It's never been truer than it is today that hard skills will get you an interview but soft skills will get the job for you and enable you to keep it. As with so many other individual skill sets, the foundation for these soft skills is best laid in the earliest years of a child's life. More and more, businesses don't see a college degree as a guarantee that someone has the skills for success.
The average child in America will spend less than 10 percent of his or her life in school through the 12th grade. If we are serious about education reform, we need to understand what's happening to our students the other 90 percent of the time, and adapt to those realities.
There are frequent conversations in Memphis about what our city brand should be. Some people suggest that it should be about transportation, other say logistics, and some say our river heritage. Those are important assets of Memphis, but they are things. They don't really speak directly to our community values and who we are as a people.
Like most urban systems, Memphis City Schools have demonstrated the kind of achievement numbers that keep school reformers up at night. One in three students fail to graduate, and those who continue remain far behind by all achievement measures. Just 4 percent of seniors score well enough on entrance exams to qualify to take college-level courses without remedial work.
Only 4% of Memphis City Schools seniors are ready for college, based on scoring at least 19 on the ACT, the college entrance exam taken by district seniors. In other words, of 6,774 seniors, only 271 are college ready. It’s a disturbing statistic that speaks to why closing the achievement gap should be a priority for Memphis and Shelby County.
Right now the talk of education in the Mid-South is all about funding, and more specifically how there isn't enough to go around. It seems obvious that our children are our community's future and therefore our schools must be well funded, but most of us know running a government is far more complicated than cutting the pie and passing out slices.
