It should be shocking that middle-class educators with college degrees and above average occupational benefits trade in these hasty, dehumanizing generalizations. Even you the reader might harbor similar classist illusions of the stereotypical low-income parent who passively allows their kids to be redlined into the dark underbelly of public schools.

Social media outrage about blackface stories doesn't carry the same weight as focusing on endemic problems that blight the lives of children and steal their growing years. If anything, obsessions with the trivial is little more than intellectual drift, and that is the worst sin for conscious people.

“[Y]oung men use crime as a means of constructing the kind of stereotypic masculinity that helps them traverse their adolescence and win the acceptance of peers, as well as fathers, coaches, and other hypermasculine role models,” writes Kupers. This is where stealing a car, joining a gang, bragging about rape — or confronting a Native American, groping a girl, assaulting a boy — becomes a way of being a man. This is also where privileged white boys are divided from other boys. While the kids at Covington and St. Mike’s and Georgetown Prep are acting out in their adolescence, they have the opportunity to graduate to a more socially acceptable adulthood of building a career (a Supreme Court position, maybe?) and a family.

The public generally agrees that teachers deserve better pay and more urgent attention to the decline in resources many of them face. They have every right to stand up for themselves, but when they attack charter schools and attempt to prevent families from accessing schools they want, it's time to reconsider our support.

We've always heard there are hundreds of social science studies that have proven the positive effects of desegregating public schools. We haven't heard as much about how many of those studies haven't been relevant for decades.

As a black education advocate, and a supporter of alternative education, it gets tiring having these basic bloggers who are threatened by competition constantly attempting to define my work as something it's not.

People take to the streets to fight for public education. The problem is they are never demanding America's school children get better classroom instruction.