If you work in the field of education, you may share the same troubling mental image I have as we enter the new decade and ponder the future of our children.

I see the beginning of a national marathon with teachers, administrators and state education officials all crowded at the starting line. There’s a giant banner over our heads. “RACE TO THE TOP,” it says. There are cash prizes to the winners of this race. The Secretary of Education has the starter gun in his hand. The President will make an appearance at the finish line in a large high school gymnasium filled with adoring students, parents, and teachers.

Many politicians and national educational experts think this is the race we must run to be the best educational system in the world. Governors, college presidents, educational researchers, economists are all in the grandstands, cheering. Some will even pass out water bottles and serve at check points along the marathon route. But those of us who continue to teach every day, or lead a school or school system, will be the ones who will actually run this race…along with our students, actually. It’s not a fair contest, particularly for those students, schools and districts that start the race at a distinct disadvantage.

Way back in 1964, civil rights leader Whitney Young, writing of the “discrimination gap” in his book To Be Equal (out of print; try your library or used book dealer), used a similar foot race analogy to state the obvious:

The situation is much like that of two men running the mile in a track meet. One is well-equipped, wears track shoes and runs on cinders. The other is barefoot and runs in sand. Seeing that one runner is out-distancing the other with ease, you then put track shoes on the second fellow and place him on the cinder track also. Seconds later it should surprise no one to see that the second runner is still yards behind and will never catch up unless something else is done to even the contest.

An achievement gap is certainly real in education. But under-resourced public schools cannnot close this gap for their students by being given a new pair of track shoes and then being asked to catch up. “Something else” must be done. Young called for a “domestic “Marshall Plan” in the sixties that was partially realized in President Johnson’s “Great Society” legislation. A similar moral and financial resolve is needed (at the level approaching that used to bail out the banking industry) if we are serious about equal educational opportunity for our neediest students. Focusing on our country being behind in a perceived global competition by raising standards, testing students more often, and closing failing schools is not the way to close our domestic achievement gap.

As “Race to the Top” draws near, I urge you to take the time to listen to a prophetic voice urging the President, the Secretary of Education, and all national policy makers to think carefully about the unintended consequences of running this race. Yong Zhao is a distinguished professor of education at Michigan State University and author of Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization. If you can’t get to the book right away, read Zhao’s recent interview with Kappan.