Opinion & Analysis

Many lawyers and their clients have discovered that if you have a legal complaint against New York’s public school system, you cannot fight City Hall.

Beliefs that are debatable or even patently false may be repeated so often that at some point they come to be accepted as fact. We seem to have crossed that threshold with the claim that U.S. schools are significantly worse than those in most other countries.

The fact is that early care professionals in all settings have stepped up their game. When kindergartners were assessed in the fall of 2012, 83 percent of children who attended Baltimore's publicly funded pre-K were deemed "fully ready," as The Sun noted, an improvement from 77 percent the year before.

Parents raised the alarm when they learned the state Department of Education had provided confidential student data to a nonprofit company called inBloom Inc.

By David S. Martin, Ph.D., 5-2-13

We read increasing numbers of messages these days about second thoughts that various entities are having in regard to the Common Core Curriculum Standards. On the one hand, this statement of concerns is definitely troubling because for the real first time, the Common Core (for all of its shortcomings) is a bona fide attempt to coordinate American public education—an historic attempt; the resistance is partly due to short-sighted parochialism on the part of some states, wanting to “maintain” their own curriculum.

Young adults who are failing in inner city schools consequently lack the skills necessary to compete in the workforce and create a drag on the Commonwealth’s economy. This is something the business community should not only pay attention to but also fear.

The gap that exists is not one of "achievement" or capability of children of color to learn, the gap has to do with access to equal opportunity and equity within the systems designed to enhance and shape the learning outcomes of all children. This gap also has to do with the structural and institutional racism that is deeply embedded within our public education system and is perpetuated from one generation to the next.

We do everything possible to encourage college attendance. In the 2011-12 academic year, for example, one program alone—the federal Pell Grant program, intended to help low- and moderate-income students finance college—cost taxpayers $34.5 billion, about half the entire U.S. Department of Education budget.

Democratic senators from rural areas are seeking a rewrite of the No Child Left Behind law to give their constituents a better chance of competing for federal funding, a touchy subject among politicians. A debate over education policy will likely split lawmakers along the same regional lines that divided them during the recent debate over gun control legislation.

Every major issue in school reform — whether it be school closings, charter schools, vouchers, teacher hiring and firing, school control, teacher evaluations, testing, curriculum or tracking — is hotly debated and brutally divisive.