"The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tirany is keeping them ignorant." --Maximilien Robespierre

mericans do not -- and clearly could not -- pride their society on the extent to which its wealth is shared equally among its citizens. While American society is willing to accept a gaping chasm between the rewards reaped by individual Americans as fruit of their efforts and measure of their "merit," there remains the belief that this process is essentially fair, insofar as equality of opportunity is said to exist. According to this nostrum, all American children living in the "land of opportunity" have an equal chance at material well-being -- and one of the ways that society seeks to ensure that equal chance is through the right to education. American public philosophy consoles (or scolds) poor children with the notion that however mean their beginnings, the path to a bright future lies before them if they will only apply themselves to their studies, and progress from there to a good job.

In reality, however, millions of American children do not share an equal chance to benefit from the opportunity provided by schooling. Many millions experience a childhood lacking in the essential requirements for good health, physical safety and proper mental and social development. These poor children are much more likely to have higher rates of developmental and learning disabilities. As already mentioned, the inadequate prenatal care poor mothers receive significantly increases their babies' risk of being born too early and underweight, conditions that can lead to serious developmental and learning disabilities as they grow up. Poverty is also a key roadblock to a child's education. Growing up at or near the poverty line means that a child is much more likely to experience difficulties in school. This is why a child born in the United States today has 1 chance in 432 of becoming a doctor but 1 chance in 5 of growing up illiterate.

Children who begin life in devastating poverty are at a huge disadvantage when they enter kindergarten, and a shortage of resources dogs them relentlessly through every stage of the educational process. By the time they reach kindergarten age, they are already falling far behind through no fault of their own.

Increasing numbers of American children today are coming to school unready for learning. As the Carnegie Foundation recently reported, as much as thirty-five percent of American kindergarten-age children arrive at school absolutely unprepared to learn. When the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching surveyed seven thousand kindergarten teachers across the country about how well prepared the children in their classes were for school learning, it characterized the results as "deeply troubling, ominous really." These teachers reported that one-third of their students arrive at school not ready to learn, and forty-two percent of the teachers said they believed the situation to be getting worse. One teacher said, "Children come to school who don't know where they live, can't identify colors, and are unable to recite their full and proper name." Another said, "More and more students are coming with deep emotional problems that interfere with learning." Some children were so hungry for food that they could concentrate on nothing else. Experts estimate that in the inner cities, the proportion of children not ready for school learning is more like sixty percent. A Carnegie Corporation task force reported in 1996 that "Millions of preschoolers are spending precious years caught in a maze of unstable, substandard settings that compromise their chances of succeeding in school."

There's a wider gap in the skills of children entering school now than there was twenty years ago, education researchers say. Many more American children today have a very low level of skills -- they can barely hold a pencil, aren't used to routine and don't even know how to turn to adults for help. There are more children at the lower end, and there are children who are extending the lower end even lower, asserts Robert C. Pianta, an associate professor at University of Virginia's Curry School of Education who has looked at the school readiness of about 1,000 American kindergartners. A major reason for this lag is poverty, he says.

Millions of kids in America these days have been exposed to family and neighborhood chaos. Poverty restricts the range of neighborhoods in which their families can afford to live. As a result, poor children living in those chaotic environments have had no predictable routines in their lives, and they have had no close relationships with adults. These kids are more likely to have few social skills and little ability to tolerate frustration. That being so, they simply don't even know how to adapt to basic routines in school or use books. Some don't even know that a pencil is something to write with. ...

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