Talking Across Divides: 10 Ways to Encourage Civil Classroom Conversation On Difficult Issue

NY Times
By KATHERINE SCHULTENSEPT. 29, 2016

"Fistfights at campaign rallies.  A congressional sit-in. Angry political trolling on the internet. It's not you imagination: America's partisan divide id deeper today than at any point in nearly a quarter-century, according to a new study."

 So begins an article from June 2016, which described a problem that has only deepened as the weeks of this unprecedented, vitriolic presidential campaign have gone on.

Months ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented the worrying effects of all this angry rhetoric on students and classrooms, and, since then, we’ve heard those concerns echoed by teachers we asked ourselves. But even after this election is over, a divided nation will remain — and teachers will always be in a uniquely powerful position to help young people learn how to talk to each other across those divides.

Below, we share some ideas we’ve collected from our readers, The Times and around the web. Use them anytime you and your students are tackling controversial issues, whether in a traditional classroom or online. We welcome your additions to the list.

We also invite your classes to put some of these ideas into practice from Oct. 3 to Nov. 7 via our Civil Conversation Challenge.

During the week of Oct. 3 to 7, we are posting a new Student Opinion question each day about five issues that are dividing Americans this election year.

Those posts will remain open to comment until Election Day, and we invite teenagers from anywhere in the world to share their thoughts and reply to the thoughts of others. The challenge? We are asking them to consciously counter the tone and content of much of what is online around hot-button issues and, instead, model respectful dialogue that fosters understanding of other points of view. And we’ll be calling out our favorite conversations.

Find all the details here, as well as links to each forum as it opens.

Here are 10 ways to prepare.

1. Create classroom rules and structures that support respectful and generative discussion, online and off.

How do you handle conversations in your classroom in general? What structures and rules are in place to ensure that they are constructive and civil, yet promote real learning and growth? How do you invite all voices? What happens when someone states an unpopular opinion?

Consider talking about these issues with your students after first asking them to write anonymously about how teachers and schools in general might improve in this area. What problems do they see? What memorable experiences, good and bad, have informed their attitudes toward class discussions? What suggestions for rules, structures or guidelines might they have? How should schools balance the need for open intellectual discussion about issues with the need to protect those who may feel marginalized for some reason?

Then, have a classroom discussion about classroom discussions.

Over the years, we have published many ideas for talking about sensitive issues, and suggested structures including journal-writing, the “one-question interview,” fishbowls and four-corner exercises. You might use any of those methods, or consult this “big list of class discussion strategies” from Cult of Pedagogy. Or, use a protocol called Circle of Viewpoints that focuses on helping students consider diverse perspectives on a topic.

Finally, extend your inquiry from physical classroom conversation to online discussion by borrowing a recent Reader Idea from a teacher named Kate Harris.

She explains how, when teaching a high school World Religions elective, she used the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as a “teachable moment” to help her students observe and critique online conversations. Ms. Harris writes:

Teachers have to address the political and social issues that divide our nation and dominate our social media feeds. More important, we need to equip students to address those issues on their own, to engage with and respond to conversations and news that may be troubling or challenging, from domestic gun control and police brutality to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and worldwide terrorism. So much of our students’ worlds is online. How can we get them to think critically not only about big media, delivered by giants such as Fox News and The New York Times, but also about “little media,” or the comments and tweets that they write, read and repost?

_________

2. Take the ‘Speak Up for Civility’ pledge from Teaching Tolerance.

Though it is a pledge intended for teachers and other adults, you might share it with your students as well:

I pledge to discuss this election with civility, to treat people whose opinions differ from mine with respect, and to focus on ideas, policies and values. I will encourage others to do the same. I will speak up when I hear name-calling, stereotypes and slurs. I will do this because children are listening, and it’s important that adults model good citizenship.

The organization’s ideas for teaching Election 2016 can also be useful, and those under the heading of “getting along” can be applied far beyond this election season.

