ACT SCORES AND "ACT READINESS"
WHAT ARE THEY?

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.



Your number of correct answers in four ACT tests converts to a score that ranges from 1 to 36 for each of the four tests in English, Math, Reading and Science —and your ACT composite score is the average of those. These four subjects are a good indicator of achievement based on ACT’s correlation of scores vs. college performance after high school. We are converting for our presentation here to a percentage of high school general knowledge and subject-knowledge after graduation. Each ACT score point is equal to 2.78%. As an example, an average consolidated ACT 21 score represents 58% knowledge level upon high school graduation. Knowledge levels below 80% upon graduation were not considered good enough for adequate education for income as far back as 1970. With robotic automation increasingly replacing more and more sophisticated jobs since about 2000, we would estimate that today, if someone wants a college education in science or engineering, the education that will survive robotics the longest, a STEM ACT Readiness with a 29 ACT score would be necessary for high school graduates in 2020, increasing slightly annually. We are very far behind unfortunately, but the top ten nations in education are between the ACT equivalent score of 29 and 34 TODAY. Our national average was at 20.7 in 2019. Many of the good US universities already require between 29 and 34 ACT average for admission to study anything. Because our public education is behind, if one talks to professors, they will tell you that today’s high school graduates need two years of remedial education to start any freshman program today. The students who want to be in a field that will survive robotics for ten years, would need to pass STEM ACT Readiness at 29 average ACT score.



ACT Readiness is different. ACT announced in 2006 that college entry readiness and job readiness became identical. Job readiness was lower before 2006. Unfortunately, ACT Readiness is not communicated clearly to parents, implying readiness to get a college degree. It is important especially for parents and school children in poverty to understand this. Our poverty rate is increasing. Guess why? Because we are graduating poorly educated children. The international high performers are way ahead of us. Many of them get to their good results independently of what the parent can do to help, because in poverty, most parents are not educated well enough to understand how the child is doing, and their life is terrible. The explanation they are given is that "God did not make all children college material. But your little Johnny is smart, could learn a trade job, and make enough money!" Unfortunately that is a lie that the poor parent accepts. I spoke to African immigrant parents and other minorities in the high performing countries and saw how well they were doing. MUCH BETTER THAN WE DO. You know how much our state education superintendents do to find out how well we are doing? They visit a class in three schools in their city, with early announcements to the school about the visit and put on a good show. They don't go to the best countries at a total cost of about $5000, to find out what high performance is about and how they do it, but they spend BILLIONS of dollars annually. As a country we spend about 1.5 trillion dollars annually on public education. I met many school boards since 2010. I found only one person, a lady school board chair, who had enough interest to read a book about Alberta, Canada's education system. Even that is not enough, but this one person in Knoxville, TN had enough interest to do this much. EVIDENCE of good intent goes very far. She is a mayor now.



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 (61% knowledge), Science: Biology score: 23 (64% knowledge), Reading/Soc. Science: score: 22 (61% knowledge) and English Composition score:18 (50% knowledge). Only those who pass all four subject benchmark tests are "ACT Ready". According to ACT, 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. ACT readiness is a very low qualification level, and it is not an indicator by ACT for any other course or program or college completion. 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 for hopefully ten years.



Of all children we graduate from high school, more than 80% are not even ACT ready in Tennessee and about ten other states. Our schools graduated only those students a few years ago who passed above 60% good answers (knowledge level) on EVERY SINGLE HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECT. JUST LOOK AT THE ACT CHART! Therefore MORE THAN 80% of today's graduates with a diploma would have been failures, who did not graduate. WE GRADUATE ABOUT 3.6 MILLION STUDENTS ANNUALLY in the US. 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 - AND IT IS INCREASING! 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 29 or higher average consolidated ACT score (80% ACT Ready). STEM ACT is not only for engineering and science 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?! It is a form of lying to the parents especially in low income areas. "Your child has done so well that he is congratulated in a public ceremony and given a diploma!" A piece of paper called a diploma, but the child did not learn enough to get a job. We respectfully requested that our governor ask someone to explain why he is allowing our education system to perform this poorly. No one ever replied. Someone higher up should be asking that question, but they don't.



We need to make enough money as a nation, with national income at 12-14%, instead of struggling at 3-4% as we have been. In order for that to happen, our industries have to be more innovative than those in other countries. More innovative means that they are designing products and services that help people to do things easier and better, with the latest in technology innovatively with larger profit margins. They are using "management by objectives" and "zero-based budgeting" to be aware precisely every month how the needed expenses produce the right quality in products, people and services. A database system software can show automatically to the minute how all key indicators are progressing in our normal operations agains an operating plan we made before the start of our fiscal year. But with the right management people, we can change the way we operate to find good solutions to problems popping up when "Mr. Murphy of Murphy's Law fame pops up from a street corner along the way". Nothing is perfect, problems can pop up because of it, and it can be enormous fun to solve them fast. Having well trained management beyond an MBA is of great value, from planning the spending and the needed work objectives everywhere, is absolutely vital for any organization from 100 employees and up. People who worked in small organizations or partnerships may be excellent in their jobs, but they may not recognize the need for focusing people on what needs to be achieved, to what standard, and go out of business or fail as a result. We will focus on public education with this website, because we are not doing well as you will see. OUR CHILDREN'S AND COUNTRY'S FUTURE DEPENDS TOTALLY ON HOW WELL, OR POORLY, OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN, COMPARED TO THE TOP THREE COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION. IF EDUCATION BECOMES THE INTERNAL ENEMY OF A NATION BECAUSE THEY ARE DOING A POOR JOB OVER DECADES OR OVER EVEN A CENTURY, AND THEY DO IT SLOWLY, SO THAT THE PUBLIC BECOMES UNAWARE, WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY THEY ALSO FLOOD THE PUBLIC WITH "GOOD NEWS" THAT IS NOT TRUE ABOUT EDUCATION, THEN THAT NATION CAN BE DESTROYED EASILY. Lenin of Communism fame is very famous for something he said frequently: "If you lie to the public a thousand times, they will believe it as truth!" We are too close to that moment. Read below what I found out during an investigation of US education and the best countries in education in the world at my own expense, with my own eyes and observations. We have some big problems to solve.

1. Our schools' responsibility is to deliver well-trained graduates to satisfy the needs of employers. How well are our schools doing? Are all the children they graduate employable?
2. In 2023-2024 Major scientific developments will create hundreds of new sciences, millions of new discoveries that will automate more areas within our industries than computers did alone. Artificial Intelligence in cognitive robotics will eliminate most jobs that are four-year college degree based, but many new jobs will be created in many new science and engineering fields requiring life-long learning as a result of nanotechnology and space sciences. The future of employment will be suddenly in areas of advanced mathematics, economics, many new sciences and engineering on a master's degree level moving toward PhD degrees. The truth is that learning on the high school level became very difficult because our teacher training and selection became weaker resulting in too many boring classrooms. Not the teachers' fault. With teaching becoming much easier with cognitive AI robotics, learning itself will become easier to open the gates to the majority of students in graduate schools, with very interesting life time learning. But to take advantage of this our current high schools must improve in teaching our children.
3. It is the employers whose opinion is the most important in defining their potential employees' education level and graduation standards. Employers must determine the standards of public education, not the education departments. It is the same with the K-12 curriculum nationally to ensure our schools' BECOMING THE BEST IN THE WORLD TO SATISFY OUR EMPLOYERS FUTURE NEEDS IN TRAINED EMPLOYEES.
4. The US or state or school district education system should not have a decision-making role in graduation requirements for high school students, in the listed courses or curriculum in this area for conflict of interest reasons but should implement a national standard only to employers' satisfaction.

