The problem, he argues, is that school’s feedback system is broken. Grading things like writing assignments is such a time-consuming, arduous task for teachers — especially those who want to offer constructive criticism — that students often don’t get the attention they need. 

“It needs to be instantaneous,” Hedman said. “You need to have that feedback now, not three weeks later.”

A Colorado-based researcher who studies how users interface with technology, Hedman said the same technology that powers plagiarism enablers like ChatGPT now has the potential to make thinking and writing come alive. He has proposed a solution that uses AI to offer immediate suggestions for students as they write.

Working with a small group of teachers, he has developed a free tool called that attaches to students’ Google Docs accounts. As they develop a piece of writing, students can simply flip a switch and ask the app to help organize their thoughts, assist with marshaling evidence, fix grammar and hone a thesis statement.

It’s one of several emerging as designers like Hedman push to flip a bleak script around AI and its negative effects on student motivation. Instead of banning AI or turning a blind eye to students as they outsource writing and critical thinking, he and others say, we should be using it to help students improve and learn more.

When it comes to writing in particular, teachers struggle with how to help students develop skills, Hedman said. Most often, students get good grades for simply turning in a serviceable piece of prose, with little regard for how they developed the ideas. And teachers often have little time to help them through this process. Pressed for time and bored — or even mystified — by assignments, students naturally turn to AI to produce a satisfactory product. 

In order to refocus on the writing process, Hedman invoked the well-known Apple Computer tagline, saying, “We have to think pedagogically different.”

‘Less like red ink’

As its name suggests, Level Up encourages students by lightly gamifying their skill development, rewarding them with a new “level” of challenge each time they improve their writing. Its main distinction lies in offering something students seldom get in school: instant questions and suggestions that respond to their writing in real time. Instead of focusing on the prize at the end — a completed paper — the tool tackles granular tasks such as shortening too-long sentences, clarifying unclear arguments and strengthening passages that employ the passive voice. 

Hedman likens it to — only without the quick, ready-made answers. Instead of allowing users to simply right-click on underlined words or passages to instantly correct them, as the popular app and similar ones do, Level Up challenges students to improve their writing at the sentence level.

Students can ask for several types of feedback: help with an introduction, an argument, a paper’s overall tone, its grammar, or the way it uses evidence to make a point. The opportunity to choose what to work on, Hedman said, makes the feedback feel “less like red ink, less accusatory” to students. And getting immediate feedback that’s not tied to a grade invites them to write more experimentally. 

Developed over the course of several months while Hedman tutored students at a local Girls and Boys Club, Level Up emerged as he pondered the many dilemmas that pop up as digital technologies burrow deeper into children’s lives. “You can’t get students to read anymore,” he said. “You can’t get students to write.” To make matters worse, tools like ChatGPT allow students to “push a single button and it’s going to write.” That allows them to outsource critical thinking at a time when it’s more important than ever.

While improving their writing is key to helping students, he said, it’s not his ultimate objective: “My goal was to understand what they cared about and what they needed” to learn better and enjoy learning more broadly. 

Hedman previously worked with elementary and middle schools to develop a free app called that helps struggling readers learn to think critically about stories. The app offers short mystery and adventure stories and invites users to shape the narrative. 

“What I discovered was, first off, students love critical thinking,” he said. “A struggling reader wants to critically think about a text they barely understand. Our brains are wired to give us a dopamine hit. We really like solving problems or getting feedback or solving the mystery. This is human nature. We like to be challenged, and we like to kind of get over that hump and solve the problem.”

Getting past ‘AI abstinence’

Level Up grew out of four years of research using “emotion sensors” he developed while earning a PhD at MIT’s renowned . He has since worked at several education providers, from the school design startup , Lego and the children’s digital game developer to McGraw Hill.

He helped develop early for Curriculum Associates and noticed that for a lot of students, school “was one of the most broken emotional experiences I’ve ever seen.” Most notably, it features a problematic mismatch between students’ willingness to learn and schools’ inability to engage them. As a result, they lose focus and eventually stop caring about school.

