I was a reporter for years in the Chicago Public schools, covering all the different ways that people tried to fix and improve those schools. And one of the big debates-- not just among the parents and politicians, but inside the schools as well-- was how much could we expect teachers to actually accomplish? Like, how much could they do, really, with the students they were given?

Some teachers definitely were the heroic we-can-do-better types. We need to try everything. They were trying all kinds of reforms and fixes to make their schools improve. Others shrugged.

This population of kids, they would tell you, arrives with such deficits-- no books at home, violent neighborhoods, the kind of family problems that would distract anybody from school. These teachers would say, we're doing as well with them as anybody could. You know, if dozens of kids show up in your classroom each year with terrible reading ability and in need of remedial writing instruction, how exactly are you supposed to bring them up to grade level on the state standardized tests in the one year you have with them?

One of the things that's been interesting about the teacher's strike in the Chicago schools is that it's actually gotten people talking about some very basic things in education, and things like these. Like for instance, one of the big issues is standardized testing. How much should teachers be evaluated on the test scores of their students? Where you stand on that one pretty much comes down to whether you think that teachers have a lot of power to raise those scores or not.

There's an essay that's being published this Sunday in the New York Times by Alex Kotlowitz, a reporter who writes a lot about kids and poverty in Chicago. And he points out how much we expect from teachers, especially teachers in a school system like Chicago's where 87% of the students come from low income families. He writes that he's been reporting in a high school lately where the staff has transformed and improved the school in lots of ways.

"And yet each day I spend there," he writes, "I witness one heartbreaking scene after another. A young girl who yells at one of the school's social workers, 'This is no way to live,' and then breaks down in tears. Because of problems at home, she's had to move in with a friend's family, and there's not enough food to go around. A young man has retreated into his shell having witnessed a murder over the summer.

The stories are all too familiar. And yet somehow, we've come to believe that with really good teachers and longer school days and rigorous testing, we can transform their lives. We've imagined teachers as lazy, excuse-making quasi-professionals or, alternately, as lifesavers. But the truth, of course, is more complicated."

I bring all this up here today because there is a new way to look at all this, a new body of science that's just starting to get discussed in a widespread way. It looks at what a difficult home life can do to the brain of a school kid-- literally to the biology of the brain-- and how it makes it difficult to learn.

And this science suggests all kinds of things that schools could be doing that could improve teaching, get through to huge numbers of kids that teachers have a hard time getting through to today.

As school starts up again, we thought here at the radio show that it would be nice to turn away from the political questions and the union questions and the money questions and all the regular stuff that people argue about when they argue about schools all the time and turn instead today for the beginning of school to something more optimistic and forward-looking, something that feels big and Earth-shaking and, I have to say, kind of exciting. That is what we're going to be talking about today.