By David L. Kirp, New York Times guest Op-Ed, Feb. 9/10, 2013

[....]  Union City makes an unlikely poster child for education reform. It’s a poor community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average. Three-quarters of the students live in homes where only Spanish is spoken. A quarter are thought to be undocumented, living in fear of deportation.

Public schools in such communities have often operated as factories for failure. This used to be true in Union City, where the schools were once so wretched that state officials almost seized control of them. How things have changed. [....]

As someone who has worked on education policy for four decades, I’ve never seen the likes of this. After spending a year in Union City working on a book, I believe its transformation offers a nationwide strategy. [....]

[David L. Kirp is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the forthcoming book “Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools.”]