In the realm of education reform, even the most vocal proponents exercise a “not in my backyard” mentality.

America has been shaped by reform: From the Suffrage Movement to the Labor Movement to the Civil Rights Movement, our daily lives have been impacted by constant change. Today, reform movements center on issues such as environmental reform, energy reform, and – most important of all – education reform. And yet, for a country built on the idea of change, our modern reform movements are amazingly hypocritical.

The hypocrisy of modern American reform is perhaps most clearly illustrated by environmental issues. Consider the examples set by residents of such progressive strongholds as Berkeley, California and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Residents of Berkeley – perhaps one of the most notoriously liberal towns in America – denied their affinity for green energy when they offered strong opposition to a project which would have created a green mass transit system. Why? Because the system would have commandeered street lanes previously devoted to car traffic, thereby inconveniencing local motorists. But the prize for most hypocritical reformists goes to the residents of Cape Cod – including the highly progressive Kennedy family – who attempted to kill a project which would create a wind farm in the Nantucket Sound. Then-Senator Ted Kennedy went so far as to propose an amendment to a Coast Guard budget bill which would have banned wind farms in the area, essentially suggesting that while he was a vocal proponent of wind energy in principle, he didn’t want to see green energy in his backyard.

“Not in my backyard” seems to be the theme of modern reform, and it is certainly not limited to environmental reform. In the realm of education reform, even the most vocal proponents exercise a “not in my backyard” mentality. Look, for example, at Bill Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated billions of dollars to education reform projects, from emphasizing smaller class sizes to researching methods of measuring teacher effectiveness. Yet for all of the billions of dollars in donations and for all of his egalitarian speechmaking, Gates has accomplished very little in the way of actual reform. The reason for this failure is simple: Reformist hypocrisy.

Gates and others like him seem unwilling to admit that the biggest problem underlying our failing education system is failing communities. It is widely recognized that our worst schools are those located in our poorest and most resource deprived communities, yet we don’t see Bill Gates offering to relocate poor families to Bellevue, Washington. Gates is certainly not alone in this: Americans everywhere bemoan the state of education in this country, yet residents of upper middle class suburbs are consistently opposed to expanding public transportation and housing projects so that lower class citizens might be able to take advantage of the opportunities offered in middle and upper middle class neighborhoods. “Not in our backyard,” they say.

Many education reformists maintain that the key to highly functioning communities is education – but they’ve got it backwards. Better education is not the key to strong communities; strong communities are the key to better education. We see this each time that we open a new C2 Education center in a struggling community. When C2 Education enters a community, student performance improves; this improvement is not a reflection of better schools, but rather a reflection of community concern – parents who fear that their children do not receive a quality education from their local public schools instead rely on small community businesses like C2.

Likewise, this relationship between strong communities and better education rates can be seen in the misguided reform efforts of school vouchers, charter schools, and busing. These reform efforts focus on bringing poverty-stricken students to wealthier schools in the hope that the better schools will offer a better education. But one of the main reasons that such efforts have been largely unsuccessful is because they bring the students to stronger communities instead of bringing stronger communities to the students. Students who are shipped off to better schools in far off neighborhoods might gain some benefits from having better teachers and greater resources, but these benefits are limited because the students are not truly a part of the community. The key to success is to build stronger communities in our poorest areas, not to simply remove students from struggling schools.

How can a child be expected to learn if he is homeless, or if his parents can’t afford to feed him well? How can we expect students to care about standardized tests if they are afraid to walk home from school or if they grow up in a community devoid of hope? It is not our schools leaving children behind, but our communities – a fact highlighted by a recent report issued by the Children’s Defense Fund, which found that:

• The number of children living in poverty has increased by four million since 2000
• The number of homeless children attending public schools increased 41% from 2006 to 2009
• In 2009, 15.6 million children received food stamps each month, a 65% increase over 10 years
• A majority of children in all racial groups and 79% or more of black and Hispanic children cannot read or do math at grade level
• The annual cost of child care for a 4-year-old now costs more than the annual in-state tuition at a public four-year college in 33 states and the District of Columbia

These are the problems that need to be solved. These are the problems that have created our education nightmare. And these are the problems that will continue to plague us until and unless we are willing to admit that education reform has to occur in our backyards.

While we applaud the efforts of documentaries such as “Waiting for Superman” and “Race to Nowhere” and speechifying celebrities like Bill Gates or Matt Damon (who recently appeared at the Save Our Schools march), their true value lies solely in their ability to shine the spotlight on our education problems. These headline makers offer few truly innovative ideas because they refuse to recognize that our education problem is really an economic problem. Until we as a nation recognize that education reform requires economic reform, until we are willing to help build better and stronger communities, we will continue to fail our children.