Too many of us in this world dislike or do not trust anyone different in some way. Anyone with a different opinion than we have, about things like religions, politics, different skin colors, nationality, does not mean that we cannot be friends accomplishing great things together. Many of us also believe that we are always right when we all know so little compared to what we will learn in a couple of decades - if we have an interest in our world. We often dislike others just for being "different," even without knowing what that difference is. Such differences can create conflicts, small or large,, and even wars if the conflict is between people on the highest level. In education district school boards, we often see people who believe that simply being on the board means that their opinion must always be true, just because they were elected. We live in a world where nothing is perfect, but beauty, goodness, ugliness, and evil behavior exist everywhere, and none of us are perfect. We do not have enough of us yet to see both the good and not so good in each other, and hopefully, we learn to become more helpful with each other. The important word is to learn to love each other in a general sense and HELP and make each other and our world a better place. The most helpful thing we could do to achieve this in everything we do, especially in public education. But if this is the problem, put aside what you cannot change AT THE MOMENT, and keep going forward.



Several countries who were colonial powers used slavery a few hundred years ago. Only WE ended up this long with an ugly black/white problem even today. It is still very much alive. Is it helpful? No. Is it a major problem creator? Absolutely. What is the best problem-solving tool for it? It is the EDUCATION OF THE POPULATION TO SATISFY THE NEEDS OF EMPLOYERS. The high school education and its prerequisite schooling have the biggest impact. By the end of high school, a good basic education focused on the subjects with the best odds to survive robotics are: advanced Mathematics, excellent Communications, and Reading, and the new Sciences with changing Physics on top.



Age 3-6 is the period with the quickest learning (speed of neuronal interconnections in the brain), making preschool vitally important. Between ages 3 and 20, there is a specific order of months or years during which the neuronal interconnections get interconnected to learn specific groups of subjects. If we do not learn a subject like mathematics so that we can learn to calculate mentally within the elementary school years, then that area in the brain remains poorly prepared for life, as learning ability slows down more as we get older after age 6-8. A baby is born with 100 billion brain cells or neurons. As we learn to see, hear, speak, muscle coordination during 12-18 years of schooling, the speed of neuronal interconnections begins slowing at an increasing rate. The interconnections slow faster if the child does not learn enough, and learning becomes more difficult. So those children who go to boring classes will have a greater problem in learning as they get older at an increasing rate. That is why in the high performing countries, accept into teaching high IQ Master's degree graduates in the subject that they will teach, who love their subject and talk to students with an infectious enthusiasm that the children will enjoy. The teacher whose profile and education is different, whose teaching the children find boring, may end up hating that subject, which could be very important for the children in the era of robotics. Our children may end up disabled in the area for mental math because of calculator use at a K-12 age. That will make them poor critical thinkers and decision-makers. By the end of high school, our high school students need to complete Mathematics through Calculus, Physics (space science is bringing major changes there), Nanotechnology/Material Science, Chemistry, Artificial Intelligence with Cognitive Robotics, and Economics, and their prerequisites. Yet what we plan to teach in the curriculum is too little and does not prepare them well. Music and Art are also important for right brain hemisphere development that is also key in decision making.



We are beginning to be concerned about why the departments of education have made decisions to teach less, skip teaching some subjects, drop the pass/fail points from 60% to as low as 30% in one or more subjects to show higher grades and graduation rates. Sounds like an effort of the puppet master in the old puppet theaters. NEVER COMPROMISE WHAT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT FOR YOUR COUNTRY'S FUTURE.

• In most states: Weak teacher selection, teacher training and certification, mostly boring classes result in students disliking the subject and jobs that require it. Low teacher morale, high turnover, 8% leaving the profession, 8% leaving the school district. Multiple-choice satisfaction surveys are poor problem identifiers and can guide the teacher away from the real causes of the problem to look better to the public ("misleading defense").
• Curriculum weak in Science and Math compared to the international curricula of nations who are passing us. What other countries do is not important - some say. NOT SO. WE WILL EXPLAIN IT SHORTLY.
• Schools with black students receive twice as much funding per student as the other schools. BUT 96% of black school graduates are not ACT Ready. 80% of other school graduates are also not ACT Ready. Obviously, the money is going to the wrong places and the wrong people. Obviously the management is weak at all levels and cannot figure out what to do and teachers are not trained well. OBVIOUSLY THROWING MONEY AT A PROBLEM IS NOT THE SOLUTION, BUT THAT IS WHAT WE DO. HOW MANY DECADES DO YOU NEED TO SOLVE IT? Better and more education is the solution. Why are we degrading our education? Well, it dumbs down the public. That makes selling the public ANYTHING easier. Only an enemy would do that. This would be only one of many things such enemy would do. And such an enemy would not want to be visible.

We have to stop thinking in terms of elementary education, high school, and college. Think of them for the future in terms of a continuous learning process for life. It will increase faster and faster throughout life from now on because jobs will become highly specialized, in narrower, more advanced fields. Learning will become much more comfortable and more fun toward areas where our natural talents lie.



Public education has not changed and improved much for us in many decades. They are defensive and not progressing with the changing technologies. They are hurting our industries and our national industries and income. Children will do much better in about 4-8 years because public education, unions, and politicians did not want to embrace change so far, but they will by then. If they wanted to improve, we would not be in the poor performance area in education today. When we do not want to learn and change to become better because of self-serving fears, we ALWAYS pay the price for it later. ONE CAN LEARN A LOT, QUITE EASILY, BY USING SEARCH ENGINES OR EXCELLENT TUTORIALS THAT ARE AVAILABLE ON ANY SUBJECT FROM THE INTERNET. Unfortunately, our public schools do not teach our children enough about our subjects for employability. Again, BORING CLASSES TURN OFF STUDENTS. IF YOU HAVE DOUBTS, SIT IN ON SOME MATH AND SCIENCE CLASSES UNANNOUNCED IF POSSIBLE. THEN GO TO A COUNTRY THAT EDUCATES ALL CHILDREN WELL, LIKE FINLAND, AND SIT IN ON THE CLASSES. Such poor preparation could take us back through a very bloody road to the stone age. The cure is to ensure excellent education for children of all colors, competitive with the top countries in education. Why have we not done that?! THAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION. If you have time, ask governors and higher-level politicians, including past presidents.



