An alarming trend in Maryland and in Baltimore County is the number of students who graduate from our public school system and enroll in our colleges unprepared for basic college level math. According to a July 12, 2009 Baltimore Sun article, 49% of our State’s High School graduates have to take a remedial math class before they can take a math class for credit.

This has significant costs to the students, their parents, the taxpayers, and the system as a whole. Making sure our children graduate from high school ready for college is our responsibility. I suggest two immediate steps that can be taken to help our children succeed, one at the state level and one at the county level. First, the Governor’s P-20 Leadership Council needs a full time chair to help coordinate its activities and implement its findings. Second, Baltimore County needs to move beyond the ill-conceived AIM Program, and give teachers more time and flexibility in the classroom.

In an effort to address the disconnect between high school and college curriculum and various other problems, Governor O’Malley formed the Governor’s P-20 Leadership Council of Maryland by Executive Order in 2007. The idea behind the Council and P-20 Commissions around the nation is to coordinate all levels of education (from pre-K through the 20^th grade). The P-20 Council is a good start, but more can be done. For example, there is no full time chair of the Council, whose job it is to implement the findings of the P-20 Council. Instead, the Governor, with his many other responsibilities chairs the Council which is composed of other professionals and public servants whose many duties do not allow specific focus on the P-20 Council. A full time Chair of the P-20 Council would strengthen it so that it may better serve its stated agenda.

Beyond failures in our curriculum there lies another problem, the growing testing and requirements with which our teachers are forced to contend. I applaud Superintendent Joe Hairston for temporarily shelving the AIM Program, a complex and nuanced grading system which has been piloted in some Baltimore County Schools, but I ask that he go further and disband the program entirely.

When I ask teachers why our students need remedial math courses after graduating from high school, their responses are frequently the same, testing and grading requirements that hamper their ability to do the job that they were trained to do. The AIM Program is another of these. One fifth grade teacher was able to demonstrate that under AIM, he would have to make a staggering 2,718 grades per quarter for a class of 25 students. It is programs like this that prevent teachers from being able to take the  necessary time to engage their students and to find and implement new ways to make learning interesting.

Make no mistake, Baltimore County’s and Maryland’s Public Schools are among the best in the nation. Education Week just ranked Maryland’s system #1 in the nation for the second year in a row. But complacency is not an option. As the statistic regarding the need for remedial math reveals, we have a lot of work to do. And while no simple solution exists, I propose that these two tweaks to our system will pay dividends for our educational system and the students it serves.