carl Glickman and Deborah Meier.) These essays are being developed in conjunction with The Forum's white paper on the appropriate federal role in supporting public schooling, which will be released on April 23rd of this year. We intend to follow this framework document with recommendations on equity, teaching and learning, and community accountability in calling for a renewal of our commitment to the public, democratic purpose of our public schools. Your comments on each of these essays are helping us frame these recommendations.

Ladson-Billings' essay focuses on a topic that gets little attention in current debates, and most of the attention it does receive does little to help the children in our schools. Under current legislative mandates we have limited any discussion of equity in our public schools to mean little more than equal test scores. But such a focus does little to actually improve schools. Instead, the focus on testing does much to limit the experience of our children and in particular the experience of our most needy students. What's more, as this edition's featured resource "Avoidable Losses: High-Stakes Accountability and the Dropout Crisis" reveals, the focus on testing is also pushing more children out of school.

I think about this as I stand in front of my middle and high school to welcome children in for the day. I wonder why these kids, simply because of where they live, go to a school that spends $9,000 per student per year less than other schools within our state. I wonder why they are not worth spending more so we could provide more course choices, more counselors, more in the arts, more, simply, of everything. I wonder what it says about our nation that in state after state the only choice parents and communities seem to have is to bring legal action against their state educational and legislative leaders in order to try and equalize school funding. What does this say about us as a nation?

It is cynical at best to require equal results from a system which creates such an unequal playing field. And it is not, as Ladson-Billings points out, just about the current inequities in our schools. It is about an historic unwillingness to strive for equity that has actually created an educational debt that cannot simply be repaid by equal distribution of resources.

Other nations have not allowed such inequities to dominate their systems. In fact, those nations that policy makers love to point to as leading the world in educational achievement (as measured by tests) all have a national system of funding schools that prohibits the inequities we see around us. They understand that if national achievement is to rise, if all citizens are to be prepared for a learning economy and democratic participation, it means ensuring that all children have equal access to the conditions to learn regardless of where they live or who they are.

The current Governor of my state, Ted Strickland, said in his inaugural address, "Where a child in Ohio grows up should not determine where he or she ends up." There is no more direct way to put it. And it is well past time that our federal government, with its clear obligation to protect the civil rights of all, realize that the civil right to an education is perhaps, as W.E.B. DuBois put it, "the most fundamental of all civil rights for which we have strived."

Every child in the United States deserves an equal opportunity to learn; in schools staffed with well prepared and supported teachers, where the facilities are sound and up to date, and where the resources are present to meet the learning needs of every child. To do less is to simply forfeit our commitment to democracy as we say that the intellectual growth and development of some of our children is not as important as that of others. It is to say that we will do education by zip code, and the public good be damned.