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A letter to the 44th president of the United States.

Article Excerpt
Dear Madam/Mr. President:

The often quoted comment attributed to the late Christa McAuliffe, "I touch the future, I teach," rightly describes our nation's dedicated teachers, but I fear that it is not honored, and sometimes not even acknowledged, by current American policies regarding child welfare in general and education in particular. I write to you because I am concerned about the commitment that the United States is not making to the future--the commitment our society is not making to our children and their teachers. We seem to be too caught in the present to focus on the future--and I am concerned that we are wasting precious resources. I hope that your legacy will be a network of social and educational supports that provide children with what the Children's Defense Fund terms a healthy start, a head start, a fair start, a safe start, and a moral start. And I hope that you will restore the public's faith in our teachers and make it possible for them to work with children and adolescents to build promising futures as individuals and as members of a strong U.S. society.

We are failing to address one of the most salient factors affecting our children's future--poverty. As a nation, we cannot continue to ignore our social, ethical, and moral responsibilities to provide a foundation for educational success, beginning with access to the health care that is necessary to learning and development. The National Center for Children in Poverty (Fass & Cauthen, 2006) reported that 18% of all U.S. children live in poverty, but that figure is much higher for certain racial groups. Thirty-five percent of Black children are poor, as are 28% of Latino/Latina children and 29% of American Indian children. This means that we are a long, long way from providing equal opportunities for success to all of our students, beginning with access to prenatal and childhood health care. The home page for the Children's Defense Fund (www.childrensdefense.org) reminds us that as of March 3, 2008, 894,206 children have been born without health insurance since the beginning of the 110th Congress, and that every 4 minutes a baby is born to a mother who had late or no prenatal care. This cannot continue. We must make a strong commitment to the health of our children so that our teachers can work with them to create futures that are tilled with promise. Without proper care, children will not be able to live or learn up to their potential.

Jonathan Kozol is one of the strongest and most consistent voices writing to the general public about the connections among poverty, inequities in funding for schools, and the resulting disparities in opportunities for poorer children to access quality education. Savage Inequalities (Kozol, 1991) is still required reading for many students of education. But with the focus on teacher and school accountability for promoting achievement as measured by high-stakes tests, we seem to have lost sight of the nation's and the states' accountability for ensuring conditions that make it possible for teachers to teach and children to learn. In Kozol's study of schools in New York City, for example, he documented the dangers of lead paint in schools, castigating those who would ignore the damage our infrastructure is doing to our children:

Many of the liberal intellectuals I know who are concerned with questions of unequal access...

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