Handing them the keys to powerful AI tools won’t help them develop learning habits, he said, but neither will depriving them of these, as many schools now do. He calls the practice “AI abstinence” and said his recent survey of about 200 students shows that many — especially high schoolers — are using AI heavily to sound smarter in writing and hit required word counts. Students now routinely let AI write their essays, he said, then go back and paraphrase sentences to make them sound more natural. 

“They talk about this process casually, like running spell check,” he , noting that many students have already figured out that AI detection tools fail when humans simply paraphrase their borrowed text. “It’s human writing, technically, but not human thought,” he said.

One student told him, “Pretty much all of my friends use AI every time,” while another likened it to alcoholism, telling Hedman, “I don’t drink, but it’s like testing alcohol. You try it once, then the next day you want more. Soon, it’s just how you do things.”

College writing coach and John Warner, who has written several books on student writing, acknowledged the difficulties of getting students to write, but said that perhaps a better way would be to focus less on their arguments and grammar and more on their ability to explore different kinds of writing, at least earlier in their education.

“We can let young students just ‘do stuff’ with writing and not worry too much about, ‘Is there a thesis?’ They just need to be writing — and they just need to be experiencing writing and reading and expressing themselves, looking at the world, seeing what they think, seeing what they feel, seeing what they mean.”

Warner said we should actually think differently about whether teachers are grading writing effectively. “I’m a skeptic about ‘real time feedback,’” he said, noting that teachers can help students on occasion by waiting until they ask for help. “Sometimes the struggle is the point.” 

Students — especially young students — need encouragement, not instructions. “The feedback would be, ‘Great. Do it again.’ The idea that we need to inculcate these very specific skills as early as possible, I don’t think there’s any evidence for it.”

While banning AI altogether might seem logical, Hedman said, it’s ridiculous in a world saturated with AI. Instead, he proposes that students need teachers to help them understand the endeavor. 

“If we put guardrails and [say], ‘You actually have to reflect on your paper — and you will get graded on this reflection,’ it changes the students’ mindset from ‘My job is to turn in a nice paper’ to ‘My job is to reflect and think about my paper and make edits.’”

The distinction might seem small, he said. “But every student I interviewed said they would prefer it that way.” 

Receiving a grade on the work that goes into an improved essay, rather than simply the end product, is much more motivating, he said. It has actually spawned an emerging field called that is only growing as AI tools improve.

“You put energy and time and reflection into this paper and you should have that be in your grade, not just that you turned in a nice-looking paper” Hedman said. “Because anyone can turn in a nice looking paper with ChatGPT now. But can people put in work and reflect and improve their papers? That’s a different skill.”

In a new survey released Tuesday by , a Massachusetts-based think tank focused on public engagement, respondents ranked preparation for college or university nearly at the bottom of their priorities for schools: 47th out of 57 overall.

As recently as 2019, prepping for college ranked No. 10 nationwide, just below learning “from exposure to different ideas and beliefs.” That priority also dropped a bit, to No. 27.

Instead, the findings show, Americans now want something very different from K-12 education: a concentrated focus on “practical, tangible skills” such as managing one’s personal finances, preparing meals and making appointments. Such outcomes now rank as Americans’ No. 1 educational priority.

Top 10 Purpose of Education Rankings

“I think the takeaway is: The American public wants ‘different,’ not just ‘better’ from education,” said Todd Rose, a former Harvard University scholar and Populace’s CEO and co-founder. “It’s pretty clear that there’s a different set of outcomes that they are expecting.”

While college prep should be an option, he said, the data show that “it certainly can’t be the point” of K-12 education going forward. 

Part of that shift comes as Americans realize the diminishing economic value of both a high school diploma and a college degree, Rose said.

A college degree, he said, has always been viewed as a key path to a better, more high-paying career. “It’s not clear that that value is there from college anymore. So then when you pile on the outrageous cost … and the debt you’re incurring, it’s just not true. The value proposition isn’t there anymore.”

So it’s natural for the public to look to K-12 schools for other, more practical priorities, he said.

To be fair, this particular set of skills, with its real-world focus, has sat atop the Populace scale since 2019, along with aspirations that students learn to think critically, “demonstrate character,” and do basic reading, writing and arithmetic.

But the precipitous fall of college prep is significant — and widespread. Actually, respondents with college degrees were nearly as likely as high school graduates or even dropouts to give college prep a low priority score: It ranked 48th for college graduates, vs. 49th for high school graduates and dropouts. The figure was slightly higher — 39th for those with graduate degrees.

