When I heard the verdict in George Zimmerman’s murder trial, I was shocked. Surely, a man can’t kill an unarmed boy and walk free? But he did. And now, he’s free. Zimmerman did everything wrong and still walked away unscathed. How do we make sense of this? More importantly – what must young people be thinking? Feeling? Questioning? All the rhetoric they are fed about freedom and possibilities and the American dream seem to be a cruel joke, a setup. I am not normally a cynical person but this weekend’s events have made me think long and hard about the messages that get delivered throughout the K-12 schooling experience. We encourage youth to be optimistic, to strive to be the best, we encourage them to compete, to win, to succeed. But what we were reminded of this weekend was that even if you work hard and are an excellent student, there are laws and institutions that have been created for and by others and those can just as quickly determine your future as passing the SATs.So why isn’t some part of school spent talking about these issues? Why do we insist that they memorize facts and figures that are disconnected from their lives and then ignore or deal distantly with a significant event like the untimely and immoral death of Trayvon Martin? What might happen if we were honest: the truth is that even if they obey laws and work hard in school, they could still be killed because their skin is the wrong color? Why don’t we warn them that there will always be George Zimmerman’s out there and that the world isn’t as rosy as we’d like it to seem? What service do we do if youth aren’t able to really understand the world they live in, or do understand it but aren’t acknowledged as such? As others have said much more eloquently than I (e.g. Questlove, Rich Benjamin, Martin Bashir), the US isn’t post-racial. I’d argue there are some people who’d like to pretend these issues don’t exist, but sweeping them under the rug does no one a service, and for young people of color, it’s doing them a disservice.The truth is that there aren’t any academic standards that address real life, no matter how “authentic” they claim to be. And often district or state laws make it difficult for youth to write, discuss or share concerns in school, which reify the same challenges they encounter in everyday society. I still recall that in our literary magazine in high school, the school board decided no articles, poems or short stories could talk about death or suicide or anything related. What if someone's friend, parent or sibling had died? What if was a stranger they felt connected to, like Trayvon? Does pretending their feelings don't exist make them go away? Does only addressing love and happiness in the pages of a high school text mean that that's the only truth? No. Neither will treating a civics or history class (or any class for that matter) like an exercise in how things work; how a bill becomes a law, umm except our textbooks don’t talk about lobbyists, or the infighting or the backroom deals... or about the Civil Rights we enjoy in this country thanks to great leaders like Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr., oh except that things aren't really always equal; you can get murdered without consequences for your race or beat up on a city street for your sexual preference, and race and class really do still matter. I guess that’s my point: we paint this rosy picture, we tell youth all their dreams are possible, we tell them about our great country, about all the triumphs but we gloss over the ugly truths, but we shouldn't. Youth's lives are still mediated by power, racial dynamics and history, that are manifested in laws and policies that are still designed to control, oppress and suppress. I just wish there was more space in schools to have honest conversations and help youth reflect, confront and question, so they aren’t ultimately setup to believe something that simply isn’t still true.Finally, I want to say that I feel deeply saddened by what happened to this young boy. It breaks my heart both for his family and friends but also for all the young people who could be in his situation. School could be a place to confront, converse, create, collaborate around and on these challenges; school has the potential to be a place of dialogue, of dialogic thinking, of peaceful resistance, of action, of reflection. I still believe that: I still think that's true.