The Greek Symbol of Knowledge and Wisdom
Athena ~ 480 BC

SCHOOL SPENDING

 

The Greek Symbol of Knowledge and Wisdom Athena ~ 480 BC COMING EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY TRENDS   Robotics are spreading into many different industries, replacing even college graduates, reducing high school graduates' job prospects, since our high schools are graduating poorly prepared children. Too many cannot communicate properly, cannot perform basic math, are not reliable and have a bad attitude. See robotics. VERY STRANGELY the state Education Department appears to be doing some things that dumbs down the students, and we need to clarify such areas as soon as possible. Our student performance is limited by how well teachers are educated about the subject they teach, the latest teaching methodologies, and how capable they are to teach, such, that they TURN ON AND MOTIVATE the children to WANT to learn more. If a teacher does not know his/her subject far better than what he/she has to teach and cannot get excited about the subject he/she is teaching, he/she needs to be tested for match to the profession and if he/she is a good match than continuing education would be appropriate to a Master's degree in the subject. It appears that our teacher training is weak compared to many nations. It needs to be improved and working conditions for teachers need to be improved as well. However, improvement in working conditions and income is always difficult to achieve, without measurement of excellent results, and teachers do not want to be measured. See The teachers' challenge. "Things not going well with the education of our children" is an understatement. What would you do if, in the only hospital available to you, 80% of patients became infected with an incurable debilitating infection and die? And your child is sick, requiring hospitalization. Would you be very concerned? This analogy is better than you think right now. Public schools are the only option for many. Considering dropouts, more than 80% of those children who enter public school in grade 9 are unemployable when leaving high school. Parents should be VERY concerned! The education laws guarantee the school districts that they receive the same amount of money in the current year, then what they received in the prior year. There are no performance requirements. They have been doing a poor job much longer than for 19 years straight in the ACT chart we show here. As one can see on the ACT chart, with only some of the 80% of those who graduated "Not ACT Ready" can qualify at best only for short-term minimum wage jobs. According to employers, "today's high school graduates cannot read, write, communicate clearly, don't know basic math, and have a bad attitude on the job." Something is very wrong with this picture. Our school districts performed this poorly for more than 19 years. Public school management is so poorly prepared, that they cannot figure out why they cannot teach our children, and get educated and change so that you can do what a teacher should be able to do. We have been paying one of the highest amounts per student in the world for such poor performance. When we want to change some things within public education that clearly hold our children back, they threaten the politicians and do not change. UNFORTUNATELY WE BACK DOWN. We respectfully request that we immediately increase funding for schools that perform well, including charter schools, and raise the minimum performance we need from all schools such that if their performance is under minimum then we close that school. We have too many discipline problems, but do not want zero tolerance because some parents will be complaining. So we handicap the teacher instead and deliver bad results. A student went to the toilet during class, came back and threw feces at the teacher. The offender was sent home but showed up the next morning as if nothing happened. We have enough challenges with several things that must be corrected to give teachers more preparation time to achieve better performance. When you are all things to all people because they demand it, nothing will be done at an acceptable level. Education management does not want any changes, while their performance was unacceptable for decades. So guess what? Someone above them must make the decision to change immediately after a problem is recognized, and the person above them must have the authority to hire, fire or make changes in the organization.   A school's success with students is limited by how well-trained and motivated their teachers are. Some teachers may say that "I have taught for decades but these students just cannot learn!" That's the same as if a sales person said "I have been selling for 30 years, but no one bought." In addition, teacher training in the USA needs to improve both in subject knowledge and teaching methodology, because it is not competitive with the top 20 higher performing nations in education results. Our teachers come from the bottom third of university classes. Our competitors' teachers come from the top 10-30% with a master's degree in one subject that they will teach. IN FINLAND TEACHERS VOLUNTEER FROM THE TOP 10% OF MASTER'S PROGRAMS FOR BECOMING A TEACHER , AND SUCH VOLUNTEERS HAVE AN ACT 32 OR HIGHER EQUIVALENT AVERAGE, and will maintain the same high performance all the way to a Master's degree. The drop in school performance since 1970 in the USA reduced many families' earnings, increasing poverty in the nation. We forget the dumbing down result by state education departments, the loss of jobs and earnings, when we blame the education results on poverty.   Another contributor is school district boards of education not wanting to learn what to do and why, and we have been creating less and less educated people for five decades now or maybe longer. The states' education departments did not or cannot provide appropriate operating guide lines. In the top performing countries, such help is provided country-wide centrally, and not by school district boards. We must correct this situation if we want more employable people.     Another contributor is the state Education Department who dumb down the state test that was created to meet the requirements of the state curriculum. They do this with a method called "Cut Scores" to make the test easier to make the student scores higher for the public and to graduate more children. They also do another interesting thing. They require that the elected board establish objectives, but do not prepare a tutorial for the elected boards about what objectives to use, what needs to be monthly or annually, and also what an annual operating plan is, how to prepare one to make sure that the monthly and annual objectives are met. It is a wonderful tool to raise results, IF PREPARED PROPERLY.   We seem to support the philosophy that all decisions must be made by the locally elected school districts' board, because they, as representatives of the people know best what we need to improve education. We have about 13,500 different school districts nationally with elected boards as a sample of the population, and the entire population was dumbed down since 1970 or before. Look at the poor results. In 1970 we were on top in many areas. In 2016 we dropped to 40th as a country in high school mathematics. It is difficult to believe that the old philosophy of neighborhoods offering the best guidance when it is the population that has been dumbed down since 1970. So every single school district must do the work to reinvent the wheel without professional guidelines from the state education departments, or better yet nationally, to work together to reach the same standards to improve performance. What good advice is coming from locally elected boards to improve our high school graduates to be better than other nations? They create lack of focus on the right objective, and that can bring only bad results. That is what we have. It would be difficult to believe that intelligent people did not discover this decades ago, so the interesting question is why the governors did not correct the declining education problem for 50 years since 1970.   We must create an opportunity for better education through vouchers, tax credits and charter schools because public schools are not improving. There must be a function within the state ideally, or within the school district to have actual facts showing to the public which charter, or public or private school (vouchers) produces the best results. Increase the funding in schools that continue to provide better test results, and reduce the funding in those schools that are doing poorly. States and school districts must become much better in setting the right measurable academic objectives, like an ACT or SAT score that is 5-10% higher than the last one achieved. State guidance of school districts must become much better, the curriculum must be stronger, the teachers better educated with a master's degree in the subject they teach (and with continuing education) and better supported by their management giving the prepared teacher full authority about classroom decisions. Support teacher efforts in the subject they are teaching for a PhD. We must educate significantly more of our children with university degrees that are in demand. Not just any degree. That, in turn, depends on how well they do in pre-school, and in grades one through twelve. That is where we have a big problem with the great majority of public schools. Teachers need to check all students understanding while they are teaching, several times each day, so that they do not move on with unlearned material that can accumulate and stop that student's progress. We don't check the students' understanding of the material taught with every lesson in the classroom. This is one big difference between us and high performing internationals. For example, in Finland such students are switched to additional tutoring the same day after normal school hours until 6 PM.   Elected boards of education could not develop 80% or more of our children's education during the past 20-25 years to a good enough educated level, to satisfy the needs of employers or universities. We have more than three million open jobs. But employers cannot find well enough educated employees for them. Employers have been complaining during the last fifteen years that our public high school graduates cannot communicate in English properly and cannot even do basic math. Boards of education do not know how to set proper objectives that work or purposefully set improper unmeasurable objectives so that the school system CANNOT CHANGE TO ACHIEVE GOOD RESULTS. They cannot create a good operating plan with proper objectives to improve. The state Department of Education cannot provide guidelines to school districts evidently, as they should. The end result is that in the school districts no one changes the way they do their jobs and the results just keep going down. This could not happen unless the governors, state education and school districts' management DID NOT CARE ABOUT THE FUTURE OF OUR CHILDREN AS WELL AS OUR BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY. IF THEY CARED, THIS COULD NOT HAPPEN.   But the problem is much bigger than that. Neither elected school boards, nor state political leadership noticed a key error. Who educates/produces the students who will be graduating from high school? The schools do. Yet we do not have appropriate easy to understand monthly objectives, that produce good results, GPA-based, and operating plans within each and every school.   There is another big problem as well. Since 1970 school spending skyrocketed, but test results went nowhere. This has been going on for close to 50 years. What is the end result of such a practice for ten years, let alone fifty years, when the international competition has been out-performing our schools? The population gets dumbed down without even noticing it. We dropped from the top to 40th in the world as of 2016 (OECD PISA Tests).   After all this, do we still believe that the best way to guide education is through elected boards that represent the local public? This is a gigantic problem with education laws and management oversight by the state's political leadership and its education department, as well as school districts if the others do not provide it. Increasing our children's education is the only way out of poverty. However, poor education is the best way into poverty. Since 1970, our public education declined. That in turn increased poverty and spending to attempt to maintain our living standards. Our elected boards of education are not the only ones who could not solve this problem - and they should not be the ones. This is a huge mistake by governors, state education departments and by the congressional education committees in the states. No one recognizes yet that if you do not plan properly with the right objectives and operating plans, covering the areas that produce the results, YOU ARE ACTUALLY PLANNING TO FAIL. THIS HAS BEEN VERY OBVIOUS FOR DECADES. IT IS ALSO A HUGE POTENTIAL PROBLEM IN LARGE ORGANIZATIONS. We have been doing a very poor job in public education for at least five decades. Did that dumb down the public? Absolutely. Proper objectives and operating plans in schools could have prevented that. Did the dumbing down increase poverty by decreasing income? Absolutely. Whose responsibility was to prevent that from happening: state Departments of Education and governors. Was this accidental or purposeful? Mistakes this large are not made in large organizations. But state Departments of Educations could have made this mistake.   This is not a teacher problem. Some teachers are not suited for teaching. Many are great. School districts do not check that upon hiring a teacher. Too many teachers are discouraged by school district management, instead of being motivated by them. These are big management problems. Most are not interested in learning, like anyone demotivated, whereas in other fields/industries it is very common for employees wanting to learn more, even at their own expense. People who love their job do that. Too many students who could not produce good grades in their selected major in college, transferred to an education major because it was easier. On the other hand, in the high performing countries, they accept only the top 10% performers from the master's level programs for teaching, with a major not in education but in the subject that they would be teaching. That makes a huge difference. There are excellent learning sources out there for our teachers, or students. For example the company we list as an example publishes the best lectures from the best professors in any high school or college subject, and could be an excellent source: The art of teaching best practices from a master educator. Or an excellent company that produced more than 40,000 outstanding tutorials in primary and secondary school subjects, the Khan Academy. Both of these examples had major positive impact on teachers as well as students. "Next in importance to freedom and justice is GOOD public education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained." James A. Garfield (1831 - 1881) A child is born with a 100 billion neurons (special brain cells) in his/her brain. Almost all neurons he/she will ever have in life, unless exposure starting 90 days before conception to heavy metals, certain drugs, insufficient nutrition, cigarette smoke, or genetic abnormalities prevent enough brain cells from developing during pregnancy, creating learning disabilities. The exposure of the child to abnormal family behavior, absence of a loving environment, alcohol, heavy metals like lead in lead paint, continuing exposure of what we mentioned during pregnancy, and drugs will also have a negative impact on the child's behavior and ability to normally develop for life. From birth, brain cell interconnections start developing at a high rate until age 6, and slower thereafter for life. This is how learning, coping with difficulties, behaviors and personalities develop, and this is why the high performing countries create excellent preschool programs to start educating children through games very early in life, from age 3 to 7. We don't do that.     We do not prepare children as well for and in elementary school and later high school as other countries. We want to graduate them as soon as possible, and we have cases where teachers are instructed to change student grades for the better. Our elementary school performance ends up very weak, with continuing weakness in reading and mathematics, making high school learning more difficult. This process of insufficient foundation produces the poorly prepared high school graduates, and it makes college and job performance more difficult as well. We must eliminate this handicap by providing excellent preparation for subsequent classes, and stop providing an incentive for instructing teachers to alter scores in order to get more children advancing into the next grade faster, for faster graduation.     The state's focus on a 90% graduation rate, instead of focusing on a 5-10% ACT growth is creating this problem. It is not doing the state itself any favors. The graduation rate is not worth more than the ACT Readiness rate which is a function of the average ACT score achieved. Employers do not want children who are not educated well enough. They cannot take years to teach them.   WE ACHIEVE HIGHER GRADUATION RATES, 85-90% OF THOSE WHO ENTERED 9TH GRADE, BUT ONLY 20-30% of them are ready for job training, 80% will be ready only for minimum wage jobs, and virtually all will be replaced by robots in the low end jobs by 2020-2022. Why do this? The 12-13 year education costs us about $120,000-200,000 per child, and for that investment, we get someone unemployable who will need financial support until his life ends? It is interesting that our education did not recognize this problem and acted on correcting it in about 50 years to date. One wonders why it was and why it is ignored: Example1, Example2.   It appears that our leaders have not done anything for more than four decades to raise the most important indicators of education achievement, the ACT and SAT scores. Only 20-30% of our public high school graduates have a chance and only until 2020, to be trained for a better than minimum wage jobs. By 2020 robotics will replace most of the labor force in the fast food and other industries. Instead of only 20-30% of our graduates being prepared, we should be graduating 80-90% of our high school graduates with ACT READINESS, prepared to be trained for a job that provides minimal income for a family of four and the opportunity to obtain more education. Instead, 70-80% of our graduates with a diploma plus dropouts, are not prepared and will be replaced by robots in just a few years. Among African American students, 97-99% of those graduating from high school are not ready according to ACT and will not be employable. However...the Success Academy Schools in New York (41 schools) with poor, inner city, African American children ARE PRODUCING TOP 1% RESULTS BEATING EVEN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS. Obviously, it is possible to educate children far better than we are doing it, regardless of the color of their skin, without fear of law suits and without tolerating bad behavior. So instead of telling the public a lie about how well we are doing, show them the ACT performance charts we have here, and explain that achieving 20-30% ACT Readiness to be trained is nothing to brag about because those not ready will be unemployable. For that reason we cannot have discipline issues, because discipline problems interfere with the entire class.   URGENT ACTIONS NEEDED IN EDUCATION IT IS VITAL TO SHOW THE PUBLIC AND OUR EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS WHERE WE STAND COMPARED TO INTERNATIONAL COMPETITORS INSTEAD OF COMPARISONS ONLY WITHIN THE USA AND WORSE, WITHIN THE SAME STATE. WE DROPPED TO 40TH PLACE IN MATHEMATICS WORLDWIDE IN 2016. OUR WORK FORCE HAS TO BE INTERNATIONALLY COMPETITIVE, AND FOR THAT, WE DEPEND ON OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM TO MAKE IT HAPPEN. THEY ARE OBVIOUSLY NOT DOING IT.   "Things may come to those who wait...but only the things left by those who hustle!" Abraham Lincoln     "There is a plot in this country to enslave every man, women and child. Before I leave this high and noble office, I intend to expose this plot." President John F. Kennedy Seven days before he was assassinated. What did he know? THESE ARE THE GOALS OF THE TENNESSEE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION IN 2017 This is a totally unworkable statement of goals, unmeasurable and without a plan to deliver it. "We now launch a new chapter where we will build on the strong foundation in each of our schools and districts to realize our goals for Tennessee students. If we are successful: Districts and schools in Tennessee will exemplify excellence and equity such that all students are equipped with the knowledge and skills to successfully embark upon their chosen path in life." HOW DO YOU MEASURE "EXCELLENCE"? "ALL" STUDENTS?! WHEN 83% ARE FAILURES TODAY?   "This is our unifying vision: success for all students upon graduation from high school. This is how Tennessee Succeeds. To this end, we have set three ambitious goals to guide our work through the next five years: Tennessee will rank in the top half of states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), or the nation's Report Card, by 2019. No one succeeds with low expectation goals like these. We the USA are 40th in mathematics in the world, and Tennessee is 35th-40th in the USA. We have to do better than be satisfied with being in the top HALF of Tennessee. We need people in management positions to set goals and objectives that are a stretch, AND KNOW HOW TO MANAGE TO ACHIEVE IT. The average ACT composite score in Tennessee will be a 21 by 2020. The ACT 21 goal was set about 15 years ago for 2020, and we are almost there in 2016. The way to get to a higher goal is with annual ACT objectives on the school districts and monthly GPA objectives on the schools that represent a little stretch, like 5-10% increase per year. The schools do not have specific objectives, yet they are producing the results. CREATE A COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT. I cannot believe that this is the guidance from the Tennessee Department of Education. The majority of high school graduates from the class of 2020 will earn a postsecondary certificate, diploma or degree. We will accomplish these goals by maintaining the department's current emphasis on rigorous standards, aligned assessment, and strong accountability, and by focusing on five priority areas: early foundations and literacy, high school and bridge to postsecondary, all means all, educator support, and district empowerment. As part of this work, the department will continue to support the governor's goal of becoming the fastest improving state in the nation in raising teacher pay."     ***THE IMPORTANCE OF MANAGEMENT TRAINING*** AND EXPERIENCE If one worked in a small company with only 15-20 people, one may encounter some people problems, some misunderstandings, but one can be successful. If one is in charge of 200 people, and 15-20 times more customers, the situation will be completely different. There is a management exercise where six people stand next to each other 5-6 feet apart. The instructor whispers a message into the ear of the first of those six people, who whispers into the ear of the second person's ear the message he/she heard, until the message is whispered from the fifth person to the sixth. Next you compare what the first person whispered to what the last person thinks he/she received, and they are different. So communications has to become more precise and in writing about everything important in the larger organization. The person heading the group will no longer have time to personally make sure that all things will get done with the quality required by the customer, the organizational and people problems will grow, communications from the top will change and will be reinterpreted as they pass through a couple of layers of management, the president and the management team has to ensure that all things are done legally, anticipating needs and planning projects will need to be done much more formally ensuring excellent execution, because "people do not do what you expect, but do what you inspect". People may or may not be different than their boss and they may interpret things differently then the boss, so written communication becomes much more important, written standards become more important, and the written policies about how we do things within the company become more important. Some people produce excellent quality work, on time, every time. Generally they are the people who are an excellent fit for the job and coworkers, and they are happy in their jobs. Some do not fit well. But if you keep changing them, people turnover is very expensive. It can easily cost 6-18 months (more for mid-to-top level managers) of salary because it took time for the performance to decline and become a terminal case, for the manager or employee to decide that the job and employee are not a good match. A company of 200 people will not be investing $500-$1,000 dollars in testing the employee and his/her background to ensure that they hired the right person. Then you hire the person and some jobs can take a year or more of experience just to adjust to the ways the company works and does business. It is the management training that allows one to eliminate such problems or to provide methods for excellent, trouble free performance - TO GET THE MORE COMPLEX THINGS DONE, INCLUDING THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE RIGHT OBJECTIVES WITH PROFESSIONALLY CREATED OPERATING PLANS. Without these nothing will happen or improve, and morale may sink in the area that produces the company results, e.g., in the classrooms of a school district with the teachers. That was a very simplified description of what happens in a 200 person organization. The complexity of management problems increases with the number of employees in the organization. At 9,000 employees, things get much more complex, and without management training or guidance good results become "impossible" and politics enter the game instead of good performance. People do not recognize the problem, and produce worse results than they could with a little bit of management know-how. Unfortunately, such problems are many in school districts, hence the poor results. OBJECTIVES THAT DO NOT WORK This is where poor performance starts. Based on each objective that follows below, how can you tell what is needed, quantity or quality required, and by what kind of person and when. These objectives sound good, but they are unmeasurable, so anyone, based on their opinion, could decide if they were achieved or not. These objectives are unmeasurable, unrealistic, and unclear. These objectives do not measure anything that the curriculum includes, and that by itself disqualifies them as objectives.   Success Academy Schools is achieving top one percent results with poor, inner city black children in New York City, beating even many private schools. They raise the children's expectations from grade one on, by referring to them as scholars of the year in which they will graduate from college. Every child believes that they WILL go to college and will achieve great things, and every teacher reinforces this. It is a fantastic way to motivate kids. THE FOLLOWING ARE EXAMPLES OF POOR OBJECTIVES Because they are not measurable or specific, or not the key indicator of success through K-12 schooling. Board members many times describe great personal qualities or meaningless qualities or nice personal characteristics, but neither of those can be measured for achievement, and they have nothing to do with school achievement, so they cannot be an objective for a public school district. "Knox County Schools (Tennessee) will provide an educational program designed to help each student to be college and career ready upon graduation from high school. Through implementation of the Tennessee State Standards, students will be able to: Read a variety of complex text, both literary and informational, to build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities and broaden their perspective; Communicate complex information in a clear and articulate manner using effective oral, written and media skills; Develop conceptual understanding, procedural skill and fluency, and application skills in mathematics and science to solve complex real world issues and problems; Participate effectively in civic life with a solid understanding of world geography, economics, history and finance; Develop positive habits that support good physical, mental, social and emotional well-being; Appreciate and participate in the arts; Pursue the acquisition of world languages; Effectively use current and emerging technologies to access, manage and create information;" Think creatively and work collaboratively with others; Demonstrate flexibility, adaptability, initiative and self-direction; Demonstrate a commitment to lifelong learning and personal excellence; and Develop the 21st century skills necessary for a successful transition to college and/or career. Many of the above are good skills/traits, but they are not objectives for a school district. Can one describe how to measure them without bias, what each of them is, how to achieve them, how to tell when each is achieved and how well it is achieved (how does one measure progress toward achievement)? The above examples indicate that management does not understand why objectives and operating plans are necessary for achievement. Objectives must be a 1. key indicator of success, and 2. be measurable. How do you know what you need to do competitively if you know nothing about the high performers and how they are achieving their great results? The world has changed a long time ago, and because we know nothing about where we should be, we are in the gutter ruining most of the children's lives through our public schools. Most of our public schools are "FAILURE FACTORIES" unfortunately. Just look in the graph at the beginning that shows a list of high schools and the high percentage of graduates who are NOT ACT Ready. Those poor children will not be employable long. THIS SHOULD BE DONE ACCURATELY IN EVERY AREA BELOW: Important actions and questions when interviewing superintendent candidates If one is 40th in the world, with others moving forward faster than you, it would be impossible to catch up. The best way to improve one's position is to visit the competitors, study how they are achieving superior results, and implement and use their superior methodologies. Educational methodologies and practices are free from legal problems, if what one is planning to copy and one learns from the other countries' education system. ACTION: One has to be honest about performance history, and pick new candidates who have delivered significantly better ACT results than what we have delivered. This principle must not be violated. Take ownership of the fact that Knox County, TN (as an example, but consider your county), consistently picked poor superintendents with insufficient management training and experience, AND delivered poor results. It is not a good idea to celebrate in public the arrival of a new superintendent for 3-4 years as Knox County, TN did the last time in 2008, especially when no one checked his background. We celebrated the arrival of a new superintendent for 3-4 years, calling him a Miracle Maker without knowing that he will do well or not. He did not do well. Yet it was known from the start that he never even managed a single school, and was not management trained, when our opportunity required the management of more than 80 schools with more than 8,000 employees. The qualification mismatch created many conflicts around him. These are the most important indicators about what you will actually get. Most board members never paid attention to such indicators and picked the wrong candidate EVERY SINGLE TIME, because the board selection committee was inexperienced in several important topics, like interviewing skills for a CEO for a 9,000 employee organization, or recognizing every year that the ACT results were poor. ***ACTION: The management skills (e.g., having a successful principal who delivered excellent ACT results as a superintendent candidate) are very important for small organizations up to about 100 employees, but management training and experience becomes key to success as an organization grows beyond 100 employees. We have close to 9,000 employees at Knox County Schools, and we have never picked a superintendent who had at least 5 successful years with increasing performance, with at least one-third as large organization as the new organization will be. So the people-management skills were totally missing, and so was the knowledge required to improve the key indicator of success, the ACT score, for the school district. They will keep selecting failing superintendents unless they pay attention to picking someone who managed a school district that was greater than 3,000 employees and delivered growing ACT performance that was always above the Knox County Schools performance. Ignoring these important elements will continue the same poor trend: picking an unsatisfactory performer. ***ACTION: If one picked ineffective superintendents with poor ACT results every time, and one keeps selecting a new one the same way, a poor performer will be picked again, and you will get political games in behavior instead of good results for our children. That is exactly what we have been doing. ***ACTION: A good candidate already examined the organization before the first interview. Ask him/her about what she found about our strengths and weaknesses and what we need to do in detail to improve. If they cannot answer, we have the wrong candidate. ***ACTION: A good candidate will be very relaxed and will not get upset about any question you ask. Don't hesitate to test that. ***ACTION: Prepare the candidate's ACT/ACT Readiness record for the last five years. Has he delivered at least 0.5 point higher steadily improving average ACT result for each of five years than we did, in a school organization with at least 3,000 employees? For example, the Hamblen County candidate's school district ACT performance was significantly below ours. How on earth will he be able to do better for us? Also, do not bother with any candidate who changed jobs every four years or less. Superintendents have minimum job durations around three and a half years. Unfortunately, there are not too many out there who are good and looking for a job. I wonder if anyone looked up the ACT performance for the candidate to be interviewed. If good candidates are available, don't waste your time on a candidate who was not a superintendent or director of schools, or had less than 20 schools under him/her. That is the most important question.   Our own past performance tells us that we never picked such a candidate before because the selectors did not have the training and experience on the management side to recognize the importance of this fact, and if recruiting firms were used, the results were less than ideal. The above example about objectives or goals the Knox County Schools and our results indicate that no one on the board and no interim or permanent superintendent was or is schooled AND experienced in managing more than 100 employees with success. If they did, then we would see suitable objectives, operating plans, and far better results. ONE CAN SUCCEED ONLY IF ONE OPENLY RECOGNIZES "IN PUBLIC" ONE'S OWN SHORTCOMINGS AND WHAT HE/SHE DOES NOT KNOW, AND THEN TAKES ACTION TO CORRECT THOSE SHORTCOMINGS. ***ACTION: Do not be in a hurry to hire. If you do not have a good candidate, continue searching. ***ACTION: An external candidate always looks better because we know very little about him/her. On the other hand, we know about all warts that an internal candidate has. That is very good because you get no surprises. The key thing is to listen carefully to the internal candidate's idea about what needs to be done to raise our bad results. ***ACTION: One can do a quick background check about any person's public record at intelius.com ***ACTION: Talk to his/her references, and find out if they know others who are familiar with the candidate? Call these "secondary" references to find out about what the candidate's successes were, and in what areas the candidate needs a little help to become more effective? ***ACTION: What mistakes has the candidate made during each of the last three years, and what did the candidate do about them? ***ACTION: Has he/she managed an organization for at least 5 years that has at least half as many employees as the new organization has, and managed it with good results? Our organization is about 9,000 employees, and having managed successfully for 5 years minimum one third as many employees is a suitable prerequisite. ***ACTION: The management part of a job becomes far more challenging after having managed at minimum a 100 employee organization, and increases in difficulty as the number of employees increase. ***ACTION: Unfortunately if someone did not manage a hundred employees in a growing organization and did not have management training, they would not understand this problem as well as someone with experience managing 100 or more employees. ***ACTION: The management training and experience with at least a 3,000 employee organization for five successful years is also vitally important. Those who did not have such experience may not understand the importance of this question, although it is the most important question in an organization of this size. ***ACTION: Teaching experience, AND having been a principal of a school for at least 5 years WITH EXCELLENT RESULTS EVERY YEAR, are also useful experiences if the candidate did well, and such experience should be present. ***ACTION: But the management experience in an organization that has 9,000 employees is far more important. Those who do not have management experience with successful results in any of these areas, will not do well. If anyone claims two years of successful experience in this area, it is too short to be meaningful. If someone claims five years of experience, with poor results, do not hire that person. ***ACTION: If one does not check a candidate's background, then let such person work for your competitor and not for you. Unfortunately, in education, such people are everywhere, in important positions - doing a poor job. We hope that Leroy in the above picture will not be the selected superintendent. But...you never know. We had some Leroys in the past and so did many other school districts. HOW DOES AN EDUCATION SYSTEM JUSTIFY THEIR POOR JOB-RESULTS WITH STUDENTS BEING SO POORLY PREPARED THAT 75-85% OF OUR GRADUATING CHILDREN ARE NOT PREPARED FOR FURTHER EDUCATION OR JOB TRAINING?! BUT THEY ALL GET A DIPLOMA FROM THEIR SCHOOL! The answer: ***ACTION: THIS MUST BE FIXED. 1. By giving children a much better education than what we provide today. It is not possible that 75-93% of a graduating class is too stupid to learn. 2. By lying to the public as in printing everywhere "Excellence for all children!" and by the superintendent (J.M.) telling the public that "we are doing well, a strong B average" when neither claim is even close to the truth. 3. By having a PR/Communication group within the school district that publishes positive stories about the schools, detracting from the ACT scores that tells us the truth. At one time, the school district under superintendent J.M. had nine full-time professional PR people.   ***ACTION: Employers have been complaining about the poor quality of high school graduates for more than ten years, and our leaders did nothing to improve the ACT scores. What is a fact is that close to 80% of our children, who are unprepared for life, are the product of our public schools, and that our education system is not good enough and must improve rapidly. It appears that our state and school district management does not feel that our teachers and schools need to improve, because they graduate 80% of the children who are not prepared. ****ACTION: Many excellent tutorial programs are available from Internet sources, like YouTube, or the Learning Company or the Khan Academy. They are designed to hold the child's or adult's interest and some are the lectures/presentations from the best professors and teachers nationally. Tutorials in any subject could be very helpful to student or teacher alike. They could be incorporated into the teaching and learning programs in all subjects we teach in primary and secondary schools, except sports. The best company in this area appears to be the Khan Academy. Google them. They cover every subject from preschool to high school graduation. They also have a collection of impressive tutorial programs for teachers to help them accomplish more in less time. For those in education management, read here what the best education systems are doing in the world differently. How many teachers and education system employees read and used in the past the tools presented here? Sadly, very few. Unfortunately most of us unless we are old enough, feel that we know everything, although we have very limited education and experience. Too many people are not interested in learning, a product of dumbing down for close to 50 years. School board members are not an exception. It is not their problem. It is the problem of old laws, and the state education departments whose senior staff is neither schooled nor experienced in management to be able to provide needed guide lines. ****ACTION: Your child is your child. He or she is not an adult. You, the parents are the decision makers at home. The teachers are the decision makers in school. There needs to be zero tolerance of bad behavior in school. The schools are NOT the providers of baby sitting services. The children's future job and income will depend significantly on how much they have learned in high school. Make sure that they work hard.   