A major school district in Philadelphia has been taken over, handed out and chopped up. The for-profit Edison schools opened in Philadelphia, just as Dallas had asked them to leave for a lack of measurable improvement in schools. Linda Darling-Hammond frames this article around what happened in Philadelphia because she feels that in some ways it is a prototype of what is going on throughout the country. She states these questions before citizens: (1) will public education perish or will we be able to join hands and rescue probably the most important institution in our society today? (2) Does every child have a right to learn? and (3) How do we secure that right for every child? Here Darling-Hammond discusses the consequences of under-education, and calls for enabling learning at much higher levels throughout society, saying that the most important challenge in our time is to enable teaching in ever more powerful ways so that we can support those higher levels of learning. The ongoing problem of educational inequality suggested by the persistent achievement gap is discussed and attributed to the fact that schools continue to be deeply segregated. Curriculum opportunity that is to a great extent allocated by race and class both within and across schools, is one way this segregation occurs. Darling-Hammond identifies the real challenge as developing teachers who are able to teach every child. This kind of teaching requires understanding what kids are thinking, where they come from, and what it will take to connect to their experiences, their understandings, their language backgrounds, and create a bridge to the curriculum.