Education J. Moore began serving a life sentence for murder at Jessup Correctional. The “other Wes Moore” had much in common with Westley. They were born around the same time and in the same area; both were fatherless children in 1970s Baltimore. Both were in trouble with the cops and at school by their early teens. Both of their moms tried changing schools—in the case of Wes J. Moore, from the catastrophically bad Northern High School (which was later closed) to the slightly less bad Perry Hall High School (currently ranked in the bottom third of Mary- land schools). In 2010, now-Governor Moore published a book after the two men struck up a correspondence and visitation schedule. The book, The Other Wes Moore, opens with the stakes: One of us is free and has experienced things that he never even knew to dream about as a kid. The other will spend every day until his death behind bars for an armed robbery that left a police officer and father of five dead. The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his. Neither man is yet fifty years old. Could schools actually level the playing field? From the first public schools of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, America has often expected our schools to deliver sal- vation for both students and society. But can education really make so much difference? Parental income and birth zip code still mostly determine life outcomes (income, arrests, etc.), with the separate effects of education sometimes hard to even discern. So how much can we expect schools to do? How much 35