We have one of the highest rates of poverty in the world (see below). Blaming poverty for the poor school performance is not a good idea when it is the poor education that created a large part of the poverty. We recognized that education is poor for more than 20 years. Why have we not done anything that raised the ACT scores? We also noticed 22 years ago that we have a reading problem after grade 3, and it is still there when students are graduating from high school. We spent about $15 million on consultants. Today the problem is still not solved. We need to sober up. Most problems are not solvable by money. They are solvable by people who know how to solve the problem. We have about 3,000 teachers. And we don't have any who knows how to teach reading?! And we don't have any teachers who would know how to get the children excited about every subject that we teach? THAT IS VERY BAD.   ***ACTION: A drop in our education since 1970 must have effected job readiness for a large number of vocations. The only thing that can increase employment and earning-ability is a much higher education level. We have more than three million open jobs because our employers cannot find suitable educated candidates. The deterioration of our primary and secondary public education is turning into a very poor investment of millions of our tax dollars. But that is not all the damage. There is a lifetime loss of income that could be associated with the dumbing down of the public, that could be extremely damaging financially, all because public education has been mismanaged. ***ACTION: New technologies eliminate many low-end jobs, and open up many new jobs with better pay. The new jobs require more education. In 2016 we had 3.5 million jobs that employers could not fill because our high school performance was/is very poor. Poor education decreases income and leads to poverty. Too many public schools are "failure factories", that do not train our children well enough for jobs. Increasing education is the only way out of poverty. However, poor education is the best way into poverty. Since 1970, our public education declined. That in turn increased poverty and spending to attempt to maintain our living standards. ***ACTION: The right education must be completed first, before we can expect to get a job. Income will depend on the education one gets. Low end jobs with a high school diploma will be replaced by robotics. By 2020, a number of jobs will also go to robotics, e.g., in healthcare, accounting and others. During our life, continuing education with higher degrees will be the only way of life in the future. Continuing education does not mean additional degrees. It means additional knowledge obtained by any means. ***ACTION: Children's success with education depends the most on how well teachers are suited for teaching as a career, how well they are educated and kept up to date about the subject they teach and with improvements in teaching methodologies included. Teachers must be excellent motivators, which means that they cannot be struggling with low morale as they do today. School district management must be much better trained in management of people, to resolve teacher problems that exist today.   ***ACTION: And now please look at the percentage of graduates from each of the Knox County, Tennessee public high schools who are ACT Ready and the percentage who are not ACT Ready. Remember that ACT Readiness means only a 50-75% chance to finish ONLY one course of the first year of a tech/vocational program or a college program. This excludes even the first year of science or engineering programs in colleges because they have a much higher ACT mathematics score requirement than the ACT Readiness benchmark's math requirement. Those who are not ACT Ready, will not be employable longer than a few years with the following. ***ACTION: Looking at the charts on the left and above, the ACT Readiness percentage is very low for those who graduated with a diploma. We are pushing children to graduate instead of being properly educated for the work place or college. Isn't that foolish? It is not what parents want. Parents want 100% graduates with a diploma, all of whom are ACT Ready. Only foolish people would say "90% graduated AND 27% of them are ready for job training or further schooling, but 73% are not ready but maybe they will get a minimum wage job." So four out of five children graduate not ready today. However, the ACT Readiness of African American students is extremely poor, only one or two is prepared out of fifty. THIS IS A DISASTER. Note that a charter school chain in NYC called Success Academy Schools, that started in Harlem in 2006, with 41 schools as of 2016, is achieving a TOP ONE PERCENT result in the NY State Common Core Tests in mathematics, WITH POOR, INNER CITY AFRICAN AMERICAN AND HISPANIC CHILDREN. THEY ARE PASSING EVEN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS! At the same time, we are getting a bottom 2-5% ACT Readiness result only in our public schools for African American and Hispanic children. IT IS POSSIBLE TO PROVIDE FAR BETTER RESULTS THAN WHAT WE ARE ACHIEVING IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. IT CAN BE DONE, IF A FEW PRINCIPALS VISIT THEM TO FIND OUT WHAT THESE HIGH PERFORMERS ARE DOING TO ACHIEVE HIGH RESULTS. Success Academy Schools have a zero discipline-problem policy. Teachers have excellent benefits and compensation, and expected to do a good job. Some parents don't like the "zero discipline-problem policy".     ***ACTION: A minority of teachers do not like the work-related expectations. We would humbly suggest that you cannot have excellent results with children who are a discipline problem, who disturb all children in a class, and you cannot have success without teachers who have been well trained in the subject they teach, who work hard, AND LEARN ABOUT HIGH PERFORMING COMPETITORS, BECAUSE THEY ENJOY AND WANT TO BE EXCELLENT TEACHERS. Our board of education members (mostly teachers in Knox County, Tennessee in 2017) do not even want to visit the Success Academy Schools to find out why they are getting a top one percent result, because those who produce the bottom 2-5% ACT Readiness result (the Knox County, Tennessee school board) feel that they will learn nothing that could improve their dismal 2-5% ACT Readiness with black students! And we just touched on the biggest problem with our public school performance: most teacher training is poor (at the US university level), when our universities tend to be one of the best in the world in most subject areas. Teachers NEED TO BE matched to the teaching profession. Too many go into teaching because they cannot perform in the major they originally selected. Teachers need to be recruited from the ACT 30 and higher results from high school. Teaching needs teachers who have a master's degree in the subject that they would be teaching. That is what brings success to the other countries that passed us. Teachers need a "zero tolerance for discipline-problems" policy, that must be there for good results. More details later. ***ACTION: According to ACT, nationally 74% of graduating high school students, among them 95% of the African American students, were not prepared in 2016 but for close to minimum wage jobs that robots will replace in a few years. IS THAT ACCEPTABLE? In NYC a school chain is getting top one percent results with poor, African American inner city children! We could do much better if the elected boards uniformly acted using the same standards to achieve the kind of results that we should have. In Tennessee the state goal for more than a dozen years was to reach an average ACT score of 21, by 2020!! The ACT Readiness percentage of graduating students at ACT 21 is around 25% only, with 75% not ready. That's no improvement. Just look at the chart. Such a "no improvement", very low goal means that the management has no idea what to do to improve. Our children's education is out of control in public schools, but the education districts through the newspapers tell the public that "we are doing fine, but there is room for improvement." If you live in another state, you are not much better. I fear the time when soon we will have to deal with too many jobless young people, and the public will discover that they were fed lies by the education district, while poorly educating our children for which we, the public paid many billions of dollars. We are forgetting what happened to the public since 1970 and forgetting that we fell all the way to 40th place in the world, weakening our workforce, the general knowledge of our population, our products and services. We are getting dumbed down by the public education system, for which WE, the public, paid and pay. ***ACTION: Our national income dropped as a result to a "break even level" for about ten years we are told. Not quite. The national debt rose at the same time to more than 19 trillion dollars as of 2017. Let me see if I understand this in very simple terms. We keep spending as long as we have some money. Unfortunately we kept spending on the wrong things, not on things to ensure a good future national income, LIKE MAKING PUBLIC SCHOOLING EXCELLENT. Our public schools kept producing poor results while spending many billions of dollars. The education departments and school districts were and still are telling us at the same time how well they are doing. The majority of high school graduates can get only minimum wage jobs for a short time. McDonald's piloting of robot solutions showed customer preference for communicating with the robot more clearly, the robot could "upsell" the customer, AND robots did a better job for less money, increasing net income almost 20%. Not a problem! We did not and do not stop spending on things that do not improve education. We "borrow" money (using Treasury instruments to sell the debt), because our tax income is poor, and increasing taxes when we are the highest in corporate taxes in the world, a very bad move. What we "borrow" becomes "The National Debt". It is about $20 TRILLION now in early 2017. It is so high that we had to pay over $258 billion dollars in interest on it in 2016 (that's $167,000 per tax payer!!) the national debt interest is payable FOREVER at our current interest rate that was 6% in 2016. Just imagine what we could do with $258 billion, instead of paying interest to countries FOREVER every year who purchased our debt (or "loaned us the money"), with China and Japan being the biggest. The interest rate is too low and it is likely to increase. The national debt is also likely to increase more, in order to strengthen national income-producing activities and our weakened military. ***ACTION: The elected board members' great majority doesn't know (and the state's education department does not provide or also doesn't know): where we stand vs. the best international competitors, what the higher performers do differently than us and why , how to hire the right superintendent for a school district with 200-10,000 employees (a medium to huge management job), who knows how to increase our poor results because he/she was educated for it and has done it for minimum five years , how to set objectives that work, how to prepare operating plans that work, how to improve teaching methodologies, how to keep employee morale high and do all of it by facing and telling the truth. Elected board members get paid for it, e.g., $25K/year in Knox County, Tennessee. They do not want to or do not even think of learning what the high performing school systems do differently worldwide to get better results, and are not even willing to visit a much higher performing school in New York City to learn how they achieve their fabulous results. By doing so, they have been throwing most of our children under the bus, with very few exceptions. For the average ACT score of 21 in Tennessee, a state goal for more than a dozen years, if reached, we would get 74% of our high school graduates plus 5% dropouts not being prepared by their school system to be trained for a job, for which us, tax payers, paid $10,000-$12,000 per year for each and every student. HOW CAN A GOVERNOR ACCEPT SUCH A LOW ACT SCORE OBJECTIVE LIKE 21, FROM THE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT THAT GUARANTEES 79% OF THOSE WHO ENTERED HIGH SCHOOL TO BE NOT PREPARED TO BE EMPLOYED?! That is a lot of money, for which we must and should get better results. "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered. The point is to discover them." Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer & physicist (1564 - 1642) ***ACTION: There are too many tests. Some measure correctly (ACT, SAT, NAEP, and OECD-PISA internationally), and some show better grades for public consumption (the state tests that are dumbed down with Cut Scores or because they are easier). ACT checks its scores against what the tested high school student achieved a few years after graduation and adjusts its ACT Readiness benchmarks if needed. Their scores and Readiness percentages are accurate. Because the emphasis is on graduating as many children as possible instead of emphasis on academic achievement, we do have a problem with grades being changed for the better by teachers, principals and support for the same by their Central Management. This problem could be solved if the test is taken on a computer under a program that does not allow changing of grades without identification of the person who authorized the grade change (Examples). ***ACTION: We graduate close to 90% of those students who entered 9th grade in high school. Only 26% of our public high school graduates (and ONLY 5% of black students!) were "ACT ready" nationally in 2015 for training to go beyond a minimum wage job. The necessity to graduate more children is discussed at board meetings. Teachers have been mysteriously instructed from "above" to change grades so that some students who would fail, actually move on to graduate. The educational performance, the ACT results were and are terrible, because state set average ACT goal of only 21 (equals 24-27% ACT Readiness only). It should be an average ACT score of 25 or above (80% ACT readiness). In twelve years we never heard of any board meetings where increasing the ACT scores, and what we need to do to achieve that was discussed, and a plan was agreed upon to do so. Most of these poor students will be replaced by robots within a few years. As an example, in Knox County, Tennessee, the board members are paid $20,000 salary plus $5,000 for expenses and car allowance every year, but they never have time for discussing how to improve the poor ACT scores. Their results are worse than the above results. The public is not informed about this fact. They just pay for the poor education with their hard-earned money in taxes. We were one of the top performers worldwide in 1970. What we see today, the poor performance, the lack of relevant knowledge and interest by elected board members, the state education department or governors to correct the poor academic performance by taking steps to increase what counts, the ACT scores, is revolting. Although we became the fifth highest spender in the world per student by 2015, we, the USA, dropped to 40th place in mathematics that our public schools delivered (2016 OECD PISA tests). Some states like Tennessee, our example, are worse than that. All governors and many locally elected boards and superintendents hired started programs that "will improve education" with additional spending of many millions of dollars, all state tests were made easier to qualify for federal funding (No Child Left Behind Act) and a big effort is made to date to identify learning disabled and children of poverty, because the school district can increase the federal cash they receive for such students. School districts also proposed programs that would permanently increase the school districts' budget annually under the law. No governor of either party stopped the aggressively growing education spending in 46 years or started increasing ACT or SAT scores, that went nowhere! The old education laws gave (and give today) all management decision-making to the elected school district boards in every state along with a guarantee for them to receive at least as much funding as they received in the prior year, regardless of performance. The old education laws that no longer work were not amended. There are approximately 13,500 school districts in the USA, all doing their own thing, but very few who do it well. The requirement to be elected to them is a high school diploma only. Central management is bloated compared to what is defined by two authorities and presented (below). What appears to be motivating school districts is to increase the money they can spend any way possible, then push the students through each grade qualified or not, so that they can graduate 90% - with readiness for job training or further education of only 27% of those who were given a diploma!! The remaining 73%, plus those who attended but did not graduate, plus those who dropped out will be replaced by robots before 2020. Obviously our school districts are interested in money (we became the 5th largest spender per student in the world), and are not interested in the knowledge they teach our children (that is why we just dropped to 40th place in the world). We did not improve the schools; we did an excellent job developing FAILURE FACTORIES. One of the latest programs to improve the education of our children is a free additional two-year college education program. Remember that children learn and pickup all kinds of behaviors and habits as they increase their brain capacity during pre-school and the following 12 years of education. Without correcting the elementary and high school education, many children finished with limited knowledge below what they should have for high school graduation, bad attitude, bad ideas like a feeling of entitlement, and they learned all that in their FORMATIVE years. Two years of additional education cannot correct the formative years' behavior problems and poor study habits, but it may provide almost enough remedial training to improve the odds for a job short-term. Since it would be a miracle to educate those children who did a poor job in high school, it will provide a limited benefit, but at a very high price. To get a full benefit, the money should go to fixing the pre-school, elementary and high school education itself, make it competitive with the best internationals, such that we graduate from high school better educated children, including a good attitude toward work. Then consider a remedial program for those who finished high school previously. Putting only a "band aid" on mistakes after the fact is never a good and efficient solution. THE BIG QUESTION IS: WHY ARE WE NOT FIXING THE MANY FAILURE FACTORIES, CALLED PUBLIC SCHOOLS? CHARTER SCHOOLS AND VOUCHERS. Charter Schools are also public schools. They are less restricted by state and federal laws than traditional public schools. However, many are forced into a working relationship with the low performing traditional public school districts. Any such connection should be avoided. Public schools have an elected board. Charter schools have an appointed board and that can be an advantage. The need for these measures arose because the public school performance was/is dismal and over several decades they were not corrected. Private schools produce an 85-99% ACT Readiness. Public schools produced a 0-50% ACT Readiness of those who graduated. Charter schools had very mixed results but improving during the past 19 years. Of the top three high schools in the nation, two are charter schools. Some but very few charter schools can perform better than most private schools (Success Academy Schools, New York City, 42 schools in 2017 for poor black inner city children with top one percent results!). Their teachers, and superintendents come from poorly performing public education, with teacher training that is less than what the top international school systems are doing (Master's in the subject they will teach, psychological tests to match them to the teaching position, more graduate level training on learning disability diagnoses and the latest about teaching methodologies - before they start teaching in a few high performing countries). The only thing that will remove the need for charter schools and vouchers, is public schools who exceed charter school performance and deliver 80% ACT