I find your accusation on 5th grade textbooks to be wildly out of line and without any proof. Education needs improvement. I agree, and not by just throwing more money at it. I agree with you again. But your article lost steam when you start attacking hardworking underpaid educators. They take a job that no one else wants, in fact, if you were that concerned I'm sure you could make a great teacher! that's what I thought, you'll keep your comfy opinion article and point blame at others.
Quality educators need help, need more education/training, need more resources and materials, pay them like professionals and by doing so attract better individuals. Students and Families need more accountability in education. America will continue to fall behind in education until these trends are corrected. You my friend, are not helping anything...

Your comment about educators needing more education is right on target. As an elementary education major, I have always felt that I was GIVEN too many methods courses but not enough actual education. I do feel that we need to have a liberal arts education with background in our areas of intended instruction and one or two courses on "how to teach."

I heartily agree with the core of the article, but I have a minor quibble at the end. While Euclidean geometry is important (without it we don't get the Pythagorean Theorem and we don't get trig) I would put more emphasis on trig. A student who goes on to study calculus will need considerable skill with it, and it's important in a number of practical disciplines. The student who goes on to study engineering or physics of any kind will study vector mechanics, which bypass much of trig's difficulties but require understanding its essence. And field or wave phenomena of any kind require mastery of circular (trig) functions, even when much of the calculation is done by other means.

Re: Judy

Given that you are an elementary education major. You can speak for all of our educators out there....yeah. I cannot speak to what it was you learned in that major. However at the secondary level, high school teachers have the bulk of their classes in the area they want to teach. For instance, a math teacher will be taking upper level calculus, matrix algebra, and other challenging math courses. Then they sprinkle throughout that courses on how to teach. I believe that this SHOULD be the method for all levels, because if you don't know the subject, it doesn't matter if you know HOW TO TEACH. The subject matter is of the most importance. Encouraging kids who get good grades, giving more opportunities or resources to kids at the poverty level, and forcing parents to have a stake in their child's education is the solution to this problem. Once Americans are willing to stop watching 4 hours of television a night, and maybe spend 1 hour on education or even just discussing societal issues as a family...Then we will start to gain ground with the rest of the international education community.