Human behavior, pride, making students feel good about themselves when they are not doing well and such are not always helpful. Being truthful and understanding is better. Even after three years of bad performance, if the boss does not say anything, everyone in that badly performing organization believes that the poor school results may not be bad but average-to-good. It is a normal human characteristic to show your performance in a good light only. But it can happen with lies, or truth or both. Low performing organizations will stretch the truth to LOOK BETTER to their customers, UNLESS THE LAW REQUIRES THE SPECIFIC TRUTH IN SPECIFIC AREAS THAT DEFINE THE TRUTH ABOUT HOW GOOD THEY ARE COMPARED TO THE BEST % IN THE WORLD IN THE SAME PRODUCT OR SERVICE AREA. WE NEED SUCH LAWS AND PUBLIC REPORTS THAT ARE NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH IN EDUCATION. Imagine the attitudes after 20 years of poor performance. "ACT Readiness" indicates only:

• An average of 25% knowledge (like 25% good answers in a test) called "ACT readiness" of four specific subjects, and
• That means that the ACT Ready child has a 50% or 75% CHANCE ONLY TO PASS THE SAME FOUR SUBJECTS ONLY ON THE FIRST YEAR, FRESHMAN LEVEL IN COLLEGE. It does not mean anything more, but some school people will claim more.

About 80% of the children we graduate from high school are not even "ACT Ready." Not too long ago, we graduated students ONLY if they had a higher than 60% subject knowledge IN ALL HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS. That was called a D or better grade-performance in all subjects. Many employers and colleges did not accept graduates with such low performance like a D. The current level of performance for being "ACT Ready" is much worse than that. We wrote to governors about this huge problem in states like Tennessee 3-6 times, and no one replied. THAT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR BECAUSE OF THE BAD RESULTS. Too many people from the education organization tell the public "tall stories." No response from a governor three times is not good news. A person who is doing well responds proudly with facts. A strong leader who knows what is happening in his/her organization is honest, truthful, has a good plan to solve the problems, and welcomes suggestions because they may learn something significant and useful. After all, an election is a contest of self-promotion. And that depends on how much one spends on self-advertising. The ACT results are solid evidence of how much a child learned between grades one and twelve. So what? Your child's ability to make a living depends on it. And the future of the entire country depends on it. And they all believe that they are doing a good job. Welcome to our public schools. Honesty with the students and parents so that their expectations for employment are realistic would be most helpful. But they are telling parents that "God did not make all children for college work. But your little Johnny is smart, he can learn a trade, and do well!" is an unadulterated lie because all such jobs will go to robotics within five years, by 2024. I attended 29 classes in 15 different school districts in science and math. The new state superintendents always attend three classes, preannounced in the newspapers. The most common complaint we heard from high school students during the past 15 years was that the classes are boring. After finding a few interesting things about our education programs, I visited the best three countries in public education. They were averaging an ACT equivalent score between 29-34. Half of the final graduation grade is a test that they take on all four years of high school courses.

It is useful to look at the 20-year average annual ACT results of Knox County, TN, the state of Tennessee and the USA high school graduates above without any explanations first. You will notice that 20-years of ACT results are flat and not improving. Others' opinions can influence all organizations. I would suggest finding out about the published results first. Just look at the results above. Focus on finding out how well our high schools are doing, looking at their ACT results for 20 years. If they are doing a bad job, like a less than 22 average ACT score, they are graduating with only a 25% knowledge of the high school subjects. THE MEASURABLE RESULT (e.g. AVERAGE ACT SCORE HOPEFULLY above 26) OF ANY MANAGEMENT CHANGE, DEPENDS TOTALLY ON THE ACTUAL MEASURABLE PRIOR FIVE-YEARS' RESULTS OF THE NEW EMPLOYEE(S) PUT IN CHARGE. For the past twenty years the ACT results were poor. Who can really think that a headhunter will find a good superintendent candidate when we have poorly performing schools almost everywhere. 74-86% of public high school graduates are that low, and we graduate them with a diploma. If the schools are doing an excellent job, like a 29-34 average ACT score, the same as what the top nations are achieving who passed us, their opinion would be valuable. Your child's and the country's future is at stake. That makes primary and secondary public education a very important thing to ensure a normal future for the entire country.



The world of public education believes that school district superintendents must have an education degree, must have a teaching background, when our world of public education produces bad results, still insists on selecting elected local people for the school board exactly like we did during the 1800s, when we lived in a local agriculture based economy. We have had a very differrent economy for 150 years, influenced by more than a thoudsand sciences and engineering instead of the local farmers and we insist that the best management decisions come from locally ELECTED school boards. Only those would think that who have a couple of tacos missing on the combination plate. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon in 120 years people! We had major technological changes and a lot more is coming! We have more than 13,500 elected school boards that make most decisions, that represents a huge very expensive duplication of people in more than 13,500 school districts, the public school results are bad, and we do such a foolish thing destroying this We tend to blame teachers and principals for the best results. They all entered education passing the universities' qualification criteria and the states certification to qualify as teachers. How could they be responsible for insufficient education or being the wrong type of person for educating children? They cannot be held responsible. The governor and the state are responsible for their poor teacher training and teacher certification. We will describe later what qualities are vitally important to be a successful teacher. Teaching is an extremely important position. Our entire country's future depends on the education of our children. Click right here to read the many publications that describe how poorly our colleges and universities train them.



The high schools have the most important job in any country. After graduation, our children become a national workforce in every industry, in every company, and government jobs. It is the workforce that creates and makes the products and services in all industries. Some high school graduates go on to get university training and be at the high end of the workforce. The quality and price of the products and services depend on how well educated the workforce is AND HOW WELL THEY KNOW WHAT THEIR COMPETITORS ARE DOING. IT IS TRUE IN EVERYTHING THAT IF ONE DOES NOT KNOW ONE'S COMPETITION 100%, THE COMPETITION WILL BEAT YOU WITH ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY. THIS IS NOT A GAME. KNOWING A FEW THINGS ABOUT THEM SECOND HAND IS NOT ENOUGH. AMERICAN EDUCATION AND POLITICAL MANAGEMENT KNOW NOTHING, ZERO, ABOUT THE HIGH PERFORMING COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION. The best products will be the most popular in features and also in price. And that depends on the high school education of the workforce in the country that creates the products. Government jobs do not make or create money. THEY USE THE PUBLIC'S TAXES. Public education is one of them. Public education depends on the taxes that private companies and individuals pay. That's called national and state income. The national income is normally 12-14%. But we have been struggling with only 3-4% as national income. It is not enough, and it depends mostly on the education of our national workforce. And then the government has to borrow money called the national debt, on which we have to pay a very high national interest to the landers. If you read this, you will hopefully understand that the quality of high school education can raise or lower national income, which depends mostly on our high schools. Our high schools are not doing well enough, and that creates a huge problem. That can destroy a country from the inside.



The high schools' job is to create a "product," called the high school graduate, who is employable in a job that pays enough to maintain a family of four. Think of the employer as the "customer" for the "student" It is essential to understand that what the high schools teach must be what the employers need, and our schools must teach it very well. NOTHING LESS, preferably more. The reality is dismal in public schools. Read about "ACT Readiness" below. 80% ACT Readiness or an average ACT score of 27 is the minimum for "well enough trained high school graduates today for tomorrow's jobs. We have a huge technological impact coming in 2023. The employers' needs from high school graduates are increasing with changes in technology. The schools may argue with you about this, but obviously for your child to be employed, his/her employer must be happy with your child's education/knowledge. By 2023 we will have three major new science groups, A.I.-driven cognitive robotics, space science, and nanotechnology, a change much bigger than what computers created. Every time new technologies arise, they will influence the way employers work and change their jobs. There will be a big change in jobs, emphasizing Mathematics to Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics becoming the most important Science. Reading and good mental Math, English Composition, and Economics are also subjects that today's high school graduates need to master very well. Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will replace many jobs. That means that most of our schools are not doing a good job. The parents must supplement the children's education using a great supply of outstanding and inexpensive learning aids and tutorials on the Internet. We are providing a list of the best below. In the ACT performance chart, the Internet's teaching material is vital because teacher training became weak. The important thing is that the "customer" for the "products" that high schools graduate are the EMPLOYERS. OUR SCHOOLS MUST SATISFY THE NEEDS OF THESE EMPLOYERS, WHO HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING ABOUT OUR POOR HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION TO GOVERNORS FOR THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, WITHOUT ANY HELP BY THOSE GOVERNORS TO RAISE THE ACT SCORES. ANY MONEY SPENDING THAT DOES NOT RAISE THE ACT SCORES IS WORTHLESS IN IMPROVING OUR POOR RESULTS. EVERYTHING IS GETTING MORE COMPLEX AROUND US PRACTICALLY EVERY MONTH. THE WORKERS NEED MORE KNOWLEDGE BUT OUR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION, THE ACT SCORES SHOW, IS NOT GOING UP. THAT IS NOT GOOD NEWS.

