In a “Letter to Our Next President,” education scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings—author of The Dreamkeepers—advises would-be commanders in chief to reconceptualize the achievment gap as the “education debt”:
The debt language totally changes the relationship between students and their schooling. For instance, when we think of what we are combating as an achievement gap, we implicitly place the onus for closing that gap on the students, their families, and their individual teachers and schools. But, the notion of education debt requires us to think about how all of us, as members of a democratic society, are implicated in creating these achievement disparities.
Hat tip: Renee Moore.