Our future success or failure depends on how well our products and services compete with the world's three best nations in any product area. You see, we deal internationally now and for a century now. We have hundreds of industries. Agriculture is one of them. I can demonstrate to you that our K-12 education has never kept up with changing technology, product changes, and market changes where we sell our products. I found two final 8th grade tests. Most of today's high school graduates could not pass the English or Mathematics portion in states like Tennessee and others.



I contacted several governors more than once about the poor education results we have and did not receive a single reply from anyone. I understand that taking steps in that direction is far riskier for a governor than for me. Our public education is not performing well. I have never seen so many organizational, management and performance problems.



There are only about 5% of the high schools in the USA that are graduating well-trained students compatible with the international high performing countries. Some of them graduate all students who entered these high schools. We need 75-80% graduating on such a high level for our economy's benefit to pay off the national debt slowly. Professors we contacted believed that our high school graduates in 2018 required two more years of remedial training to start attending the first year of a college program. The K-12 education-related unions do not want to change anything to raise the ACT scores. Our average nationally ic close to ACT 21, with 80% ACT Readiness. We should be at MINIMUM AVERAGE ACT 27 in 2020, with 75-80% of graduates being ACT Ready, instead of 20-25%. ACT Readiness is a low qualification representing less than 60% subject knowledge on four subjects only. It is nowhere near what the high performing countries achieve. We need at this stage to be at an average ACT, above 29. That is the lowest equivalent score for the top ten countries in education. IF OTHER COUNTRIES CAN OUTPERFORM US SO MUCH BETTER - AS THEY DO, THEN WE CAN SAFELY CONCLUDE THAT THE GREAT MAJORITY OF OUR K-12 SCHOOLS ARE DESTROYING OUR FUTURE. WHY? BECAUSE OUR FUTURE DEPENDS TOTALLY ON HOW WELL WE EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN.



GOOD TEACHERS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT PEOPLE IN ANY SCHOOL DISTRICT. We have too many people who would agree - they would say, but you can count on one hand the people who are willing to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. That includes their unions. If I am 90% correct, and I believe that I am close to 100% accurate, then we, as a nation, have a huge problem with public education destroying our country. Most schools do not deserve the "school" name, because they are FAILURE FACTORIES and do THAT very well. They speak about how we Americans do not respect teachers like other countries' population does. It is not because of the good people who decided to be teachers. Our teacher training programs and teacher certification, along with the curricula, are much weaker than those of many other countries. The teachers are trying with what they have; they are frustrated; their morale is low. Their superintendents never had management training; their subject knowledge is too low. We need to ensure that potential teachers meet the following:

• Teaching in other countries that are great in education requires a BS and MS in the subject that they will teach.
• They love their subject and keep up with every new development in it.
• They are the right personality for teaching and
• Come from the top 10% of their Master's programs, and
• They create fabulous results with children in the ACT 29-34 average equivalent range.
• Our teachers are nowhere near that. And that is the people's fault who approved the teacher training curriculum and the rigor of certification. And that's not enough.
• The teachers are treated worse than a factory worker. Management training is absent in education organizations.
• What have the teachers' unions done about that in the interest of teachers? What have the governors done about that? WHAT DID ANY OF THEM DO TO RAISE THE ACT SCORES TO AT LEAST AN 80% ACT READINESS LEVEL? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
• Well, the unions did more. THEY COMPLAIN AND DEFEND THE TEACHERS INSTEAD OF CORRECTING THE PROBLEMS. AS IF THE TEACHERS' TRAINING AND CERTIFICATION WERE EXCELLENT IN EVERY WAY. THAT MEANS THAT THE TEACHERS UNION DOES NOT WANT BETTER TEACHER TRAINING AND BETTER CERTIFICATION.

Many nations went through a poor teaching period between WWI and WWII. Many corrected it. A few of our schools did as well. A few, because our philosophy is that "locally elected school boards know the best what schools should teach and how." Do you know how old this idea is?! It was this way since 1850, in a purely agricultural economy, where the local farmers knew very well what the children had to learn to do an excellent job on the farms. It was perfect for the period up to the early 1900s. THE EDUCATION COMMUNITY FIGHTS FOR THE SAME LOCALLY ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD IDEA WHEN IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THE LOCALLY ELECTED BOARD DOES NOT HAVE THE EXPERTISE TO HELP MAKE OUR SCHOOLS COMPETITIVE IN TODAY'S WORLD. THIS FACT BY ITSELF SHOWS THAT TODAY'S POLITICAL AND EDUCATION LEADERSHIP DOES NOT CARE ABOUT THE COUNTRY AND WHAT PEOPLE WANT. ACTIONS AND LACK THEREOF IN SOME AREAS MAKE THIS VERY CLEAR. They don't even realize that we went from the horse and buggy to the moon, went from local agriculture to international sales in more than a thousand different industries, with huge technological changes during the last 120 years. Today's school board requires much more knowledge, especially as a majority, to make changes to solve the problems we have in public education. Many things delegated to locally elected school boards need to be made nationally on the highest level. Examples are the school curriculum, teacher training curriculum, teacher certification, high school graduation requirements, hiring superintendents, managing superintendents. Also, continuing education for teachers since we are advancing faster in many technologies, better teaching tools, and how to make every class an exciting experience for the children instead of boring. Sit in on school board meetings and see how much time board members spend on improving our children's poor education. Do they make any good changes that increase the ACT scores? The locally elected school board members do not know some vital solutions that they are trying to make and do not have time for learning.



Our success depends on how good our workforces are in every industry compared to the top three countries. AND THAT DEPENDS ON HOW WELL EDUCATED OUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES ARE. I am afraid that we are doing very poorly. The ACT scores in the chart we have here show how much our children are learning from grade one to twelve in our public schools, and how poor the results were since the year 2000 and most likely longer. Look at the ACT chart below, showing no improvement for 20 years. In a world where technologies are advancing, we have been falling behind other countries. Such is the price one pays for bad leadership.

Good results always depend on how decision-makers think, and how good a job their employees are doing. With the public education results we have, we must change the way we think and do things.
Good results always depend on how well we do our jobs each day as workers, to meet a specific, measurable objective to be achieved each month IN EACH INDIVIDUAL SCHOOL. Unfortunately we seriously regressed in public education for too long.

It is vital to have the right monthly GPA objectives (measured year to date) in every single school. The GPA year to date monthly objective is 10% higher each month than it was in the prior year, with a monthly operating plan for any teacher or manager in every single school. YOUR RESULTS IN THE SCHOOLS ARE BAD BECAUSE THEY REQUIRE AN OBJECTIVE BUT NOT A CORRECT ONE THAT FOCUSES THE PEOPLE ON WHAT MUST BE DONE. YOU WILL NOT IMPROVE ENOUGH WITHOUT IT GUARANTEED! IF IT IS DONE CORRECTLY. By not having the right measurable objectives, that is a key indicator of academic success or failure; IMPROVEMENT IS NOT POSSIBLE EVEN WITH MAJOR CHANGES. Please look at the ACT performance chart FOR THE PAST TWENTY YEARS. IT IS A VERY POOR RECORD. WITH THE TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES COMING IN 2023-2024 in AI-ASSISTED COGNITIVE ROBOTICS, NANOTECHNOLOGY, AND SPACE SCIENCE, MOST OF OUR CHILDREN WILL BECOME UNEMPLOYABLE. THE FUTURE SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF OUR NATION DEPENDS ON HOW WELL WE EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN TODAY IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. THEY ARE DOING VERY POORLY.