_________

3. Read and discuss articles that explore the problem of a divided America.

Your students might annotate as they read, then use one of the discussion models listed above to talk about their reactions. Here are just a few places in The Times to start:

• The Divided States of America

• Why Calls for a ‘National Conversation’ Are Futile

• Polarization Is Dividing American Society, Not Just Politics

•Bipartisanship Isn’t for Wimps, After All

• Why Facts Don’t Unify Us

• The Age of Post-Truth Politics and a response from a teenager — a Student Summer Reading Contest Winner, Michelle Kim — who wrote:

After reading this op-ed piece, I am more aware of my own attitude and more wary of this polarization — the “us” versus “them” mentality that often reduces comments sections into battlegrounds, when passionate ideals are not tempered by a willingness to explore possibilities in order to approach fact.

To what extent do your students experience these divides? What can their generation do to close them?

_________

4. Consider commenting standards — and test what you learn via the Times Comment-Moderation Quiz.

In “What Your Online Comments Say About You,” Anna North writes about some questions researchers recently asked:

When we comment on news stories, most of us hope to say something about the topic at hand — even (or maybe especially) if it’s that the author got it all wrong. But what do the comments we leave say about us — about our beliefs, our biases and how we act when the ordinary rules don’t apply? And how do our comments affect the beliefs of others?

Read that article, and, for more context, perhaps the Room for Debate forum “Have Comment Sections on News Media Websites Failed?” Why do we seem to be able to say things online that we wouldn’t say in person? Where do students see especially glaring examples of that?

The Times, including The Learning Network, has commenting standardsput in place to maintain civility. You might share them with students, along with a related Times post, “The Top 10 Reasons We Deleted Your Comment.” What do they think of these rules? Could they be useful elsewhere on the internet? Why or why not?

Then, test how well they have absorbed those standards by taking a Times quiz created by our comment-moderation team. If you were a moderator, which responses would you approve and which would you reject? Why?

Finally, have students choose a Times article that interests them and that has many reader comments. Scan the comments, noticing which ones are “reader picks” and which are “Times picks.” What do they notice about the conversation? Is it generally civil? Do they think people are actually talking to each other, or do you think they are more talking at each other? In their opinion, can online conversations ever change minds?

You might start with a recent Op-Ed essay “Will the Left Survive Millennials?” Among the many comments, this one by Andy B:

Has anyone noticed that despite our increasing diversity, we are becoming a more isolated society? More prone to stare at a screen than to engage our neighbors in conversation. That same screen provides easy access to surround oneself with an echo chamber that allows for an ever growing sense of entitlement to impose one’s opinion on others above all else. Both sides have moved so far away from one another that honest constructive debate is next to impossible. For the sake of our American experience, let’s hope we can eventually find a unifying force. Imagine what could be done as a society if we unplugged and engaged again.

_________

5. Practice empathy.

Do your students know who Glenn Beck is? He is a conservative radio host and media personality who surprised many this summer when he urged his fellow conservatives to understand the Black Lives Matter movement. He then published an Op-Ed essay in The Times that begins:

In a recent speech to a group of conservatives, I made what I thought was a relatively uncontroversial point about the commonalities between Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter activists. I thought this was a simple idea, but the criticism was immediate and sharp: How dare I try to understand the “other side”?

But as people, wouldn’t we all benefit from trying to empathize with people we disagree with?

Have them read what he has to say — and read some of the 919 comments Times readers made in response. What do they think of the argument he makes? What issues about which they feel passionately might they seek to understand from an opposing point of view?

_________

6. Back up statements with evidence and sources.

 “These days it seems like politics and propaganda take precedence over rational discussion, especially when the conversation goes online, “ writes Chris Sloan in an essay at KQED Education on “Teaching the Art of Civil Dialogue. He suggests “teaching argument the way it’s been conceived since Aristotle’s time.”

It seems that everyone agrees that in order to be “college and career ready” our students need to know how to write argument and back it up with evidence. In reality, this approach falls short when our own assumptions are challenged; however, research shows that learning gains are greatest in these moments of “cognitive dissonance.”