That is our biggest problem. The signs are all around us. The old American courage is gone. Our founding fathers' great ideas are trampled. Money is king. Too many of us worldwide hate and even kill each other for rediculous reasons like different opinions, different appearences, different languages, or for different religious beliefs. Have we all become slaves to something evil? People with extreme wealth and the best education in small numbers can control anything. The key word is "best education". And we human beings can do all of this on a large scale. In Vietnam we lost about 57,000 young people. The reason given for it was not true. The reason given to the young soldiers we shipped there was a big lie. WHY? Poverty in the US is growing at a high rate instead of decreasing. US public schools became the most expensive per student, in the world. Most of our public schools' education became the worst in the industrialized world. The American public education system has been declining, dumbing down the high school graduates. The international PISA test shows us way behind. Articles in one of the major education publications claims that we are number 1 in the PISA math tests worldwide. A huge lie, and without any government agency taking any action whatsoever to apologize for delivering poorly educated children who will be jobless. They could be fixing it instead. But they don't. WHY? Politicians propose something because "the American people want it, deserve it or need it." Just wondering. Our public education is in a bad shape perhaps with only 5% exception. How come we do not hear any support from politicians for actions that increase the ACT scores? Is it the parents who want their children unemployed in the future?? Or is it the governors? Why is it that governors do not make changes in our public education that raise the ACT scores? Why do you allow education publications to publish not just small lies but major ones, like America is number one in the OECD PISA international tests in mathematics, when we were 25th at best in the past, closer to 40th most of the time? ACT Readiness benchmarks pass you at at a 23 score at best, which is only like 22-24% good answers on a test, in 4 high school subjects only, which is very low performance in extremely low performasnce. Why do you allow 75-84% of children who do not even meet ACT Readiness to graduate from high school? And for black students you graduate 94-97% who do not meet the low ACT Readiness!! Our education system should make sure that 90% or higher ACT Readiness graduates. They cannot even hang on to jobs for a month that way? We used to graduate only those students from high school who passed all four years of high school courses above 60% good answers in every single subject. Is it our political leaders up to governors who want our children unemployed? And you allow people with such low performance to be employed or to be decision makers on our education. We are doing what Edmund Burke warned us about in 1776. Such low performance has been dumbing down our children in public schools

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING!"
Edmund Burke, Irish/American statesman, 1776

Those good men, our political leaders and law makers of BOTH parties, did NOTHING that raised the ACT and SAT scores! OUR HARD_EARNED TAXES PAID THE HIGHEST RATES PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD, BUT DROPPED OUR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION TO THE BOTTOM OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES. It would be reasonable if governors could explain why they did this, and what their plan is to restore our MINIMUM high school ACT readiness to 80% of the graduating classes.Those scores show reliably every year what our children learnt by grade twelve.

• In business, there is a natural control to help keep the organization healthy. If you do a bad job, like the great majority of our public schools, your customers disappear within a few months, and you are history. No one will use you, and public education would be gone, and someone better would take the bad schools' place. Why do we treat poorly performing public schools preferentially? Their money is guaranteed by law, regardless of results. AND! The law says that your child must go to one of them, EVEN IF THEY ARE DOING A POOR JOB. IT APPEARS THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS DO NOT HAVE ANY CHECKS AND BALANCES BETWEEN THEMSELVES AND THEIR CUSTOMERS, THE EMPLOYERS. ALSO, THERE IS NO OVERSIGHT OF SPENDING, AND THEY WASTE A LOT OF MONEY. THAT IS WHY WE PAY THEM THE HIGHEST AMOUNTS PER STUDENT, BUT THEY ARE DELIVERING THE WORST STUDENT "PRODUCT". PUBLIC EDUCATION SHOULD NEVER EVALUATE THEMSELVES. IT IS THE EMPLOYERS WHO SHOULD JUDGE HOW WELL THE HIGH SCHOOLS ARE PERFORMING 25% AND 75% BASED ON A NATIONAL STANDARD THAT IS COMPETITIVE WITH THE TOP 3 COUNTRIES IN HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION. I lived in a communist country until age 16. If you got caught misbehaving, the teacher would give you a handful of stones. You had to kneel on them for one hour in front of the class. That hurt! So I became one of those few who never got caught. And then I read the US Constitution and all the freedoms we have. I was in heaven. About 40 years later, it seems, I started thinking about our public education, that appeared to become much worse. It wasn't much different in the US, other than the discipline was weak in the US, and they did not teach you as well as most other countries did. But if your parents were rich, you could go to a private or Catholic school, and if you misbehaved, they did not make you kneel on a handful of stones. Not even for a minute. And then I noticed something. With all the freedoms we have, why don't we allow all people to choose any school for our children's education? Allow them to carry the full cost of education allocated per student per year from our taxes to another school that the parent would prefer? That is approximately $11,000/year/student, NOT LESS, to the school that the parent or guardian wants to use to learn more. WHY WOULD YOU GUARANTEE MONEY TO SURVIVE, TO AN ORGANIZATION IF IT HAS BEEN PRODUCING BADLY EDUCATED STUDENT "PRODUCTS" FOR TWENTY YEARS? THAT COULD DESTROY ALL OF OUR FREEDOMS, OUR JOBS, WITH ONLY THE VERY WEALTHY SURVIVING? WHY DON'T YOU READ THE US CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS? AND LOOK AROUND WITH OPEN EYES.





• Unfortunately, the laws require attendance of PUBLIC EDUCATION by students, without the parent being able to use the actual amount of money spent on a child's education, which is $11,000 from taxes. The education laws also guarantee the schools at least the same amount of money for the new school year from the people's taxes, that the school district received the previous year, REGARDLESS OF PERFORMANCE. THESE ARE THE CONDITIONS THAT PRODUCE BAD SCHOOLS AND THE WORST OF MONOPOLIES TO EDUCATE THE PUBLIC. THERE IS NO RISK TO THEM IF THEY DO A BAD JOB. AND THAT IS HOW MORE AND MORE OF OUR SCHOOLS BECAME "FAILURE FACTORIES." But by being so bad in providing education, they are graduating the great majority of our children (75-80%) so poorly educated that they will be jobless, in poverty. CHANGE BOTH OF THESE AREAS!





• The education system uses poverty as the reason for bad school results. They are WRONG. THE MORE YOU KNOW, THE MORE YOU LEARNED, THE MORE VALUABLE YOU ARE TO EMPLOYERS AND THE MORE MONEY YOU CAN EARN. BUT IF YOU ARE NO VALUE TO EMPLOYERS, YOUR EDUCATION WAS VERY POOR. IT IS "HELLO, POVERTY!" They are creating poverty by providing inferior education. Teachers are not the cause. We will explain that further on. The result is that 80% of our children who graduate high school with a diploma, cannot read well. They cannot read and write the script but only block letters. They cannot do basic math, cannot fill out a job application, and have a bad attitude. Schools fib about how successful they will be as they are. When they start a job, they will lack the knowledge for the job. People talk, and other employees will see that you make the same money as they make, but you know nothing. That creates a bad environment for poor high school graduates. The worst part is that our governors and lawmakers did nothing about raising the low ACT scores that anyone can see below in the chart for at least twenty years! This is an awful situation, especially for the poor, less educated people. Wealthy people have the money to hire even lawyers to have a chance to be ruled innocent, even if they did something bad. But no one enforces any standard that educates our children well enough to be employable with minimal income to survive. What kind of job will they do when they are in charge of the country? Will they be part of a workforce that is competitive with the top ten nations? No one understands in public education why that is important. IF YOU WORK IN A SCHOOL, you will fight very hard against anyone who believes that your education is bad. We understand that. It is normal human behavior. IT IS NOT WHAT OUR FOUNDING FATHERS CREATED. BUT THE MOST DANGEROUS SITUATION IS HOW BAD PUBLIC EDUCATION BECAME. NOT BECAUSE THE GREAT MAJORITY OF OUR CHILDREN ARE NOT EDUCATED WELL ENOUGH TO BE EMPLOYABLE. BUT BECAUSE OUR ENTIRE NATION'S FUTURE DEPENDS ON THE EDUCATION OF TODAY'S CHILDREN.
  