There exists a terrible idea about what management is within education organizations. Generally, they promote the best worker into management. And he does not work out. Bad workers will not make a good manager. But without management training, the good worker also will not become a good manager of people. An MBA provides a very general introduction to management that is not very useful. Some universities offer a very busy two-week post-MBA Advanced Management Program. That is the best program to learn to solve management problems. It is a role-playing of management problems that one has to solve under pressure. Two professors from the graduate school of management and a clinical psychologist supervise 14 hours per day, six days per week. Management problems start developing in organizations if a manager has about 50 employees working for him. Management problems become more sophisticated as the number of employees increase. One major problem public schools have is a lack of such management training for principals and superintendents, contributing to poor results and teachers' high turnover. Proper Mathematics, Science, and Management training rarely exist in our education, which accounts for most of our problems today. I hope that we will make the governors and public education management people think so that they become much better problem solvers. Any organization with poor results can only improve if the organization recognizes its real problems openly to the public and plans well with proper objectives and operating plans. We have done none of that in public education while paying the most in the world per student. No one in the political leadership decided to solve the problem. The poor performance continued for decades. This inaction damaged us. We have been harming the majority of the public. It must be corrected. How can those who caused the damage claim innocence and claim today that they had nothing to do with it? How can they claim that as politicians, they acted in the interest of the people when they were party to damaging the country very seriously from within?



Focus everyone on what they have to accomplish every month. All people who supervise and lead others, especially teachers, must see their results together with their managers to see exactly how they could improve what they are doing. It needs to be an open discussion about what could work better. IT IS IMPORTANT TO TRY ALL IDEAS THAT MAY WORK. That is how one can find the best idea when multiple solutions exist. Hostile feelings and hurt egos have no place here. No one is perfect. But the senior person is more experienced. An objective is the measurable MONTHLY key indicator of success or failure under every manager, supervisor, principal, and, most importantly, every single teacher in every single school. For low performing schools like ours, the objective has to be 10% higher than the previous year's actual achievement during the same month. People do not respond to low objectives well. They just keep working the same way as before with the same results. However, people respond to the challenge of an objective that is a stretch and not easy.



A comment on management terminology that needs to be clear. The word "objective" applies only to the current OR coming fiscal year, with a specific, measurable key indicator of success or failure, like a GPA or YEAR-TO-DATE GPA (Grade Point Average). You must have such a target to achieve monthly to focus all employees. A "goal" on the other hand, is a target that one would like to achieve during a longer period, like five years. Things can happen during those five years that could change the goal.



A grade point average or GPA is the best measure for an objective at all school levels. Some universities prefer that to an ACT or SAT score because it is very specific when they look at its details. It is also essential to have a national test (ACT or SAT) objective each year that is 10% higher than the immediately preceding year's score because cheating has happened with state tests to make the results look better for the public. Having a "90% graduation" objective with a low average ACT 21 minimum score has been creating pressures at the end of the school year to pass children who would otherwise fail. It is harmful instead of beneficial. Just look at the bad ACT results we have. THE CHILDREN ARE IN SCHOOL TO BE EMPLOYABLE WHEN THEY GRADUATE, AND ABOUT 80% TODAY ARE NOT EMPLOYABLE. For higher academic achievement, a graduation-only goal does not work. It only makes the schools look better, creating an enormous problem for the children and the nation later. Unfortunately, building up the graduation's and diploma's image in the public eye, instead of getting higher grades without dumbing down pass/fail points, is useless and harmful if the child cannot get a job. Why did the education system create it? Most are misleading the public, while the public schools do not teach most children enough so that our children become JOBLESS! Add to this a few 150-year-old management problems that worked well during the 1800s, but not after WWI. And we make the public's hard-earned tax dollars pay for it at the highest amount per student in the world. I think that for some reason, our political leaders have done nothing. They ARE smart people. If so, then they have a morbid fear of something, and we must find out what and remove it.



In addition to the objectives as described, for every individual identified for objectives, there must be an "operating plan" that lists the objectives, and the tools/material/training they need to achieve their objectives, so that both the resources and the results can be verified.



We need to buy an open-ended multiuser database system that can be very useful nationally to keep everyone informed about the public schools' progress for which they are responsible. With high enough security, automatic tests that are secured, with the ability to add other management functions to it later. This would cost much less, than 10% of the amount of money we waste with overstaffing 13,500 school districts' central management and loading teachers with paperwork.



In correcting problems of this magnitude, one has to act firmly and quickly. We are a bit late to this party. There will be big job losses and civil disorder problems, but not as big as we will have if we keep ignoring it further. Our governors and state departments of education ignore three important things. The technological developments fuel our industries if they have well-trained workforces. That means that our K-12 curricula must advance closely behind the technologies, with management training for all principals and superintendents, and state education leadership. Teachers need much better subject knowledge and continuing education about new developments in their subjects above the 4th grade. Use the objectives and operating plans in every school as described above.



It is vitally important to keep educating teachers to educate our children better to improve our workforces. Excellent K-12 education is essential for any industry's workforce to create products and services that are internationally competitive. We don't do that, and it is a big mistake. An organization that produced bad results at the highest cost IN THE WORLD to the American public for 20 years should not make any decisions in a new education system's management structure and standards. They are the worst source to set standards in teacher education and high school graduation standards to produce internationally competitive results. They are to satisfy employers' needs. Many employers met with governors about the poorly trained workers by our public high schools. The education organizations must deliver the employers' needs with the public schools, with much better prepared high school graduates than what they produced. Employers need new technologies to become more competitive internationally. And they need high school graduates like those educated in the top three nations in public education. Unfortunately, our public education claims to be the best globally, and they are far from it. The employees within school districts cannot and should not be blamed. The blame is squarely on the shoulders of governors and departments of education in every state, because THEY SET THE STANDARDS FOR THE STATE, and they created the bad morale within every school district that resulted in a very high teacher turnover in the USA.



Our objectives to improve public education need to be based on the following trends.