To Rose, that finding suggests a “broader zeitgeist shift” about college, one coming even from its graduates, who believe that in its current state, “This thing is untenable. It’s just too expensive.”

The survey of 1,010 adults was conducted Sept. 12-30. Pollsters also surveyed 1,087 parents separately. Researchers asked participants to imagine rebuilding our K-12 education system “entirely from scratch based on the purpose of education as you define it.” Then it set out pairs of priorities that participants ranked.

The data on college preparation suggest that the drop is driven largely by attitudes about higher education among one large group: White respondents, who placed it 46th overall in 2022. By contrast, Black and Hispanic respondents both placed it near the middle of the pack, 22nd out of 57 priorities. Asian respondents placed it relatively high at 9th place.

Even before the pandemic, attitudes about college-going were beginning to fray, research suggests. In 2019, the found that only half of American adults believed colleges and universities “are having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.” Nearly 4 in 10, or 38%, said colleges were having a negative impact, up from 26% in 2012.

Rising college costs are, of course, a big factor: At public four-year colleges in 2020, average tuition and fees were than in 2010, according to the U.S. Education Department. 

The rise in negative views, Pew said, arose “almost entirely” from Republicans and independents who lean Republican, with 59% saying colleges have a negative effect on the nation.

Overall, undergraduate between 2009 and 2020, according to the department, from 17.5 million students to 15.9 million. But it’s expected , to 17.1 million students by 2030.

Rose said even the oft-invoked culture wars over “indoctrination” of college students may actually be a function of higher education’s larger failures. “If college was still delivering on the value proposition, of the kind of careers that make for your little slice of the American dream, I don’t know that anyone cares” about indoctrination, he said.

More Rankings of Note

As for priorities in the Populace survey broken down by race, the results reveal a few interesting details: White respondents’ top priority was for schools to teach “practical, tangible skills” — managing finances, preparing meals and the like. In that sense, they basically track with mainstream priorities.

By contrast, Black respondents’ No. 1 priority was thinking critically, while for Hispanic respondents it was allowing students to advance in school “if they meet minimum grade requirements.”

Asian respondents’ top priority: Giving all students “the option to choose the courses they want to study based on interests and aspirations.” That indicator actually fell in importance overall, from No. 2 in 2019 to No. 9 in 2022.

Another big change since 2019: Americans now ­­largely distrust standardized tests, prioritizing how a student ranks against others on such exams even lower than college prep: 49th out of 57 priorities. They’re much more likely to prioritize teacher-administered exams, projects or “performance in real-world applications,” according to the survey.

And they have a new-found appreciation for mastery learning: The idea that “Students advance once they have demonstrated mastery of a subject” jumped from 30th out of 57 priorities in 2019 to 7th in 2022.

Part of that is doubtless due to the forced homeschooling that millions of families found themselves taking part in during the spring of 2020, Rose said. That changed families’ priorities about the purpose of schooling, almost overnight. 

“The pandemic affected our experience with education,” he said. “It put kids back in the home, with parents who watched their kids learn online, if at all. And like most public shocks to systems, it tends to lead to a rethinking: ‘What is it that matters to us?’”

For these families, the experience taught them, “It’s not simply, ‘How do we get kids better test scores and get them into college?’” Going forward, Rose said, “That is not going to be good enough.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and Stand Together Trust provide financial support to Populace and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

After five years of leading , where I work with school systems across the nation to help them create a reality where critical thinking is no longer a luxury good, I was extremely reluctant to step into the world of “equity training” when the demand exploded after the summer of 2020.

For one, I took great pride in my obsessive focus on practical, but powerful tools educators could use to seamlessly integrate critical thinking into their existing content. As a Black man leading this work, it meant something to be known as a curriculum and instruction expert, a resource for enhancing access and outcomes in gifted and talented programs, and a trusted guide for helping parents and families . I refused to be pigeonholed as the “DEI guy.” 