  WE WENT FROM THE HORSE AND BUGGY TO THE MOON IN THE LAST 120 YEARS. WE WENT FROM A LOCALLY BASED AGRICULTURE ECONOMY TO A WORLDWIDE COMPETING MANUFACTURING ECONOMY WITH MORE THAN A THOUSAND NEW SCIENCES DRIVING IT. AND THAT WILL DOUBLE IN 3-4 YEARS! OUR EMPLOYERS' WORKFORCES HAVE TO KEEP LEARNING MORE TO DO A GOOD JOB. IN 2023 WE WILL SEE A BIGGER INCREASE IN THREE SCIENCE GROUPS, THAN WHAT COMPUTERS CREATED: AI-DRIVEN COGNITIVE ROBOTICS, SPACE SCIENCE AND NANOTECHNOLOGY WILL BRING HUGE CHANGES, ELIMINATING MANY JOBS, AND ALSO CREATING MANY NEW JOBS THAT WILL REQUIRE FAR MORE EDUCATION. WE WERE TWO YEARS BEHIND WITH HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION ACCORDING TO PROFESSORS IN 2018. BY 2024, A HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE WILL REQUIRE FOUR YEARS OF REMEDIAL EDUCATION TO START A FRESHMAN YEAR IN COLLEGE. THERE WILL BE NO JOBS WITHOUT MUCH MORE EDUCATION! SOMEHOW, THE LAST 100 YEARS ERODED THE IMPORTANCE OF PROTECTING THE CITIZENRY AND OUR COUNTRY IN VITALLY IMPORTANT AREAS - VERY, UNFORTUNATELY. IS IT NOT THE POLITICIANS AND THEIR LEADERSHIP WHO SUPPOSED TO SAFEGUARD OUR CONSTITUTION AND FUTURE?





• THE BIG CHANGE IS THIS. A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, A JOB WOULD NOT CHANGE FOR AT LEAST 50 YEARS, BECAUSE THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES CAME MUCH MORE SLOWLY TO CHANGE THE JOBS THAN TODAY. TODAY, THE JOBS WILL CHANGE IN JUST 4-5 YEARS. BUT VERY QUICKLY THE JOBS WILL CHANGE EVERY YEAR OR EVEN BY PROJECT AND WILL KEEP CHANGING FASTER, EVENTUALLY FOR SINGLE PROJECTS OR PRODUCTION RUNS WITHIN 20-30 YEARS. TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENTS CHANGE THE WAY EMPLOYERS AND THEIR EMPLOYEES WORK. PUBLIC EDUCATION DID NOT KEEP UP WITH IT, BUTHE STATES DROPPED OUR CHILDREN'S GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS. TODAY IN 2021, 75-80% OF PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES ARE NOT TRAINED WELL ENOUGH TO LEARN ANY JOB THAT WILL LAST MORE THAN A COUPLE OF YEARS.





• The future (2030) education curriculum comparable to high school today, will need to rise to Master's level UNIVERSITY work (2018) equivalent knowledge by age 18, in 2030. We need a much stronger foundation in basics in both elementary and high schools. E.g., mathematics beyond Calculus, 5-8 different groups of sciences, communications, and economics with psychological analysis included so that the future workers can be reeducated for much narrower, much more advanced knowledge that could be optimized for the natural talent of individual children. The future will bring many highly specialized jobs that will have a short duration with fast technology changes. That will require constant learning for life. This will include inorganic supplemental brain implants by 2030 to raise the human brain capacity and power much higher. Such "high school" education can be accomplished only with AI-driven cognitive robotics that will educate people with a fantastic "Education-in-the-Pocket" product, with knowledge updates literally in seconds. I see the possibility of yet unknown sciences and knowledge popping up as a need from one day to the next, with a short job duration because new developments will overtake the old job that fast. Falling behind in education today is becoming a very dangerous thing in the USA for the 2020-2030 period, although I believe it will greatly benefit humanity. We understand in a very limited way only by formally and informally what we get educated on in the broadest sense. But the knowledge that humanity is to learn as yet is infinitely huge. Yet we act and pass opinions as if we knew everything today, when we know virtually nothing yet.





• I have some very good news for tomorrow's students. Today's education is like a "one size fits all suit". Very few teachers are the type of personality and educated well enough in the subject they teach, who have the knowledge and personality to create very enjoyable classes to motivate all students. If students feel that the classes are boring, they lose interest in the subject. In the highest performing school systems internationally, for teaching above 4th grade, they test the top 10% of the Master's program psychologically in the needed subject for which a teacher is needed. That gives the school a high IQ candidate, who knows the subject better than the American teachers and psychologically a better match for teaching than the American teacher who was not screened and happens to come from the lowest one-third of university performance. Teaching will undergo a huge technological change. Buddhism is more like a guide for a peaceful life than a religion. They may have multiple gods for various earthly values, but they would qualify more as spiritual leaders for specific human needs. Many of their monk's two-thousand-year-old teachings apply to the successful correction of neurological and other problems, for which Western medicine does not have good solutions. They and other cultures also believe that all human beings have specific and very high talents that would make them in such a job very happy and successful. Steve Jobs of Apple Computer was a good example. One may also see such unusually high natural talent in sports, in talent shows for young children, in music and in art, but they could be such talents in any vocation. Such talent shows as a naturally high degree of interest in a specific activity that parents should support to have the child become as good as he/she wants in addition to normal school. Unfortunately, the current form of educating groups of children could only support a national curriculum and teacher training and certification standards. BUT Teaching will go automatic with AI and cognitive robotics by 2025-2027. It will be able to recognize such unique talents and psychological interests in the background of an AI component and find out how and what educational option could be more effective for any individual student to maximize his.her interest. And it will be able to do it anywhere without today's education methods, by 18 years of age with a complete university education. AND THE CHILD WILL LOVE IT. Until that new system delivers graduates, the current education system is so dangerously low. The education management system is so poor that the idea of the destruction of our country from within is a real possibility.





• PLEASE LOOK AT THE ACT PERFORMANCE CHART COVERING 20 YEARS. HOW WELL DID WE DO? WHAT GRADE WOULD YOU GIVE THIS PERFORMANCE? DID IT GO UP IN 20 YEARS? 20 years of bad ACT performance in our public schools will not provide the school employees, the state department of education or the governors with any credibility for promising a change to better performance. They all promised a fix, and changed nothing that would raise the ACT scores. Standards get established from the top of the organization on down. If the education results are bad, who is in charge of education? It is the state's governor. Therefore, the governors, the legislators are also without any credibility, because they wasted AT LEAST 20 years and created as a result great damage BY NOT INITIATING ANY ACTION TO RAISE THE ACT SCORES in our children's education, on whom the future of our country depends. We will be paying a very high price in lives for this huge mistake, not having remedied for 20 years or longer. The public was hurt badly, and they were not even told the truth. INSTEAD OF EVERYTHING DECIDED BY AN ELECTED BOARD IN EACH OF 50 STATES, EVEN IF THEY ARE VERY SMART AND EXPERIENCED PEOPLE, THEY CANNOT PROVIDE A GOOD, UNIFORM NATIONAL DECISION. THE FUTURE DEPENDS ON HOW WELL WE EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN TODAY. THE 20-YEAR ACT CHART CLEARLY SHOWS WHAT THE ORGANIZATION CREATED FOR EDUCATION AROUND 1850, IS STILL THE SAME IN ALL KEY MANAGEMENT AREAS. WE DID NOT CHANGE IN VERY IMPORTANT AREAS TO THIS DAY. IT IS CLEAR THAT AT LEAST DURING THE LAST 20 YEARS, LIKELY LONGER, WE DID VERY POORLY. WE HAVE HUNG ON TO TOO MANY OLD AND INEFFECTIVE WAYS OF MAKING DECISIONS, WITH DIFFERENT LEVELS OF TALENT. THAT WORKED WELL ENOUGH DURING THE 1800s. But the world became much more complicated during the 1900s, requiring much more experienced talent than what we could find in all states. Look at the ACT chart. For 20 years, we are in a bad performance area and not going up. With such results, no one can claim that we have done a good job. We must centralize education-related standards as other countries did about 70 years ago. That is why they passed us. You cannot expect other than poor results if you continue with locally elected board guidance. If one elects such guidance, do you think that the best people will jump up and run for such an election? If you elect such people to guide education to one of the best in the world in all 50 states? We delegated virtually all decisions to individual school districts' elected local boards. THERE ARE 13,500-14,000 OF THEM IN THE USA. That is insane. The education system is almost the same as what we had in 1850 for the village school for the surrounding farms. They worked well then. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon since then. That is a huge technological change. But our state education departments still insist that it is the locally elected board that knows the best what our children's school should achieve. The jobs are very different today. And we think that things like teacher training and certification standards, objectives and operating plans of individual schools are good enough for our children to be employed? They are far from good enough. Such standards need to be the same nationally since WWII, and the standards need to be competitive with the best countries in education.





• The biggest mistake the education community can make is to be defensive. Unfortunately, they keep doing it. Our children were poorly educated for decades by our public school system. Only total public honesty without any fibbing, and a total restructuring and a lot of school employee training of our system can save our children. The objective must be to raise average ACT performance from 21 to 27 minimum. Our competitor nations are already producing graduates in the ACT 29-34 equivalent range. We all must work together to solve this problem. We certainly cannot do that with the currently used authority WITH THE RESULTS OF THE PAST 20 YEARS, from the governors on down, to set objectives for teacher training, goals and objectives, curriculum, and operating standards. They must be controlled by an independent, highly-educated retired CEOs of major corporations who are to employ future HIGH SCHOOL graduates. As part of solving this problem, we cannot afford hateful behavior between black and white folks. WE MUST CHANGE THAT NOW. Everyone must forget and forgive. No conflict is one-sided. Both sides are contributing to the conflict. If you all do not listen, our country will break apart with no winners. The only thing that can save us is the willingness on the part of all sides, to get educated as much as possible so that we all become smarter to understand this self-destructive problem. Everyone has a good side and a bad side. See the good in others. We don't do enough of that. You see, none of us are peaches and cream. Education is the only thing that can save us. And we have a huge job to do to recover. Those who created the last two decades of poor performance cannot change the way they work, and how could we trust TO IMPROVE those who made bad decisions, created bad results for 20 years, to create all of a sudden good results. WE HAVE A NATIONAL EMERGENCY BECAUSE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION'S AND POLITICIAN'S POOR PAST PERFORMANCE. How can we trust such people to get us into the top ten countries in K-12 education in the world?





