This title will make sense by the end of the article. I promise.
I recently faced an ideological struggle—not the kind that makes headlines, but the quiet, deeply personal kind on Zoom that unsettles your spirit. It wasn’t marked by shouting matches or viral soundbites—just the slow, sobering realization that people who meant good were actually building something that contradicted what I’ve spent my career working toward: a vision where communities are equipped with what they need to truly succeed.
In a space I was working in, someone helped constructed a coalition to again focus that nation on high-stakes test scores. Their mission? To bring testing back to the center of the civil rights conversation. They cloaked it in familiar language: urgency, achievement gaps, equity. But I saw the truth behind the vocabulary. This wasn’t about equity. It was about optics. It was about aligning with power. I know this because, when challenged, one of them admitted: “That’s what Trump cares about.”
Let that sink in.
Not what students care about.
Not what educators know works.
Not what communities have asked for.
But what a president—who defunds public schools, is trying to close the US Department of Education, and threatens educators—cares about.
I’ve Been Here Before
In the 1990s, I worked in the Houston Independent School District under Rod Paige. I saw the blueprint for Texas-style high-stakes testing up close. I saw how it flattened students into numbers, punished teachers for serving vulnerable communities, and fed a national narrative about testing and accountability that has never once delivered on its promises.
I’ve written extensively about this on Cloaking Inequity. I’ve testified in legislative chambers. I’ve challenged think tanks. I’ve offered alternatives such as Community-Based Accountability.
I have also supported a complimentary framework as a board member of the Schott Foundation—one that centered love, investment, and community-rooted indicators of success. A framework that could replace toxic “accountability” with authentic responsibility.
But the coalition that rallied around high-stakes testing? They quietly killed a proposal that centered the inputs most critical to our most vulnerable students. They didn’t debate it. They didn’t discredit it. They simply ensured it never saw the light of day. Their proposal focused entirely on bringing high-stakes testing back into the heart of the civil rights conversation. I may have lost that battle—but I haven’t lost the war.
We Keep Measuring the Wrong Things
Test scores are not the problem. The problem is what we do with them. That’s why they are called high-stakes tests.
High-stakes testing assumes that if we just pressure kids and teachers enough, we’ll close opportunity gaps. But in reality, what it does is pressure the already disadvantaged—and then call their struggle a failure.
It’s a system of accountability that demands miracles from those denied the most basic investments.
A child who hasn’t had a stable home in months. A student whose school can’t afford working heat in the winter. A teenager raising siblings while working nights. These are the stories behind the test scores. But our policies never ask why a student is struggling. They just ask how to punish them and their educators for it.
We’ve normalized blaming children for conditions adults created.
Loving Cities Is the Framework We’ve Been Waiting For
Since 2020, I’ve served on the board of the Schott Foundation for Public Education. One of our proudest initiatives is the Loving Cities Index, a data tool rooted in love, justice, and equity. It doesn’t just measure what’s happening inside classrooms—it measures what’s happening around them.
Because students don’t live in test prep booklets or computer windows. They live in neighborhoods. They breathe city air. They walk through food deserts. They ride unreliable buses. They survive systemic racism, economic violence, and political neglect.
The Loving Cities Index includes 25 equity indicators across four domains:
- Care (e.g., access to mental health, nutritious food, clean air, school counselors)
- Commitment (e.g., fair discipline, early education, anti-bullying policies)
- Stability (e.g., affordable housing, transit, livable wages)
- Capacity (e.g., experienced teachers, rigorous coursework, equitable resources)
These are the real ingredients of student success. And Loving Cities tracks them.
Loving Cities Offers a Different Kind of Accountability
The brilliance of Loving Cities is that it flips the script.
While traditional testing data blames students and their educators, Loving Cities holds systems accountable. It asks:
- Is your city ensuring children can breathe clean air?
- Do students have access to healthy food and healthcare?
- Are schools free from harsh, exclusionary discipline?
- Do teachers have the salaries, support, and training they need to succeed?
This is a different conversation entirely. One based on human dignity, not fear-based compliance. One rooted in the idea that you don’t improve public education by punishing the public.
But We Can’t Stop at Data Alone—We Need Community Power
Measurement isn’t enough. Communities must be armed with the tools to act on these truths. That’s where equity audits come in.
