A few weeks ago, I went on my third Cultural Relations retreat, this time as a leader. Watching the program through a new light confirmed to me that it continues to be uniting and life-changing. But the polarization at Garfield is silently screaming that something is wrong. It’s something we’ve all desperately wished that we could magically make right.

Barack Obama was just elected the 44th President of the United States. He has already inspired millions of people around the globe. His presidency already means a lot to so many people. But I still feel as if we’re just not doing enough. We need to make early public education equal for everyone in America. It’s a simple solution to the very complex problems of racial inequalities and general race relations.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of “reminding America of the fierce urgency of now,” an idea that has been echoed in today’s political arena and still holds an essential truth. The problem is that programs like affirmative action, which is hotly debated every fall college season, are “tomorrow” solutions, however noble their intentions may be. They delegate reform to the next generation. What we need is an approach that takes King’s philosophy, the “fierce urgency of now,” to heart.

The most formative development occurs in the early childhood, not in the teenage or college years. By incorporating affirmative action into college admissions, we are essentially helping those who have already “made it:” youth who have graduated high school with good grades and the qualifications needed to be viable candidates for college in the first place.

Not only is affirmative action based on the hope that positive effects will surface in a few generations, but it also only helps the portion of the minority population that is already academically accomplished, not the part that really needs help. The rest of the people, the ones who have been struggling since kindergarten, are left in the dust.

If we want mass change immediately, we need to make mass efforts now, and those efforts need to address the roots of the problem, not the exceptions. The “roots of the problem” aren’t very easy to define, but in my mind, the single most important thing we can do to close the achievement gap is to fund the mass improvement and parity of early education.

Some countries, like Finland, have federally equalized public education systems. True, Finland doesn’t have quite the racial makeup that America does. However, that might not even matter. A recent study of hundreds of Texas public schools concluded that race and family background can be statistically trumped by factors like class size and school resources, both of which are based on funding. In other words, the negative impact of a child’s race on his or her academic success can be virtually eliminated by solid funding and quality teaching.

By fourth or fifth grade, a time when our school district conducts most of its testing for “gifted” students, the status quo has already been established. It’s too late. The more affluent kids test well and enter the APP program; those with lower socioeconomic status stay in their neighborhood schools.

We need to make real changes in order to achieve the ultimate goal: that we group ourselves not by race, but by shared values, cultures, and interests, and that we become a more meritocratic society. Barack Obama has already helped people begin to regroup themselves.

And we have absolutely everything we need, save political will, to make America live up to its promise of meritocracy, its promise that the harder you work and the more deserving you are, the better you will do. But as Al Gore says, “Luckily, political will is a renewable resource.” Let’s use the new mobilization and inspiration from Obama’s presidency to make things fair once and for all.