Schools that work.

• Author: Noguera, Pedro

If we loved our kids as much as we love football, we would get better schools.

There's a little town outside of West Palm Beach called Belle Glade. It's a dirt-poor, mostly African American town. It has produced more professional football players than any other town in America. Some people say it's because the grass is so hot that they run fast there. I say it's because we love football. Football coaches will go anywhere to get a football player: in a trailer park, in a dirt shack, in a housing project.

It's a reflection of our priorities, our popular culture, what we care about, what we invest in, and what we don't.

A year after Katrina, the Superdome was up again. Years later, there were still no schools in the lower Ninth Ward.

The biggest obstacle to educating children right now in America is the belief that some children aren't worthy, or simply can't learn, or that their parents don't care.

If you believed that was true, then you wouldn't be troubled. You'd say, "Well, look who we're working with."

That says something about American culture.

The small Caribbean island of Barbados has a higher adult literacy rate than the United States. And the people are poor.

When I was there, 300 students took the SAT, and all of them got a score over 1200. All of them were black. All of them were poor or working class.

Why is it that being poor and black is not an obstacle to achievement in Barbados? It's not about race. It's about something else. It's very American. I think unless you travel and see other places, you don't realize how American this phenomenon is.

If we could figure out how to meet the academic and nonacademic needs of students, if we could see kids beyond their deficits, and understand their strengths, their needs, how they learn, and engage them, we would design very different kinds of strategies. We would think more about how to create a different culture in the school.

In many schools, parents are seen as the obstacle--we will do this in spite of the parents, not with them--and it shows. Parents always have an impact--either positively or negatively. The kids who have the worst outcomes are those whose parents are least engaged.

We need a different kind of vision.

We need to think about the work of teaching as being embedded in a community, and we need to see the community as a partner.

I'll give you an example.

There's a school on the Lower East Side, PS 18, which is located right in the housing projects. There are high rates of...