• The governor hires the state superintendent of education on whom the education results depend in the state. One wonders if they know how to do their job. The results have been bad for decades. Nothing changes. Do they think that such a person has to come from the education industry, which happens to be a total failure in public education? Yes. You will not find excellent management people in any organization that performs badly, like public education in the USA, except for a few states like Massachusetts and Connecticut. Good performers do not join bad organizations. If they do, they will leave it quickly. When public education hires new management employees at any level, they need a person who has been a successful management talent with large organizations and has turned around such large organizations already. There is no such person in education. We have been producing bad education results for decades, and in the last few years, our public education declined in results even faster than before. How could that happen? Those who do a bad job always describe their job as much better than reality. Too many people assume in education that if they are hired, they know their jobs very well. They don't want to learn, but their boss and bosses' boss doesn't know either what to do. They could visit an outstanding school to find out what they should do, but "if anyone finds out" doing that is a sign of weakness. As a result, enormous mistakes are made in this paralyzed management environment. Anyone who does not like what they do is prejudiced. Combined with "Lenin's law" of "If you lie to people a thousand times, they believe it as true," this is especially bad for the inner-cities' poor people, because the public school system is not honest with them in simple language, and they give them false hope.





• A POORLY PERFORMING ORGANIZATION DOES NOT WANT A HIGH PERFORMING INDIVIDUAL AMONG THEM, BECAUSE THEY DO NOT WANT TO CALL ATTENTION TO POOR RESULTS. THEY WANT PEOPLE WHO ARE LIKE THEY ARE. IF YOU WANT CHANGE FOR THE BETTER, YOU HAVE TO START THE CHANGE ON THE VERY TOP. AND THE TOP PERSON IS THE GOVERNOR FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION.





• When the people in poverty discover that their child cannot get a job, we will have major problems in our streets. We are very close to that now. This is what we should be very concerned about. AND THIS IS WHY WE MUST USE AN ACT SCORE FOR ANNUAL HIGH SCHOOL AND SCHOOL DISTRICT ACT PERFORMANCE AS THE OBJECTIVE BECAUSE THE ACT GIVES AN ACCURATE INDICATION OF WHAT OUR CHILDREN LEARNED FROM GRADE ONE TO TWELVE. A 90% GRADUATION RATE MEANS NOTHING UNLESS GRADUATION AND THE DIPLOMA REQUIRES 26 ACT AVERAGE OF EVERYONE WHO IS TO GRADUATE. ONE CANNOT IMPROVE WITHOUT KNOWING EXACTLY WITH A MEASURABLE KEY INDICATOR OF PERFORMANCE WHERE ONE STANDS AT THE START AND WHERE ONE WANTS TO BE MONTHLY AND ANNUALLY. IF YOU DON'T WANT THAT, THEN YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE.





• Please remember the following. We found many low-performing high schools and a few great ones also. See them here. The high schools that are on a level where they should be (80% ACT Readiness/subjects knowledge = average ACT 27), produce less than 5% of our graduates. 5% of graduates is much less than what our economy needs to be competitive. We need more like 80%. We met three high school graduates who could not figure out what the answer was to "50 minus 23". There should not be even a single such 4th-grade student, let alone a high school graduate. Many brain functions use the area of the brain that does basic math. We allowed students the use of calculators during classes and tests starting about 20 years ago. We no longer required memorizing multiplication tables, mental calculations, and even doing mathematics on paper during primary and secondary schooling. Unfortunately, the mathematics area of the brain did not develop fully as a result of such decisions. The brain automatically uses this area very fast for other brain functions such as critical thinking, decision-making or pattern recognition. The states did this by not consulting brain-specialized neurologists in education-related decisions about changing policies or practices. Not teaching art and music, especially classics, impacts brain hemisphere neuronal interconnection development, which also impacts the same brain functions.





• We have a major problem because our future as a nation depends on today's high school graduates. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon. Our public education has been regressing, and it did not keep up with all the new technological developments that employers required. To make it worse, we graduated from high school children who could not read and write script, could not fill out job applications, and could not learn simple things. We have two 8th grade final tests below as examples, that are more than 120 years old. Many high school graduates could not pass them today. Having attended many high school science and math classes, they were boring. NO PERSON, YOUNG OR OLDER, WILL LEARN ANYTHING IN A CLASS THAT IS BORING. Difficult to believe unless we sit-in at a few school board meetings and look at the past 20 years of ACT performance. Go to a school board meeting, please. Ask how they are doing and what needs to improve. Write down the answers. It will be "we are doing OK, but we need money." Then, write down how much time they spent on "how to improve our children's education." Ask at the meeting what actions they are planning, who is to do what by what date, to improve the ACT scores. Make notes on what they say. You will be asking very good questions after you read this website.





• According to college professors in 2018, our high school performance was too low. It requires high school graduates to complete two years of remedial courses before they can start the first freshman courses of a college program. By 2024, our high schools will be not 2, but 4 years behind what our employers need. THAT is going to damage our economy very badly.





• What makes school courses difficult for a child? This is extremely important. Bad experiences with something, repeated 3-4 times, conditions children or adults to expect additional similar experiences to be bad. The oriental philosophy of "What you think,...you become" becomes "What you believe,...you become" with conditioning. Boring classes create children who dislike ANY SUBJECT, and without any solution to solve the problem, they learn to dislike the schools. I heard many times from children that school is boring. It is the teachers' job to make the classes VERY interesting and entertaining for the children. It requires a unique personality to be an excellent teacher. Some tests can determine that. The Strong Interest Inventory correlated with the Myers-Briggs Intelligence Inventory can do that. A child who finds school a boring, bad experience cannot do well. Selecting the right kind of profile for teacher training acceptance will make or break any school's performance. We will discuss this in more detail below.





• We have another very serious problem. Only better education could solve it. I did not find this problem in other countries. Too many white and black people believe that others are inferior. Our public education level is responsible for that. In Tennessee and many other states, 94-97% of the graduating black students are NOT EVEN ACT READY! Moreover, we spend twice as much in their schools than in those with white students. The locally elected school boards believe in those states that money is the solution, and in most problem solving, including this one, money is not the solution. Better education requires better teachers trained on the Master's level in the subject they teach. Teachers who come from the top 30% of their university training. Teachers who are a good psychological match for the profession, working under management who are well trained in management, had excellent results. That is the most important solution to this problem in most of our states. A good education is the only remedy to fix both our education and our old black and white conflict problem. We found a charter school with 46 schools in New York City, that takes only poor minority children, the majority are poor black children. They are scoring higher than most private schools! A public education system that operates as poorly as ours can destroy the entire country.
  
  The poor education for black folks and other minorities will be the fuse that WILL BLOW US APART. We warned about this problem as very urgent in 2010. Education would be the only remedy to solve it, but very interestingly, both our politicians and education management would prefer to do nothing about these two huge problems. We need to fix our non-existent teacher selection program, our poor teacher training programs, the lack of management training in education, and why no governor has done anything to raise the ACT scores. PUBLIC SCHOOLS MUST DELIVER MUCH BETTER EDUCATION IF WE WANT OUR COUNTRY TO SURVIVE. Look at the ACT results. They are destroying the country.





• Please look at the graph below. One can verify the numbers on the Internet or by contacting ACT. For the time being, look how high the percentage of high school graduates are who are NOT READY TO BE EMPLOYED OR TO BE TRAINED FOR A JOB each year (those who are not "ACT Ready"). The great majority of today's graduates will be jobless very soon. We will cover this decision also in detail.

"ACT READINESS"
WHAT IS IT?

On the ACT chart, the black numbers are the ACT scores. The red percentages below the black ACT scores are the ACT Readiness percentages/year in a group of graduates. The third group, red percentages again, represents THE PERCENTAGE OF GRADUATES who are NOT EVEN ACT READY. Their numbers are shocking. Approximately 80% of the children we graduate ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY. WHY DO WE GRADUATE THEM FROM HIGH SCHOOL with a diploma? Not too long ago, a high school graduate had to pass ABOVE THE 60% KNOWLEDGE LEVEL ALL COURSES IN HIGH SCHOOL. THAT MEANS ALL HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS PASSED WITH TEST RESULTS ABOVE 60% GOOD ANSWERS.



