Here’s the good news: American schools may not be as bad as we have been led to believe. Ah, but here’s the bad news: The rest of American society is failing its disadvantaged citizens even more than we realize. The question is, Should educators be responsible for fixing this? In a report released last week, Martin Carnoy from the Graduate School of Education at Stanford, Emma García from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and Tatiana Khavenson from the Institute of Education at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, suggest that socioeconomic deficits impose a particularly heavy burden on American schools. “Once we adjust for social status, we are doing much better than we think,” Professor Carnoy told me. “We underrate our progress…”