The winners of our annual Student Editorial Contest, in which we invite students to “write about an issue that matters to you” but back it up with evidence both from The Times and elsewhere, can provide models for how to do this. You might invite students to scroll through the essays and find a few that interest them to see how the evidence is woven in.

And this related lesson plan can help with tips and ideas. In it, we quote Andrew Rosenthal, former Times editorial page editor, who made a video for our contest and reminds students to do their research. He says:

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, you’re not entitled to your own facts. Go online, make calls if you can, check your information, double-check it. There’s nothing that will undermine your argument faster than a fact you got wrong, that you did not have to get wrong.

_________

7. Listen better, and ask genuine questions that seek to help you understand rather than judge.

Hearing is easy, writes Seth S. Horowitz in the Sunday Review. But “listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.”

Many teachers are familiar with the concept of “active listening” and, via activities like “think/pair/share,” have incorporated regular practice in the skill. But listening can be much more, as this famous essay from the 1930s, “Tell Me More,” describes. In it, the writer Brenda Ueland says listening is a “creative force,” and explains:

When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weakens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it.

One recent example of listening in action: a new book by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild that seeks to understand “Why Do People Who Need Help From the Government Hate It So Much?” The Times reviewer writes, “A distinguished Berkeley sociologist, Hochschild is a woman of the left, but her mission is empathy, not polemics.” Have students read the review to understand the role open-minded questioning and listening played in this “respectful” work, then think about how they might practice listening to those with whom they disagree.

_________

8. Expand your ‘filter bubble.’

In a Student Opinion question, “Is Your Online World Just a ‘Filter Bubble’ of People With the Same Opinions?,” we challenge teenagers to look at their social and news feeds and work to broaden them to include new perspectives and opinions.

Read our questions and invite your students to think about where and how they get their news. How diverse are their social media and news feeds in terms of the ages, races, religions, geographical locations, interests and political affiliations of the people they follow — and why does it matter?

_________

9. Consider why ‘us and them’ is so ingrained in who we are.

Our friends at Facing History and Ourselves frequently look at questions like these:

• Why are notions of “us and them” such a consistent feature of human societies?

• When and why does an “us and them” view of the world become especially appealing or attractive? When does this worldview develop into verbal and physical violence?

• How can individuals respond to expressions of hatred, anger and fear? What happens if we choose to remain silent?

In “How Teachers Can Help Students Make Sense of Today’s Political and Social Tensions,” Laura Tavares and Jocelyn Stanton list a number of resources to help teachers and students go deeper.

_________

10. Learn about and try to counter ‘confirmation bias.’

Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for information that supports the way we feel about something. Carl Richards wrote about it for The Times in a 2013 piece, “Challenge What You Think You Know”:

We do this all the time. In fact, academics even have a name for it:confirmation bias. It’s when we form an opinion, and then we systematically look for evidence to support that opinion while discarding anything that contradicts it.

The first place we go for feedback about what we believe is other people. And who do we ask first? That’s right, people we know who are already inclined to think the same way as we do. And friends don’t always tell one another the truth, even if they disagree. The result is a dangerous feedback loop that actually confirms our bias. It’s incredibly hard to avoid.

The Upshot also wrote about this phenomenon, saying:

...confirmation bias may be the reason that our political debates remain intractable. After all, as you accumulate more evidence confirming your views, you’re less likely to question them, and less likely to change your mind. As members of competing political tribes collect more evidence in favor of their favored views, their opinions harden, and each tribe becomes more convinced of its correctness.

So what’s the solution? As Mr. Richards writes, “The only solution that I see is to purposely expose yourself to views that don’t match yours.” In an echo of many of the other ideas in this post, he suggests purposely seeking out views from “the other side,” whether via websites, books, radio or television, or conversations with people across the aisle. And, he says, it’s not enough just to seek them out:

Try, just try, to listen, to understand. See if you can get to the point where you can honestly say, “I understand the argument and can see why they feel that way.”

_________

Conversation starters:

1)      How can you incorporate some of these strategies in fostering difficult conversations in your setting? Please leave your comments below. 