But this was not just about image, it was about impact. Although I’ve attended many powerful workshops dealing with issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, it always felt like something was missing. As many of our school system partners across 40 states engaged in this work, a strange pattern emerged. So many school leaders and educators left these workshops pumped up, especially when you looked past the naysayers and focused on those who were fully bought-in to the big ideas around systemic racism, implicit bias and opportunity gaps. 

This pattern raised a challenging question that confounded school system cabinets across the nation: Why do so many educators who are deeply committed to ending educational inequity still struggle with persistent inequities in their classrooms? Inequitable academic outcomes, inequitable disciplinary consequences, and in some cases, inequitable everything?

All of these educators understood why achieving educational equity was an urgent priority. They all saw enough of that equality vs. equity graphic with the little boys standing on crates to see the baseball game from outside of the fence to know, conceptually, what equity was. But the “how” remained elusive, and sometimes, flat-out wrong.

Part of why I wrote was to offer a clear definition of what educational equity actually means to me. I define educational equity as the work we do to eliminate the predictive power that demographics have on outcomes. This would destroy the norm of demographics determining destiny. The outcome of anything we call equity work must accomplish this goal. If the policy change, program, or service does not disrupt the predictive power of demographics, it isn’t equity. 

This transformational vision of educational equity is multi-layered. On one level, Tangible Equity requires a laser-focus on traditional academic outcomes. This approach is indifferent to the common practice of rejecting the deficit phrasing of “the achievement gap” calling it “the opportunity gap,” instead. This distinction means nothing to minoritized students grappling with intergenerational poverty, students who will struggle to have any opportunities without successful academic outcomes. In other words, the outcome is the opportunity. How could we reduce the predictive power of demographics on outcomes without focusing on outcomes?

But the second level of the Tangible Equity approach requires a bolder vision. As an achievement-over-everything educator, I preached the same sermon to my students that my immigrant grandmother and mother preached to me. The same sermon so many in marginalized groups heard when they grew up and still preach to their children: “You can’t just be good. You have to work twice as hard to get half as far.” 

It is easy to be outraged about crystal clear racial injustice, police killings of unarmed Black folks and racist shooting sprees. But after decades of hearing and preaching the work-twice-as-hard-to-get-half-as-far gospel,. I suddenly asked myself, “isn’t this unacceptable, too?” This gospel is and always has been extremely unjust, but it is so deeply entrenched into our reality that most marginalized and minoritized folks accept it and keep pushing it. But I couldn’t do that anymore. I drew a line in the sand. I refuse to teach this lesson to my children.

Maybe I could lead an equity workshop if the outcome was a practical instructional framework and set of tools that prepared students to not just play the game, but to slay the game. I want to use my life as an example of the problem here. My education was successful on the first level of Tangible Equity, because I am blessed to have a demographics-defying story. I grew up on free and reduced lunch in Brooklyn, New York as a child of immigrants in a single-parent home with a father incarcerated for selling drugs. And I “made it” by getting into NYC’s gifted and talented program, attending one of NYC’s top specialized high schools, graduating with my computer science degree from Syracuse University, teaching, graduating top of my law school class, getting the big law firm job, founding this organization thinkLaw that is working with schools all over the country, and selling over 20,000 copies of my first book, .

But so much of me “making it” was about me learning all the things and doing all the things necessary to successfully navigate an unjust system. I get that this is the way it is. But this is not the way it ought to be. If all we focused on was playing the game, we have to ask, “at what cost?” Scholar-activist and education leader Charles Cole III’s addresses this in his book, , where he coins the jaw-dropping term “The Black Achievement Trauma Tax.” I “made it,” but I also paid this tax. I started going bald in my early twenties, I struggle with prostate and high blood pressure issues, deal with deep levels of imposter syndrome and irrational fears that my success can instantly be snatched away, and grapple with strained family and personal relationships. 

Academic success matters. So does building instructional models that give students frequent opportunities to go beyond analyzing the world as it is and push them to question what the world ought to be. It would inflict massive harm on students if we did not give the tools needed to successfully navigate our systems. But if we do not also give them the tools to question and dismantle the unjust elements of these systems, the work is not enough. 

This is why I wrote . I wanted to help educators, school and system leaders see why it was so important to shift from a conversation to something more concrete. Tangible Equity obsesses with the “how” by providing several systemic approaches all stakeholders in our school systems can use to eliminate inequities by prioritizing issues within their individual scope of power and authority. 