ACT’s Benchmark at the end of high school for “ACT Readiness” is based on meeting only 4 of these individual subject scores: Math: Algebra (score:22), Science: Biology (score:23), Reading/Soc. Science: (score:22), English Composition (score:18). Only those who pass all four subject benchmark tests are "ACT Ready". The ACT Ready students have only a 50%-75% chance to pass only four first-year college-level courses in the same freshman-level subject-name ONLY, as the ACT benchmarks' subjects are. That is all that "ACT readiness" is. The ACT scores 22-23 represent only a 25% subject knowledge, and ACT 18 average score represents only a 12% subject knowledge. ACT readiness is a very low knowledge level, and it is not an indicator by ACT for any other course or program or college completion. It is only the passing of four benchmark courses at less than 25% subject knowledge that gives the ACT Ready student a 50-75% chance to pass four freshman courses in Biology, English Composition, Algebra, and Social Science. ACT Readiness is too low for employers beyond 2022, and it is the STEM ACT definition that has already been identifying the graduation knowledge level that will be necessary to be immune to robotics in the near future.



Of all children we graduate from high school, more than 80% are not even ACT ready in Tennessee and about ten other states. That means that 80% of the students we graduate are below 25% subject knowledge on all benchmark subjects. Our schools graduated only those students a few years ago who passed above 60% good answers on EVERY SINGLE HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECT. NOT 25% ON ONLY FOUR HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS. ABOUT 80% OF OUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES DON'T EVEN MEET THAT! JUST LOOK AT THE ACT CHART! Therefore MORE THAN 80% of today's graduates with a diploma would have been failures. WE GRADUATE ABOUT 3.6 MILLION STUDENTS ANNUALLY. WE NOW KNOW THAT WE STARTED THE VIETNAM WAR, WHERE 58,000 YOUNG AMERICANS DIED. IS WHAT WE DO WITH PUBLIC EDUCATION WORSE THAN THAT? WHAT IS 80% OF 3.6 MILLION CHILDREN? This was a very foolish creation by the department of state education in every state because more than 80 % of graduates do not have the knowledge to be employable. ACT readiness is at such a low level of product knowledge that by 2023-2024 they will be replaced by robots as well. What we will need coming out of high school today are graduates who are "STEM ACT ready" with an average 26 or higher ACT score. It is not only for engineering jobs. It should be our standard for all high schools now because it will be required for all jobs after 2024. Robots will take over the jobs that require less than STEM ACT Readiness who graduate from high school. Why do we graduate them and give them a high school diploma to imply that they are ready to become self-supporting when they are not?! Our high schools in Tennessee destroyed any chance for them! We respectfully requested that our governor explain why he is allowing our education system to perform this poorly. No one ever replied.



ACT's score range is 1-36 in everything. The most important part of ACT scoring is the understanding of ACT READINESS. It represents the percentage of subject knowledge that corresponds to the score. For example, an ACT score under 20 is a level of knowledge, that is not enough to make a living. 30-36 is outstanding and brilliant knowledge. THAT IS WHERE THE TEN BEST COUNTRIES' AVERAGE PERFORMANCE IS. ACT READINESS is nothing more than passing only four subjects (ENGLISH/READING/ BIOLOGY/MATHEMATICS) with an ACT score of 18-23. If one checks with ACT, one will find that passing the readiness level represents only 25% or less knowledge of each of the four subjects. That is a low knowledge level. Not too long ago we had to pass ALL high school subjects, not just four subjects, at the 60% knowledge level (60% good answers on any tests in all high school subjects) to graduate. About 20 of the highest performing nations also require a "matriculation" exam at the end of high school with 80% correct answers ON ALL HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS TO GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL. And that score counts as half of your graduation score. Today about 80% of those children we graduated FROM HIGH SCHOOLS ARE NOT EVEN "ACT READY." THAT IS NOTHING MORE THAN VERY POOR PERFORMANCE IN KNOX COUNTY and other counties, in TENNESSE and many other US states. We WILL move to the STEM ACT standard with a stronger curriculum, stronger in sciences (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Advanced Algebra, Trigonometry, solid Geometry and Calculus with a minimum 26 ACT average in each. Only that offers more time in employment, with jobs that will take much longer to be replaced by robots. Graduate degrees in mathematics, sciences and economics will be the most immune to robotic replacement. Don't have any concerns over this. When your classes are as boring, as they are, it is because teachers are not trained well enough in the subject they teach (not their fault). It takes a high IQ, a Master's degree in the subject they teach, and the type of personality that loves the subject they teach, and they are doing it with an infectious enthusiasm that the students love. THAT MAKES LEARNING A LOT MORE EASY, THAN THE WAY WE TEACH THE BORING CLASSES TODAY.



Teacher training at colleges and universities also declined, when other major areas of study at our universities did not decline. Very strange. If we wrote a few specific questions to governors, no one answered, even if we repeated the letters three times. The department of state education buys new tests every 3-5 years. The test supplying companies supplied the test always accurately per the state curriculum. First, the state would run its new test in every school district in the state. BUT WOULD NOT PUBLISH THE RESULTS. THE NEW TEST WOULD NOT BE USED FOR TWO YEARS. We found out that the first test trial's results were terrible. The state used 18-24 months to lower the pass/fail points in the test from 60% correct answers to as low as 30% correct answers only, dumbing down the state test, and showing as a result higher scores. Later the state did this selectively for one or more specific subjects. This would produce better scores to the public instead of improving test results by improving teaching with continuing education programs to bring both teachers, principals, and superintendents up to date to produce better grades instead of modifying the state test. The direction given to schools was one to dumb down the public. Why would anyone do that? Because such an act will make it easier to sell any story to the public. Like "The best direction for our school children comes only from the elected local school board." Absolute nonsense was instrumental in dumbing down the public, and no one questioned the stupidity of such a decision in today's highly competitive world for more than 100 years. I am sorry, but a Mobongo chief in the Brazilian jungle makes better decisions than we did about public education. As a result, the knowledge of the great majority of our high school graduates just kept declining. But that is no problem for the state education departments! They just grease the pass/fail points in the state tests so that they go down faster than an Olympic downhill gold medalist, so that the grades look good, as the knowledge of graduates goes to hell. We think that an investigation pf fraudulent practices combined with a forensic audit could show some interesting results.



We have been competing with many nations' products worldwide. Our education management and governors do not seem to appreciate how we compare to the top ten nations in the world in education. Some governors may not fully understand that high school graduates feed all of our industries' workforce directly or through our universities. The poorly educated high school output degrades American products' product and service quality so that our sales in competition with the better-educated nations will sell less than the competition. At a lower margin that reduces our national income, that is part of our already huge national debt of $30 trillion by the end of 2020. The total interest due by the end of 2020 will be slightly over 9.5 Trillion dollars! Interestingly our spending per student is the highest in the world per student. The law guarantees at least the same amount of money to public school districts, as they spent the prior year - REGARDLESS OF THE RESULTS! So we are the highest spender in education, and we have the worst education results among all the industrialized countries. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? THAT MEANS THAT A GOOD PART OF THE EDUCATION MONEY THAT WE SPEND IS NOT BEING SPENT ON IMPROVING OUR DETERIORATED PUBLIC EDUCATION! IT IS SO BAD THAT ABOUT 80% OF THOSE CHILDREN WE GRADUATE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO QUALIFY FOR LEGAL JOBS. THEY WILL BE EXTREMELY UNDEREDUCATED, THEY WILL BE HUNGRY, AND THEY WILL BE HORNY, MAKING BABIES, BUT NOT TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEM. OUR SCHOOLS ARE BLAMING THE RAPID RISE OF OUR POVERTY IN THE USA. HOWEVER, GUESS WHAT THE TRUTH IS! IT IS OUR MISMANAGED PUBLIC EDUCATION THAT IS CREATING THE FASTEST GROWTH IN POVERTY IN THE WORLD. Guess how much interest we have to pay on the $30 Trillion National debt? Almost $10 Trillion dollars! It is a huge problem. The much bigger problem is the fact that we graduate much more poorly educated high school graduates for the national workforce than MANY OTHER NATIONS do.



We went from the horse and buggy to the moon in 120 years. We had an agricultural economy during the 1800s. Education was based mostly on the one-room school with one teacher then, and local school board, with the idea that the local school board was the best advisor for what we should teach our farmers' children to have successful farms in the town. Before we landed on the moon, a huge change has taken place. We changed from the agricultural economy to a very complex manufacturing and service economy. As a result, we ended up competing worldwide with thousands of different products and services, increasing competition with different nations, with thousands of different sciences and engineering solutions. However, we stayed with the local school board idea "because it is the local citizens who are the best in guiding what the local children should learn." BIG MISTAKE. Today, more than 13,500 different school districts whose elected local board is the advisor to the local schools on standards, financial decisions. They knew nothing about the competition of education systems and employers' needs, domestically or internationally. How can a group of people be so blind that they do not realize that the state standards for teacher selection, training, and certification, the ACT standard achievement, student ACT graduation standards must also be the same IN EVERY STATE? It is the same with ACT readiness at 80% instead of the poor 16-25%, which makes our children unemployable with the ACT 21 objective that we could not reach for the past 15 years. Why? Because of the poor job that our schools are doing, who are still living in the 1800s. Life is not always peaches and cream. But politicians from the governor on down, do not have the know-how or courage to solve the education problems.



