For those of you who didn’t plow through the New York Times this sunday—a fading ambivalent ritual akin to family dinners—the magazine cover story by Paul Tough tackled the continuing education gap that separates, basically, white kids from black and latino kids in the U.S. The upshot is that Bush is right: it is possible to draw the test scores closer and leave no child behind—to put the entire nation of high school graduates on level ground, at least as far as education goes, which would be doing a lot, as much as any nation today could hope to achieve.

The article details how after decades of research, we now know how book-smart people learn and so we can recreate the conditions for almost anyone, including the impoverished “uneducable” residents of the baddest of the bad innercities and neglected country corners. To do it, though, would be controversial and expensive. We would have to recreate in the classroom what the author calls a “white middle-class” approach to parenting, an approach referred to as “concerted cultivation” that treats children like “apprentice adults” and that doesn’t necessarily create the nicest, happiest, most polite people but that, on the contrary, fosters feelings of entitlement, disproportionate self worth and sassy individualism.

Some charter schools have acted on the findings by designing curricula and schedules that in effect, as the article puts it, “let the kids in on the joke” of what constitutes good school behavior—actions and attitudes that, although not necessarily natural, definitively help people engage traditional school material. The success of these schools makes it plain that if poor students are going to close the achievement gap, it will require “not the same education that middle class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better trained teachers, and curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually…”

Meantime, Bush’s plan falls short by almost every standard but good intentions. Funding is the most glaringly inadequate part of the plan. In fact, the money now flows to good schools not bad schools, drawing away resources and the best teachers, amounting to an American “education apartheid” where relatively high-performing states like Mass and Conn receive double the amount per child than low-performing states like Ark and Miss.

What’s not written about in the Times article is what all of the Times readers already know: that the low-class/middle-class equation is missing a variable, the one that sees all the rich kids in the country being shuttled in SUVs to outrageously expensive private schools, scaring middle-class kids into joining them and screwing public education and the future of the country in the process.

Part of any solution to the sorry state of American education should be making it ultra-punitive tax-wise for parents to send their kids anywhere but to a public school. That would change the look of things overnight. Rich people may not be nice or happy or polite, but they have the power now and apparently the “concerted cultivation” of their youth to get shit done!