Ready graduates instead of just 25-27%. What will remove public schools will be the good charter schools, vouchers, home schooling that produce much better results on the ACT and SAT tests than the public schools did. LET'S DIGRESS TO EXPLAIN A FEW THINGS THAT ELECTED BOARDS NEED TO UNDERSTAND FOR SUCCESSFUL PERFORMANCE     PAY VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO WHAT FOLLOWS. So far what we see is expenses skyrocketing yet the ACT or SAT education results, the only annual tests that shows what children have learned, did not go anywhere in about fifty years. Our international competitors improved significantly as we are about to see below. We dropped in high school mathematics to 40th place in 2016 of 73 nations, from the top in 1970. The state-set performance requirements for schools are too low. That is an average ACT score of 21, that produces upon graduation only 25% of those who earned a diploma minimally ready. The state does not have appropriate objectives and operating plans to reach a 21 ACT score, so they could not reach it now for more than a dozen years. When the objective is too low to motivate or wrong, one cannot stop the poor escalating performance. It is like chasing a big bolder downhill on a mountainside. Most such children would not be accepted by employers if they graduated. Those children who do not want to work or are a discipline problem, should attend different classes or handed back to the parents so that our teachers have a chance to produce better results. We must change being a baby sitting service, and create excellent ACT scores instead. Why do we allow public schools to exist without closing them if more than 50% of their students with a high school diploma are not even prepared to be trained for a job?! WHY DO WE GIVE STUDENTS WHO ARE NOT READY A HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA? Why do we continue operating high schools at public expense for MORE THAN TEN YEARS if more than 90% of their graduates cannot be prepared for job training, AND WHY ARE WE SPENDING TWO AND A HALF TIMES AS MUCH PER STUDENT ON THEM THAN IN THE BETTER PERFORMING HIGH SCHOOLS? IF THE INCREASED SPENDING MADE NO DIFFERENCE FOR 2-3 YEARS, DON'T WE KNOW THAT WHAT WE ARE DOING IS NOT WORKING?! IT IS A FACT THAT MONEY IS NOT GOING TO THE RIGHT PLACES AND/OR FOR THE RIGHT PEOPLE IN THAT SCHOOL. HIRE A SUPERINTENDENT WHO CAN IMPROVE THEM SIGNIFICANTLY WITHOUT SPENDING MORE THAN DOUBLE PER STUDENT. Why do we make excuses for such poorly performing public schools instead of making changes to improve their results? If a superintendent cannot make such changes within a couple of years, one needs a different superintendent, instead of letting hundreds of children become uneducated to survive. We hear objections against "corporate ideas" in education, but no one can explain what these are. It would be better if public schools and leadership worried more about their results and improved them. What corporate ideas are detrimental to education achievement? We must try systems that we have not tried to improve education. If one is against something, then offer a better idea! Or better yet, visit the best three countries in education, and learn how they do it. Many different schools and programs offer higher ACT READINESS than most public schools. Why should not the public, who pay for public schools via taxes, be able to choose a different school such that their child will succeed instead of having to attend a poorly performing school? If you don't like such choices, do something to make sure that the public schools perform better. Why should anyone support schools that prepare our children so poorly that the great majority, as much as 95% of the students, are likely to become homeless? We pay more than twice for more than a decade per student in the poorly performing schools without any improvement, than what the good schools spend per student. Is that good management of the people's money? If something does not work for two years, the money is not being spent in the right places, or the goals, objectives and operating plans are absent or wrong. If it does not work after two changes, then you have the wrong superintendent.   For almost 50 years, as the CATO study showed, our primary and secondary education deteriorated. The school districts kept delivering good news to the public, as one by one 39 countries went past us as we dropped to 40 place, the bottom of the international countries. During all that time we just kept spending more money per student and today we are the fifth highest spender per student, delivering poor results. That means that we became accustomed to the poor performance and we do not even see that when the result of such poor performance is loss of competitiveness with barely breaking even as a nation in national income for the past ten years. So we turned to debt and set an enormous record by driving our national debt to $20 trillion dollars. We must become more competitive, and start rising again in the national rankings. Today, our education is so bad that 74% of our high school graduates will not be able to exist financially and cannot compete with robots and more and more countries as a result. For several decades now, our strategy became one where we simply throw more money at a problem - and the problem does not get solved. We have been pouring more and more money into low performing schools, two and a half times as much per student as the better performing students get. And for decades, such extra spending did not create a change for the better. Why? Because we did not change the way we actually run our schools, teacher subject knowledge and teaching methodology and the way we handle student behavior that interferes with teaching and learning. It is good to see that some principals managed to turn around their schools. We should be able to learn a few good lessons from them. But we as a nation must do better and get back among the top ten nations in high school math, where we used to be four decades ago. References: A list of schools that were turned around, and how their principals did it. Mathematics in art: The Fibonacci Curve, is one of the most important curve lines in famous pieces of art, in architecture as well as in nature, and in astronomy. The curve is superimposed on a galaxy that is about 100,000,000,000 light-years in diameter with as many solar systems within it that have planets. Today we can conclude that we have about 100,000,000,000 such galaxies in the universe. There are an infinite number of very interesting things out there that all of humanity could benefit from, requiring many highly educated people in related jobs - instead of fighting, killing each other and living in poverty. HOW DO WE COMPARE TO OTHER COUNTRIES IN THE EDUCATION OF OUR CHILDREN AND THEREFORE WORK FORCE QUALITY?     The knowledge of high school graduates depends significantly on the standards a country sets. Many of the foreign countries teach more under the same subject heading than we do. A parent told us that their two boys went to two different high schools in Knox County, Tennessee. They took the same courses, but in one school they covered much more material in the same course than in the other school. I sat in on 16 math and science courses. The teachers' subject knowledge, teaching skill and ability to motivate students from preschool to high school graduation needs to improve. Teachers told us that a student went to the rest room and when returned, threw feces at the teacher. The punishment was for the parent to take the offender home only for one night, and the offender was back in class the next day. Unbelievable. We, the U.S., dropped to 40th place internationally in mathematics. We need to improve significantly. The quality of our workforce depends on the quality AND amount of K-12 education. The quality and competitiveness of our products and services depend on the quality of our workforce in all of our industries. Our national income depends on the quality and competitiveness of our products and services in a domestic and international market place. Our national income depends to a great extent on the quality, education, and subject knowledge of teachers, and their ability to communicate with and motivate students. Isn't it obvious that we should be comparing our high school output to the best performing countries in the world and the way we teach and manage education to the best international competitors? Instead we always compare against our own poor 40th performance in the world. Our fourteen thousand different elected school boards set objectives that cannot be measured, but no problem! They do their own performance reviews. No wonder that the results are so poor, as we are graduating more and more students each year. Isn't it a necessity to be competitive worldwide today with our high school results, since our industries depend on our high school graduates in order to compete with the best worldwide? Why don't we visit the high performing internationals to find out how they achieve excellent results but we do not? Why don't we learn from them and then make some changes? Read about one of the best, Finland's education system.   "When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity". Dale Carnegie Technology like video conferencing, the Internet, airplanes made almost every country easily reachable in the last few decades. The world has become "smaller". Anyone can sell in any country products or services that can meet local requirements, and we compete against products or services from other countries here in the US. A worldwide competitive product or service must ensure that it has a well-trained workforce that is better than its competitors worldwide. The competence of the workforce depends on how well educated they were coming out of high school and how much they improved after that in additional schooling and years of experience. We were on top in 1970, but in mathematics we dropped to 40th by 2015 internationally of 15-year-olds of 73 countries (OECD PISA). According to the 2014 World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report on 149 nations, the USA is: 41st in Quality of Primary Education, and 66th in Primary Education Enrollment Rate. We do not educate all of our children as some claim, but a list of countries do. 49th in the Quality of Math and Science Education, 49th in Secondary Education Enrollment Rate, 18th with Internet Access in Schools, 12th in Extent of Staff Training (teachers), 9th in the world in grade 4 mathematics (but becoming 40th by the end of high school!), (TIMSS - Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study given every four years), 12th in grade 8 (TIMSS) math of 49 nations and The fifth highest spender per student in 2013 of 65 nations. These are the latest figures as of 2016. The big challenge for the USA is high school performance where we are 40th (OECD PISA) of 73 countries or 49th of 149 countries (World Economic Forum) in the world. WHY IS IT THAT WE DID NOT TAKE ACTION TO CORRECT OUR SHORTCOMINGS IN EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN DURING THE PAST 46 YEARS SUCH THAT THE ACT AND SAT SCORES CONFIRMED SUCH ACTION'S EFFECTIVENESS? Hong Kong, Macao, Shanghai, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan methodologies may not be culturally transferable to the USA, because the high achievement is the result of parental pressure, e.g., homework until midnight, and getting on the train to school by 6 AM. In addition, Shanghai tests and admits only the highest performing students into its public schools. The graph below provides an international view of expenses per student per country. The US is one of the highest spenders, but unfortunately, our performance is poor. THAT MEANS THAT THE MONEY IS NOT SPENT IN THE RIGHT PLACES. Delegation of responsibilities does not mean that we can turn our back on it by trusting the individual to whom we delegated. "Trust but verify." - said President Ronald Reagan. Many elected board of education members, nationwide, don't know what ACT or SAT scores mean, and they believe what the superintendent says without knowing if it is fact or not. They certainly could not "inspect" how a school district is doing on a monthly basis, since there are no monthly measurable academic objectives in our public schools EVERYWHERE, AND THEY ARE PRODUCING THE RESULTS. In some countries like Finland, teachers are more educated, the teaching methodology is different and much better than in the US, and a teacher knows exactly how each of his/her student is doing DAILY as accurately as with a test. If a student is slow, extra help is provided immediately. Therefore no testing is required. Our education board members could inspect the ACT (or SAT) scores annually and insist on them improving, but most do not even do that. ACT tests 64% of our children nationally as of 2016. Their 2016 results show that 74% of high school graduates nationally are not prepared for higher level education and future training for employment - they are not ACT READY. In Tennessee the ACT scores increased slightly, because the state allowed students to retake the ACT a second time. Making it even worse, many of them have bad work attitude, a feeling of entitlement regardless of how well or poorly they do their job, they are depressed, no ambition, in addition to poor English communication and science knowledge and don't even know basic math. It is not enough to demand jobs, if people during their young days are not willing to work hard in our schools and learn what employers need. Just look at the very poor ACT results of Tennessee and its Knox County below. One cannot ignore the impact of robotic automation from 2016 on ACT Readiness. Robots will increase the qualifications needed for the jobs that remain, hence the importance of much more science and mathematics knowledge and higher student achievement that will be needed from those graduating from high school. This will become necessary to remain trainable for frequent job changes to higher level vocations, because the lower level jobs will be replaced by automation. If you are not certain about what ACT readiness means, please click on the following and read it: Explanation of ACT scores and ACT Readiness Take a good look at the above chart results if you were an elected board member at the time in this school district. The NOT ACT Ready percentage of diplomas indicate how many students of those who graduated WILL NOT be prepared for the first year only of a tech/vocational school or college and pursue any science or engineering related course. What we have is a very high failure rate that we call "NOT ACT Ready" based on those students who already earned a diploma and graduated high school. There is another version of NOT ACT Ready, that is based on all those who entered high school in grade nine. Increasing the ACT scores to improve the poor results is the most important task of an education board in our opinion, yet this problem is not discussed and a plan of action is not created at education board meetings to do so. Approving spending bills is a large part of every board meeting. Do you really think that these were good results? The superintendent worked for you, the board. You gave yourselves, the board, and the superintendent good performance reviews for these results every year. About 80% of the graduating children, including 98% of black children, are and will be having a terrible life because you did nothing to ensure better results as board members. A school-chain called Success Academy Schools in NYC is achieving top one percent results with poor, inner city black children, passing even most private schools in New York State. New York State is the 5th best performing state in the US. As a board member in Knox County, Tennessee, you are paid $20,000 annually, plus another $5,000 to cover expenses and a car allowance in Knox County, Tennessee. Yet board members cannot afford to go and visit Success Academy Schools in NYC to find out how they are achieving those high results with poor, inner city black children when black children in Tennessee achieve only a 2% acceptable result? Something is very wrong here with public education. Such inaction about educational performance is building a powder keg that will blow sky high. The low national income cannot support the amount of social services in welfare that our very high percentage of those not ACT ready (74% nationally plus dropouts) put on the street with the help of robotics that replace them. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing!!" Edmund Burke, Irish statesman, 1776 The chart above shows the Knox County, Tennessee school district's annual results and ACT readiness. Look at the high percentage of high school graduates who are "Not ACT Ready". These are terrible results for the county, but the state is even worse! Yet no one does anything about it. The school board gave itself and the superintendent excellent performance reviews every year based on these results. Yes, they all set their own objectives and then performance reviewed themselves every year. See ACT scores and readiness explained. Those not ACT Ready are trainable only for close to minimum wage jobs that will not last long. Unfortunately such jobs are beginning to be replaced by robotics in 2016 and virtually all will be replaced by 2020. Robotics will make success increasingly more difficult for ACT Ready high school graduates to succeed and impossible for those not ACT Ready. The only path to reasonable success between now and 2020 is to have students take two more science and math courses beyond the core curriculum, initiate an excellent preschool program for all, and strengthen primary school performance without rewarding earlier graduates. The chart below shows the poor ACT readiness within each high school in the same school district. The best high school has only average readiness, and the worst has not a single student ACT Ready! IS THIS THE RESULT WE WANT FOR OUR CHILDREN?! This is shocking. It is rather obvious that measurable academic objectives do not exist for this school district and for any of its high schools. It is impossible to deliver good results without such objectives and school level operating plans in the hands of school management when one is dealing with poor performance like school districts within the entire state of Tennessee and in other states.   