The current public education performance can only bring an economic failure in the USA. Many problems produce bad results that one cannot be flexible, especially with a partner that has produced bad results for decades. We claim but do not deliver excellence. No one can produce excellence without measuring performance. That is the same as driving blind on the interstate. The result is a failure. Both Republican and Democrat organizations failed with public education. Thus, we would suggest establishing an independent group of former corporate executives, since the schools' products, the students, depend on having a job. An organization independent of politics and education management, that knows what our children need, must be the decision-maker about objectives to be used for improving education, graduation standards that must deliver at least 80% readiness of high school graduates at an average ACT score of 27. The education system is responsible for progress to deliver these standards. Unfortunately, the past 20 years clearly show that public education management is unable to deliver the results that today's employers need. There are only about 5% of our schools who can.



The elected school board made sense when we had an agricultural economy during the 1800s. The local community's school board was the best body then to oversee how well the local school must operate to produce children with the right education for the local community only. But we went from the horse and buggy to the moon since then, and there are thousands of different companies in hundreds of industries, a huge increase in sophistication. Every school district must produce well enough educated graduates for the entire country. I am sorry, but we need more experienced and educated people to direct education than what we have with locally elected boards. Curriculum and graduation standards must also be set along with teacher training such that our schools are competitive in every state with the three best nations in education. We are extremely weak in this area. Duplication of talent for every school district is impossible to find at the right quality and is unnecessary. Our competitive quality of high school education must be the same nationwide.



ACT College and Career Readiness (ACT CCR and STEM ACT CCR) need to be understood very clearly. Even college graduates misunderstand it. But most school board members and even superintendents are not familiar with its details, its meaning and its consequences.



We would like to remind the readers that not too long ago, a passing grade in any high school subject had to contain 60% correct answers to earn a passing grade, and a passing grade WAS NOT considered to be a good grade unless it had 80% or more correct answers. But this is not the most important point. What is even more important, that back then one could graduate from high school ONLY with a diploma if one passed all four years of all high school subjects at 60% correct answers or higher. Today, 80% or more of the high school graduates are not even ACT READY, which means that they are below 25% subject knowledge. We found that no other country graduated high school children so poorly prepared as we did. Not even countries like Uganda or the Congo in Africa. We did this because the subject knowledge of at least, repeat AT LEAST 90% of high school graduates would have been FAILING BECAUSE THEIR SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN 60% MINIMUM ON ALL FOUR YEARS OF HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS AND THAT MEANS A HIGHER THAN 90% FAILURE RATE. AND THEN THE SCHOOL SYSTEMS IN EVERY STATE PUSHED FOR A 90% GRADUATION RATE, WHICH MEANS NOTHING BECAUSE THE SUBJECT TESTING WAS CHANGED TO LOWER THE PASSING POINTS TO 20-25% TO PASS MANY CHILDREN WHO WOULD HAVE FAILED UNDER ANY SYSTEM THAT COULD BE INTERNATIONALLY COMPETITIVE. WHO DID THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENTS OF ALL STATES HELPED?? NOT THE PARENTS. AND NOT THE CHILDREN. IN FACT THEY HOODWINKED THE CHILDREN AND PARENTS PROMISING THAT "GOD DID NOT CREATE ALL CHILDREN FOR COLLEGE, BUT YOUR CHILD WILL BE FINE WITH LEARNING A TRADE WELL, AND HE WILL DO FINE!"



That is absolutely not true. Not the teachers' fault, but they are not matched to the profession, the American teacher training is not good enough on the subject training, much more knowledge is badly needed, and this makes the classes very boring. Our teachers typically come from the bottom third of their university classes. Many cannot do their original major, and transfer to teaching because it is easier. Trade jobs are disappearing to robots. Robots can deliver the finished product faster, lower cost, and higher quality than a human can. The exception is unique products that are specially tailored to one person. This is a small and shrinking market, require the best in the trade to work it, no training available because it would require decades of experience. IT IS AMAZING THAT THE PUBLIC PAYS THE HIGHEST RATES PER CHILD IN EDUCATION, AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE LESS EDUCATED POOR PUBLIC, BY LYING TO THEM ABOUT SOMETHING THAT THE PEOPLE IN EDUCATION JUST MAKE UP. TODAY IN 2020 THEY EDUCATE CHILDREN WITH ONLY 20-30% SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE IN ONLY FOUR SUBJECTS, WHEN 10-12 YEARS AGO A GRADUATING HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT EXCEEDED 60% SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE IN ABOUT 20 SUBJECT - 4 SEMESTER COURSES. A MORE DETAILED EXPLANATION IS PROVIDED BELOW.



Looking at the ACT scores and ACT readiness percentages above and the low ACT benchmark scores in the table above indicate that the student is only 25% prepared in the top four Benchmark subjects to be passing with one exception: English. For that subject, the benchmark score is 18, representing only 10% readiness only, meaning 10% good answers in a test. But the US education system chose this benchmark for English.



"ACT READINESS" is a meager target for public education, and it will not get any student into a position of remaining employable longer than a few years unless the student graduates with an average ACT score at 27 minimum today in 2020. The reason for this is that the countries with which we compete to achieve a satisfactory national income, have a better-trained workforce, than we have due to our long-declining high school education. Those countries graduate children from high school with average performance that is in the ACT 29-34 range, depending on the country. The reason for this is the fact that the success of all industries in any country depend on the training level of workforces in those industries, and that is dependent on the education level of high school graduates.



What has been very disturbing during the last ten years is the discovery that our own department of education in each state is not doing anything about the deterioration of our public education. I wrote to the governor seven times in eight years about what we observed. Not one response to my questions from anyone. Then I wrote to the next governor four times, and again not one response from anyone. The things that should be done very well, were not done well. And the bad things that should not be done, were done - very well. It appeared and appeared to this day that most is done purposefully to ensure poor results.



In the last few years, 74% of public schools graduates nationally, and 85% of those graduated in the state of Tennessee and other states are not even ACT Ready. This is accomplished with a method called "cut scores," done by the state education departments, who describe this method as a beneficial alignment of student performance in order to raise the ACT scores. Then they present a fairly complex looking mathematical manipulation and changing of the pass/fail percentages in one or more subjects to achieve the desired outcome in graduates.



The pass/fail percentage went from 60% to 25% or less below, but we kept graduating 80-85%. Did the students’ knowledge go up or down during this period? IT DROPPED LIKE A STONE.



The departments of education require elected boards to set objectives. But they don't know what kind of objectives work or not, and they also don't know that a written operating plan is a necessity without which no improvement is possible. And that makes the great majority of our high school graduates unemployable even for minimum wage jobs.



WE ARE ONE OF THE FIVE HIGHEST SPENDERS IN THE WORLD PER STUDENT. EVEN IN TENNESSEE WHERE WE DO NOT SHOW WITHIN THE SCHOOL DISTRICT'S EXPENSES, THE EDUCATION-RELATED MORTGAGE EXPENSES THAT ARE HIGH, LEGAL EXPENSES AND GOD ONLY KNOWS WHAT ELSE. COUNTRIES LIKE FINLAND ARE DELIVERING THEIR FABULOUS EDUCATION RESULTS AT A LEVEL THAT IS ABOVE AVERAGE ACT-30-EQUIVALENT, AND THEY DO IT 18% LOWER COST THAN OURS PER STUDENT WHEN THEIR COST OF LIVING IS HIGHER THAN OURS. THEIR TEACHING METHODOLOGY IS SO GOOD THAT IT ELIMINATES THE NECESSITY FOR TESTING UNTIL THE MIDDLE OF HIGH SCHOOL. BUT THEIR TESTING IS TOUGHER ONCE THEY START DOING IT, BECAUSE THEY NOT ONLY GRADE TESTS ON THE BASIS OF CORRECT ANSWERS LIKE WE DO, BUT THEY ALSO SCORE THE METHOD THAT THE STUDENT USES TO DECIDE WHAT THE RIGHT ANSWER IS. AND FINALLY, AT THE END OF HIGH SCHOOL EVERY STUDENT MUST TAKE A MATRICULATION EXAM IN FINLAND AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES AS WELL, THAT IS A TEST THAT COVERS ALL HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS.

• We do not have a "subject-knowledge maintenance" program covering every school year, and our students retain only 25-30% of the previous year's subject knowledge, let alone all high school years' subjects.



• We are approximately 100 years behind the high performing nations in teaching methodologies, management, student-teacher relationships. We do not match teacher candidates to the teaching profession before selection for admission to teacher training. Teacher education declined to a poor level, yet we pushed out the older teachers who were better trained, and the new young teachers' turnover rate became very high.



