What defines an ally? Competing answers to this question threaten to tear apart the increasingly fragile political coalitions working to improve our nation’s schools.
I’m an education policy researcher who has spent 25 years exposing unequal opportunity and outcomes in public education and proposing ways to fix those inequities. When I began, I was compelled in part by working in tandem, if not always in agreement, with a lot of other people who saw that public education was failing too many students.
While I personally shy away from the “reformer” label, I was heartened to see people on the left and right come together around one idea: There are systemic reasons for unequal opportunity. Overcoming those systemic barriers required people who didn’t agree about so many other things to work together.