This book also lays out the five philosophical shifts necessary for school systems to adopt a Tangible Equity culture, such as moving the conversation from closing achievement gaps to shattering achievement ceilings. And lastly, but most importantly, Tangible Equity provides practical, easy-to-implement frameworks teachers can seamlessly integrate into their existing curriculum to deepen learning relationships, accelerate learning outcomes and hold up a mirror to our students so they can see their own power.

It is my hope that this book helps educators, school and system leaders overcome the “one more thing” syndrome that often plagues new initiatives, including equity efforts. Because you should not have an equity plan, anyhow. Equity needs to be the lens used to plan for everything. Please let the Tangible Equity approach guide the vision of your equity lens and translate your plans into reality. A reality where students will successfully play the game and have all the tools necessary to slay the game.

In the introduction, I defined equity as reducing the predictive power of demographics and zip codes to determine the success of young people inside and outside of the classroom to zero. This utopian idea sounds too pie-in-the-sky for a book called Tangible Equity. But there is a reason I set forward such an extreme, unreachable goal for equity: the process matters more than the outcome.

The Tangible Equity process is part of my personal journey. My story, as a Black child receiving free and reduced lunch from a family of immigrants with an incarcerated father, is one of bucking the highly predictive power of demographics on student success. On demographics alone, I am the type of student our educational system typically does not serve that well. Making matters more complicated, I was not just a bad first grader — I was gifted at being bad. I went above and beyond in my mischief. Looking back at my behavior as an adult, I realize that the greatest crimes I committed were not quite the acts of terror they were painted as at the time.

Apparently, I talked. A lot. To everyone. At any time. It did not matter how many days in a row I would lose recess as a punishment, I was going to talk! It is worth noting that taking recess away from a high-energy child is probably going to punish that teacher post-lunch much more than it punishes the child. I was shocked to learn as an adult that at some point, my mother told my third-grade teacher she was no longer allowed to call her to complain about my unappreciated gift of gab. She couldn’t figure out how to stop me from talking either! So deal with it! With the hundreds of keynotes, YouTube videos, podcasts, and panels I speak on each year, maybe talking in class was not really willfully defiant after all.

I was also a repeat offender of the serious felony of excessive question-asking. Because how dare I ask “why” and protest that “it makes no sense” to write the word “paint” ten times when I already knew how to spell it before class even started? My most terrible act? Fighting my teacher. Not fist-fighting or physically attacking my teacher. I’m from a Caribbean family and I learned in pre-school that my family’s old-school method of parenting and my highly-sensitive rear end were not compatible, so I was not going to go there. By fighting, I mean having the audacity to question the way a teacher was doing something, or even worse, suggesting that she ought to do that thing my way instead.

As “bad” as these so-called behavior challenges were, they all stemmed from the same root: a lack of being challenged. As you read that last sentence, can you think of a child who shares my story? Behavior challenges arising due to a lack of academic challenges? I want you to personalize this as much as possible because a major event happened in my academic career that can certainly happen for the child you are thinking of right now. That major event was my accidental identification into the New York City Department of Education’s gifted and talented program. This was the most transformational experience in my educational career. But you know what the biggest transformation was? The fact that I did not change.

I was still the same Colin. But I was no longer “bad,” I was gifted. Talking was far less offensive in a class where student-centered work, student-centered inquiry, and basically student-centered everything was simply the way it was. We were the classroom that frequently got that knock from the law-and-order teacher next door about needing to tone it down because her students were almost always at Level 0 (complete silence) while learning. And for some reason, these students then and students I see in classrooms across the country today are often asked to be at Level 0 for all sorts of things that have nothing to do with learning. But that is an issue I will get to later in the book. Another transformation? Asking questions was no longer disrespectful. Asking questions was now required for what it meant to be inquisitive and curious. When Mr Eisenberg wanted me to do the required math fair project on fractions with some annoying, unoriginal recipe assignment about multiplying fractional quantities to feed the school what I was certain would be subpar cupcakes, I refused! I told him it was boring, dumb, and I did not want to do it. This would have been a no-recess-for-life moment in another classroom. But for Mr Eisenberg, he was as cool as the other side of the pillow:

            Him: “Do you have a better idea?”