• Within one year of any new technology or science introduction, high schools' curriculum needs to include increasing information about the new technology or Science. The Kurzweil chart shows the increase in calculations that a $1000 computer will do, and this man's forecasts are accurate. Please look at this chart and remember what it tells us. We are getting very close to the $1000 PC that can do as many calculations as the human brain does per second. In 20-25 more years, the $1000 computer or PC will do as many computations per second as what all human brains could do or about 8,500,000,000 human brains combined, and the computer will be much smaller than the nail on your small finger. Think about what that means when robots use that much computer power, with artificial intelligence that will be about a million times faster than human intelligence. Read and learn about it first, then think about what good or bad things could such technology do. It does not mean that humanity will be destroyed because we already know how to use that high computational speed to multiply the brain's power during the 2030s. But it will require a well developed and educated and healthy brain. It would not work with an undereducated, recreational drug infected brain. That could take a child who studied hard and did not get involved with drugs out of poverty very easily and could bring us into a world of happiness. The problem is the coming ten years, during which the existing public education could eliminate the possibility because they are reducing our knowledge they are dumbing the population down. It is quite easy to show that with what we found.
  
  
  
  
  
  Dr. Ray Kurzweil is the best technology futurist, with a record of 87% of his predictions being correct and on time. Education leadership should read his books. It would be exciting and beneficial to explain such technology trends in high school classes. More importantly, when we do not incorporate new technology changes in the curriculum or don't know how to make our education a positive experience for most of our children, our education failed us. Example: requiring only Algebra 2 and Biology for high school graduation when we need Calculus and Chemistry plus Physics about 50 years ago, is the same kind of damaging move as lowering pass/fail points in the state test to produce higher grades. We are making a science out of "how to teach less and look better to the public as we dumb down our children so that they cannot get a job."


There is a very urgent need to accomplish these steps as soon as possible.












• The US education department needs to be aware of any changes in the curricula, teaching methodology, teacher training programs, K-12 graduation standards of the three best nations in education, especially in Science and Mathematics, and adopt such new information or standards in our education system TO KEEP OUR COUNTRY COMPETITIVE TO SURVIVE.

The other traditional side of education has to do with the knowledge of subjects specified in the state curriculum to make better decisions in a changing world and to be employable. But that cannot help if the curriculum and quality of education is not competitive with the best three countries in education. The majority of public high school graduates in most of our states cannot read well enough, cannot do basic math, read and write only block letters, and cannot fill out job applications. The poorly performing public education is costing us the most per student in the world. Instead of improving year by year, we teach our children less and less. We do things that stunt brain development in critical areas and use methods that worked in 1850 but not after the industrial developments that started accelerating after WWI. Our political leadership, lawmakers, and our weak education management do nothing to improve, and the top leadership is certainly smart enough to do it correctly but has not done that for many decades. WHO IS HOLDING A GUN TO THEIR HEAD TO DO NOTHING TO IMPROVE PUBLIC EDUCATION, MEANING INCREASING THE AVERAGE ACT SCORES FROM BELOW 20 TO 27 THAT CORRESPOND TO INCREASING ACT READINESS FROM A VERY POOR 25% SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE, BASED UPON ONLY FOUR SUBJECTS TO BE "ACT READY" OF A GRADUATING CLASS TO 80% ACT READINESS? We will show how low "ACT Readiness" is. It requires only four specific subjects' knowledge out of four years of subjects. We used to require 60% minimum knowledge of all high school subjects ten years ago to graduate. Consider also that in a state like Tennessee, more than 80% of those who graduate from high school with a diploma are not even ACT Ready. Our political leadership is not thinking that we should improve our children's knowledge to be employable to average ACT score 27 to achieve 80% ACT Readiness because the education management feels that such a goal is impossible. When we have low expectation objectives that are unmeasurable, yearly instead of monthly, and are not a key indicator of success or failure, it will not improve. That is what we had in place for decades, and it is a major contributor to operating education without any guidance to achieve good results.



Why do our high school graduates' results need to be competitive and be at the same level as the top 3 countries in education? "WELL, THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!" - SAY SOME PEOPLE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION. THEY ARE WRONG. WE USED TO BE THERE ABOUT 50 YEARS AGO. WE MUST BE THERE NOW MORE THAN EVER. THERE ARE GOOD REASONS WHY WE ARE DOING SO POORLY. ALL ORGANIZATIONS WE STILL USE AND DO SOME IMPORTANT THINGS EXACTLY THE WAY WE DID IN THE LATE 1800s. Teacher training declined.



Every time a new governor is elected, he/she hires a new state superintendent, We had huge technological changes since then. But not a corresponding change in our schools. We allowed education to be controlled by politicians and to be controlled by locally elected school boards. We have 13,500 elected school boards in the nation, all doing their own thing. These are huge mistakes that can only produce failure. We will deal with this in more detail below. The national and state management structure does not work, and the current structure will not work.



Our high school graduates will be employed by a company's workforce. Almost all companies' products and services are sold not only domestically but internationally. When we go shopping at home, we will see that many products are made in other countries. Both the quality and profit margin of products depend mostly on the workforce's high school education level for job training or additional college training. If our high school education is worse than those high schools whose products we see in our stores, most likely their high schools did a better job of educating their high school graduates. Such a situation results in fewer sales, lower profit margins, fewer taxes paid, which results in less national income. Normally that income would be 13-14% to pay for all federal programs. We have been struggling at 3-4%. When that happens, governments have to borrow money, which becomes the national debt, which will be about $30 Trillion for us by the end of 2020. The interest portion of the national debt will be close to $9 Trillion by end of 2020. THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR PUBLIC EDUCATION DOES A POOR JOB.



So, where is the problem? The ACT scores show very poor results and very poor readiness for college or employment. The ACT shows what our children learned from grade one to twelve. This is the teachers' fault. Right? That is not true. A high school graduate decided that he wants to be a teacher, with a fair assumption that the standards for the degree in teaching are at the right level for at least the first five years of teaching, and that the same is true, along with the knowledge of the subject that he will teach. It is a fair assumption by the high school graduate that all of these things are true. But they are not true. Both the elementary and high school has done a poor job. As a high school graduate, the student has reading and basic math problems, only one subject in Science, Biology, Physics, and Chemistry being more important. The classes were boring, so the student ended up hating the subjects. None of us could learn in a boring class. But we could certainly learn to hate the subject. The trouble is that cognitive AI robotics will start replacing jobs in 2024 that are not based on sciences that are changing under the influence of Space Science, Advanced Mathematics, English, all at the Master's level - if the new high school graduates want to survive. The good news is that the new robotics will be much better than teachers anywhere by about 2029, and the children from then on will be much better educated. But the time before then will become a big problem because we are graduating about three million children per year who are so poorly trained by high schools that they will be jobless. Thirty million of the existing workforce will also become unemployable because they were not educated well enough to be trainable for the new jobs. For a solution, the management structure needs change, management training is necessary for principals and above, the standards for teacher training needs change, so does certification, and performance needs to be measured by a national test plus GPA, and education laws need updating along with continuing education for teachers in the subject they teach.



