Juan Williams: Education’s grand bargain?

From The Hill, here.

The damage being done to American children — and most of all to black American children — by bad schools is painfully obvious.

James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first black person to enroll at the University of Mississippi, said in January that the nation is “losing millions of our children to inferior schools and catastrophically misguided … education reforms.” He said schools are being “hijacked by politicians … and for-profit operators.”

High rates of single-parent families and poverty complicate the sad picture of minority student failure. But it is also clear schools are failing to do their part.

Politicians, including Obama and Scott, are stuck in partisan paralysis even as they claim to understand the urgency to deliver on the promise of equal opportunity and solve this generation’s top civil rights problem.