Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is David L. Kirp, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and author of Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children’s Lives and America’s Future (2011).

Schools are just beginning to open their doors, but the education food fights are already underway. I’m not thinking about kids in the cafeteria but adults wielding books and blogs. Amid this tomfoolery among the grownups the critical needs of children are going ignored.

On the one side of the current fight stands the “no excuses” crew, personified by Michelle Rhee, the broom-wielding ex-superintendent of the Washington D.C. schools. To them, and to the producers of “Waiting for Superman,” retrograde unions and bloated bureaucracies are biggest impediments to reform. Turn the schools over to the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter school network, make every teacher as well-pedigreed as those recruited by Teach for America and our education problems will be solved. Diane Ravitch was once a dues-paying member of this group. She switched sides—detailed in her recent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System—and since has been on the warpath, staunchly defending the contributions of teachers unions and the quality of public school teachers. From the outset this fight has been nasty, and with the recent publication of Steven Brill’s Class Warfare it has turned downright vicious. Brill makes a big deal of the fact that Ravitch is earning a bundle by (shock, shock!) being handsomely paid to give speeches to organizations that share her beliefs; Ravitch, saying that Brill has got his facts wrong, is threatening a defamation suit. Oy!

What gets lost amid all this “he said, she said” squabbling are the needs of kids. Little attention is getting paid to what’s important, not only to bridge the achievement gap but also to expand opportunities for all youngsters. We have to change the conversation, to emphasize what’s happening between birth and age five, and during the 18 hours a day, 180 days a year that kids aren’t in school. This requires a sea-change in our thinking—a shift away from fixating on the 3 R’s and toward doing what’s required, outside as well as inside the classroom, to improve the lives of children.

Polls consistently show that Americans care deeply about our children, but there’s little awareness of the problems many of them encounter, no sense of just how dire the current situation truly is.  Far and away, children are the poorest members of this society. The 2011 Kids Count report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, issued earlier this month, finds that the child poverty rate increased 18 percent between 2000 and 2009, with 42 percent of children living in low-income families.  But the reaction to this report, as well as to past Kids Count studies and research from other child policy organizations that reached similar conclusions, has been a news-cycle’s worth of angst and nothing more. Isn’t it commonsensical that children who don’t know where their next meal is coming from or where they’ll be sleeping tonight will have a hard time focusing on schoolwork?  Without a doubt, narrowing the poverty gap would narrow the achievement gap as well.

What’s more, at least 30 percent of poor youngsters come to school every day with uncorrected vision problems, uncorrected dental problems (which cause 1.5 million absences ever year) and untreated asthma. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that kids who can’t read the white board, are in constant pain because their teeth are rotting or are having a hard time breathing won’t do well in school, and the data support that proposition. (One interesting finding is that vision problems are especially prevalent among juvenile offenders; perhaps their myopia helped launch them on the path of bad behavior.) It would be cheap to solve those problems—less than the cost of tax deductions for corporate jets—and doing so would give poor kids a much better shot at success in school.

What happens after school and during the summer also makes a huge difference in shaping children’s lives. Research shows that the hours that children spend hanging out on street corners are a better predictor of school failure than race or class. Studies have also demonstrated that students from poor families fall far behind their middle class peers during summers, since while they’re idle during those months better-off youngsters are stretching their minds. The policy message is plain—poor kids will be much better off if they receive something of value after 3 PM and during summer vacation.

In Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children’s Lives and America’s Future,   I lay out a system of supports for improving the lives of children—game-changers, based on solid evidence, which won’t break the bank. It’s the policy version of the Golden Rule—All children deserve what we would want for a child we love. Because poor youngsters are worst off they deserve our first attention, but the “kids first” agenda aims to benefit every child.

Here’s the agenda:

• Give new parents strong support.

• Provide high-quality early education.

• Link academically rigorous schools and communities to improve what both offer kids.

• Provide mentors to youngsters who’d benefit from a stable, caring adult in their lives.

• Start youngsters off with a nest egg that helps pay for college or start a career.

Kids First spells out these ideas. They’ve been shown to work in even the most hard-luck communities. They can be put in place on a wide scale. They give concrete meaning to our shared sense of stewardship for all our children.  And they’re also affordable. My back-of-the-envelope calculation is that these initiatives would increase total federal spending on children, $265.9 billion in fiscal year 2011, by about $40 billion, or 15 percent.

Beacons of excellence can be found in every state, in barrios as well as gated communities. Whether it’s the childhood programs from the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, which are harder to get into than Harvard, or a preschool in a Chicago neighborhood so rough that the playground is ringed by barbed wire, you leave awed by what is happening there, wishing that your own kids could have similar opportunities. At the same time, you come away troubled that so few youngsters, whatever their backgrounds, are lucky enough to have such experiences. It’s as if they’ve won the lottery. Why shouldn’t every child be so fortunate?

Because these ideas represent wise investments, they can help keep America competitive in the next generation. They add up to one big idea—making the array of supports that kids need as commonly available as kindergarten, and turning cradle-to-college support into something that American families take as much for granted as well-baby checkups. They will help to bridge the achievement gap—and, what’s more, they can give youngsters a decent shot at success in the life beyond school.