In the graph on the left, we show a poor five-year average ACT score history and ACT Readiness of each high school in Knox County, Tennessee. We spend more than twice the amount of money for each student in the two poorly performing high schools - for more than a decade now. Why don't we spend only one percent of that money we spend in one high school, go up to New York, visit the Success Academy Schools. They are achieving top one percent results with poor black inner city children, beating even most private schools, in the entire state of New York. Some teachers do not like this school. They have excellent benefits, good salaries, but they have to work long hours, generally 8 AM to 6 PM. WELL, WHO SHOULD DECIDE IF WE SHOULD IMPROVE OR NOT AS THIS SCHOOL DID? NOT PARENTS BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT INFORMED OF THE REAL SITUATION WE FACE. SCHOOL DISTRICT MANAGEMENT MUST DECIDE. WHY DO WE EVEN ASK SUCH A QUESTION WHEN WE ARE DOING SO POORLY? UNFORTUNATELY, SIMILAR HIGH RESULTS FOR WORKING LESS HARD IN POORLY PERFORMING STATES LIKE TENNESSEE AND KENTUCKY, IS NOT POSSIBLE ANYWHERE. The graph below shows a thirteen-year annual average of each high school also in Knox County, Tennessee with performance going nowhere but down. It is rather obvious that neither the state of Tennessee, nor this school district had any effective management controls, the right objectives and operating plans in place to date. It is even more obvious that either we hire state Education Commissioners who are not prepared for the job or the governor does not like their suggestions. Consider that the worst performing high schools spend more than twice as much money per student as the higher performing ones FOR THIRTEEN YEARS OR MORE, WITHOUT ANY IMPROVEMENT. They just keep delivering lower ACT results year after year. What is the major contributors to this failure? The wrong or no academic objective, the 90% graduation rate, and poorly trained teachers in the subjects they teach. If you push children through high school when some may require a year or two more, you miss the most important thing - their education. The result: lack of A HIGH ENOUGH ACT SCORE OBJECTIVE leads to the poorly educated high school graduates and that leads to poor employment for life. We spend more money per student in Knox County, Tennessee than the great majority of the top 19 countries in education, whose cost of living is higher. They cannot even read well enough by the time they graduate. Although our spending per student is the fifth highest in the world, in mathematics we dropped from the top in 1970 to 40th as a country with disastrous results. That means that we spend a lot more money than they do, and we deliver much worse education to our children. The education they get is so bad that three out of four graduates have only 3-5 years of low end employment before robots replace them for the rest of a 40-45 year working life beyond high school. The poor results indicate that WE DO SPEND ENOUGH, BUT IT IS NOT BEING SPENT ON THE RIGHT PEOPLE AND PROGRAMS. Our "ACT Readiness" is only 24-99% of those students who graduated with a diploma. What is the logic behind graduating 73-99% of the students who are NOT ACT Ready and therefore will not have a chance for any job in a few years? IS THIS ACCEPTABLE? We do a poor job in education with one of the highest expenses per student in the world. That means that a large portion of the education money is not spent in the right places and on the right, well-trained people. Who are we helping with such an outrageous long-failing system for many decades? Not our children, not their teachers, not the quality of our workforce and therefore not our economy or country. BUT WE CERTAINLY ARE BUILDING ONE GIGANTIC POWDER KEG! With the years passing, most job requirements and related education increased as robotics and software automation replaced lower level jobs, and as new technologies created new jobs. ACT changes one or more of the four benchmark target scores to define ACT Readiness accordingly. Such a trend will continue in the future, but faster. According to ACT, in Tennessee 83% of the graduating students (98% of black graduates), plus those who did not graduate, plus dropouts are not prepared to be trained for a job as of 2015. Nationally, 94% of black children (74% of all children) who earned a high school diploma, plus about 10% who attended but did not graduate, plus dropouts, were not prepared for anything other than close to minimum wage low skill jobs, and have no chance to finish even the first year of any tech/vocational training or college. ARE THESE ACCEPTABLE RESULTS? ONE WONDERS IF STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENTS AND ELECTED SCHOOL BOARDS UNDERSTAND THE HUGE PROBLEM THEY ARE CREATING BY NOT ACTING ON IT. Some people blame this on parents and poverty. But a 42 school system in New York City called Success Academy Schools takes ONLY poor, inner city black and Hispanic children. They scored TOP ONE PERCENT in the NY State Common Core Tests, PASSING EVEN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS! They have a waiting list of more than 19,000 families! There are no inner city areas that are more difficult than Harlem in New York, where this school system started in 2006. The responsible people for the poor performance are the governors, the education subcommittees in legislature, the state boards of education, the state departments of education and the elected district school boards. A very large percentage of our children will be replaced shortly by robots as a result of our poor public education, and because we did not fix our poor education a long time ago. We are not developing the great majority of children in our public schools (very few exceptions) for the future that they will face. We are creating soft, undisciplined and poorly educated children to face a tough world after high school. We are developing a huge powder keg that is about ready to blow up on us. In 2015 we had more than three million jobs we could not fill because our companies could not find well-educated potential candidates (Click here for report). Our schools need to understand that they are preparing a "product" called a student, who are required by the "customers" called employers and/or universities for further learning, to supply what employers need. The ACT is a test used by 59% of graduating high school students to show how well they are prepared for employment or further education. The poor ACT results indicate that no one in political leadership either cares or understands this fact and are doing nothing about it. It is totally unacceptable to spend $120,000 of the people's money MINIMUM per student for twelve years of education, 74% of whom are not ACT ready nationally to be trained for a job. With robotics coming now to replace fast food and higher level jobs, the 74% unreadiness of high school graduates will rise. (Click here for report). Product and service competitiveness depend on the workforce's education. At the upper end PhDs design and make the products...and they all depend on the quality of high school graduates they produce as a nation. With only 26% of the graduating high school students being ACT READY in the USA, we have been doing a very poor job having our children educated for many years, and Nanotechnology will have an additional major impact by 2020, requiring more education, impacting the great majority of jobs. Our children's education declined, but robotic artificial intelligence (AI) passed average human intelligence in 2015 and their cost dropped below minimum wage. Fast food companies plan to automate every store fully. For example, McDonald's plans to replace 25,000 stores before end of 2017 or about 500,000 jobs. However, we are beginning to see robots that replace people with a graduate degree, e.g. new fighter plane pilots, nurse anesthetists and even anesthesiologists. We cannot expect teachers to do their best if they do not have full authority to deal with student discipline problems decisively on their own, and if they are loaded down with paperwork, too much testing to reduce their preparation and teaching time. Performance evaluations cannot be done 3-4 times a year without such evaluations being student results-based. After all the purpose of the teachers' and the schools' existence is to provide excellent internationally competitive education for our children. THAT IS NOT THE CASE TODAY. JUST LOOK AT OUR ACT OR SAT RESULTS. "A nation can be no swifter than its progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource."   John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) Thirty-fifth President of the USA It would be reasonable to expect that all 3.5 million children who graduated nationally from public high school with a regular diploma, would be (ACT) Ready for job training or further education. Unfortunately, 74% or 2.59 million of our graduating children are not ready each year, and we wasted more than 31 billion dollars per year covering their TWELVE YEARS SPENDING $372,000,000,000 to graduate children who are not prepared (there is no adjustment to constant dollars because the twelve years of education could shift back or forward. These are very low conservative assumptions and the real cost will be higher). They will have minimum wage jobs for a couple of years and then...NOTHING. Robots will replace them. There are very few public high schools nationally who are exceptions. The public should be aware that private high school graduates have 85-99% readiness. But they cost $8,000-15,000 per year. Since the public pays for the poorly performing public schools, the public would deserve a voucher or tax credit in the entire amount of the public school average expense/year/student, if a parent wishes to have his/her child educated in a private school instead. We feel that we, the public deserve a good enough education for our children, that supports minimally a family of four, and improves each each year to make it possible for our children to qualify for the better jobs that new technologies will create. What the public does not deserve is for 2.59 million of its children nationwide to be sentenced to failure factories for schools EVERY SINGLE YEAR for whom we paid $130,000 constant dollars per child or $336.7 BILLION DOLLARS of the people's hard-earned tax dollars, and be ruined for life by the poor quality of public education. A third of a TRILLION dollars is an enormous amount of money that is wasted per year, increasing annually, preparing children poorly, compared to many other nations. Our graduates cannot communicate properly and cannot even do basic math. We are one of the highest spenders per student in the world, and dropped to 40th in the world in performance. Just look at the numbers we are presenting. They are the government's numbers. How many decades do we need to wait and accept such a poor job that we, the public are paying for? We cannot afford to wait. We wasted a lot of money for more than four decades on these failure factories we call schools. We could change for the better. We need changes urgently. There is a new development that most of the public does not know as of 2018. A new class of robots have started to replace many low-end jobs in 2016, some of which require a college degree, not just a high school diploma. How do you think those 2.59 million children will survive, who are not prepared well enough each year? We have been competing worldwide for decades. Our education management, teaching methodology is about 100 years old. Others improved, especially after WWII. We dropped to 40th in high school math in the world in 2016 because we did not improve teacher preparation, the way we teach and manage school districts and schools, as many other countries did and passed us. If we want to learn about how to become better, look at how the best in the world are achieving their fabulous results, like Singapore and Finland. Study how they do everything in education and adopt their methods. Their methods are transferable to US culture. Then you will have an excellent chance for improvement in student results. We are enclosing here a comprehensive document from Finland, one of the best systems in education in the world. Try to read every page of every link in it. This is how the best countries in education plan and conduct the education of its citizens. Click here to read it. AS TIME PASSES, THE WORLD IS GETTING "SMALLER", AND MORE INTEGRATED, MORE FAMILIAR WITH EACH OTHER'S CULTURE We are moving toward faster technological developments that bring with them faster job changes. Jobs replaced by automation at the low end, and many new jobs open - but they require more education. That means that the fundamental education children get in primary and secondary school needs to create a stronger, much better foundation of knowledge than it has created to date. We need to teach at least as much as in the honors courses to all, not just in science and math with an expanded curriculum, but also with music and art to develop both hemispheres of the child's brain. This is important for good decision making and creative thinking. We are talking about it, but we are not doing it. We compete worldwide but we compare ourselves only to US results and US ideas. Our high school graduates dropped to 40th in math in the world. Dropping to 40th in math when you are the fifth highest spender in the world per student, raises serious questions about how we spend our tax dollars to deliver such a poor result. What percentage of public school students who take the ACT in the US are ACT Ready upon graduation? ONLY 26%. What percentage should be ACT Ready? AT LEAST 80%, but preferably all students who graduate with a diploma need to be ACT Ready. Since our high schools feed the workforce-needs of all industries, the poor high school output is destroying us from within. "The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." Albert Einstein SOME THINGS HAVE TO MAKE MUCH BETTER SENSE IN OUR SCHOOL DISTRICTS. WHY DON'T WE ELIMINATE THINGS THAT DO NOT MAKE SENSE AND DAMAGE US? DO MORE WHAT HELPS US INSTEAD! When a school district picks low expectation objectives like a 21 ACT score, THAT IS MORE THAN 10 YEARS AWAY, you have a board and superintendent who have no idea how to set the right objectives in each school, how to organize an operating plan to achieve that objective to achieve better results. Why are our education standards so low that we cannot produce 80% minimum ACT Readiness instead of 26% among our high school graduates? Look at Finland whose methods overcome even most learning disabilities. "Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is TO TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO LEARN" Peter Drucker, 1909-2005, Father of 21st Century "Management By Objectives" ACT (or SAT depending on the state) SCORE IS THE BEST INDICATOR OF THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR CHILDREN'S PUBLIC EDUCATION Look at the above graph. In 2006, ACT indicated that their empirical research (comparing ACT scores to jobs or additional education the student was able to obtain some years after taking the ACT) shows that college entrance and workforce training have the same requirement in English and math from 2006 onward. That has changed over the years, because ACT started using a four-subject benchmark test for READINESS, plus university degrees in engineering and science require a higher ACT score in mathematics than the ACT Readiness benchmark in mathematics. ACT defined the additional benchmarks for and definition of "Career (job) and College Readiness", that indicates what CHANCE (not a guarantee) the ACT READY child has to finish the first year only of a college or tech/vocational school. Those who are NOT ACT READY (and DO NOT meet all four subject benchmarks) do not have a chance to finish the first year of any tech/vocational or college program and will have spotty minimum wage employment for a limited time. Robotics will replace them. Passing only one benchmark means that the student does have a chance only to finish the college freshman version of the same subject only as the benchmark that the student passed. However, in addition, the robotic technologies that many US companies have already contracted by 2016 will replace them rapidly. Some of the new robotic applications are replacing jobs FOR THE FIRST TIME that require more than a college degree (anesthesia robots, already installed in some hospitals, however some robots that are involved in healthcare will have slower growth because of public acceptance). We will see more of such applications within a year. Artificial intelligence passed average human levels in 2015 and it is growing faster. Under these circumstances, those who graduate from high school even ACT Ready, will not be employable within a couple of years at most, unless we increase both the high school curriculum and increase the material within each course of the curriculum significantly, and increase the teachers' subject knowledge to Master's level and improve teaching methodologies, to the same level where the top performing international education systems are. With the above poor results - just think about this for a moment: we have poor ACT performance leaving most children behind - not just 51%, but 76-85% and among African American students 96% are left behind. There will be a big price to pay for such negligence! Investigating how the best school systems achieve their results worldwide is NEVER discussed in board meetings to improve what we do. School board members never take ANY TIME at school board meetings to discuss and plan how we could improve our poor ACT scores. Do you think they are interested in doing better? The evidence is not encouraging. "A lie told often enough becomes the truth." Lenin (1870 - 1924) THE PUBLIC PAYS THE HIGH, INCREASING PUBLIC EDUCATION COST. THEY DESERVE THE TRUTH AND BETTER SCHOOLS WITH A MUCH HIGHER ACT READINESS. One cannot solve a problem long by covering it up, or by "packaging" it in good news for those who are paying for it, the public. Unless...those in charge don't want to or don't know how to solve it. "A half-truth is a whole lie" is a popular proverb that has been directed at newspapers and politicians since the 1880s. However, the majority in public education management beat them all. For example in the Knox County School District, Tennessee, 76% of those who graduated with a diploma in 2015 are prepared only for a close to minimum wage job. They will not even have a chance to finish the first year of a tech/vocational school or college per ACT. A new generation of robotics will replace them in a few years. At the same time the superintendent published everywhere, including on his letterhead, that we provide "Excellence for all children" and knowingly and purposefully told the public that "We are doing well, a strong B performance, but we have room to improve". It was a lie about actual school performance. Tennessee did celebrate the highest growth in the USA in 4th and 8th grade NAEP test scores one year...but we were still below the USA average, which we did not mention. Nor did we mention the fact that Knox County did not even take the test, yet some people and foundations partnering with this school district used it as if they did and this was a county achievement. We as a country should also consider that we dropped very significantly from other nations to 40th place in mathematics. In 2013, the same school district set an all time low average ACT score record at 20.2. The ACT is the most important test. It shows what our children learned from grade one to twelve. No one said a word to anyone about the all time low ACT score in 2013. The bad news and the complete truth was and is ignored. Anything that sounds good is published by the school district communications group. What the public gets is a lie, when all this poor education and the lies about their results are created with the public's hard-earned tax dollars within the education budget. SIDE NOTE: Please remember that tests are designed for a specific subject or group of subjects in accordance with the curriculum of the state in which the person studies and/or takes the test. In other words, they are designed such that a 90-100% score would merit an "A" and anything under 60% would be an "F", a failing grade. Test designers are professional people generally with a master's degree in the subject for which the test is created. Unfortunately, some states are changing grades based on what they call a "Cut Score" where a low score like 45% may be changed to a "B" to make the school system look better, and the student loses. Then they celebrate the "B" openly in the newspapers!! TCAP state test results for Tennessee show approximately double the score of the national ACT or NAEP tests, because they are much easier tests. The TCAP's rigor or toughness was 58% lower than the ACT. In other words, the much easier state test shows much higher grades, putting into good light performance that is a disastrous failure. As a result, we hurt a very large percentage of graduating children who are not ready for a meaningful job or for more education without two years of full time remedial courses. Praising and calling a superintendent a Miracle Maker with our TCAP results is not a true representation of the actual results for which the public is paying with their hard-earned tax dollars. Frankly, one would reasonably expect a more truthful representation made to the public in an article like the one below, by any journalist or especially an editor or publisher of any newspaper. The ideals and standards of journalists have changed unfortunately. All the above shows a planned, willful and purposeful misrepresentation of the truth, to create an impression that the school district is doing well, when, in fact, it is doing very poorly according to ACT's impartial college readiness figures. The misrepresentation starts with the Boards and superintendents of school districts who are not telling the entire truth. The public is paying for it. The public is misinformed PURPOSEFULLY with partial truth using the easy tests that provide higher grades. Tennessee is changing those tests in 2016-2017.     