The neighborhood is gentrifying now.

The city is in the final stages of closing and razing its public housing units. Along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, in the same neighborhood where Coretta Scott King lived until her death last year, they're tearing down whole blocks of largely derelict storefronts, revealing $250,000 condos springing up behind. And the people who have been here are leaving, to be replaced, one imagines, with people who can afford condos.

I've taught middle school special education in this neighborhood for three years. No matter how Vine City changes, I can forget neither the kids I've met here nor what I've seen them experience.

If you're raised in the middle class, it's difficult to imagine with any clarity what it's like to be deeply poor in the city. Even now, there's a lot I don't think I'll ever understand. The social pathologies I've witnessed are mind-numbing. What makes a child write on a bathroom wall with his own feces? Perhaps the final outrage is that, as the city turns its attention to this area, bringing new buildings and new jobs, it pushes out those who have needed just those things for so long.

In the midst of this, we teach. Perhaps more to the point, we experience daily the hypocrisy of No Child Left Behind as we teach the children who have been pointedly left behind already by the very creators of the law itself. I'm reminded daily of Maslow's hierarchy:



The idea here is that, before one can reach higher levels of functioning, the needs of the lower levels must be met. In other words, if you haven't eaten in 24 hours (or longer), you're not coming to my class ready for problem solving. Yet that is what NCLB requires of my kids.

It certainly isn't that the kids I teach *can't* problem solve, or be creative, or maintain a moral outlook. But to expect them to attain high levels of evaluative thought every day while refusing to adequately address, as a society, what they lack in food, shelter and safety is a deep moral failing in the wealthiest nation on the planet.

They say that we have to address the "achievement gap", in which African-American children achieve at a lower rate than their white counterparts. That much is certainly true. But that goal will not be achieved until we widen our focus to address, not school achievement in a vacuum, but the economic issues that negatively impact the learning of children of all races.