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Review: ‘Blood at the Root,’ a Tale of Racial Cleansing Close to Home

New York Times: Book Review
By: Jennifer Senior
Date: September 14, 2016

Early one morning in September 1912, an 18-year-old white girl named Mae Crow was discovered in the Georgia woods, badly beaten and barely alive. It took only a day for the Forsyth County sheriff to arrest three young black male suspects. Two were hanged by the state within two months; the other was hanged by a mob within 48 hours.

There was barely a difference. The trial of the two accused young men was merely for show, predicated on confessions made under extreme duress. After the sentencing, one of the boys, all of 16, asked for permission to “make a run for it,” preferring an immediate bullet in the back to three terror-filled weeks of waiting for the noose.

Stories of savage racism and judicial burlesque were unremarkable in the Jim Crow South. What distinguished this case from most others was what happened in the aftermath: Almost every single one of Forsyth’s 1,098 African-Americans — prosperous and poor, literate and unlettered — was driven out of the county. It took only a few weeks. Marauding residents wielded guns, sticks of dynamite, bottles of kerosene. Then they stole everything, from farmland to tombstones.

Forsyth County remained white right through the 20th century. A black man or woman couldn’t so much as drive through without being run out. In 1997, African-Americans numbered just 39 in a population of 75,739.

“Many in Forsyth believed that ‘racial purity’ was their inheritance and birthright,” Patrick Phillips writes in “Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America,” an astonishing and thoroughgoing account of the event, its context and its thunderous reverberations. “And like their fathers’ fathers’ fathers, they saw even a single black face as a threat to their entire way of life."

To give an idea of just how dedicated residents of Forsyth County were to the notion of racial purity: During the 1950s and ’60s, there were no “colored” water fountains in the courthouse or “whites only” diners in the county seat, Cumming; there was no black population to segregate. In 1987, an intrepid local citizen and several national civil rights leaders organized a Brotherhood March — made up largely of people who lived outside the county, obviously. They were almost immediately overpowered by rock-throwing hordes screaming hate-filled invective.

“We white people won,” crowed the head of the Forsyth County Defense League to The New York Times, “and the niggers are on the run.”

Oprah Winfrey did a special from Forsyth County that same year. On YouTube, you can watch her patiently listening to her all-white audience use the same language, her composure a marvel and a reproach.

“Blood at the Root” is a compendium of horrors and a catalog of shame. (The title comes from the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit,” originally a poem by Abel Meeropol.) As he was doing his research, Mr. Phillips, who grew up in Forsyth County, realized how uncomfortably abstract this purge had become, even to him. Misinformation and distortions about it were part of the soundtrack of his childhood. They masked prodigious bigotry and made a whitewash of history.

“The tale,” he writes, “stripped of names and dates and places, made the expulsion of the county’s black community seem like only a legend — like something too far back in the mists of time to ever truly understand — rather than a deliberate and sustained campaign of terror.”

The observation reminded me of the moment in “Between the World and Me,” when Ta-Nehisi Coates implores his son to remember that “slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific slave woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own.”

Because so many African-Americans in Forsyth did not know how to read or write, and because the victims from that era are long gone, Mr. Phillips was not able to give us a series of psychologically intimate portraits. But he did a heroic amount of archival spelunking to tell this story, one that still humanizes its subjects and brims with detail. He also explains the larger historical forces and phobias that set the stage for mass expulsions in Forsyth County, including the downward mobility of whites in the antebellum South; the irrational panic over black male sexuality; and the paranoia over the possibility of a black uprising to avenge slavery, which allowed whites to see themselves as victims, rather than aggressors.

This last anxiety suggests that white people’s fear of African-Americans was, and may well be, a fear of their own conscience and sins.

Mr. Phillips carefully documents, too, the brutal origins of Forsyth. Before its citizens drove away African-Americans, they drove away Native Americans. They resisted Emancipation with consistency and brazen creativity. “It was a place where powerful whites rejected black citizenship on principle,” he writes, “and resented the very idea of paying for black labor.”

