Reaction to Sunday's column ran from, "I've changed my mind about this," to , "You're as crazy as Alonso." The reaction that is particularly noteworthy is that of middle class and even affluent suburbanites who were annoyed at the suggestion that, back in the day, they received reward from their parents for good grades -- or that they have rewarded their own children for academic achievement. Nothing of the kind, they say. Never happened. Dear old dad never bribed us to get good grades.

It may not have been the case for everyone -- some of us actually grew up near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and learned to expect nothing for good grades. (In my family, the restraint of an angry father and the absence of a beating usually was reward enough.) But it's hard to believe most people -- and, once upon a time in America, most people were middle class -- when they can't come up with a single example of reward for achievement.

The other striking thing about some of the e-mails I received on this column is the almost breathtaking cluelessness of some (fortunately, not all) suburban readers on the subject of Baltimore poverty. People who are making the strongest judgements about Alonso's proposal don't appear to have any understanding of the facts about the lives of the majority of Baltimore's public school children.

Eighty-five percent of them are on a free or reduced-price school lunch plan; that means their families can't afford to send them to school with lunch, or the govenment allows them that relatively modest measure of support because of their low income levels. While poverty nationally has dropped, and in Maryland, the nation's wealthiest state, poverty among children has fallen, poverty remains concentrated in Baltimore, where percent of families live below the government-set poverty line of $20,444.

"The problem isn't a lack of opportunity," one reader wrote last night, "the problem is a monstrous sense of entitlement among too many of our inner city residents. They don't lack for the necessities of life, and they don't lack an opportunity to get an education."

That's what I mean by cluelessness -- or the refusal to acknowledge a reality in our midst that contributes, for one thing, to low academic achievement among kids. To this reader, it's the welfare mindset at play, not circumstances.

The Census Bureau considers a person poor if he makes under $10,488 a year. (That's for men and women under 65; for those over 65, the threshold is $9,699.) For a family of four, poverty
is a household income of $20,444 or less.
   That's $393 a week.
   Imagine trying to get by on that.
   Imagine trying to get by on, say, $480 a week. That's what a family of four
living on $25,000 a year would have, and they would not be considered in the
official poverty count.
   Add this to the equation, also from the Census Bureau: The number of people
without health insurance coverage rose from 44.8 million (15.3 percent) in
2005 to 47 million (15.8 percent) in 2006.

"I don't pay my kids to get good grades," wrote another reader. "They are rewarded for going above and beyond satisfactory. My kids have been A students for their entire formal education years (5th grade and 7th grade). They have earned Ipods, Nintendo DS, trips to Hershey Park and other payola for their efforts. Isn't that life? Work hard and excel and you will be rewarded with the finer things life has to offer. Cruise along just getting by and expect those things the achiever has, all the while blaming society for your short comings."

I published this letter so you can see the garbled logic -- I don't pay my kids to get good grades, but I reward them when they do. What's the difference? However you scratch it, it's still an incentive package. And this same person, apparently able to afford these things for his kids, doesn't want the Baltimore school's chief to slip a few bucks to city kids who pass their state assessments.