My apologies to iconic hip-hop artists, De La Soul for I have shamelessly appropriated the title, Stakes is high to underscore the importance of the work ahead for educators, students, parents, community members, and researchers as we attempt to develop a generation of what I call students for a world we can hardly imagine. Through this article, I would like to address the so-called gap, the concept of new century students, and the magnitude of the challenges that lay ahead-particularly as they pertain to African American students.Keywords: culturally relevant pedagogy, hip-hop pedagogyThe 2012 Charles H. Thompson Lecture-Colloquium PresentationAchievement Gap?The term achievement has worked its way into most mainstream discussions about scholastic disparities between Black and Brown students and their White, middle class counterparts. To be sure, we are not talking about all Black and Brown students or all White students. Rather, the discourse is about the pattern of underachievement that is extant among these groups of students. The patterns are so regular and so predictable that we have come to expect them. But, I contend (and have contended since 2006) that what we actually have is not so much an gap as what I term an (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Some might argue that I am merely making a semantic difference since in the end both sides are identifying academic disparities. However, what I believe have been central to my argument are the root causes of the disparities and the sense of social responsibility that accompanies those causes.When we describe what has transpired in our communities as an gap we slip into a discourse of individual or personal responsibility for a situation that has been centuries in the making. The notion of the gap seems to cast blame on individual students, parents, schools and teachers without looking at the structural inequalities that have been at work since the establishment of the nation. Achievement gap language suggests that each individual is responsible for his or her own educational circumstance and Black and Brown students need to catch to their White counterparts without acknowledging the ways that catching up is made near impossible by the many structural barriers the society has imposed on them.When 1 argue that what we really have is an education debt I am speaking of the historical, economic, socio-political, and moral components of inequality that shape the contours of this nation. And just as we claim to have shared responsibility for the nation's economic debt, we have shared responsibility for the education debt. Briefly, the historical debt came as a result of the failure and outright denial of education and educational opportunities to African American children from the founding of the nation. Indeed, the fact that it was once illegal for African Americans to learn to read says more about the society's notion of literacy and learning as valuable commodities than any trite statements about education ever could. After the Civil War, the denial of real education persisted. In the South, there were separate and unequal school opportunities for more than 100 years. In the North, the system of de facto segregation often produced similar results as in the South. Today, almost 90% of Black and Brown students attend what Orfield and Frankenberg (2008) call hyper-segregated schools. The historic debt alone speaks to the systematic denial of equal education to Black students.Coupled with the historic debt is the economic debt. This debt speaks to the persistent underfunding of African American schools that not only began centuries ago but is also manifest in today's schools. Because U.S. schools are typically funded through property taxes and African American families are more likely to live in communities with lower property values, they are unable to generate enough tax revenues to fund their schools at the same levels as their suburban counterparts. …