BOSTON

IN RUSSIA there are just over 17 million school-age children. Cribbing from Crash Course, Chris Whittle’s wonderful look into the future of American education, the U.S. is home to 15 million public school students who are below basic literacy levels, which means we have about as many students who don’t possess the skills to function in the workplace as some other large countries have kids.

But not here in Massachusetts, right? After all, we have outperformed every other state in each category of national assessments two years running. We’re right to be proud of that, but we should also recognize that it’s mainly due to improvements in suburban schools as a result of the state’s 1993 Education Reform Act. Our major urban centers have hardly improved and the achievement gap has not narrowed since 1998. For urban districts, the dream remains deferred.

Almost 40 percent of the state’s schools fail to meet annual performance targets under the federal No Child Left Behind law and 63 Boston schools have been designated “underperforming.” Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) scores in our middle cities — 14 cities outside the Boston area that range in population from 40,000 to 175,000 — lag state averages.

Recently, education analyst Jay Greene noted that opinion leaders on the right and left implicitly or explicitly make the case that blacks and Hispanics cannot be held to the same standards as non-minority students. In a Wall Street Journal piece early this year, Charles Murray argued that many students just aren’t capable of achieving high standards. Richard Rothstein, friend to the unions and former education writer for The New York Times, argues in a recent book that poverty dooms inner-city students to failure.

I am amazed when I hear variants of these views here in Massachusetts. More than other states, we have avoided the pursuit of a single “silver bullet” by embracing several innovations that have proven successful.

Charter schools, pilot schools and the METCO program have improved urban student performance. In addition to being important to industry, vocational-technical schools, which serve a percentage of special-education students that is twice the state average, have made significant progress educating their students.

The University Park Campus School, in Worcester — a partnership with Clark University — demonstrates the potential in university partnerships, and recent data show that extended school days are boosting achievement in 10 Massachusetts schools.

All these innovations — not just charters, pilots and METCO — are ready-made for urban schools. They have proven successful at teaching kids too often categorized as “unteachable,” and they succeed in great part because they require choice and parental involvement.

Massachusetts faces two questions. First, do we possess the will to continue pushing proven, if sometimes politically difficult, reforms? Second, how can we apply these relatively isolated successes on a larger scale?

If we are serious about scaling up reform and not sacrificing another generation of students, we should raise caps that currently constrain the growth of urban charter schools. We should also seek partners among the presidents of our leading universities to each run two or three failing schools, and increase the number of inner-city students educated in surrounding communities under the METCO program. The Boston Foundation is already leading a push to make the seven new pilot schools agreed upon by the city and its teachers union last year a reality.

Remember the original bargain of education reform: more money in return for innovation and accountability. Municipalities and the commonwealth spend more than $9 billion annually on K-12 education, an average of about $9,500 per student. More is always better when it comes to the kids, but the state has certainly lived up to its end of the bargain.

We have developed a number of arrows in the reform quiver. If rigorously applied and brought to scale, they could provide a result no other state has achieved: shedding the racial and ethnic blinders that narrow our vision of what students can achieve.

Jim Stergios is executive director of Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts public policy think tank.