By now, most of you have either read or at least heard about yesterday's piece by Paul Tough in the NY Times magazine that looks at efforts to close the achievement gap, the tensions between home influence and school influence, and what high-performing charter schools like KIPP and Achievement First and Uncommon Schools are doing about it.

There's a lot in there, and I appreciate very much the contribution it is likely to make in terms of throwing the door open to more meaningful debates on reform. Bloggers can take bits and pieces in many directions with this piece, so here's mine.

I read the article on a flight from NYC to LA, and perhaps because I had been thinking of AFT Ed's question to me last week, I kept honing in on other issues surrounding the sometimes complicated trade-offs we see with meaningful reform efforts. Specifically, I thought about what happens when we support efforts to create high-achieving schools for our weakest students and those schools end up being so successful that the families of higher-achieving students start to flock there, as the article describes happening at KIPP.

Interestingly, Tough highlights some of the efforts and sentiments surrounding the attempts of schools run by KIPP and Achievement First to specifically target and attract the lowest-performing students in the lowest-performing neighborhoods. (It is worth noting in these kinds of conversations about 'creaming' and such that MANY charter schools select their locations based on where their offerings will do the most good. The UFT, for example, specifically opted to be located in East New York, Brooklyn, because it felt there was an important need it could meet. I find that extremely commendable and it shows the kind of thinking going on in many quarters here in NYC.)

These schools, Tough notes, are going out of their way to attract the weakest students they can find, because teaching those kids is what their schools are built to do.

It does seem inevitable, however, that success can throw a school from its mission - at no fault of the school. Parents do pick up on success and will flock to successful schools. From a policy/political perspective it still would seem that the key here is not to engage in hand-wringing over the decisions parents make to select high-achieving schools, but to give parents in every city as many high-performing options as humanly possible. This is what makes keeping the cap on the number of new KIPPs and Achievement Firsts in New York State seem so completely asinine right now.

AFT Michele blogs on the article here; UFT's CitySue is here; Alexander Russo is here.

Kind of related point on the trade-off front: Over the weekend, the Boston Globe featured an article an fundraising done by parents at public schools and the impact it has on those schools. White, middle class parents have "adopted" public schools, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to subsidize arts and science education, for example. The concern, like we see with KIPP in Ed's example, is that black and Hispanic families will feel excluded.

Of course, the policy answer is to manage and fund public schools so that they don't have to rely on outside funding, but in the mean time, shouldn't we applaud the efforts of these parents? We need as many great schools as we can get, and these families are playing an important part in the transformation, the trade-offs notwithstanding.

These cases also highlight the reality that race and class issues are always lingering in this arena. The better we get at talking about that and confronting it, the better off we'll be.