• Curriculum, knowledge level in mathematics, sciences, reading and language studies, teacher training, management training are poor. They all have a management structure that makes it impossible to improve, and lacking proper objectives and operating plans for improvement.



• School boards have no idea how to background check, interview and hire the right talent for any job, and for this reason they hire superintendents, who were unsuccessful and never bothered to learn how to manage a school district's specific average ACT score's growth. The ACT and SAT are national tests, that consistently and accurately measure graduating students' knowledge. ON THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION LEVEL, THE STATE TEST PASS/FAIL POINTS ARE REDUCED SELECTIVELY BY SUBJECT IN ORDER TO SHOW HIGHER GRADES FOR THE DECLINING EDUCATION THEY PROVIDE. The failing points can be reduced as much as from 60% good answers on a test to below 30% good answers GRADUATING MANY CHILDREN WHO WOULD OTHERWISE FAIL. There are no central country-wide standards in the USA for objectives, graduation, performance measurements such that it actually damages public schools' graduates.



• Lastly, there are weak areas in education laws and some criminal laws that would need to be strengthened as a serious investigation would indicate, and applied strictly in view of the huge damage that our public education system caused and likely to cause for the future with the job they do today. We would recommend an urgent forensic audit in a state like Tennessee on the education spending to gather more evidence. Follow that with an impartial investigation by a highly reputable NATIONAL firm on the above-mentioned problems, plus any new areas indicated by the forensic audit, with special focus on any area that connected to politics or public education management. The cost of such investigation would appear to be high for individual citizens, but it would be lower than the wasted dollars in one year by the education organization, and it would make a huge difference in results.

Unfortunately, it is too low, especially considering that we have been doing very poorly in some states like Tennessee in both reading and English composition for more than 20 years. It does not seem to matter to decision-makers like governors, that 75% of the students we graduate from high school are not even ACT Ready. To be specific, we graduate from high school with a diploma three times the number of ACT Ready students WHO ARE NOT ACT READY.



About 35-40 years ago the failing score meant that one had 70% or less correct answers on a test. To graduate from high school, one had to pass all courses in four years at 70% good answers. Ten years later, the failing point was lowered to 60% or less per subject. Today we measure the end of high school readiness level of graduates with five benchmark tests in the above table. Every test that ACT does is measured by a 1-36 scoring range that is not linear. For example, a 15 ACT score is about the same as only 0-2% good answers on our typical tests. ACT readiness benchmarks correspond to only 10-25% good answers on tests, and 76-84% of the children we graduate from high school with a diploma are not even ACT ready. That means that 4 out of 5 children who graduated from high school in a state like Tennessee, with a diploma, had only 5% good answers or less on his tests, graduated from high school. Under these conditions almost all the children who graduate from high school are so poorly educated that the outcome will be joblessness for almost all of them and disastrous for our country, children and grandchildren.



Passing "ACT readiness" benchmark tests represent only a 25% minimum subject knowledge in three subjects and 10% minimum subject knowledge in a fourth subject (English). But "many will score much higher than that" the schools will tell you.



The challenge is that 74% nationally and 84% in Tennessee of those who graduate high school with a diploma, are not even ACT Ready. Nationwide...the children learn some subjects in any school year, and forget too much of it each year. One has to learn how to learn first, and THEN learn in different and fun ways in all subjects and keep playing with it to become fun. In the high performing countries they know very well what qualifications have to be for a successful teacher. Any teacher, including assistants, has to be high IQ, who completed a 6-year Master's program in the subject he/she would teach. The teacher has to be in the top ten percent of his university classes, loves his own subject, can give many examples of fun work with his subject today and in the future. Such a teacher has enormous fun making his/her classes the most interesting and better each year because they love performing for the children and learn more about his/her subject every year. Impossible, you think? I actually saw this in many countries that are high performing in education. Such teachers and children would not want to miss a single class. We have many among teachers who bring up opposing any proven successful practice from any country with untrue excuses and knowing nothing about the country, or the methodology. But our competitor nations are doing exactly that and know exactly how poorly we are doing. We do not care, and our results show exactly that. We have to remove schools from politics totally. And great performers do not mind if their performance is measured against objectives. They WANT to find ways to learn how to become better.



Before 2010, a student could graduate from high school only if all high school courses were passed above 60% good answers! Today, ACT Readiness, that represents about 25% subject knowledge or good answers on a test, in only four subjects. But about 80% of high school graduates are not even ACT Ready! Big difference in the knowledge of American high school graduates then and now. A bigger problem is the even bigger difference between the top 30 internationals and the USA today.



What we need today is 95% of our children graduating from high school with a 27 ACT score average that represents 80% ACT Readiness among the graduates. Impossible? That is how people feel who have been performing badly for decades. But even the 27 ACT average is below what the high performing nations are doing. They are doing an average ACT equivalent between 29 and 34. We could do better, but not with the same standards in teacher selection and training, not with the same laws, not with the same untrained management, not with the same elected school board guidance. The high performing countries score tests based on the answers being correct, but you also have to explain how you arrived at the answer. In addition, they cover more information than we in every subject, in some of the top twenty countries they have to be fluent in two languages and a few with four languages. To graduate from high school, all students must take a matriculation exam covering all subjects required in four years of high school which counts as 50% of your final grade.



Most of our public schools performed poorly for several decades. GOD FOR COLLEGE creates NOT ALL STUDENTS right level of readiness for our children, then provide the exact prorated expense per student to another school of the parents' or guardian's choice, be it another public school or charter or private school. Public schools are monopolies. In other words, they do not have significant competition, and for that reason, they do not have to improve. The law and legislators protect public education to continue to do a poor job that will make most, if not all, of our children unable to qualify for a job. Such inferior education at one of the world's highest prices for each of our children will weaken and damage our nation's workforce slowly in all industries. It has already been going on for more than 50 years. When we damage the workforce, they cannot provide competitive products or services globally as they did before, and income drops. That in turn reduces the nation's tax income as well, destroying the nation's government programs. And that can turn our nation into a third world country. Everyone needs to understand that our nation's future existence depends on the education of our children today, who are educated better against the best, well enough to raise the quality of our workforces, our profitability and tax income. Without a dramatic increase in public education, this cannot happen.



To better see how far we fell behind in public education, please look at two 8th grade final exams more than 100 years ago: one is from 1895, and the other is from 1912. We are showing how much tougher the 8th grade education and tests were more than 120 years ago. It appears that we did not improve public education enough compared to the technological advancement of employers.



We will show you that we went from the horse and buggy to the moon in 100 years, but 80% of our public high school graduates today cannot read well, cannot communicate well, can read and write block letters only. They cannot do basic math, cannot even fill out a job application. Are we better educated today than 120 years ago? No single governor, and not a single teachers' union leader, stood up and said that "WE CANNOT CONTINUE GRADUATING CHILDREN SO POORLY PREPARED. THE PEOPLE'S MONEY IS PAYING YOU THE HIGHEST AMOUNT OF DOLLARS IN THE WORLD FOR EACH CHILD WHILE YOU LIE TO THE PARENTS WITH YOUR SLOGANS THAT CLAIM THAT YOUR SCHOOLS DELIVER "EXCELLENCE TO ALL CHILDREN!" Just look at what we have been delivering in ACT scores to date without any real monthly objectives, without a competitive teacher training and continuing education program. The schools will not improve significantly enough without any measurable objectives and operating plans in every single school. Without management training and performance-based quality control of superintendents and principals, AND with elected boards whose decision making majority does not have the training and experience to improve school results, do not even try. They all cost a lot of money. It is not the one-legged 100-meter dash runner's fault that he could not win a single medal. It is the fault of management who picked him for the race.