        Me: “Of course I do! I play piano and I want to do a project called Fractional Music where we look at all the ways fractions show up in music with quarter notes, half notes, triplets, dotted quarter notes, etc.”

        Him: “Class, Colin had a different idea for the math project. Colin, explain what you were saying.”

         Me: “I am brilliant. Just do what I say because I am brilliant.” (paraphrased)

        Class (in unison): “Colin is brilliant! Let’s just do what he says because he is brilliant.” 

                                                                                   (100% accurate, word for word)

What could have been a moment of willful defiance in any other classroom became a moment where my advocacy and leadership was encouraged and celebrated. This memory helps me see that I omitted a huge piece of the puzzle in my zealous advocacy for a critical thinking revolution in education. There is a massive prerequisite for critical thinking to flourish in today’s education system that is almost entirely an adult issue: ensuring children have the safety to be brilliant. In many of our hyper-compliant, rules-over-everything classroom environments, I question whether these spaces are psychologically safe for students to wonder, ask, speak up, collaborate, offer alternatives, think creatively and do all the things we associate with 21st century readiness.

Culturally, my Caribbean upbringing, like the upbringing of many immigrant households and other super-strict families, was one where “because I said so” was a good-enough justification for parents to do just about anything. But when we think about the safety to be brilliant, do we ever ask ourselves why parent phrases like “don’t get smart with me” exist? It is hard for me to think that the grave consequences Black folks could face historically for “getting smart” with the wrong white person does not play a role in this type of rhetoric. I have undocumented family members. So, I am also very familiar with the guidance, said or unsaid, that children of undocumented parents receive about not shining their lights too brightly in school to avoid raising unnecessary attention.

Tangible Equity recognizes that we cannot rest on proclamations and resolutions about how much we care about and value student diversity. It makes no sense to have this beautifully diverse set of students and ask them to spend most of their time conforming to what we deem “normal.” There is no value to our students’ diversity if we do not find ways to allow them to be themselves as a regularly-scheduled aspect of their learning process.

This resonates with me because I have experienced the downside to what happens when we do not create the psychological and actual safety students need to exercise their brilliance. I lived the student experience of never having a learning space speak to the magic of my identity, and I know that I am not alone. My elementary school, self-contained gifted class bussed in some of the most brilliant children from South Brooklyn. But as amazing and transformational as this experience was, I spent years scratching my head about why three of these students did not graduate from high school. Not graduate school, not college, but high school. Mind you, my classmates and I all started high school at least one or two grade levels ahead because of high school credits we earned in middle school. Still, three did not graduate, and I was so close to being the fourth one with the 80 absences I had in ninth grade.

Why does this happen? Why do we have so many children who are rock stars in their earlier grades, but go through this process where the longer they are in school, the less they are into school? I have more questions than answers, and there are plenty of amazing scholars who research this question in more detail. I just know that the painful sight of leaving genius on the table was unbearable for me.

This sight stuck with me when I became a teacher. I was the outcomes-over-everything educator to the extreme. I was not pro-high stakes standardized exams. But I was, and still am, pro-reality. Leveraging Tangible Equity’s power must involve interrupting intergenerational poverty. As an educator, therefore, I had to ask myself a simple yes or no question: is education an important part of disrupting intergenerational poverty? Yes or No? Mind you, I’m not asking whether education is the be-all, end-all. But I doubt any reader of this book would doubt whether education was at least an important part of what it takes to interrupt intergenerational poverty.

If we believe this, we must also be able to look into our classrooms and see our students as future doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, and even future teachers. This means they have to pass tests. A common objection usually occurs around this time where someone chimes in saying “college isn’t for everyone.” When we say this, we miss the reality that the power of a thoughtfully financed college degree is undeniably transformational, particularly for women and people of color. Given the vast improvements in earnings with a four-year college degree vs anything less than this, it literally still pays to go to college. But in recognition of the growing opportunities for well-paid, high advancement potential fields that do not require a four-year college degree, we should be clear that tests are still necessary. Plumbers still have to pass tests. So do police officers. We cannot talk about Tangible Equity without talking about the outcomes needed to fulfill the promise of Tangible Equity.

