This is an excellent analysis by economist Laura D’Andrea Tyson about poverty and educational opportunity. She provides excellent links to up-to-date statistics about children living in poverty. She understands that their opportunities are shadowed by the circumstances of their lives.
But at the end of this otherwise excellent article, she concludes that President Obama’s Race to the Top program is addressing the problem of poverty and limited opportunity.
I am guessing she has no idea what the Race to the Top consists of. I wonder if she knows that it is designed to cater to the “no excuses” crowd at the NewSchools Venture Fund that believes that poverty is no obstacle if public schools are turned over to private management, if students take more tests, if teachers are evaluated by their students test scores, and if kids are taught to walk in straight lines and drilled to take tests.
I left a comment, something I seldom do. You should too.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m pretty sure that if Prof. Tyson had had first-hand experience with No Child Left Behind, she would be skeptical of Race to the Top. Wikipedia tells us that she has one child, a son who graduated from The College Preparatory School, an Oakland/Berkeley private high school, in 2001.
Race to the Top does not affect The College Preparatory School. NCLB, imposed charters, and Broad Foundation ideology strongly affected my kids’ three public schools in Oakland. It is starting to annoy me that people’s own family experiences — even if they are bright people — seem to be required to understand the state of education in America.