I saw this posted on Twitter last week.

Which reminded me of this post, a few months ago, by Bill.

FDR said those words during his 1937 Inaugural Address.  80 years and still we struggle to pass his test of progress.

I have been working with students in poverty for 11 of my 17 years in education. While the work is incredibly challenging it is also incredibly rewarding.  Our kids face challenges that are incomprehensible to most, many of their successes can’t be measured on an EOG test.  But you hardly hear about those stories.

Instead, we hold up EOG scores, dismiss the challenges kids in poverty face and wonder why they aren’t as successful as their more affluent peers.  We place those schools in a perpetual cycle of blame, reduce funding, blame, reduce funding and so on.

I wonder what FDR would think? Our high poverty schools are still struggling, whose responsibility is it?

What if we all lived by these words…

I’ll lift you and you lift me, and we’ll both ascend together.

– John Greenleaf Whittier