Mr. Phillips’s descriptions of lynchings are graphic, unflinching, important — a clear reminder that a century (or less, even) is hardly enough time to recover from the sentiments that made them possible; hate is in the groundwater. After a second Brotherhood March in 1987, one that was far more successful, the civil rights leader Hosea Williams drew up a list of demands from Forsyth leaders, including financial reparations, enforcement of federal laws and programs to train black police officers. They might as well have been issued yesterday.

“Twenty-nine years later,” Mr. Phillips writes, “Hosea’s letter looks like a blueprint for confronting deeply ingrained bigotry and for combating the kind of institutional racism that persists in so many American communities in the 21st century — from Ferguson to Charleston, Baltimore to Staten Island.”

Sometimes, Mr. Phillips gets a bit too granular in his research, bombarding readers with a great many names and places all at once. (This is his first work of nonfiction. Before this, he wrote three books of poetry; “Elegy for a Broken Machine” was a National Book Award finalist in 2015.)

But this rookie mistake does not, ultimately, detract from the moral force of “Blood at the Root” or even how involving it is. The subject is too urgent, the characters too memorable. Some were depraved, showboating politicians. But others were remarkable men and women, who were violently uprooted. At least here, they begin to get their due. 

Why American Schools Are Even More Unequal Than We Thought

New York Times 
By SUSAN DYNARSKI 
Dated: AUG. 12, 2016

Education is deeply unequal in the United States, with students in poor districts performing at levels several grades below those of children in richer areas.

Yet the problem is actually much worse than these statistics show, because schools, districts and even the federal government have been using a crude yardstick for economic hardship.

A closer look reveals that the standard measure of economic disadvantage — whether a child is eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch in school — masks the magnitude of the learning gap between the richest and poorest children.

Nearly half of students nationwide are eligible for a subsidized meal in school. Children whose families earn less than 185 percent of the poverty threshold are eligible for a reduced-price lunch, while those below 130 percent get a free lunch. For a family of four, the cutoffs are $32,000 for a free lunch and $45,000 for a reduced-price one. By way of comparison, median household income in the United States wasabout $54,000 in 2014.

Eligibility for subsidized school meals is clearly a blunt indicator of economic status. But that is the measure that policy makers, educators and researchers rely on when they gauge gaps in academic achievement in schools, districts and states.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card, publishes student scores by eligibility for subsidized meals. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act, districts have reported scores separately for disadvantaged children, with eligibility for subsidized meals serving as the standard measure of disadvantage.

With Katherine Michelmore, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan, I have analyzed data held by the Michigan Consortium for Educational Research and found that this measure substantially understates the achievement gap.

In Michigan, as in the rest of the country, about half of eighth graders in public schools receive a free or reduced-price lunch. But when we look more closely, we see that just 14 percent have been eligible for subsidized meals every year since kindergarten. These children are the poorest of the poor — the persistently disadvantaged.

The math scores of these poorest children are far lower than predicted by the standard measure of economic disadvantage. The achievement gap between persistently disadvantaged children and those who were never disadvantaged is about a third larger than the gap that is typically measured.

Education researchers often express test score differences in standard deviations, which allows for a consistent measure of gaps across different tests, populations and contexts. Measured using that conventional approach, the gap in math scores between disadvantaged eighth graders and their classmates in Michigan is 0.69 standard deviations. This places disadvantaged children roughly two grades behind their classmates. By contrast, the gap based on persistent disadvantage is much wider: 0.94 standard deviations, or nearly three grades of learning.

In fact, there is a nearly linear, negative relationship between the number of years of economic disadvantage and math scores in eighth grade. These lower scores do not appear to be caused by more years of disadvantage, however. When we look at third-grade scores, nearly all of the eighth-grade score deficit is already in place. By third grade, those children who will end up spending all of primary school eligible for subsidized meals have already fallen far behind their classmates.

