Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, has released a new report full of data that she hopes will support efforts to improve the quality of public education.

WASHINGTON
On two huge screens at the front of a hotel ballroom, Kati Haycock displays a chart demonstrating that in the past five years, schools in El Paso, Texas, have brought up test scores of its Black and Latino students by about 50 percentage points. The jump has nearly eliminated the achievement gap with White students, who improved their test scores at the same time. All kids appear to be doing better in El Paso.

"My challenge to you is this," Haycock said to the 800 or so educators from around the country. "Beat El Paso."

Haycock was speaking at the November conference of The Education Trust, an organization she created to "promote high academic achievement for all students, at all levels, kindergarten through college," with a focus on those students often left behind -- Latino, African American, and Native American students.

The conference attendees included parents, teachers, guidance counselors, university administrators, and heads of local and state school systems and education associations. Many among this loose band of people at all levels of the education system feel a sense of urgency that if they do not act quickly, their school systems may be dismantled by charters and vouchers. In the words of a top official from California's school system, "this may be the last chance we have to save public education."

That urgency is shared by Haycock, who, with characteristic bluntness, said later in an interview, "The polls among Black folk around vouchers versus public education are an indication that you cannot continue screwing a whole bunch of people and have them not catch you at it and decide that the game is so rigged that they may not continue to play. I think we're hovering on the edge of waking up to the fact that this is a seriously rigged place."