There are a few important facts that also apply and are necessary for providing good-to-excellent education. No adult or child will listen, enjoy, and learn from a boring presentation where the presenter does not know the subject well enough and has to go to the textbook for an answer. I attended 29 classes in high school science and math 8-10 years ago. Then I went to the three best countries in public education to investigate their systems in detail; for about 40 years, I spent time several times annually in 10 countries initially that grew to 80 countries worldwide later. I am very familiar with cultural differences that could make or not make excellent ideas transferable to the US culture. I saw some smart children in every class in the US who could ask good questions. The people we need as teachers in the class are one whose personality is upbeat has a master's degree in the subject, loves the subject enough to keep up with new developments, and teaches with infectious enthusiasm to turn on all children their subject. We could test people for such qualities for a long time. That is what the high performing nations do in education. To achieve that, you could take two tests to find out the best fitting profession for you where you will be happy if you are 20 years old or older when taking these tests. It takes that long for the relevant areas to develop in the brain, but they do not change as you get older. We will always do the best job when we are happy in that job. The test names are the Strong Interest Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Intelligence Inventory. You can download both from the Internet for $100 total for both tests.



We operate in an "international economy." We trade internationally to satisfy customer needs internationally, NOT LIKE IN 1850. We advertise and develop products and services for all countries to be sold everywhere, including other countries. Around 1995 many of us noticed that our high school graduates could not figure out the amount of change for a customer if the electric power went off in the store. This is a grave matter because it involves some brain functions not operating well enough. At my own expense, I spent ten years investigating US education in every state from every angle and did the same in detail in the best three education countries. We were far behind in many areas as if we were using 150-year-old methodologies. In many important areas, from management structure to standards and subject knowledge, our public education is doing exactly that or less. I know, because I found TWO, more than 120-year-old 8th-grade final tests that most high school graduates today could not pass. To ensure that they were real, I found elementary school textbooks for English and Math from the same period, when we had only one dominant industry called agriculture. The world changed a lot since then, and we went from the horse and buggy TO THE MOON. That brought enormous technological changes everywhere, but not in education. The great majority of today's high school graduates could not pass those old tests. We will show them to you further down. IT APPEARS THAT IN BOTH ENGLISH AND MATHEMATICS; WE TAUGHT MORE TO 8TH GRADERS AT THE END OF THE 1800s THAN WHAT WE TAUGHT TO HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES TODAY, MORE THAN 120 YEARS LATER. MANY OF US NOTICED AFTER 1995 THAT YOUNG CASH REGISTER OPERATORS COULD NOT MAKE CHANGE IF THE ELECTRICITY WENT OUT AT A STORE. LATE LAST YEAR, I HAD TO PAY A $23.00 BILL IN A STORE. THE ELECTRICITY WENT OUT, AND I PAID WITH A $50 BILL. THERE WASN'T A SINGLE CASH REGISTER OPERATOR OR SUPERVISOR, WHO COULD FIGURE OUT HOW MUCH CASH I SHOULD BE GETTING BACK. THEY WERE ALL HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES, I VERIFIED. THERE SHOULD NOT BE A SINGLE SUCH POORLY EDUCATED HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE ANYWHERE. < br>


Why would anyone or a nation do that? What does such a move do to the nation? It dumbs down the people who graduated from public school. That's about 80% of the population. But it is progressive. Every few years, you dumb down the public a little more, the public does not notice, but we are creative people! In about 50 years, the public's knowledge can be downgraded by 50%. This is a very important science related to military operations in psychological warfare, called disinformation theory. It goes back to V. I. Lenin's favorite saying: "If you lie to the public a thousand times, they accept it as truth!" We, of course, would not use it. Not even in the running for an office to be a member of congress at any level. Especially not in elections, not in political decisions, after all, we represent what the public, "The American people want...". This is a phrase that we all hear from politicians often. It rests easy because we would never do to "the American people" what public education is doing. Wait a minute...if our public education is doing that, they are doing it to American children on whom the country's future depends. Who is running public education I wonder. It is not managed the same way as other US government departments, with an annual budget approved, an annual operating plan approved with national quality control to compete with the world's best. Public education is an orphan; standards are not the same nationwide for anything. And each state fully delegated operational and spending decisions to the elected board of each school district. Anyone should understand that you cannot get good results that way. But you certainly get varying low performance when an elected body of the local population is in charge of things that they know nothing about.



The OECD PISA tests show how we are doing as a country compared to other countries. One country, China, shows only the top four school districts' results. Do not use China, Macao, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan as an education system from which to learn. The parental pressure in these countries is enormous on the child seven days per week to study to be the best. Children normally do homework until midnight, and by 6 AM, they take the train/subway to school. The most effective teaching methodology and teacher selection methodology is in Finland. In our opinion, that method is transferable to the US. Their graduation rate is high, and the grades are also high, with a small difference between the highest and lowest grades. Their teaching methods are very friendly, without pressure, and with playing emphasized. In teacher selection, they emphasize the candidate being in the top ten percent of the Master's class in the subject that they would teach, psychological testing for the right personality for teaching. They will be an assistant teacher for 15 years, but all teachers are totally independent in planning the course's sequence, what books, teaching materials they want to use. There are no discipline problems. Their minorities are black African, gypsy, and Lapp tribes, but with good results by all. Education to a PhD in any field, and medical services are free, worker benefits are better than ours, but they are not a socialist economy. Poverty and extreme wealth (beyond $10 million) do not exist, and UN tests always show the population to be the happiest in the world. National level economic and business planning includes education and medicine on the same level as the major industries. That is the highest level of education in any country. But with the US, SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG, and NO ONE HAS THE COURAGE TO STAND UP AND FIX IT. So let me suggest a few questions to think about.

What do you want to achieve? It has to be a measurable key indicator of graduating student knowledge, both monthly and annually per school, as a goal five years away, and as an objective during the coming fiscal year. What level/percentage of ACT Readiness is to be achieved in graduating classes is a very important part of planning, because ACT Readiness is such a minimal requirement, that such graduates will not be employable with the new technological developments coming in 2023-2024.

What do you need in: people, their schooling and employment history, DECISION-MAKING AUTHORITY, equipment, money, and automation of testing and actual achievement vs. the objectives of every teacher, principal and other supervisors/management people AND WHY WE NEED SUCH RESOURCES to meet the OBJECTIVES AT ANY AND ALL LEVELS. These things must be known at all levels each month, so that you know what is not working as planned, to decide what must be done to meet the year's objective.