Equity of outcomes sounds utopian. I am often asked, “don’t you mean to say equity of opportunity?” The answer is no. I mean to talk about the equity of outcomes. Recall that I am defining equity as reducing the predictive power of demographics on outcomes. This means that changed outcomes are the only way to show that the predictive power of demographics has been reduced. Fortunately, the equity of outcomes is tied to equity in opportunity in significant ways. I would not have received a transformational educational experience had I not been accidentally identified as gifted and bussed to a gifted and talented program outside of my neighborhood. For brilliant students with no such program within bussing distance and without transformational learning options in their neighborhood schools, they do not have this opportunity. But even if they did, opportunity itself would not be enough.

Let’s use basketball as an example. Pedro Noguera often uses an example of the National Basketball Association that I want to borrow to explain why opportunity is not enough. In 2020, although Black people represented 13.4% of the population, Black players in the NBA represent 75% of all NBA players. This statistic is often used by doubters, who say “See! Racism and poverty are just excuses. Black athletes’ dominance and prominence in basketball proves that if they cared about school as much as they cared about shooting hoops, these inequities would not exist.” But Noguera offers brilliant insights to counter this flawed reasoning that uses basketball to teach us what an equity of outcomes could look like in education.

In basketball, the rules are standardized and common to all players. The rim is always ten feet off the ground. Basketballs must be inflated between 7.5 and 8.5 pounds. The free throw line has to be set 15 feet away from the face of the backboard. The point system is standardized and common to all players. A basket in the hoop counts for two points during play. Free throws count as one point. Anyone gets three points for shooting the ball from 23’9” away from the middle of the basket. These rules are the same no matter what state you live in, what basketball court you are playing in, how much money your parents earn, the zip code you live in, your race, your ethnicity, your native language, or your parents’ educational level. Basketball, therefore, is a level playing field. The rules of playing the game and the rules for winning the game are always the same. I can therefore conclude that athletically gifted basketball players who do not get injured and put forth the time, effort, and hard work to reach greatness have as much of a shot at NBA success as anyone else with similar situated gifted, healthy, athletes who exert the same time, effort, and hard work.

We are nowhere close to this in education. The only universal standard in the United States’ education system is that nothing is universally standard. Outcomes must be tied to opportunity because equitable opportunity is not enough for a brilliant child who is the fourth generation of her family to grow up in an economically disadvantaged trailer park community. She can have a 4.0 grade point average and even be the valedictorian of her class. And even with this impeccable resume, she could still not be accepted to highly selective universities. As outrageous as this might sound, it is even possible that she could graduate at the top of her high school class and not meet the course requirements to enroll in her state’s flagship public university. This is not to say merit does not matter, because it does. But merit, alone, is not enough.

When we consider the extraordinary educational effort required to transcend intergenerational poverty, the time, effort, and hard work are not measured by any sort of standardized or common set of rules. Do you remember the wild Varsity Blues scandal that revealed the lengths wealthy families went through to buy their children access to universities through bogus sports accolades, extra-curricular activities, and faked test scores?7 This illegal scandal pales in comparison with the very legal system that gives the super-privileged access to (and the ability to afford) prestigious unpaid internships, and the pay-to-play social capital system from prestigious pre-kindergarten programs to Ivy League feeder high schools. These are not the same rules. This is not even the same game.

This reality is not news to those growing up in the struggle. Part of why I push so hard for equitable outcomes goes beyond knowing our students need to pass tests to be future doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, and even future teachers. Because this is so much more complicated than simply passing tests. As an immigrant, my mother was raised under the mantra that she had to work twice as hard to get half as far. She raised me to understand that as a Black boy growing up in Brooklyn, I was also required to work twice as hard to get half as far. As a father to two young children, I feel completely ashamed that at some point, I need to explain the same thing to my children. I am truly ashamed of myself.

I have dedicated so much of my life to ensuring that stories like mine are no longer the exception to the rule. Yet, I have spent so much of my energy challenging myself to successfully navigate this unfair system instead of challenging the unfair system itself. The rules for playing the game and winning the game are not standardized and common. The rules are highly dependent on what state you live in, what kind of school you go to, how much money your parents earn, the zip code you live in, your race, your ethnicity, your native language, or your parents’ educational level.

