Low-hanging Fruit

This week, the Maryland state education department awarded the St. Mary's Early Childhood Advisory Council a Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge Grant.  These funds are designed to expand and improve educational services to children birth to 5 years old.  The grant funds will be used to provide buses to early learning fairs, train stakeholders on the impact of growing up in poverty, a social media campaign, social media training, an annual retreat, and...well you get the point.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education recently released a report highlighting more issues the state had implementing the third year of the Race to the Top grant.  Maryland is "significantly" delayed in developing an assessment of the controversial common core curriculum.  There are also significant delays procuring vendors to support the roll-out of common core.  The report further highlighted the states inability to come up with a way to measure how it evaluates teachers and principals.

The Race to the Top grant is designed to make meaningful educational reforms.  With all due respect, social media training won't cut it.  While Maryland does score well on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and there were some year three achievements, boots on the ground know that schools in low-income neighborhoods are struggling for the very reasons the state can't seem to figure out how to tackle.  Hopefully we'll see some more inroads into the challenging aspects of implementing these reforms in year four.