Summer is nearly over and in the next couple of weeks schools will fill up with students—and teachers will begin the task of trying to overcome the social and economic inequities that only they seem to be charged with battling. They take on the task willingly, but I wonder why they alone are expected to close the gaps our children face.

In case you missed it, this summer saw the release of a report from Johns Hopkins University that was no surprise to any of us who work with America's children. The report was from a study of Baltimore children and has been following kids in that city for 25 years. Along with a host of other issues facing children in poverty, the researchers found that for poor children much of what is learned in school is lost over summers while for children who have summer opportunities such as access to library programs, summer camps, books, and all the rest learning continues through the summer months.

Interestingly, it seems that children who are school-dependent show great learning gains during the school year. However, the summer months wash these out, meaning that these children have to learn twice as much to catch up with their more well-off peers. In fact, these researchers found that "cumulative achievement gains over the first nine years of children's schooling mainly reflect school-year learning, whereas the high SES—low SES achievement gap at 9th grade mainly traces to differential summer learning over the elementary years.

I was reminded of this reality when I received a summer newsletter from a school that serves well-off children. It reported on all the summer trips to France, work with movie producers, and internships in research hospitals these children were enjoying. On the other hand, I know that most of the kids in the city where that school is located spend summers walking passed closed libraries, working for minimum wage pushing hamburgers, or sitting on their doorsteps waiting for school to open again.

The point is not that schools should give up trying to help kids "catch up" in their learning or that school should be stretched out over the summer. Rather, the issue is that until America deals with the inequities our children face, in everything from health care (including prenatal care) to housing to nutrition to summer learning opportunities it is cynical to charge our teachers with closing learning gaps that are not of their making.

I can hear the refrain of the "school-blamers" in response to these findings: "But what about the fact that achievement gaps increase the longer students are in school?" Leaving aside for the sake of argument that these gaps are only those found on standardized examinations, I would respond that this growing gap merely proves the point. Kids that come to school with all the advantages, including homes where there are the resources to support the school, learn more quickly and then extend that learning over the summer. The achievement gap race is a rigged game, with some kids starting only a few hundred yards from the finish line and others starting miles away and teachers being expected somehow to overcome the difference in 180 days a year.

While I was thinking about this the September issue of Harper's magazine was put in my post office box with the Peter Schrag's cover story "Schoolhouse Crock: Fifty Years of Blaming America's Educational System for Our Stupidity." It should be required reading for every policy maker and pundit in the country.

Schrag argues that American schools, while they could be better, are not as bad as they are painted to be. Further, while we think we are generous in funding our schools, this is not the case as we expect them to do much more than their sister institutions in other nations where things like sports and music are provided by communities and students come to school having reaped the benefits of childhood health care and adequate nutrition. As he points out, international comparisons of schools fail to paint a true picture as "our schools are forced to serve as a fallback social-service system for millions of American children."

The lesson Schrag draws from his survey of American school reform is this: "More so than other modern societies...the United States tends to act as if the schools can do it all. Yet children who come to school hungry, or with vision problems, or with toothaches, and who pass through mean streets to get there, can't possibly be expected to learn as well as healthy kids."

The Forum is committed to policies that address all the conditions that effect how our children learn. We cannot pay off the educational debt America owes its most underserved communities and children by simply making kids take more tests. Rather, we must provide the supports for every child, all of our children, that make it possible for all of them to develop the habits of heart and mind that make democratic life possible.