Yesterday I cited the statistic that 67 percent of Americans believe that the American education system is in crisis. Some of you questioned that notion. After all, for many of you, your schools are perfectly adequate. Your kids are learning their math facts. Your teachers are polished and smart. You meet regularly with the teachers to discuss your kids' progress.

It's worth noting that some of you have these schools which range from adequate to excellent, because you can afford to live in the right neighborhood or pay to send your kids to private schools, you are educated and informed, and your kids are well fed, smart, and motivated. (We bloggers and blog readers are an exceptional bunch.) Not everybody is so lucky.

But let's go back to the basic question. Are our schools really in crisis? In an excellent book, Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform, David Tyack and Larry Cuban question that notion. They look at our schools over time and find that our schools aren't performing any worse than they did in the past. They say these panics about school quality are cyclical and that our schools aren't all that bad.

Tyack and Cuban are correct that most schools are performing just as they have for a hundred years. However, urban schools have been consistently bad. As I said yesterday, 1/3 of kids don't graduate from high school. That's an average. If you just look at urban schools, that percentage is much higher. I talked to activists in Philadelphia who told me about schools in their neighborhood where only 1 in 10 kids graduated.

In this economy, we need every kid graduating from high school. The type of jobs that used to provide decent wages for poorly educated individuals don't exist any more. The steel mills have closed. The factories have moved to China. If you lack a high school education, you are more likely to be unemployed and to make less money than those who graduate from high school. 

Then there's the troubling correlation between educational achievement and income. The number one variable that explains education achievement isn't curriculum styles or computers in the classroom. It's income. Sure you have your kids that manage to beat the odds. My parents did. But they are outliers.

For the most part, the wealth of your community will determine how much your kid learns. This applies not only to broad diferences between the rich and the poor, but even among the fine gradations of income within the middle class. Last summer, the New York Times ran a graph that demonstrations that the wealthier a student’s family is, the higher the SAT score. Last spring, I fooled around with the numbers and found that even within my very middle class corner of New Jersey, those findings held.

That extreme correlation between income and achievement disturbs me. Our schools should be a place that levels economic stratification. The great promise of our country has always been not pure equality, but an equality of opportunity. Let the smartest, hard working kids have an equal shot at achievement. Sadly, that's not the case. The rich replicate the rich.

So, I do think that there is an educational crisis in this country. The harder question is why we are at this point and what changes can occur. I'm going to slowly build my case throughout the week.