What is the explanation? It appears that years spent eligible for subsidized school meals serves as a good proxy for the depth of disadvantage. When we look back on the early childhood of persistently disadvantaged eighth graders, we see that by kindergarten they were already far poorer than their classmates.

We can see this with national data. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, run by the Department of Education, tracks a sample of children who started kindergarten in 1998. Among children who were eligible for subsidized meals through eighth grade, household income during kindergarten was just $20,000. For those who were only occasionally eligible, it was closer to $47,000, and for those never eligible, $80,000.

These data also show that persistently disadvantaged children are far less likely than other students to live with two parents or have a college-educated mother or father. Just 2 percent of persistently disadvantaged children have a parent with a college degree, compared with 24 percent of the occasionally disadvantaged (and 57 percent of those who were never disadvantaged).

No one ever actively decided that eligibility for subsidized meals was the best way to measure students’ economic disadvantage. The metric was widely available and became by default the standard way to distinguish between poorer and richer children. But it was always an imprecise measure, and we can do better at little cost.

Many states now use administrative data on eligibility for means-tested programs such as welfare benefits and food stamps to automatically qualify children for subsidized meals in school. Since these programs have a range of income cutoffs, their eligibility flags can be used to distinguish between children who are extremely poor and those who are nearly middle class. The children whose families persistently receive benefits will be the neediest of all.

Why does all this matter? Many federal, state and local programs distribute money based on the share of a district’s students who are eligible for subsidized meals. But schools that have identical shares of students eligible for subsidized meals may differ vastly in the share of students who are deeply poor. The schools with the most disadvantaged children have greater challenges and arguably need more resources.

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Not just college: Technical education as a pathway to the middle class

Brookings (Blog)
By: Michael J. Petrilli
Dated April 1, 2016

Education reformers are obsessed with getting many more low-income students “to and through” four-year colleges. Understandably so, a bachelor’s degree is the closest thing we have to a guaranteed ticket to the middle class. 

The trouble is, few children from poorer homes are likely to end up with a BA. As Andrew Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute shows in his chapter of my new book, just 14 percent of children from the bottom third of the income distribution will complete four-year degrees. Even if we doubled that number, most poor and working class kids will still need other paths to the middle class.

“Bachelor’s degree or bust”: A failed strategy

The academic-dominated approach is not working, especially for economically disadvantaged students. Of this group, about 20 percent of teenagers don’t graduate from high school at all. Of those who do graduate, about half matriculate to some form of college. But many are not ready: two-thirds of low-income students at community colleges start in remedial classes.

Here’s where things really fall apart. Only a third of community college students who start in remedial courses complete a credential within six years. Forty percent don’t ever get beyond the remedial stage.

The common outcome of our current strategy—“bachelor’s degree or bust”—is that a young person drops out of college at age 20 with no post-secondary credential, no skills, and no work experience, but a fair amount of debt. That’s a terrible way to begin adult life, and it’s even worse if the young adult aims to escape poverty.

Technical education for social mobility

A better approach for many young people would be to develop coherent pathways, beginning in high school, into authentic technical education options at the post-secondary level. But, right now, 81 percent of high school students are taking an academic route; only 19 percent are “concentrating” in career and technical education (i.e., earning at least three credits in a single CTE program area).

As Tamar Jacoby demonstrates, high-quality career and technical education (CTE) programs, culminating in industry-recognized post-secondary credentials, have great promise in engaging students, helping them succeed academically, boosting college completion rates, and brightening career prospects. By age 20, graduates of such programs have academic credentials, technical credentials, and work experience—and, usually, well-paying jobs:

There is a fear of ‘tracking’ in high school, for obvious reasons. But it simply doesn’t work to wait until kids are 18. Generic high school experiences are not preparing low-income students to successfully pursue either academic or technical routes after they receive their diplomas. A student must be able to choose their own path. But there should be a real choice.

The education system alone cannot solve persistent poverty or the growing gaps between working-class and college-educated Americans. But it can do a lot better. If we are serious about social mobility, we need to move past the singular obsession with four-year colleges, and give more weight to career and technical education.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and editor of Education for Upward Mobility.

