Early Childhood, Baltimore, and "Changes at the Margin"

Go ahead, yell at me.  I promised to write more and actually managed to write even less.  I am clearly still working out the kinks of establishing a blogging schedule -- and failing miserably!  So I won't promise, again, to write more regularly.  But I will say with a smile, "I'm baaaa-aaack!!" 

Saw this article in the NY Times today.  It is actually from Tuesday. 

Here is the executive summary:

• The achievement gap, a well-documented enigma, exists.  It's proven itself largely un-fixable despite countless efforts.
• A new study says that believe it or not, it's worse than we thought, and part of where we need to fix will be unpopular for a lot of reasons:  the correlation is more than just poverty, but rather what happens at home in the early childhood years. 
• Baltimore has done a great job seeming to close the gap, and in fact had the dropout rate of black students lower than that of white students.
• The Baltimore schools head attributes this NOT to "changes at the margin," but rather to staying on top of the kids, where they are and what decisions they are making, IN REAL TIME. 

This is interesting.  (And not just because it's a story from the NY Times that doesn't blame teachers for all that is wrong in education today, and doesn't point to anyone else who does so!)  In fact, in two separate places, the article seems to point to the kinds of things I've often lumped together as "common sense," but which of course go far beyond that moniker.

First -- we can do everything in our power to change what happens at school, and before and after school, and we can adjust for single-parent and no-parent homes, but until and unless we can change what happens because of what is considered normal in raising the youngest children, we likely can't make as much of a difference as we'd like.  A person who doesn't know (how or even whether) to talk to an infant, or read to a toddler, or teach proper grammar to a child who is learning to speak, is likely not going to raise that child to survive our schools, to be literate or even functional.  I suppose you can say that one can teach what one doesn't know.  We all know that our actions speak louder than our words, and we raise our children (at least to some extent) how we were raised, following what was modeled for us.  When what has been modeled is universally agreed to be not just non-ideal, but actually a failure of society, we need to have the discussions about how to change what has been generationally embedded. 

Second -- the highly-touted "solutions" of closing failing schools, lengthening the school day/year, increasing the prevalence of charter schools, and increasing teacher quality, are actually not much of anything.  They are, according to the study, not really shown to make a difference; and according to the Baltimore schools chief Andres A. Alonso, they are the "changes at the margin" -- the things that don't make as much of a difference as they make a headline and a stink.

Here's the article.  If the link is expired, leave a comment and I can update to a pdf version.