The current campaign finance system is corrupt. Billionaires and powerful corporations are now, through super PACs, able to spend as much money as they want to buy elections and elect candidates who represent their interests, not the American people. Meanwhile, we have one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any major country on earth, and Republican governors are working overtime to suppress the vote and make it harder for poor people, people of color, seniors and young people to vote.

What do we want? We want to overturn the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and move toward public funding of elections. We want universal voter registration, so that anyone 18 years of age or older who is eligible to vote is automatically registered. We want a vibrant democracy and a well-informed electorate that knows that its views can shape the future of the country.

Our criminal justice system is broken. We have 2.2 million people rotting behind bars at an annual expense of $80 billion. Youth unemployment in a number of inner-cities and rural communities is 30 to 50 percent, and millions of young people have limited opportunities to participate in the productive economy. Failing schools all around the country produce more people who end up in jail than graduate college. Millions of Americans have police records as a result of marijuana possession, which should be decriminalized. And too many people are serving unnecessarily long mandatory minimum sentences.

What do we want? We want a criminal justice system that addresses the causes of incarceration, not one that simply imprisons more people. We want to demilitarize local police departments, see local police departments reflect the diversity of the communities they serve and end private ownership of prisons and detention centers. We want to create the conditions that allow people who are released from prison to stay out. We want the best educated population on earth, not the most incarcerated population.

Tautology haunts the shape of these fervent lessons. “Grittier spellers practiced more than less gritty spellers,” Duckworth assures us. Well, yes. She is looking for winners, and winners of a certain sort: survivors in highly competitive activities in which a single physical, mental, or technical skill can be cultivated through relentless practice. As examples, however, instances of success in soccer, spelling bees, and crossword-puzzle design suffer from the same weakness as success during Barracks Beast—they may not offer much help to people engaged in work that demands more diffuse or improvisatory skills. In many careers, you can grind away for years and get nowhere if you aren’t adaptable, creative, alert. In modern offices, many people work in teams, present ideas to a group, move from one project to another. Grit may be beside the point….

Duckworth’s work, however, has been playing very well with a second audience: a variety of education reformers who have seized on “grit” as a quality that can be located and developed in children, especially in poor children. Some public schools are now altering their curricula to teach grit and other gritty character traits. In California, a few schools are actually grading kids on grit; the practice is widespread in the trendsetting charter-school chain kipp (Knowledge Is Power Program). The standardized-testing agencies that administer the National Assessment of Educational Progress (naep) and the Program for International Student Assessment (pisa) are moving toward the inclusion of character assessment as a measure of student performance. Duckworth, to her credit, has argued against tying such scores to the evaluation of teachers and the funding of schools, but that development may be inevitable.

This snowballing effect among school reformers can’t be understood without recognizing a daunting truth: We don’t know how to educate poor children in this country. (Our prosperous students do fine on international tests.) George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program and President Obama’s Race to the Top incentives were designed to raise test scores in general, and in particular to close the gap between affluent and poor children, but neither program, putting it mildly, has succeeded. Despite some success at individual schools, there has been little over-all improvement in the scores of poor children. The gap between white and minority children has actually increased in recent years.

For children, the situation has grown worse as we’ve slackened our efforts to fight poverty. In 1966, when Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty initiatives were a major national priority, the poverty rate among American children was eighteen per cent. Now it is twenty-two per cent. If we suffer from a grit deficiency in this country, it shows up in our unwillingness to face what is obviously true—that poverty is the real cause of failing schools…..

Bowman’s ideas for CASA High School include using New York City as a classroom based on its museums, financial institutions and corporations, as well as a heavy focus on interdisciplinary work.

“No longer should each discipline — math, science, humanities — be looked at in silos,” he said. “We should take an interdisciplinary approach to curriculum because in the 21st Century economy, students have to be able to look at things holistically.”

Students would also spend one day a week outside of school working at an internship and spend their senior years studying outside of New York state.

“Senior year is usually a winnowing down year anyway, so why not create true global citizens by taking them outside of New York state, outside of the United States?” Bowman asked. “Go learn with cultures all over the world.”