Building Children's Brains

New York Times: Op-Ed

Author: Nicholas Kristof

Date: June 2, 2016

First, a quiz: What’s the most common “vegetable” eaten by American toddlers?

Answer: The French fry.

The same study that unearthed that nutritional tragedy also found that on any given day, almost half of American toddlers drink soda or similar drinks, possibly putting the children on a trajectory toward obesity or diabetes.

But for many kids, the problems start even earlier. In West Virginia, one study found, almost one-fifth of children are born with alcohol or drugs in their system. Many thus face an uphill struggle from the day they are born.

Bear all this in mind as Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump battle over taxes, minimum wages and whether to make tuition free at public universities. Those are legitimate debates, but the biggest obstacles and greatest inequality often have roots early in life:

If we want to get more kids in universities, we should invest in preschools.

Actually, preschool may be a bit late. Brain research in the last dozen years underscores that the time of life that may shape adult outcomes the most is pregnancy through age 2 or 3.

“The road to college attainment, higher wages and social mobility in the United States starts at birth,” notes James Heckman, a Nobel-winning economist at the University of Chicago. “The greatest barrier to college education is not high tuitions or the risk of student debt; it’s in the skills children have when they first enter kindergarten.”

Heckman is not a touchy-feely bleeding heart. He’s a math wiz renowned for his work on econometrics. But he is focusing his work on early education for disadvantaged children because he sees that as perhaps the highest-return public investment in the world today.

He measures the economic savings from investments in early childhood — because less money is spent later on juvenile courts, prisons, health care and welfare — and calculates that early-education programs for needy kids pay for themselves several times over.

One of the paradoxes of American politics is that this is an issue backed by overwhelming evidence, enjoying bipartisan support, yet Washington is stalled on it. Gallup finds that Americans by more than two to one favor universal pre-K, and Clinton and Sanders are both strong advocates. Trump has made approving comments as well (although online searches of both “Trump” and “preschool” mostly turn up comparisons of him to a preschooler). 

To be clear, what’s needed is not just education but also help for families beginning in pregnancy, to reduce the risk that children will be born with addictions and to increase the prospect that they will be raised with lots of play and conversation. (By age 4, a child of professionals has heard 30 million more words than a child on welfare.)

The best metric of child poverty may have to do not with income but with how often a child is spoken and read to.

So it’s in early childhood that the roots of inequality lie. A book from the Russell Sage Foundation, “Too Many Children Left Behind,” notes that 60 to 70 percent of the achievement gap between rich and poor kids is already evident by kindergarten. The book recommends investing in early childhood, for that’s when programs often have the most impact.

It is true that cognitive gains from preschool seem to fade by the third grade, but there are differences in life outcomes that persist. Many years later, these former pre-K students are less likely to be arrested, to drop out of high school, to be on welfare and to be jobless.

A wave of recent research in neuroscience explains why early childhood is so critical: That’s when the brain is developing most quickly. Children growing up in poverty face high levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which changes the architecture of the brain, compromising areas like the amygdala and hippocampus.

A new collection of essays from Harvard Education Press, “The Leading Edge of Early Childhood Education,” says that this “toxic stress” from poverty impairs brain circuits responsible for impulse control, working memory, emotional regulation, error processing and healthy metabolic functioning. Early-childhood programs protect those young brains.

So in this presidential campaign, let’s move beyond the debates about free tuition and minimum wages to push something that might matter even more: early-childhood programs for needy kids.

“It is in the first 1,000 days of life that the stage is set for fulfilling individual potential,” writes Roger Thurow in his powerful and important new book on leveraging early childhood, “The First 1,000 Days.” “If we want to shape the future, to truly improve the world, we have 1,000 days to do it, mother by mother, child by child.”

America’s education wars resemble World War I, with each side entrenched and exhausted but no one making much progress. So let’s transcend the stalemate and focus on investing in America’s neediest kids.

We rescued banks because they were too big to fail. Now let’s help children who are too small to fail.