New York City Schools revealed its much-anticipated plan for increasing diversity and access in its public schools. But some critics say it doesn’t go far enough or name the true issue at hand.

If you’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird, you might remember the scene in which Scout beats up Walter Cunningham in the schoolyard. It’s the first day of school and Scout’s teacher, Miss Caroline, is not from Maycomb. She doesn’t understand just how hard the Great Depression has hit the farmers of southern Alabama. So she innocently offers Walter a quarter to buy lunch in town. He refuses. As Scout explains he’s a Cunningham, and Cunninghams never take anything they can’t pay back. Every student at my school is eligible for free lunch this year, so they understand Walter’s situation. But what they don’t understand is “why other students get to go off campus for lunch and we don’t.”

A legal settlement reached in Los Angeles Tuesday could reverberate through schools in low-income neighborhoods across the country. The Board of Education there approved a deal with the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups that would radically limit the practice of laying off teachers based solely on seniority.

Homeless kids can be hard to identify and even harder to help. But teachers can do a great deal to make sure that they don’t fall through the cracks.

The language that educators use to address students can maintain and reinforce class structures and classist attitudes. The antidote? Anti-classist language.

Third grade was a bad year. Third grade was the year I learned in school that I was poor.

Grow food justice in the garden or the classroom.

Last week, I had a chance to preview documentary films that showed how a strong arts program—and that could range from mariachi to Shakespeare to poetry slams—could turn struggling schools into powerhouses of energy and promise. Last night, millions of viewers got a chance to see what students from a school that values the arts look like—on the Academy Awards, no less.