O, you students here, you all look so young and fresh and brave and beautiful! And so many schoolteachers and principals! My favorite people are those who teach pint-size kids in elementary school. They do the best thing there is to do with your life: bring joy and beauty and mystery and magic to tiny people three feet high.

*

It seems to me sometimes that that every politician in America feels free to condescend to and patronize teachers. They all know better than teachers what teachers should do. But I tell you the cure for arrogance: go to a school where conditions are the worst, and class size the largest, and funding the most parsimonious, and enter any class, and ask the teacher if you can teach it for a while. I do that sometimes, and I always mess up. But I love how the children jump out of their seats! and wave their hands all at once and want you to choose them! I sometimes feel like I’ve accidentally set protons and electrons spinning around the classroom.

*

For the last twelve years I have worked in the South Bronx, the poorest congressional district in America, right next to Manhattan’s upper East Side, one of the wealthiest and whitest neighborhoods in the world.

Life is tough for children there. A quarter of these children suffer from chronic asthma, which is now an epidemic in inner city neighborhoods all over the United States. A quarter of these kids see their fathers only when they visit them in prison, and New York’s Rikers Island prison is now the largest penal colony in the world, with 20,000 inmates, “the largest barred ghetto in the world,” as black folks say. Many of these kids are hungry, especially in the last week of the month when food stamps run out. Many have been homeless; almost all of these kids have lost a relative to AIDS.

Now, wouldn’t you think, being a good country with basically generous values, we would say to ourselves, Look at all the stuff these kids have going against them, and we would make sure that they have opportunities to get ready for school — screen them for illnesses, for example, and make sure they don’t have hearing or vision problems — all the things that the Head Start program does, for example?

But we choose not to.

*

In my country many people send kids as young as two years old to private preschools that cost about $20,000 a year. $20,000 a year for people who weigh forty pounds. The Baby Ivies, these schools are called. But far more children spend those formative years at home, if they have a home. Yet all these children face federally mandated high-stakes tests at age eight. Who do you think does the best on those tests? I say it is outrageous to impose so many high-stakes tests on children so early if we have first denied them any opportunity for preschool. That’s unfair and hypocritical. It’s robbery.

*

For more than 30 years I have gone to Capitol Hill and begged for programs like Head Start to be expanded. Everyone’s friendly to me, Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals. They come up to me and they grab my elbow to show how intimate we are with each other and they say, Jonathan, these things take time, be patient...

But it does no good to tell that to a three-year-old. In a few years she won’t be a child. She might not be alive. You don’t get to be a child twice. You cannot return childhood to a child. It’s lost forever.

*

In the South Bronx there are 11,000 children in the elementary and middle schools. Exactly 26 children are white. That’s a segregation rate of 99.8 percent. Is that not apartheid? And do you think this is not the case in parts of Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland?

*

Should we talk about inequality in education in Portland? Underfunding here is to the point where several schools may be closed because enrollment in the buildings is too low — too much empty space, in a country as wealthy as we are! Good God! You have extra space in the building? Reduce class size, add more teachers, create science learning centers or play space for the littlest ones.

Do you really think it makes sense for our educational policies to be determined by tax policies?

*

Look, I’m not a complete romantic. Tests can’t be simply derided or ignored. We live in a world where we’re going to be tested in a thousand ways, and children and poor people need to be well armed in order to survive the competition. But there’s something venomous and cruel in a federal agenda of severe examinations without prior equity, without equivalent resources for all children. Such tests are not diagnostic tools. They are simply clubs to bludgeon children we have cheated from the hour of their birth, and to intimidate and humiliate principals and teachers. The entire system of so-called accountability imposed upon our schools and teachers by the legislation called “No Child Left Behind” has taken on a pathological dimension, frightening good administrators and creating a system whereby students cannot be measured by their creativity, spontaneity, happiness, goodness, kindness, or spirit.

Is that the educational system we want for America?

*

People say to me, “Can we really solve all these problems by throwing money at them?” and I answer, Yes! Yes! Throw it! Dump it from a helicopter! I don’t know a better way to put a new roof on an old school, or to stock a school with wonderful children’s literature, or to install good computers and good software, or to pay a young, idealistic, glowing, first-year teacher fresh from the Univer­sity of Portland, flying high with youthful idealism and energy and beauty. Money gives her the first year of a career she might chase for a lifetime! That’s what money does! Yes! Yes!

*

Isn’t the true measurement of educational quality this: whether our schools are creating compassionate children, children with intelligent capabilities for decency, children with mischievous delight, children not measured solely by proficiency and benchmarks and rubrics and efficiency, but by redeeming sweetness? The Germans between 1935 and 1945 were terribly proficient, and they had an efficient school system, and children probably scored well on exams, but did they learn as much as they needed to about decency in the face of evil?

*

Old trees and the wild delight of children will outlive us all. Life goes fast. Use it well. Attend to the children.