In many ways, the education reforms proposed come across as moving the furniture on the Titanic. There is too much attention put on testing and "accountability". It is interesting that the primary person responsible for education in most countries is the student, followed by the parent. Research indicates that children not read to before age 5 generally never read at grade level. One study that gave children the option of eating M&Ms immediately or waiting and getting more suggested that children who could delay gratification were generally more successful and those that couldn't had higher instances of behavioral issues and even incarceration. Other research indicates that economic and social levels greatly influence academic performance.Yet this type of research is ignored. Teacher accountability is the expedient answer.

Money has always been how the US places value on people and services. We pay millions of dollars to athletes and to movie stars but pay an educator who has a master's degree or higher (sometimes more than one) a six-figure income--ridiculous! As long as education is funded by property taxes or in other similar ways, public education will always be deficient. The type of education we need to give our children is not cheap and someone has to step up to the plate and be willing to put money into it. I see no one taking that lead.

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bba

I disagree about the problem with education boiling down to money. I think that money is one facet. Obviously if programs can't be funded then they can't exist. That being said, money is not a fix-all solution. Schools spend tons of money on ineffective curriculum materials. Right now as we speak, Baltimore schools are pumping money into reading programs and textbooks that are not preparing young readers to be proficient readers.

A solution to the problem? For one, the tests that students are forced to take to ensure "accountability" need to be normed appropriately. When creating these tests, the people in charge are not including samplings from urban populations, so even when urban schools are showing awesome improvements, they are still scoring very low on these standardized tests.

The result of this is that students learn to strongly dislike tests and label themselves as poor test takers. This can lead to students losing confidence in their abilities and believing they are below-average, unintelligent kids, when in fact that may be completely untrue.

We have to ask for the kids' input. I told an old-fashioned teacher this once and she looked at me like I was a lunatic. I had a student tell me the other day, "It's not that I don't read. It's that I don't like to read what you all make us read." Rather than forcing a curriculum on students, we need to figure out what they are interested in and incorporate that into the learning process. Let's face it, The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter are outdated. An 11th grade urban population may thrive on more motivating text that they can relate to. That's a start. There's so much more that we need to do to improve the schools...

Pouring more money into education seems to be the time honored way of solving whatever ails public education.The solution du jour is to give more money to teachers whose students improve performance on state mandated assessments. When will they ever truly understand (and honestly acknowledge) that academic success begins in the home and is a direct function of parental involvement with a child's learning at ANY stage of schooling ? Motivation must become intrinsic. Teachers can do only so much. I suggest the writings of Diane Ravitch to anyone seeking a glimpse of hope for our public school systems.

I totally agree with the concept of education beginning in the home. I also would suggest that free public education until 16 or 18 is a concept that needs to be rethought. How many college graduates do we really need to run this economy now? Some of these students would be better served with excellent technical training and marketable skills.

@vetern teacher -

If you think there are more blue collar technical openings than white collar you're not paying attention to what's happening in the Baltimore area or in the US in general.

From the Baltimore Business Journal "42 percent of all job openings in Maryland between 2006 and 2016...require more than a high school diploma, but less than a four-year college degree"

From the US Department of labor's fastest growing job list of the top 20 only 2 don't require a highschool diploma (at least).

@ Laura

Baltimore city schools may not be getting texts students can relate to, but that is more the fault of the person who chose such texts than it is the person who wrote them. The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible are not dated. The problem is that these works are lexically beyond most city students. They're lexically beyond most college graduates. But they're better than fashionable caricatures of people living in hard times. Further, you seem to be espousing the kind of temporal provincialism that makes these books lexically too difficult for PhDs in literature.

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