Adjust the system nationwide, but you must achieve ACT Readiness at 100% of those who graduate short term. The constant dropping of standards and requirements we saw during the last 20 years MUST BE ENDED NOW. THE PUBLIC MUST BE TOLD THE TRUTH and ALL OF THE TRUTH. The public's hard-earned money pays for our poor public education, and that HAS TO CHANGE NOW.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already passed average human levels in the USA with a high school education and will rapidly pass us in most fields within five years by 2025. AI-driven cognitive robotics (they can learn faster than a human being and can obtain answers from search engines like Google about anything in milliseconds for the right decision) will replace an additional 30 million from the existing workforce in just a few years as a result of the marginal high school education they were provided by our public schools. A major contributor was and still is our poor public education system, with less than 5% exception. We will show below that our public education did not keep pace with technological developments for about 100 years, which is degrading our workforce and national income. The effect will be twofold. We graduate 3.6 million students annually who would be destined to the workforce of our various industries. The great majority of them, 74-84% are unemployable. Second, the existing workforce, 30 million will also lose their job for the same reason. All these losses could have been greatly reduced if our public education maintained compatibility with the top three primary and secondary education countries. Is that all? Not yet. We have something that is far more dangerous. It is called the "black/white problem" that went unresolved for more than 100 years now. In fact it became worse during the last 12 years. We have been building a huge powder keg in this area by us doing a very bad job in public education. AND, WE HAVE DONE A SUPERB JOB TO CREATE A FUSE BY IGNORING OUR POOR PERFORMANCE IN EDUCATION, THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE THAT THIS INCOMPETENCE IS LIKELY TO PUT ON THE STREET AT A TIME WHEN OUR NATIONAL INCOME IS VERY LOW. STILL, OUR NATIONAL DEBT WILL BE EXTREMELY HIGH, AT $30 TRILLION BY THE END OF 2020. A RESOLUTION OF THIS PROBLEM WOULD REQUIRE URGENT ACTION UNDER CENTRAL AND NOT STATE CONTROL TO ENSURE RAPID IMPROVEMENT OF EDUCATION RESULTS AT MINIMUM 10% PER ANNUM. I AM DESCRIBING THE STEPS REQUIRED TO DO SO UNDER "ACTIONS" BELOW.

“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 scores!



76-84% of children we graduate today (94-97% of black children) are so poorly prepared that they will be unemployable. As a result, we fell from the top to the bottom of the industrialized countries in important subjects. We were told how well our public schools are doing by education management everywhere -- and now we find that what they told us was not true. THERE HAS NOT BEEN A SINGLE PERSON IN PUBLIC EDUCATION LEADERSHIP WHO STOOD UP TO FIX IT IN MORE THAN 20 YEARS. NOT ONE! Our parents are told by the schools that we are doing fine as students when we are not. Then if that is untrue, many children may be unemployable for life. Did any governor care enough to do some things that raised the poor ACT scores? NO ONE DID. WE HAD THOUSANDS OF GOVERNORS SINCE 1970! BUT THEY ALL PROMISED WHILE RUNNING FOR OFFICE TO FIX EDUCATION to RAISE THE ACT SCORES AND TO MAKE OUR CHILDREN EMPLOYABLE. LET ME TAKE YOU THROUGH WHAT WE FOUND FIRST.



In 1997 I noticed that we are graduating children from high school who cannot read well and cannot do even basic math. This negligence IN MANAGEMENT in teaching handicaps students through high school. Instead of visiting a few schools with very good reading and math results to find out what works best, they hired consultants without looking at a good school, which is the best start in any important task. Few consultants are good. They are generally people who lost their jobs and they do consulting until they find a good job again. So the reading and math problem went unsolved for twenty years now, but we are starting again with the money-wasting approach! After rediscovering the problem again, they did the same thing. The problem went unsolved. The most effective and least expensive solution is to visit a couple of schools that have the best results both in reading and in all subjects, in the USA or anywhere in the world. It is important to visit and see the best. Find out exactly how they do it. In parallel find and read a few good articles about how they teach reading and math in countries with an excellent education system, like Singapore and Finland. They are much better than we are. Then you know what you have to do and how. One always learns best by observing the best people in the best nation, and then doing it yourself. Much better than any other method, it may cost the school $3-4K. Hiring a consultant will cost the school $100K-1,000K. It will not work, because to successfully hire anyone, you have to know how to do the job well and what has to be done. Unfortunately, in most schools, they know a lot less than what is required for excellent performance. When the 20-year ACT record is as bad as it is on the chart, you generally do not have the right people for high performance. Such people do not stay in a poorly performing organization. We will further explain a much more serious problem that the use of calculators created in children in mathematics will continue into adulthood.

The following information is to explain some things for the ACT chart and graph below. The ACT measures what our children learned from grade one to twelve. As an annual national test, the ACT is the test of choice for about half of our states, covering about 55% of all graduating students. It appears that most state tests are not good indicators of performance because the state departments alter them to show higher grades for less subject knowledge. We wrote to some governors as much as three times and we did not get a reply from anyone (re:"cut-scores").

Why is it important to know how the best countries achieve their excellent results in education?

The OECD PISA test is the most respected international test whose results cover the 73 best countries' educational performance plus the best four Chinese cities/provinces but not the average best result of China. About 50 years ago, I traveled on business to about 90 countries annually for about 40 years. 50 years ago, I saw American products valued the most in every country because they were indeed the best. We were operating our industries in an international market then, both in the USA and in other countries and even more so today. Our public education declined more since then, but we poured more and more money into it per student, and we became the highest spender in the world per student. Other nations improved their public education better than we did and passed us. Today, when you go to most stores, you see that most products are made in other countries. We lost entire markets to them (e.g. all heavy machinery, all electronics and others). Look at any product. We became the highest spender nation per student, which dropped our children's education and, therefore, our country's future to the bottom of the industrialized nations. Why? Because our education system and schools do not think that our schools compete with other nations' schools. THIS IS A HUGE MISTAKE. The high school graduates become employed by the workforce directly or through university education of various employers. IT IS THE EMPLOYERS' COMPANIES WHO KNOW BEST WHAT LEVEL OF EDUCATION THEY NEED TODAY AND IN THE FUTURE FOR THEIR WORKFORCES. US Education Management never seems to pay attention to this important fact or to things like the brain's neuronal network development, where unique capabilities develop at a specific age and in a specific sequence, between birth and about 20 years of age. Learning is possible later, but it is much more difficult unless you kept up learning. Such is the impact of using calculators in school instead of learning math very well. The brain is used for fairly complex mathematics and pattern recognition when critical thinking and decision making. And this is only one example of what kind of decisions have been made in our public schools. It is the workforce of companies and entire industries that create the products and services. If our workforce was educated well, if we kept our schools one of the best than other nations, we would be doing much better. If they knew what the best international education systems are planning and achieving so that our education system would be among the top three in the world, we would be doing much better financially as a nation. That also means a good tax income for our state and federal government. Today our national income is struggling around 3-4%, when it should be at 13-15%. To pay off our huge national debt, that will be $30 TRILLION by the end of 2020, we would need an additional 4% raising the needed national income to 17-19%. Many would say that this is impossible. People who are used to poor performance for decades always believe that they are doing their best. They don't know that the results always mirror how everyone does their job, and they all work very hard. What they don't know without extensive management training, which does not appear to exist in education for some reason, that they are working hard with 19th Century shovels instead of 21st Century machines that can accomplish a hundred times more with one worker with an easier job. Doing a job in an excellent, smart manner and creating excellent results is easier than doing a job that turns out bad.

Our country's future depends on how well our children are educated today. 15-25% somewhat prepared, like today, is far from enough. Why is it that those good men and women who are our political leaders, our public school management, and our lawmakers of both parties did nothing to increase the ACT and SAT scores to be among the best five countries in education when our spending per student is the highest of all nations?