In education, we are still very far from being able to conclude that academically gifted students growing up in the struggle who put forth the time, effort, and hard work to reach greatness have as much of a shot at successful educational options as anyone else with similar gifts who exert the same time, effort, and hard work. Yet, I have spent so much of my energy helping children master all the tricks and shenanigans of playing an unfair game. What would happen if instead, I focused more on what it would take for them to master the skills needed to slay the game altogether.

Tangible Equity is not an either/or challenge? Academic success must be present for Tangible Equity to exist. But as long as a child’s race, income, and zip code translates to requiring extraordinary levels of academic success to reach ordinary outcomes, academic success is not enough. We need academic success and educational justice. Educational justice would mean getting our system to be similar to the standardized and common rules of basketball. The math teacher in me recognized the need for a formula to describe what I am trying to say here in a way that breaks it down more clearly in Figure 1.1.

Think about how often we celebrate stories of children who grow up in the struggle, overcome all sorts of unfair obstacles, and “make it.” The Tangible Equity Equation helps us rethink what it means to truly “make it.”

I recall my experience as a Computer Science major selected for the amazing INROADS program. This non-profit organization’s vision of diversifying Corporate America is 50 years strong, and I was proud to go to New York City and meet lots of other Black and Brown college students aspiring for internships that would put us on the path for lucrative, successful careers in Fortune 500 companies. I remember attending a workshop on how to dress appropriately.

All of us college students had our most professional clothing on, but I only heard what they told us young men because young women received a different workshop. I learned that facial hair was a no-go. I learned that bright-colored shirts underneath my suit were loud and improper. I learned that cornrows were unprofessional. Wearing my hair in twists or locks? Completely unacceptable. I learned how to sit. I learned how to look someone in the eyes and give a firm handshake. How to speak, sit, question, and answer professionally. I could only imagine the kind of lessons the young women learned about how not to dress and how not to style their hair. By the end of the day, I learned the hidden curriculum of how to succeed in Corporate America.

The most important lesson of this hidden curriculum was that important pieces of me needed to stay hidden. The two Black men presenting this workshop were passionate, funny, cool, and caring. They wanted nothing more than to open doors for us, doors that would not be opened if we could not master all the necessary ways-of-being that make these lucrative careers accessible to Black and Brown college students. We had to be “professional.” As uneasy as I felt about this, I carried this same mindset into my classroom. I spoke frequently to my students about code-switching so they understood that when they were in “professional” settings they needed to act differently. Speak “properly.” Act “appropriately.” Because again, if we want to realize the potentially transformational impact of education for students most impacted by the ills of racial discrimination and poverty, access to successful career paths matters.

Something always bothered me about my INROADS experience. If diversity is such an asset to Corporate America, why would they require folks from diverse backgrounds to conform in such an extreme fashion? How could they realize the benefits of my diverse perspective and unique understandings if I am asked to hide so much of myself to even gain access to the entry level? It is even more bothersome when I realize that I attended this INROADS workshop in the year 2000. In the 20-year period after that workshop, Fortune 500 companies have had only 16 Black CEOs, 36 Latinx CEOs, ten East Asian CEOs, and 22 South Asian CEOs. With only 72 white women holding at the helm during this same time period, leading in Corporate America is still clearly a white man’s game.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong about teaching our young people the hidden curriculum to successfully navigate an unjust system. But at what point do we teach them how to use their access to the system to question it, reimagine it, and dismantle it altogether? From an educational perspective, it is hard to think about classrooms that equip young people with the tools to lead, innovate, and break what needs to be broken when students still get in trouble for asking too many questions. I cannot envision a dismantling of unjust systems when it is still far too common for classroom teachers to punish student leadership and advocacy as “willful defiance.”

I understand and value my mother’s journey and why working twice as hard to get half as far mattered so much to her life that she had to pass that lesson onto me. I understand and value the journey of the gracious Black men who took a Saturday break from their challenging positions in Corporate America to school us to the tricks we needed to master to access these lucrative career fields. But the work of reducing the impact of demographics on the predictability of outcomes requires that we put equal effort into helping young people know what it takes to play the game as we do equipping them with the transformational tools needed to slay these unjust games altogether.