Equity audits are powerful frameworks that allow parents, educators, organizers, and youth to systematically assess disparities in access to opportunities, inputs, and institutional practices. Rather than fixating on test scores, they ask: Who is being denied? And why?
When communities conduct equity audits, they uncover disparities that would otherwise remain hidden beneath statewide averages and public relations spin:
- Are schools in Black neighborhoods more likely to lack librarians?
- Do English learners have less access to advanced courses?
- Do certain ZIP codes in a district have less resources than others?
Equity audits don’t just illuminate injustice. They empower communities to demand remedies—with the receipts in hand.
Equity Audits + Loving Cities = A Recipe
Together, equity audits and the Loving Cities Index are some of the ingredients in a recipe for advancing educational justice. The Index provides a framework to reimagine what success truly looks like, while equity audits supply the localized evidence communities need to hold decision-makers accountable when that success is systematically denied.
This is the work of true accountability: not punishing schools and students for struggling—but demanding that systems change the conditions that caused the struggle in the first place.
We don’t need more accountability for students. We need accountability to students.
That starts with asking better questions—and giving communities the tools to make those questions impossible to ignore.
Cities Are Where Students Live—Not Just Where Schools Are
Education policy continues to treat students like disembodied minds disconnected from place. But students are city residents. They’re shaped by the paths they walk, the air they breathe, the buses they take, the overpolicing they endure, the wages their families earn.
The Loving Cities Index understands this. It reminds us that public education does not start and end at the school door. It’s embedded in every policy that touches a child’s life—from housing to healthcare, from zoning to wages.
This isn’t just good theory. It’s urgent practice.
Communities Deserve More Than Test Scores
When your school is underfunded and your scores are low, you don’t get investments in curriculum—you get a state takeover.
When your students face trauma and struggle to perform on assessments, you don’t get more counselors—you get more threats.
This is not equity. This is coercion.
Loving Cities and equity audits allow communities to flip the lens. They say: if you want to measure us, start by measuring yourself—your budget, your policies, your priorities. Accountability becomes a two-way street for policymakers.
Cities Leading the Way
The 2020 Loving Cities Index included Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Miami, Providence, and more. The upcoming edition will feature even more: Houston, Sacramento, Birmingham, New Orleans, Memphis, and others.
And here’s breaking news I learned this week during our Schott Foundation board meeting: the new Loving Cities Index data will be released in mid-June.
This data will be a game-changer.
It will spotlight the systems that need repair—and the communities demanding investment. It will once again show that love is measurable, justice is quantifiable, and the real gaps we need to close are about access, opportunity, and equity.
You can explore the Loving Cities Initiative and sign up for updates here: schottfoundation.org/our-work/loving-cities
A Personal Story About Ingredients
Let me tell you a story that’s stayed with me all these years.
My senior year in high school, my first serious girlfriend told me she was baking cookies for me. It was a small gesture, but to my teenage heart, it felt like a big deal.
She came over smiling, holding a container of freshly baked cookies. I reached out eagerly—but she pulled it back at the last second, laughing nervously.
“I forgot the sugar,” she said.
We both laughed. I bit into one anyway. It looked right. It even smelled right. But the taste? Off. Hollow. Like a pretend version of what it should’ve been.
That moment taught me something as an educator and advocate:
The inputs matter.
You can’t leave out the sugar and expect cookies to turn out the way they’re supposed to. You can’t starve a school of resources and expect excellence. You can’t ignore housing, food, mental health, wages, and community and expect test scores to tell the truth about a child’s potential.
When we evaluate outcomes without ever interrogating inputs, we blame the cookies instead of the recipe.
The War Isn’t Over
So no—I haven’t lost this war. Because every time a community conducts an equity audit, the truth gets harder to ignore. Every time a city joins the Loving Cities Index, we take one more step toward measuring what truly matters. Every time we remind leaders that students are whole people—not data points—we rehumanize the work.
The road is long. Supporters of strategy simply based on high-stakes testing are organized. But so are we.
Let’s keep baking justice—with all the right ingredients.
Because students, like cookies, deserve more than a cookie that isn’t a cookie.
They deserve the sugar.
They deserve equitable systems.
They deserve to be baked with love.
Please share.
Cloaking Inequity 
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