When many of our poorest students start school, they are already behind their more wealthy peers. The gap starts before the school door even opens. Does that mean we give up on public schools in the US and send them away to another country as you suggest? Absolutely not! It means we have to change the way we run our schools for the neediest students - we must change the structure, the amount of school time, the amount of extracurricular programs available, etc. We must change the very idea of what a public school looks like for some of our neediest kids (one new model that shows great success is the KIPP model).

And Mr. Williams, the study that you cite, while showing that our numbers are lower, certainly does not account for ACCESS. The United States at least makes an attempt to reach EVERY child and provide a decent education to EVERY young person. We do not exclude based on race, or whether you can afford an education, or whether you test high enough to make it into some of the very schools that provide the data in these other countries.

So, Mr. Williams, I very much hope your opening paragraph was in jest. Because while we have our problems in the United States that need urgent attention, and while we SHOULD make our system more competitive, please don't forget: some of the very students who would supposedly become better readers (ie. many BCPSS children) by being sent to another country as you suggest...wouldn't even be given entrance through the school door.

Literacy is on the way out. America is just ahead of the curve.

National differences should be taken into account, although I doubt that Canada or the European nations mentioned are denying poor kids access to public schools.

A more likely (although less politically correct) excuse is that a decent portion of "American" schoolkids are non-native speakers from the Third World - something that is less of an issue in Luxembourg or Hungary, I suspect.