THE SHOCKING COST OF ONE CAREER AND COLLEGE READY PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE'S EDUCATION WITH A REGULAR DIPLOMA One will not survive at minimum wage. With robotics taking the low paying jobs, those not ACT Ready cannot survive. If 80% of graduates are not ACT Ready, then eight out of ten high school graduates will not make it under robotic pressure in the job market. But we will be paying for the education of all ten in our example. Therefore the expense of developing one ACT Ready graduate will actually cost five times as much as one graduate. The average per student cost in Tennessee is above $10,000 per year including capital and interest expenses. We will assume $10,000 for easy calculation. For twelve years the cost of educating one student is $120,000. Remember that we pay for all students. Those students who do not test ACT Ready, will be short term minimum wage material. Therefore the cost of 12 years of education for those who leave high school who are not ACT Ready, becomes part of the cost of all those students' education who ARE ACT ready. to be trained for a job or go on to college. We spent $10,000 per student in 2016 in Knox County, Tennessee that included almost all education-related expenses. These expenses are rising every year. This is the public's money - our tax dollars. Under these conditions, the 12-13 year MINIMUM cost of one career (job) or college ready high school graduate, with a regular high school diploma is sky high, because we also pay for those students who dropped out and those who did earn a regular diploma, who are not career or college ready according to ACT. THAT makes the cost of one ACT Ready student in specific demographic areas as high as presented hereunder, because of the ACT Readiness percentage in a specific demographic area is so low. We did not consider inflation adjustment on these dollars because the twelve year education could be spreading to the past (less $) or future (more $) in different degrees, and the future ACT Readiness may vary up or down. One ACT Ready Black Student: $3,960,000 One ACT Ready Hispanic Student: $1,200,000 One ACT Ready Average Student: $600,000 If All Students Were Ready Like In The Top Ten Nations In Education One ACT Ready Student would cost: $120,000 - $140,000 ...because we also have to pay for the many students who are not prepared and not ready in the same demographic group. If 75-98% of those students who earned a regular diploma (plus dropouts, and those who "finished" high school but did not earn a diploma) are not ready to be trained for a job, then our diplomas are worthless - and they are. So why push a 90% graduation rate? That means very low income for the majority of those entering our high schools with increasing unemployment and a huge negative impact upon our economy for lack of a well-trained workforce. RECOMMENDATION: The state focuses school districts on achieving higher graduation rates. THAT IS AN INCREDIBLY POOR STRATEGY IF THE STATE WANTS EMPLOYABLE CHILDREN TO GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL. THE TEACHERS ARE PUSHED SO HARD THAT THEY ARE EVEN INSTRUCTED TO CHANGE GRADES. THE RESULT IS THAT THE ACT SCORES SUFFER, AND 83% OF THE GRADUATING CHILDREN ARE NOT "ACT READY". THEY ARE UNEMPLOYABLE. THIS IS SO STUPID THAT IT BOGGLES THE MIND. IF EACH SCHOOL SET A GPA OBJECTIVE THAT WOULD BE 10% HIGHER THAN THE LAST YEAR'S GPA PERFORMANCE, THE GRADUATION RATE WOULD GO UP AND SO WOUILD THE ACT SCORES. SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT THE WAY WE TEACH THEM IN TENNESSEE. THERE ARE MANY JOBS - WE JUST DO NOT HAVE WELL ENOUGH EDUCATED CANDIDATES FOR THEM. In the USA, 74% of our schools are public schools, 22% are private schools and 4% are charter schools a form of public schools also. The lower skill manufacturing jobs have been disappearing to robotic and software automation for more than two decades. More and more low-end jobs will be replaced by robotics and many new jobs will open with new technologies faster and faster, but they will require more education on the high school level, not just what we know as job training. There were more than three million jobs open in 2015, that could not be filled because employers were not finding candidates with the education that they needed for such jobs. Such new jobs will require a much better education coming out of high school than what public schools deliver today. The stories about good education are true only with very few public schools. What's going to happen to our children? THREE OUT OF FOUR OF OUR CHILDREN ARE BEING LEFT BEHIND TODAY IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN ADDITION TO DROPOUTS. What is going to happen to our state and country? I fear the answer to this question. The poorly educated workforce, mostly untrainable (80% per ACT), is a major concern of corporations who are paying most of the taxes. To do well, they need a well-trained workforce. They are holding onto cash instead of hiring. To survive, they will have to expand elsewhere or move entirely, or depend on the new generation of robots. This trend just started happening. Expect such changes happening here on a much larger scale. We will not survive the poor objectives and lack of a professional annual operating plans on the school district management level. It is common in high performing nations to hire teachers who have a Master's degree in the subject that they would teach, come from the top ten percent of their Master's major, and then they send them back to grad school for learning the latest in teaching methodologies and in some cases diagnosing learning disabilities as well. US teachers come from the bottom third of four-year college programs that are the easiest. The graph above shows a demographic breakdown of the unreadiness percentage of those who graduated from high school nationally. The results are horrible nationally because all states and school districts operate the same way with poor objectives and poor plans. You are looking at a powder keg, that is about to blow up. Our employers must go to robotics, because our graduates not only cannot do the job, they are poorly educated, and they have a bad attitude. If they do not go to robotics, they have to leave and go to where the workforce is better trained - or close the business and no one will be employed. But...in New York City there is a charter school chain with 41 schools in 2016, that started with one school in 2006. They are called Success Academy Schools. This school is scoring top one percent passing even most private schools in the entire State of New York WITH POOR BLACK AND HISPANIC INNER CITY CHILDREN! Anyone with such high performance will have plenty of critics. Misbehaving children who disturb entire classes are gone. So are teachers who do not meet their high standards. Guess what the public wants? They want their child to have an excellent education and future. Obviously our traditional public schools have no idea how to provide excellent education to our children of ANY COLOR, and the states are not doing anything about it! They know however, how to spend more money each year than the majority of the top performing 19 nations in education. What do you think will happen when robotics will dump 50-80% of our children on the streets because they have been poorly trained in our public schools? This is very likely to happen by 2020-2021. The countries that passed us in education, teach significantly more advanced material per subject per year than we do. Unless we bring up both teacher and student knowledge with a tougher curriculum and life-time education for degrees that are in demand, we will not be economically competitive against robotics in problem solving, critical thinking, decision making and job skills by 2025. Poor results shown in the above charts are unacceptable. In Knox County, Tennessee, and in many other school districts and states, we just keep dumbing down the population with the poor results from our public schools, as the elected school boards keep giving themselves and the superintendents an excellent performance review for the poor performance, and increasing education spending every year. As a remedy, some governors announced a free two year college program after high school, that will cost more money and will not solve the problem of declining education, because: We do not take advantage of the fastest brain development that occurs under six years of age with an effective pre-school program, We are not improving and increasing knowledge in K12 education and are not correcting behavior and attitude problems that developed during those formative years. We are not correcting the fundamental K12 problem that limits young people's brain in how much they can achieve for 12-13 years of K12 schooling, We are enabling only some remedial education with the free two-year college, to get closer to the low state standard of today. This does not solve the problems of the K-12 education shortcomings that became set in concrete in our children during the formative years. Yet we will have to pay a higher rate for the additional two years, without fixing what caused the problem in K-12. It would be more effective for the people's money to fix some basic areas within K-12 education to solve the poor performance problem, such as: Raise expectations with a measurable objective, such as an ACT score objective that is 5-10% higher than the actual ACT score achieved the previous year, Create an annual operating plan that simply specifies a monthly year-to-date GPA objective that is minimum 10% above the prior year's monthly year-to-date GPA for all management people and for all teachers. There has to be many years of GPA history available per student. Based on them, an average GPA baseline could be established for at minimum covering the preceding 3 years, using this baseline GPA for every class in any subject before the class starts, and measuring against this baseline GPA what individual teachers achieve at the end of the school year as an average class GPA. There must be a fair assessment of what teachers achieve in average GPA increase beyond the baseline GPA that reflects their class members actual performance for the past three years. Teachers are not treated well compared to the high performing international school systems. They must be treated fairly, and to that end some state laws will need to be changed to allow them to do their best with high morale. Our governors, state departments of education and the elected school district boards managed to develop FAILURE FACTORIES nationwide with their inaction instead of good results, through incompetence in management, with weaker teacher training, limiting teachers' authority and preparation time with unproductive tasks. Teacher morale is low. The higher performing countries require teacher candidates to have a master's degree in the subject that they will teach, they are tested for suitability for the teaching profession, and must continue to update their education every year in teaching methodologies and subject knowledge. We do not seem to be interested in learning from the top performing countries. When one dropped from the top to 40th in the world (and our example state, Tennessee, is much lower than that), one does not have the experience to come up with a winning methodology to become one of the best based only on USA experience in education. No wonder we have poverty problems. We don't even recognize that our dropping education results dumbed us down for 45+ years, weakening our workforce, creating more poverty plus a huge problem for employers, who have only two options to survive: move to areas with a better-trained workforce, or replace low-end jobs with robotics. McDonalds decided in 2015 to replace 25,000 stores totally with robotics by end of 2019, so did Wendy's and many others. Robots were announced in 2016 to replace anesthesia nurses whose education goes well beyond high school. We better improve education very quickly by focusing on ACT score objectives and learning as much as possible from the highest performing countries in education about how they are achieving their fabulous results. The result for us will be increasing social problems with the unemployed. There will be no money to solve them, because our national income has been struggling for ten years at break even only. All of this happened because the poor high school education output weakened the workforce in all industries, from the low end jobs, up to and including PhD's. For several decades now foreign students made up 50% of the PhD's we needed for research and development, but for the past few years many are returning to their home countries because they find better opportunities there. WHY ARE WE ONE OF THE HIGHEST SPENDERS PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD DELIVERING THE WORST EDUCATION RESULTS AMONG INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES? School districts do not identify all education spending for the public to see. We try to do that and relate the approved budget to it although the approved budget itself does not include all education-related expenses. We would advocate the board of education being fully responsible for a budget that includes ALL education-related expenses. The "Current" budget is approved at the beginning of the school year. It excludes certain education-related expenses, like capital and interest expenses, legal and other expenses that are commingled hidden in different county cost centers. That means that we do not know exactly how much we spend on public education. A special investigative audit, called a forensic audit would be the efficient way to identify ALL education related spending. The "Current" budget is overspent 15-18% every single year (2008-2014), and we get the above poor results for it. The state publishes the Grand Total Education Expense Spent in the same school district, that is overspent 28-38% every year beyond the approved budget, including the capital and interest expenses covering school renovations and new schools that the education department decides to renovate or build respectively, but excluding them from the budget they present. Even the Grand Total doesn't include all education-related expenses. All this points to another very important thing that is not being done: ZERO BASED BUDGET PLANNING, AND PRESENTING TO THE PUBLIC ALL PUBLIC SCHOOL-RELATED EXPENSES. It is the school system that initiates or causes all such expenses, but they do not have responsibility for the outcome. This is not a good way to manage to success. ZERO BASED BUDGET PLANNING means that the budget being prepared for all departments identifies first all actions that they will have to take during the coming year to improve results and reach a specific performance objective. Then each department and school puts the budget together for themselves on that basis. That is how one can make sure that any surprises are minimized for the coming year, and it is an important part of planning and creating an operating plan for the coming year only. Poor planners do a quick and easy way, called INCREMENTAL BUDGET PLANNING in which one looks at what one spent last year, and modifies it by adding or subtracting amounts that one just guesses without planning. For small organizations that total less than 100 employees one can do that. For larger organizations, the end result is overspending beyond the approved budget every year, and that is what is happening in Knox County, Tennessee and in many other school districts. When one starts putting together multi-year plans, like the five year plan, it just does not make sense because too many unanticipated things will be changing each year that no one can predict that far ahead. Therefore in well-managed operations one sees zero-based budget planning for a ONE-YEAR OPERATING PLAN, based on which the spending can be managed accurately. That is what well management schooled and experienced superintendents do. When one sees a five year plan, that looks beautiful with color charts and pictures, with simply a fixed percentage increase on some activities every year, and then adds a tenth year result that looks just OK, no serious planning went into that plan. The superintendent in such a case prepared a "selling document only", it is always a beautiful colorful document, but without any serious planning. Five years are too long. Too many things can change even within a year. What many school districts do not have is a one year operating plan where there is a measurable performance goal like an ACT score that is 5-10% higher than the last one achieved, and measurable objectives are defined for every management and supervisory position in every single school and in central management. One cannot achieve good results with only titles. The Five Year Strategic Plans of the Knox County, TN superintendent, were good examples of this. The Knox County, Tennessee school district has an unusually large PR group as of 2015 whose planning and execution on any action they target is excellent. They do not report all of the news. They report only what looks good, creating a positive image in the eyes of the public. As a result, the public is unaware how poorly their children are prepared in our public schools. One sees significant additional money requests annually from the board of education, with two big problems. They are never tied to a plan to show how much they will raise the ACT results that count. The promises are endless. Most such programs do not produce any improvement in the ACT scores. However, the amount approved one year just keeps included every year thereafter and no one questions it. It is sad how the people's hard-earned tax dollars are wasted in education without any improvement in results. HIDING BAD RESULTS FROM THE PUBLIC "A half-truth is a whole lie" is a popular proverb that's been directed at newspapers and politicians since the 1880s. "A lie told often enough becomes the truth." - Lenin "Present good news to the public and repeat often, no matter how insignificant it is. Do not present the bad news to the public, no matter how important it is" - Goebels and Hitler All these methods are used in most PR organizations in school districts. We overspend the people's money every year in education in Knox County, Tennessee and produce one of the worst results at the same time within the USA. Internationally, we dropped to 40th place in math, a new all time low record - that's the bottom of the industrialized countries. Our education spending per student is the fifth highest in the world. Our school districts are always pushing for more money as the solution to fix the poor results. We also do not identify for the public all of the money we spend on education. Some such moneys are commingled with non-education related expenses and hidden in different cost centers. I think that the public who is paying for the poor results and high expense levels deserves to get a detailed accounting of how much money we really spend on education-related expenses. We need a forensic audit to identify exactly where the money went and why it was not getting to the right place in the school district, destroying most of our children's employability, our workforce and our economy as a result. Proposed programs costing additional tens of millions of dollars in each state by school district management, did not and do not deliver higher act or sat scores. They are the only tests that show the real end of high school results. Could these kinds of ineffective actions be accidental after more than 40 years? No, they cannot and they require uniform statewide control via laws. More than 30 states cut back education spending since 2008. See http://www.cbpp.org/cams/?fa=view&id=4011. Even with such reductions in spending, the US is the fifth largest spender per student among the industrialized countries, with the lowest academic performance among those nations. All things are possible - if one is smart. The chart below shows very poor expense management without any reasonable monthly control per school that disregards the approved budget with overspending without any recourse and with poor academic results. No report covers all expenses going into education, although the state report covers significantly more in its Tennessee Education Statistical Report for each year than the Knox County education district itself. The problem is that when board members look at a chart like this they do not recognize poor results or excessive spending. Most of them do not understand what not being ACT Ready means, and most importantly do not understand how robotics will impact all children who are not ACT Ready, and within just a few years will be impacting some jobs that require training beyond high school. Most board members do not want to learn and do not question the superintendent about academic results and spending vs. objective or budget every month at board meetings. In our opinion two questions are vital in managing poorly performing education districts. THESE TWO QUESTIONS need to be answered monthly: How are we doing with the most important academic results (e.g., annual ACT and monthly year-to-date GPA) year-to-date vs. plan in every school and the school district, and How much money are we spending per school and project, year-to-date vs. the approved budget. Neither of these is presented or discussed. THE PUBLIC IS NOT GETTING THE TRUTH ABOUT HOW POORLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN This is vital in order to get parental help and because the public is paying one of the highest dollars per student in the world. Why are we not doing it?   "Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence." Vince Lombardi     To get more public support, tell the truth. Generally both parents have to work today, and single parents have a tougher time. We need more support from them. Giving the public good news only is not helpful under the circumstances. Another important consideration is the fact that the public is paying everyone's salaries in public education. They deserve to know the truth. IF THE PUBLIC FINDS OUT WITHOUT FOREWARNING THAT THEIR CHILDREN CANNOT GET A JOB AFTER GRADUATING FROM OUR HIGH SCHOOLS, WE WILL SEE A VERY BAD, VIOLENT REACTION. IT WOULD BE SMARTER TO ADMIT THE PROBLEM WE FACE WITH OUR POOR EDUCATION AND TAKE OWNERSHIP FOR WHY IT HAPPENED. THERE WOULD BE SOME INITIAL REACTION, BUT THE PUBLIC IS FORGIVING IF THEY SEE AN HONEST ATTEMPT MADE TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Only 26% nationally, 16% in Tennessee and 24% in Knox County, Tennessee of our graduating students with a diploma are ready for job training or have a chance to finish the first year only of a college, tech school/vocational program - in 2015. However the school system tells the public that all is well, and complains about parents not pushing the children enough to study. This level of readiness of public school graduates for job or higher level training is very poor and it is not improving. Many including the schools blame the parents when there are examples of some of the best school systems in the world achieve very high results parent-independently. Our education management has no interest in how they achieve that. The graph below shows the percentage of high school graduates nationally by demographics, who are not prepared for any job other than minimum wage jobs that will be replaced by robots shortly. The Tennessee figures are worse. We produce only 26% readiness of high school graduates nationally for job training or to have just a chance to finish the first year of a tech/vocational school or college according to ACT. But much worse, we produce only 5-6% ACT ready black high school students nationally (Tennessee 2%). The 41-school charter school, Success Academy Schools of New York City, produce top 1% results with poor, inner city black children. At the same time, a new generation of robots started replacing low and medium level jobs. See examples further down. As a result, those students' chances who are not ACT Ready, will evaporate for any job. If our governors and legislators cared, this would not be happening. When Performance Is As Poor As Ours, It Is Vital To Have Two Objectives Only To Focus The Entire Organization On The Key Measurable Indicator Of Academic Success, Like An ACT Score That Is 5-10% Higher Than The Last ACT Score Achieved. The Second Objective Must Be A Limit On Spending To Stay Under The Budget That Was Approved Before The School Year Started. Anyone requesting additional school funding must commit to an ACT score increase in return with a plan in writing that explains how the ACT score increase is going to be achieved. State leadership, education committees, state school boards, and the state department of education, all must be focused on achieving an ACT score objective that is 5-10% higher than the last ACT score achieved along with the school districts. There is much more effort going into spending more money on programs that do not improve the ACT or SAT scores that represent our graduates' knowledge, or making excuses on the state or local level. There Is No Effort To Learn From The Best International Performers To Improve Our Poor Results. Our Public Education System Has The 5th Highest Cost Per Student In The World, While Dropping To 40th From The Top At Great Cost To The USA Public. All ACT objectives require that an operating plan exist detailing what committee members, board members and all management and supervisory personnel need to achieve by each month's end. Look at the high percentage of graduating children who are not ACT Ready in the chart. Not being ACT Ready means no chance to finish even the first year of a tech/vocational school or a college. They are qualified only for minimum wage jobs, which will be replaced by robots in a couple of years. "Denial. Ask any psychologist what the major obstacle to recovery is, and the likely answer will be denial. It's fundamental. Until you admit there is a problem, you can't begin to solve it." John McCormack "Self-Made in America"   The elected boards have to oversee the management and success of a school district with typically 100 – 10,000 employees, and a $10 million - $1 BILLION annual budget through a superintendent that they interview and hire. That is a huge management job, for which the voting majority or even a single board member would not be experienced and qualified. One requires substantial training even to interview and decide to hire a superintendent for an organization of that size. The state cannot provide management guidelines because the old education laws block it and they are likely to not have the experience to give it. School districts have meaningless objectives. They don't know how to change the way they manage and operate to create better results.   The elected board has to set objectives for the coming school year. Their objectives are always very vague, never about achieving an ACT score and never about not exceeding the budget approved at the start of the school year. The result is poor ACT scores, poor readiness after graduation and the budget exceeded every year. Then they perform their own performance review. The superintendent does the same and gives himself excellent marks, although the academic results are terrible. All objectives turn out vague and immeasurable. The superintendent is to prepare a five-year "strategic" plan according to the state, again with vague goals, many $100 words that no board-member dares to question for fear of looking uneducated. The plans do not include academic and financial objectives for schools, and school performance is the most important area. With such an arrangement, life becomes very political, and a poorly performing mayhem where sexual harassment can happen without the individual being fired. You hire and promote friends and relatives. You do nothing about helping teachers and principals to make their life more productive with higher morale so that they become more effective with students. All within current education law.   When the state itself is performing as poorly as Tennessee, it is not happening because they have the right management experience in the Department of Education, in the state Board of Education or even in the governor's office. If you disagree, just look at the ACT results. What does that tell us? It does not tell us that we have brilliant people with the right management experience, they just decided for a very important reason not to solve the problem that is destroying our children's future.   The American public is paying a huge increasing bill for education with a school system failure rate at 74% nationally. For black students, it is an outrageous 95% ACT Unreadiness or failure rate, when a NYC chain of 42 charter schools, Success Academy Schools scored top one percent passing even most private schools with poor, inner city black students! IT CAN BE DONE. VISIT THIS SCHOOL, FIND OUT WHAT CREATES THE SUCCESS, LEARN AND IMPLEMENT ANYTHING THAT WOULD HELP. "It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy." Albert Chancre, President of the American Federation of Teachers SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM This website lists the ten best tools that could make learning easier for students and make teaching easier for teachers, in any school environment: http://www.teacherswithapps.com/top-10-most-effective-online-tools-for-academic-classes/. AVOID OBJECTIVES THAT DO NOT WORK SEE THESE EXAMPLES. Many objectives dilute each other. A second primary objective is also needed, monthly, to not exceed the expense budget that the board approved at the start of the school year, with each and every school principal being responsible for meeting a corresponding expense objective and academic objective, spending and personnel decisions without interference. All other objectives are secondary objectives applying to specific management positions under the board or superintendent. The objectives set in the past that one sees below, cannot achieve good results, because those who produce the results, the schools and support staff are not focused on the right two elements, a measurable academic and expense objective monthly. Schools are not research institutions. They are production institutions of the highest importance, whose national result has a vital impact on our children, every industry and our economy. In the school district's website the superintendent mentions that: "In fact, you may remember that a key goal of our strategic plan is 100/90/90/90, that is:" "100% of students completing high school" (What is the value of "completing" high school with 80% of those who entered 9th grade not being ready per ACT but for minimum wage jobs at best?) "At least 90% graduating with a regular diploma" (What is the value of a diploma when 77% of those with a regular diploma are not even ready to be trained for a job or to enter a college or tech school per ACT?) "At least 90% of our graduates taking the ACT," (All students take the ACT by law. What is the value here? Just taking a test has zero value in any case.) "At least 90% of ACT takers scoring a 21 or better" (An average ACT 21 score means that 73-75% of those who entered in 9th grade are NOT ACT READY and are prepared for minimum wage jobs only. This is a shamefully low objective. A neighboring school district's objective is ACT 24. The top 19 countries in education are delivering high school students in an ACT equivalent range of 26 to 31)." In the superintendent's Five Year Strategic Plan we have these different objectives that are also not appropriate, unclear, not measurable, neither academic nor spending related. Ask yourself on each one of these "How on earth can I tell if they met this objective or not? How do I measure how well they have done?". "Guarantee Excellence in Teaching and Learning." "Personalize Learning" "Facilitate High Quality Student Supports" "Build & Support Our Community of Learners" "Build & Support Our Community of Leaders" "Value Our Hardworking People" "Build & Strengthen Our "One Big Team"" "Invite & Earn Stakeholder Feedback" "Improve Customer Service & Communication" Are these easy to understand, clear, measurable academic objectives and a spending objective vs. the approved budget? Of course not. Can you tell what measurable result to reach in each one? Of course not. Can all workers be focused on these objectives so that the GPA and ACT scores go up in every school? Absolutely not. That is the reason for poor performance. No one is going to pay attention to such objectives, and when they are not measurable, there can be no possible consequence. Ignoring it works. What becomes important is to please your boss and shield any complaints from him. Anyone can come up with excuses for the ACT score not improving. And the boss needs good excuses so he/she will appreciate you for it. That is the effect of too many objectives that are not measurable to see with certainty if they were met or not. Such a situation ends up with politics becoming important and achieving good results become less important. Poor, unmeasurable objectives increase the importance of politics in organizational behavior for survival. You may want to read "Objectives are vitally important if you wish to accomplish anything" with a group of people - or even alone - especially in a poorly performing organization. That is why we are producing the 40th result internationally in math. Tennessee is worse. We were on top in 1970. Teachers do not take the initiative to find out how the best nations in education are achieving their excellent results. They are focused on resolving their own personal issues with management, they have been demoralized over the years and not even given the basic right of being in charge of the classroom with full backing by management over discipline issues in the classroom. That is demeaning to teachers and reduces their credibility and authority in front of their students. Although the states should do this centrally, we do not see teachers making an individual effort to learn about why the top competitors are producing much better results, learn about them and implement such new methods. Unfortunately such attitudes are understandable with low morale but not helpful. Most parents are not pushing their children to study harder. A few decades ago only one parent worked and the other parent could focus on what needed to be done at home, including focusing the children on studying. Today, both parents are working, and most parents take the child's side if a complaint comes from school about the child's behavior. When the school district PR machine lies to the public about things going well, it is not helpful in getting single parents to help the school because they are working long hours every day. Many parents are not supportive enough to get their children to work harder today. It would be very helpful if the public was well informed about the poor performance of schools, to motivate them to help. However, there are school systems that produce uniformly excellent scores from all students, minority or not, without parental involvement, e.g., Finland's teaching method, or the 42-school Success Academy Schools in New York City that achieved in 2015 top one percent results with poor inner city black children, an amazing achievement. Finland's teacher selection and teaching methodology is better than ours. We are covering them in more detail later. Unfortunately our children pay a heavy price for all this. Four out of five graduates are unprepared for better jobs and robotic automation will replace them. All because our schools are not doing a better job. Parents we cannot control. Schools are to be controlled by their elected board and elected board members do not have the experience to do so. Some people show better OECD PISA results for the USA by showing only OECD member country results (35 countries), a smaller number. OECD as of 2015 publishes both member and non-member countries' results, 73 total, on the same page in its results. We dropped to 40th in the world in math in 2015. The potential working years of a high school graduate is 40-45 years. More than 75% of graduates in Knox County, Tennessee (more than 80% for Tennessee) are not prepared for any employment other than close to minimum wage jobs with increasing unemployment during their short working life, as robotics replace the low-to-medium level jobs. Excellent high school results are critical for our nation and individual graduates to be employable or what is called ACT Ready. Not just by one student in five being ready for employment as we have it now, but at least by four students out of five. Those who are ready, become part of our workforce. We need an outstanding well-educated workforce to create competitively priced outstanding products and services that our various industries can sell worldwide. Our workforce declined in skills. Our national income, GNP, and tax income depend on the success of US industries worldwide. Our GNP has been under 3% in growth for the past ten years. That's not good enough. It is the result of the poor readiness we deliver from our high schools. It is vital for us as a nation to fix our schools' performance. The world is everyone's market. That means that we must become competitive in the world market and that means that our high school output must be one of the best. It dropped to 40th in math. CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW WE COMPARE TO OTHER COUNTRIES IN PERFORMANCE. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing!!" Edmund Burke, Irish statesman, 1776 WHAT COULD BOARD MEMBERS DO DIFFERENTLY AND BETTER TO IMPROVE EDUCATION? Between 1995 and 2014 Knox County, Tennessee students increased only 14% but administrators increased 130%. The spending would have been more appropriate in the classroom. BUT THAT IS NOT ALL. Administrators hire people to work for them. The real increase ends up 650-900% if they hire 4-6 people per administrator for only a 14% increase in students. However, with this huge increase in management, the ACT results dropped like a stone setting an all time low record in 2013 with a score of 20.2! ACT Readiness reports indicate that as a result, more than 80% (statewide 89%, nationally 76%!) of those students who enter 9th grade are ready only for minimum wage employment, the types of jobs that will disappear. It is common knowledge in management that if you increase management numbers beyond standard operating ratios, managers (administrators) will start justifying their management positions, and such efforts actually hurt results and morale. This huge percentage of management increase was not reversed to this day, and it did absolutely nothing but cost us a lot of money! So...money is being shifted away from the classroom producing poorly prepared children in large numbers. Management overhead was increased purposefully, but the results dropped like a stone. I am sorry, but the wisdom with which the public's money and these decisions appear to be handled by school boards and superintendents is mind boggling. No one in leadership appears to have the wisdom to stand up and reverse such foolish spending. Why is the state allowing the wasting of so much of the people's money and dumb down virtually the entire workforce year after year? That is what the ACT results indicate under the governor. Any medium-to-large school district could reduce total Central Management employees to 2% of the total school district's employees. Any school district set as their most important two objectives: a 5-10% higher ACT score than the ACT score last achieved, and an objective for all managers in any school that is a monthly, month-to-date GPA objective. The second objective needs to focus on not exceeding the spending budget as well. The ACT and SAT tests show that our public school results are extremely poor. It is not surprising. If you attend any school board meeting, they never discuss the poor results and how those results could be improved. In addition, it is the schools that produce the results, yet we do not have monthly year-to-date GPA objectives in our schools that is 5-10% higher than the last one achieved. THAT EXPLAINS THE OUTRAGEOUSLY POOR PERFORMANCE.   In our state's plans to improve math and English requirements, we are focusing on public opinion about what the school district should be doing. Education spending per student rose aggressively since 1970, and student performance went down. None of our leaders suggested any changes to our education system that would have increased the ACT and SAT scores, the key indicators of what children learned before graduating from high school.   The public became less educated as a result, was dumbed down since 1970, and public opinion would not know anything about what our international competition accomplished and is planning, and what our employers need. As you see many foreign products around us, it should be very clear that we are competing with foreign countries whose education systems passed ours. We must catch up with the best. It will not be the local public's advice that will improve us.   