VERY IMPORTANT: THERE IS AN OPTIMAL PERIOD IN A PERSON’S AGE FOR LEARNING. AFTER 18-20 YEARS OF AGE IT WILL TAKE LONGER AND HARDER TO LEARN THE SAME THING AFTER 20. THE BIGGEST MISTAKE WE MAKE IS NOT MAKING USE OF THE 3-6-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN'S FAST LEARNING. A CLOSE SECOND IS TEACHING "READING" OR "BASIC MATHEMATICS" VERY POORLY. ALSO NOT TEACHING CURSIVE WRITING (pattern analysis), ART, AND CLASSICAL MUSIC (decision making). ALLOWING CALCULATOR USE INSTEAD LEARNING MULTIPLICATION AND DIVISION TABLES, OR DOING MATH CALCULATIONS LONG HAND DAMAGED FUNCTIONS LIKE PATTERN RECOGNITION, CRITICAL THINKING, MENTAL MATHEMATICS, AND DECISION MAKING. WE LEAVE DEVELOPMENTAL GAPS IN THE BRAIN, THE EXTENT OF WHICH WE DON'T KNOW YET EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, BUT IT IS SIGNIFICANT. Talk to a neurologist if in doubt. People at the highest levels in education made some very foolish decisions over the years or were convinced or forced to do such damaging things TO MAKE SCHOOL EASIER FOR CHILDREN. THEY ARE STILL MAKING SUCH POOR DECISIONS, THOSE WHO PRODUCED THE TERRIBLE RESULTS OF THE OPINION: THE ONLY ONES WITH THE EXPERTISE TO FIX THE RESULTS. AND WE HEARD THAT STORY FOR DECADES WITH POOR RESULTS. If we need to make important decisions about a problem like should we teach art and music in school, we must learn and understand several other related subjects. For example, why learn music? Read about the many important benefits for school results and life when learning music early as part of the curriculum. Why include art in the curriculum's early years? Read about why art is needed in the curriculum. Much better student training is needed in Reading, English, math, and other areas, but the results indicate teacher subject training needs to become much better. As a general fact, US teacher training at our colleges and universities is a problem that reduces the effective delivery of any subject, and it poorly prepares our children. This is not the teachers' fault. It is the result of poor teacher training at our colleges and universities and the teachers' low-expectation certification. We found it interesting that while the teacher training became much weaker, other university departments remained high quality. That certainly raises an interesting question, but we found many such questions that target and weaken public education. And why learn such fundamental subjects in preschool to 5th grade? Because the human brain's ability to learn is the quickest between birth and 6 YEARS OF AGE, SLIGHTLY DECLINING BUT STILL GOOD, MAKING LEARNING A LITTLE MORE DIFFICULT AS THE YEARS INCREASE. But there is also some indication of benefit to the child's brain if classical composers (such as Beethoven's) are played for them. It appears to improve learning compared to those who were not exposed to such music. The young brain develops its areas in order of specific developmental priorities. For example, "vision" first, then "hearing" second, overlapping and so on. As learning starts slowing, by age 15-18, learning starts becoming more difficult. We will cover more about this further on. We just wanted to show that critical thinking involves the knowledge of the other fields, sometimes many, and it is more important to know other related subjects well instead of teaching critical thinking. Critical thinking is a very important skill in order to make good decisions, but it cannot exist without understanding THE other subjects as well that are related to the problem that one needs to solve. But there are subjects that can relate to most if not all problem solving, like reading and math, the subjects we learn in high school, that we are not teaching well. Our education system is talking about teaching critical thinking in high school. We disagree. One has to teach a lot more with much better results first. AND THEN, CRITICAL THINKING EMERGES AUTOMATICALLY UNDER NORMAL DECISION MAKING. The use of calculators in school or at home, not teaching music and art appreciation, creates insufficient neuronal interconnections in the brain's areas that handle critical thinking and decision making. In addition, one has to be well enough trained in mathematics the subject where the problem is that requires a decision, and related subjects in order fo have good enough critical thinking and decision making. Our public education has not been good enough for decades to create a large enough group of decision-makers.



It is very important to understand that neither the parent nor the teachers can force a child to learn. Learning will happen only if the child is excited about it and wants to learn a subject. That depends on the teachers' personality, level of subject knowledge, love of the subject the teachers teach, a desire and decision to learn always how to produce better results, and the classroom environment's friendliness. Artificial intelligence will enable robots to become outstanding teachers by matching the teaching methodology to the child in an optimum way. All such robots could "learn" anything new in a few seconds with a simple downloaded update. Our schools' poor performance accelerates such developments, which will be available by 2023-2024, enormously accelerating home learning, coupled with very secure testing. The lab portion of science courses can be simulated perfectly as part of the course.



The standard for high school graduation rate must be to teach all students, who are not learning-disabled to a level where they cannot learn enough, to be able to earn a good living. The graduation rate we need today to be competitive is 95%, with an average ACT score of 27. It seems too high, isn't it? That is where we were as a nation about 50 years ago, relative to our international competitors. When you are low in school performance or anything, the normal competitive level appears to be too high. It isn't too high. ACT 27 performance is below the top ten countries in education, some of whom have an average at the equivalent of ACT 30-31. We should be graduating 95% of those children who entered our high schools at ACT 27, much better educated than we do today. We graduate ONLY 5% OF OUR SCHOOL CHILDREN AT THAT LEVEL INSTEAD OF 95%. WE GRADUATE 84% OF HIGH SCHOOL CHILDREN IN TENNESSEE WHO ARE NOT EVEN "ACT READY" (ACT 21-22 average and below). MOST CANNOT READ WELL, MOST CAN READ AND WRITE BLOCK LETTERS ONLY. MOST CANNOT DO THE SIMPLEST MATH MENTALLY (I MET THREE HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES WHO COULD NOT SUBTRACT 23 FROM 50) WITHOUT A CALCULATOR. MOST CANNOT FILL OUT JOB APPLICATIONS. THE SCHOOL SYSTEM SHOULD NOT GRADUATE A SINGLE PERSON LIKE THAT, BUT THEY GRADUATE MANY. IS THIS ALL RIGHT? WHAT IS THE EFFECT OF SUCH PERFORMANCE? We will show you two eight grade tests that are more than 120 years old. Few high school graduates could pass it today. It appears, that in some critical areas most of our high school graduates cannot perform as well mentally as our children did more than 120 years ago.



We were all newborn babies starting our lives. We were educated, had jobs to be self-supporting. Most of us had children, and decades later, we retired and died. Then the next generation took over, to create a better future for them all. If the public education system is good, the children will be well educated. ONLY THEN CAN WE PROSPER AS A COUNTRY.



If the public education is NOT good, the children will be poorly educated. The poor education weakens the nation's workforce. That, in turn, weakens our industries against the almost 40 countries that passed us in high school mathematics. A less educated workforce weakens the products and services of the nation's industries. All nations compete in the world with each other. When your products are less competitive, you sell less, decreasing the national income, and poverty grows in that nation. All this depends on how good a nation's public education is. That is how our babies of "yesterday create a nation's future."

NOW THAT WE KNOW WHAT KNOWLEDGE LEVEL
"ACT READINESS" REPRESENTS:

We can look at the ACT chart again to see not only that high school graduates' knowledge is not going up, but we can also tell that a huge percentage of high school graduates leave high school, about 80%, who are not even ACT Ready. Considering that ACT Readiness represents only about 25% knowledge of four benchmark subjects only, is much lower than what the employers really need, and much lower than the previous pass/fail knowledge levels were for the graduating students before. THIS IS NOT GOOD NEWS!

WHY IS THAT?

BECAUSE VIRTUALLY NO PERSON IS TRAINED AND EXPERIENCED IN MANAGEMENT AT ANY LEVEL IN EDUCATION, AND AMONG MANY GOVERNORS AS WELL. WHY IS THAT IMPORTANT? BECAUSE THAT IS WHY SUPERINTENDENTS CANNOT IMPROVE THE VERY LOW ACT SCORES. OR ... THEY SIMPLY DO NOT WANT OUR CHILDREN AND OUR COUNTRY TO SUCCEED, OR ... THEY ARE AFRAID OF SOMETHING. WHY GOVERNORS? BECAUSE MOST THINGS THAT DUMB DOWN THE EDUCATION WITHIN PUBLIC SCHOOLS OR THINGS THAT ELECTED SCHOOL DISTRICT BOARDS SHOULD DO, THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION CANNOT TEACH THEM, TO ENSURE THAT SCHOOL BOARDS AND SUPERINTENDENTS ARE WELL TRAINED TO DO THEIR JOB. WE SHOULD ALSO CONSIDER WHAT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF STATE BOARDS OF EDUCATION ARE. DON'T THEY KNOW HOW POORLY THEIR EDUCATION SYSTEM IS PERFORMING? OR DON'T THEY KNOW OR LEARN HOW TO FIX THEM?

OUTSTANDING LEARNING TOOLS

There are excellent learning tools and tutorials on the Internet for very low cost and they are better than the expensive books that the school use that are not as up-to-date than what one can get from one of the sources we list here. Efficient learning does not come naturally. But anybody could learn faster. Some countries like Japan teach that as a subject in the third grade. It would be important to incorporate that in the curriculum. The fastest learning period in brain development is from age 3 to 6. We also do not make use of that like the high performing countries. With our poor performance we could get a jump start if we encoraged the creation of pre-school programs everywhere. Effective programs are incorporated in games in the high performing countries.

1. Khan Academy: Outstanding. The best in this group. Any subject, any grade, most useful.



2. The Great Courses presentations from the best professors in the USA in any subject. Many of them include an entire semester or year of the subject, and huge discounts are offered on a group of courses periodically.



3. Brightstorm has an outstanding collection of the best high school teachers for every single lesson period.



4. Open Culture, great educational resources.



5. The best math resources for teachers



6. EDX Courses for K-12 and personal interest from the best universities.



7. List of study/learning skills



8. Teaching without lecturing



9. MIT OpenCourseWare covering high school



10. SKILLSHARE is loaded with thousands of job-skill tutorials for jobs or pleasure


11. Google Classroom