My book is called “Fighting the White Knight: Saving Education from Misguided Testing, Inappropriate Standards and Other Good Intentions.” The words good intentions are the key. I probably should have said “allegedly good intentions.”

I believe my book helps explain recent problematic test results that keep resulting in calamitous educational policies, followed by even more atrocious plans and actions.. Across time and across the country, educational “reformers” keep trying to find solutions to the achievement gap that do not involve changing the US school funding system, hoping to find a magic fix while deflecting attention away from the effects of local property-tax-based school funding.

As I have observed before, property-tax-based funding favors Congresspeople, mid-level bureaucrats, and other decision makers. Middle-class (or better) employment allows parents to choose between more expensive, prosperous neighborhoods where education funding flows freely into schools that have all the support staff, devices and special services most parents could desire. Meanwhile, in less fortunate neighborhoods, technology, software, books, aides, and tutoring tend to be much thinner on the ground. In the US today, you get what you can pay for. That can be a single language option on the curriculum instead of six different languages, and almost nothing for afterschool activities except sports, while luckier kids down the road have more than twenty after-school clubs, on top of all the usual sports.

Eduhonesty: FUNDING needs to be front and center in our sights as we work to bring equity, fairness and improved performance to the US educational system.