I found this ReformK12.com article to be very interesting. The author suggests that when students graduate from high school and can't read or do basic math, rather than trying blame parents, home life, underfunded schools or large class sizes, perhaps we need to look at who were the teachers who passed this student forward, grade after grade with teaching them to read.

The author points out in the real world people are accountable. If a bridge fails, there is an investigation to determine the cause. Was it:

• a bad design
• poor quality construction
• lack of maintenance
• exceeding capacities

The idea is to make certain that this problem doesn't happen again. This never happens in public education. We just pass kids on and if they can't read at graduation, it is somehow their fault or the fault of the parents. We can blame anyone and everyone except the educators who sent this child to the next grade without basic skills like reading or math.

The author suggests we need a longitudinal analysis of the student's performance each year and that we need to tie the teacher's name and subject taught as part of the student permanent record.

If a student is at grade level in fourth grade, but leaves fifth grade behind, we need to examine what happened in that classroom. Are the other students also behind? Something happened in that year that we need to address and correct for future students. I understand there are outside circumstances that could affect student performance, but that doesn't excuse the drop in student performance. It only means we need to provide additional support to those students, immediately upon identifying the gap without parents needing to ask or waiting until the child is 3 or more grade levels behind, years later.

All kids can learn. If they're not, what do we need to do differently to help them succeed. We need to end the blame game and start innovating!