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 50-70% minimum subject knowledge (ACT scores 18-23) of only four subjects (like 50-70% good answers in a test) called "ACT readiness," is not a sufficient minimum standard ANY MORE. 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. That is nothing compared to the level of knowledge we need for employment that can survive robotics for ten years. The level of readiness coming out of high school is not good enough. ACT Readiness cannot be ACT's doing because the state education departments are doing many things to create higher grades for less knowledge. The education system does not want to raise ACT Readiness because 75-80% of those children they graduate are not even ACT Ready. Consider also that ACT's income depends on our school system, and our public schools fight against any change to improve ACT scores. The education system in every state acts against any change or improvement. All the new technology areas are accelerating faster. The graduating requirement from high school needs to be ABOVE WHAT WE HAD A FEW YEARS AGO, WHICH WAS 60% achievement minimum in all high school subjects. We need central control of all standards in every state to increase our chances of recovery. WE NEED TO BE ABOVE 70-80% KNOWLEDGE LEVEL IN ALL HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS. OTHERWISE, IT WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR OUR INDUSTRIES TO SURVIVE. The nations we compete with have ACT 29-34 equivalent average results when graduating. Our high schools give a diploma to more than 80% of graduates in Tennessee, who are not even "ACT Ready" and that is below 60% knowledge level of four high school subjects only.

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 public education countries to learn how they are getting much better results. 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 ALL high school courses.

“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 score.

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 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 until 2024 only. 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 beyond Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics is 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.

This is our biggest problem. The signs are all around us. The old American courage is gone. The ACT results have been too low for 20 years or more. Neither party did anything to fix it. The ACT scores remained low. Our founding fathers' great ideas are trampled. Money is king. Too many of us worldwide hate and even kill each other for ridiculous reasons like different opinions, appearances, languages, or religious beliefs. We have been struggling with a historical problem for more than 100 years. A good education would be critical to fix it. Why is it that our children's education is not important enough for the governors from either party to raise the ACT scores for 20 years or more?! UNBELIEVABLE! Have we all become slaves to something evil? People with extreme wealth and the best education in small numbers can control anything. Not necessarily bad. The key to our survival is "our public schools must be among the best three worldwide in education." Read here how poor we are. And we human beings could have fixed all of this on a large scale, with the right leadership in every state. 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. The education system blames poverty for the bad education results. Not true. Bad education creates graduates for low paying jobs only. Bad education creates poverty. 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. We should not have slogans like "Excellent education for any child!" How about "POVERTY FOR EVERY CHILD!" It is a lot closer to the truth. The American public education system has been declining for a very long time, dumbing down the high school graduates, and "misinforming" parents and the public. The international PISA test shows us too far behind. An article in one of the major American education publications claims that we are number 1 in the OECD PISA 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." NO THEY DON'T! Their "representatives" convinced the public with promises that are not kept to give them money for advertising to fight and deliver the promises made. This kind of behavior is not so common. EXCEPT FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION. From governors on down, they delivered NOTHING that raised the ACT scores. Our public education is in 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?? "SPEAKING FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE" must be it! 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 a 23 ACT score at best, which represents only 22-24% good answers on a test, in 4 high school subjects only, which is very low performance. Why do you allow 74-84% 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. Not just 16-26%. They cannot even hang on to jobs for a month that way. A decade or so ago 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 high school subject. In the last few years, 74-84% of high school graduates do not even meet the four subject benchmark test that passes only 25% of subject knowledge called ACT Readiness. Do our political leaders and governors 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 NOT ENOUGH 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 EDUCATION. PUBLIC EDUCATION SHOULD NEVER EVALUATE THEMSELVES. IT IS THE EMPLOYERS WHO SHOULD JUDGE HOW WELL THE HIGH SCHOOLS ARE PERFORMING BASED ON A NATIONAL STANDARD THAT IS COMPETITIVE WITH THE TOP 3 COUNTRIES IN HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION.





• 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.





• 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 destroying 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 better performance change. 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 world's best 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 CEO 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 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 has 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 does not 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.





• 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 IS, 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 ACHIEVE ANYTHING.





• 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, impacting 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 a 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 improvement. 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 Buddhist philosophy of "What you think,...you become" becomes "What you believe,...you become" with conditioning. Boring classes create children who learn to dislike ANY SUBJECT, and without any solution to solve the problem, they learn to dislike that subject or subjects. 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! IN TENNESSEE, 84% OF THOSE WHO GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY, WHICH IS A VERY LOW PERFORMANCE INDICATOR. Moreover, we spend twice as much in schools PER STUDENT than in those with white students. SO I FOUND A SCHOOL CHAIN CALLED SUCCESS ACADEMI SCHOOLS, WHO TAKE ONLY POOR INNER CITY STUDENTS. GUESS WHAT KIND OF GRADE THOSE CHILDREN ACHIEVE? THEY SCORE ABOVE 90% AND ARE BETTER THAN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS. IF THEY CAN DO IT, SO COULD WE, IF WE HAD LEADERSHIP WHO ACTED IN COUNTRY'S BEST INTEREST. 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. That just means that elected school board members have no idea how to solve performance problems, don't want to learn how to solve such problems, but they do want the extra $25,000 dollars every year to spend on themselves. 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. The great majority of public schools are destroying our 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. New technologiesWe will cover this decision also in detail.

“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 scores!

OUR HARD_EARNED TAXES PAID THE HIGHEST RATES PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD, BUT PUBLIC EDUCATION 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 raise our MINIMUM high school ACT readiness to 80% of the graduating classes. ACT Readiness means that the graduating high school student passed only 4 subjects with an ACT score between 18 and 23, that is at or below 25% product knowledge in a test. To make it worse, 76-84% of our graduating children ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY meaning they don't even know 25% in four subjects only! The ACT scores show reliably every year what our children learnt by grade twelve. The state test results are dumbed down regularly by the state education department under the governor dropping the pass/fail points from 60% good answers to as low as below 30% good answers each year for one or more courses that produces higher grades with significantly higher grades for less knowledge. Let us mention here that a few years ago our children had to pass every single high school course in 4-5 years of high school above 60% good answers (D score), and in many schools at 70% good answers. We dropped with this and with many more actions/methods/practices the knowledge of public high school graduates very significantly. We will cover them all.

"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 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 TENNESSEE 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 quality of high school education must be the same nationwide. IS THIS WHY WE PAY MANY MILLIONS EACH YEARTO DUPLICATE DECISION MAKING AUTHORITY WITH PEOPLE WHO HAVE CREATED THE POOREST RESULTS DURING THE LAST 20 YEARS IN PUBLIC EDUCATION? SHOULD NOT WE MAKE ALL IMPORTANT DECISIONS IN ONE PLACE NATIONALLY WITH THE BEST PEOPLE WE CAN FIND INSTEAD OF WASTING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN DUPLICATION FOR INFERIOR RESULTS?



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 in the tests 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, is 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 could not complete 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 MUCH LONGER AND HARDER TO LEARN THE SAME THING AFTER AGE 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 OF OUR CHILDREN, 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!

“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.

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 encouraged 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