After all, it did not do any good so far for many decades, especially since they are misinformed by the school district PR groups about how well our schools are doing. It will be the detailed knowledge of what makes the top performers in the world much better than we are in the OECD PISA tests, that will tell us what areas we need to correct in primary and secondary education. We need to forget the old American slogan that "WE ARE THE BEST". We are 40th in high school math. That is not the best. Be honest with the public, and have objectives and operating plans achieved to become the best. One should be friendly and fair, but never become personally attached to anyone who works for you. It will bias your judgment about them. You may have to make hard decisions about them. If they are your close friend, you will not be able to do that. You have to judge your employee's performance through measurable key indicators of success in their job, their specific objective. THIS IS NOT BEING DONE. Board members must understand VERY WELL what ACT's definition of Readiness means (go to ACT scores explained), as it is changed by developments in robotics to replace low-to-medium level jobs. Most do not understand this area. They must appreciate the impact of new technologies on existing jobs, and also the new job opportunities they create and the education required for them (go to in robotics). They must understand that we are competing internationally, and that we therefore must compare our progress to the countries that passed us. It would be important for board members to be familiar with two high performing countries' education system, Singapore and Finland. THEY KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THEM. It would be important to know exactly what Singapore and Finland cover in each subject in their curricula and try to do better than that. The state education department should be doing such work. But if they do not, we need the school boards to be creative. One can request such information from the Ministry of Education in the country. ACT does provide in their annual readiness report statistics about how to increase the ACT scores. At minimum, Board members must understand these areas well. THEY DO NOT. If the board member was a teacher, they need to realize that we have to become much better. Our teachers did not improve in subject knowledge, teaching methodologies and education management like other nations who passed us. THEY ARE NOT AWARE OF THIS AND WE ARE INCLUDING REFERENCES HERE. We have some serious work to do. A potential superintendent is very experienced in operating in a political environment whether he/she accomplished excellent results or not. Superintendent's last in a job only 3-4 years for a couple of reasons: they take direction from a board who may or may not agree, and he/she is more experienced in the job than the board members. Or he or she cannot produce better results. In interviewing them, ask meaningful questions, such as:   How would you measure monthly what a school district or a school achieved academically? How can you tell which high school graduates are prepared to get a job after high school that can minimally support a family of four? What does ACT Readiness mean? What ACT or SAT average did you achieve during each of the last three years? What mistakes did you make in each of the last three years? How do you know that morale is high or low in your organization? The superintendent is the board's employee and not the board's boss. Board members must understand what ACT Readiness and ACT scores the superintendent is to deliver. That is the superintendent's responsibility. If the superintendent is delivering poor results for seven years and the board gives the superintendent good performance reviews, the Board is responsible for the poor results. The board has destroyed the future of up to 76% (those not ACT Ready) or more of our high school graduates. If the board cared about them, this would not happen - or perhaps the board had no idea what to do and made no attempt at learning what to do. When the results have been bad for decades, one must focus the entire organization on one performance and one spending objective like the ACT score and spending vs. budget in education. Without such focus, there is no chance for recovery. Look at the chart below about ACT results. If only 24% of the high school diplomas are "ACT Ready" qualified, we are doing and extremely poor job, and both the Board and superintendent do not deserve a good performance evaluation. Yet that is what we gave year after year. It is not acceptable to do a job under which 76% of the graduating children's jobs will be subject to replacement by robots within a few years, and they have not been educated well enough to learn a more sophisticated new job. 76% not being ACT Ready means that they have no chance to complete even the first year of a tech/vocational school or a college. Science and engineering programs require a 26 ACT achievement in math, in addition to the ACT Readiness benchmark in math, and that is way above 24% ACT Readiness. Also in addition, look at the examples listed here for immediate robotic applications. Some of these are replacing employees with four-year college degrees. It is fair to conclude that those who are not ACT Ready have only a few years of employment, because robotic capabilities will increase rapidly from now on. See examples of robotics. The ACT achievement and budget compliance objectives need an operating plan. The operating plan requires a monthly year-to-date objective per school in two areas: one is an academic objective to be determined, most likely a GPA average, and the second a spending objective not to exceed a monthly year-to-date expense budget. It is necessary to have a monthly year-to-date progress measurement in both objectives for schools to identify any shortcomings early toward meeting the annual average ACT and budget goals for the school district. Performance-related objectives are needed for all supervisory positions in schools, in central management and for teachers also. All objectives at all levels need to be measurable, a key indicator of success for the job of the individual AND FOR HIS/HER SUPERIORS AND ORGANIZATION, that contribute to ACT school district objective achievement. They have to be brief and simple enough to be remembered precisely at all times by the individual. No current objectives at any level meet that criteria today in 2016. Click here to see ACT scores explained for the graph below http://www.education.org/1actscoresexplained.html . A useful document to read would be this guideline from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that covered 65 countries' primary and secondary education, with the best in the world among them. We can see in the OECD chart above spending per pupil for each of 65 countries. We in Knox County, Tennessee are one of the top spenders per student compared to these 65 nations. But in results, we, the USA, are 40th in math - very poor. Tennessee is at the low end of USA performance. Knox County, Tennessee results would be much worse than 40th worldwide. That means that we spend enough money, but the money is not being spent in the right places. For example not enough money is getting to the classrooms that results come from, and there are requirements on teachers that cut down their preparation and teaching time, so that they cannot do their best. See chart below. If we want 80% of those with a diploma to be ready to get better than minimum wage jobs, we need to be at an average ACT score above 25. That simply cannot be done with the poor management performance shown in the above charts. A diploma generally means that the person is fully prepared for a job or further education. With a 20.7 (Knox County, TN 2015) ACT score we produce only 24% of the graduates with a diploma who are ACT ready. That makes our Tennessee public school diplomas - worthless. What is the point in issuing worthless diplomas?   We are raising both at home and in school very soft and poorly trained children for a much tougher and more competitive world after high school. Schools and families must get tougher so that our children can survive in this tougher market. Otherwise they will not survive. The public is purposefully misinformed about how poorly our children are prepared in high school. It is done both by the state and the school districts. They employ professional PR people at public expense for which the public pays with their hard-earned tax dollars in order to produce good news. State Education Departments do it with "Cut Scores", no specifications for objectives and operating plans that elected board members do not understand, interviewing standards and practices especially to hire superintendents, limit on the size of central management organizations that are bloated, and requirements as well in addition to the above, to assist elected school district board members. It is the ACT or SAT scores that indicate every year how well our children have been educated from grade one to twelve. They can claim that they have done many things, and they blame teachers and parents - but they have not initiated any program that raised the ACT or SAT scores since 1970. Those are the only tests that count and are given every year. But they organize big celebrations if we show even tiny gains in tests that do not count, because they are easier to show higher scores. This is how they misguide and lie to the public, who pay more and more every year for the poor results. "Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either". Albert Einstein Are school boards and superintendents telling the public all the truth and nothing but the truth about their results? Raising the minimum wage instead of increasing public high school performance and improving behavior to internationally competitive levels, accelerates the demand for the less expensive and more productive robotic automation. Among black high school graduates, 95% were not ready nationally in 2015. 95%! At the same time a charter school chain in NYC (Success Academy Schools 1, Success Academy Schools 2) with poor, inner city black students with 32 schools scored top one percent in math in the New York State Common Core Tests in 2013 beating even most private schools. They demand excellence in teaching and in student behavior. New York State is the fifth highest performer in the USA. Tennessee, a state we use for some examples, is in the bottom half of US performance. Or better yet, look at a world top performer, Finland with methodologies developed that are pure genius to produce excellent results in less teaching hours and lower cost than ours, although their cost of living is higher (Finland 1, Finland 2). Excellent results are possible, but not the way we have been running public schools in any state for the past hundred years. We do not visit those who excel to learn from them. "With the long-term decline of primary and secondary education, we are developing a nation of sheep. A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves." Edward R. Morrow, Journalist, 1908-1965     TCAP state test results for Tennessee showed a much higher score than the national ACT or NAEP tests, because the state tests are easier. In addition, if the percentage score of right answers is low, e.g., 45%, normally it would be a failing grade. To make it look better, the state translates the low 45% score to a "B". They call this failing grade translation "Cut Scores". The result about how well the students know what they were taught, becomes a lie to the public. The TCAP's rigor or toughness was 58% lower than the ACT. Tests are never designed to show less than the intended results for a grade. In other words, the much easier state test shows much higher grades, putting into good light performance that is a disastrous failure using these "Cut Scores". As a result, we hurt a very large percentage of graduating children who are not ready for a meaningful job or for more education without two years of full time remedial courses. TAKING A LOOK INTO HOW AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES COMPARE TO OTHER NATIONS' GRADUATES   Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is TO TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO LEARN. Peter Drucker, 1909-2005, Father of 21st Century "Management By Objectives" For black students the percentage of those not ready for a job is 98% in Tennessee (95% nationally). The public is unaware of these facts. The black student figures are very disturbing. A chain of charter schools with poor black inner city children (Success Academy Schools of New York City 1: http://educationnext.org/what-explains-success-academy-charter-network/, Success Academy Schools of New York City 2: http://successacademies.org/about/, A virtual tour: http://virtualtour.successacademies.org/tour/#welcome) worked hard and had outstanding results with 32 schools in 2014. They have 41 schools as of 2018. These black inner city children from poor families scored in the top 1% in Math and the top 3% in English on the difficult Common Core tests in the entire State of New York, the fifth best performing state in US education. THE PROBLEM CAN BE SOLVED, BUT NOT THE WAY OUR PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICTS ARE MANAGED. We have created a powder keg that will surely blow up. All of this, because state law delegates ALL decisions to the school districts' elected board everywhere, whose majority has no management experience on the scale of the school district. Important: The states do not provide MANAGEMENT GUIDELINES. What brings success in other countries? (Statement from the national institute for excellence in teaching on the 2013 NAEP results and Nation's report card). Most national income tends to be generated internationally, because the international market is huge. That happens only if American companies who sell internationally are selling competitive products in quality and pricing. Such competitiveness depends on the quality of their workforce, which in turn is dependent on the competitiveness of the high schools. That in turn depends on the nation's position on the OECD PISA tests, how wisely that nation spends money on education per student, and how teachers are prepared and managed to educate the coming workforce. Education results depend to a large degree on the TEACHERS' education, quality and management of teachers, AND most importantly how the teachers' personality matches the teaching environment. That quality needs to be high internationally to have competitive children in the workforce after high school graduation or to go to higher level learning. The graph below shows the excessive hours that US teachers have to work in the classroom compared to the high performing internationals in education. Our teachers also have a large load in paperwork and in tests relative the competition. COMPETITIVELY THESE ARE EXCESSIVE AND DO NOT IMPROVE THE POOR PERFORMANCE. The results of the teachers are not good, since we dropped internationally to 40th place as a nation when 15 year-old students are tested worldwide.   "Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource." John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) Thirty-fifth President of the USA   The very low black student performance is likely to become the fuse in this "powder keg", that our state departments of education and elected school boards in our school districts allowed to happen. A charter school is a public school also. Before anyone says that improvement is not possible, a charter school system called Success Academy Schools in New York City with 32 schools and poor inner city black children, scored in the top one percent in mathematics in the New York State Common Core tests in 2014. They beat the majority of all state public AND private schools (Success Academy Schools of New York City 1: http://educationnext.org/what-explains-success-academy-charter-network/, Success Academy Schools of New York City 2: http://successacademies.org/about/, A virtual tour: http://virtualtour.successacademies.org/tour/#welcome). The big difference between a charter school and a public school is the board of education who are in charge. In a charter school, the board members are appointed by the school system management. In a public school district, the board is elected. The results mirror the quality of the voting majority on these boards. New York State is the fifth highest performer in the USA.   In our opinion, we are facing a national emergency. No one took sufficient action in any state's leadership to raise the ACT (or SAT) scores, yet the Success Academy Schools clearly show what can be accomplished! At what average ACT score level should we be to be ACT Ready for a job or to enter a college? Assuming 80% ACT readiness ( note that we are 80%+ NOT ACT READY) of high school graduates. More than an average ACT score of 25 would be needed, instead of 21 nationally and close to it in other states for 80% of our high school graduates to be ACT Ready. THE 21 ACT GOAL BY THE STATE BY 2020 IS TOO LOW.   We are not doing as well as the school districts' PR groups tell us through the local newspapers. The education laws allow the school districts to conduct their business in any manner whatsoever. They get fully funded under the law. They don't have to be competitive. The public has to be reasonably satisfied, and the school district PR Groups achieve that. Lenin, the father of "disinformation" theory said that "A lie mentioned often enough "becomes the truth." The public who pays for it all does not get the entire truth. Under Hitler, master propagandist of the Nazi regime, Joseph Goebels, his information minister, added the following practice: use half-truths to build a case that the public will buy. "A half-truth is a whole lie" - says a proverb. A group can get away with it only until the majority discovers that their children cannot get a job. That moment is coming close AND THERE WILL BE A LOT OF ANGER.   Programs with very small growth in objectives reflect low expectations and the gains produced will hardly justify the expense. When people face high objectives, they rise to the occasion and meet objectives. When people face low objectives, they have difficulty meeting them.   For example if Tennessee is producing only a 14% ACT Readiness, and starts a program that will raise it only to 21% ACT Readiness, with the rate at which job requirements are growing, they accomplished nothing. That is exactly the kind of low expectation objective that is being implemented and celebrated. You do improve somewhat with it if delivered, it will look good to the public, but it means nothing. And then cognitive robots come into the market and the majority of your children will have no chance for a job.   " Educational failure puts the United States' future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk", warns the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, chaired by Joel I. Klein, former head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, Director, Stanford University, former U.S. secretary of state. The country "will not be able to keep pace - much less lead - globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long," argues the Task Force. US Education is a major national security problem that IS VERY IMPORTANT http://workforce/united-states/us-education-reform-national-security/p27618.   Our failure level, and market size we are demonstrating make us an ideal target market for robots. That has a positive side, because many companies are dissatisfied with workforce quality and are holding funds so that they can move to states or countries with a better trained workforce.   Look at the chart for teacher turnover below. Turnover typically costs 6-18 months of the salaries of the people replaced. We are not showing total turnover expense, but only the portion that could be saved with better people management. Many nations spent less per student than we did, and delivered superior results. This is the result of better education management. Poor management: poor results with MORE THAN ENOUGH FUNDING. THE MONEY IS NOT BEING SPENT IN THE RIGHT PLACES. And the poor inexperienced management keeps making the same mistake every year. This is NOT a right or left wing, Republican or Democrat problem. It happened under both parties since 1970. IT IS AN AMERICAN PROBLEM, and we keep doing nothing about it. It is time for some big changes.   We have a problem to solve. IN EVERY SCHOOL DISTRICT OF EVERY US STATE, IT IS THE ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD THAT DETERMINES WHAT OBJECTIVES AND PLANS THE SCHOOL DISTRICT WILL FOLLOW. With more than 13,500 school districts nationally, performance standardization and achievement becomes an impossibility. Imagine a ball game with 13,500 playing. They just follow their own rules, and don't even know where the goal posts are. And, they cost A LOT of money.   The elected boards have more authority than the state or federal government in areas relating to education results, spending and operating ratios. Board membership requires only a high school diploma. The end of high school results (ACT and SAT) are very poor. Imagine that in the case of Knox County, Tennessee, our example, such an elected board oversees an organization with more than 8,500 employees with a budget of more than half billion dollars. That is a huge management task requiring management training and experience on the highest level. Such background and experience is not available in school boards even on the individual level let alone for the voting majority. The results can only be terrible under such circumstances. Who was responsible for these poor results and bad teacher morale in Knox County, Tennessee? The board of education is totally in charge of all decisions about objectives, operating plans and financial decisions under the state law. However, we have a sample of the public running for the school board, and the state education departments do not help them at all with explanations and guide lines in areas where the average person is not familiar with the process - because they don't even know. The people who were responsible for the poor results in Knox County, TN, are the superintendent, and board of education chairs INDYA KINCANNON, KAREN CARSON, LYNNE FUGATE AND MIKE MACMILLAN. Superintendent taught for one year, then managed food service, security and accounting with less than 150 direct employees, never managed a single school before the board hired him with a 5:4 decision to manage 89 schools, more than 8,500 direct employees and a half billion dollar budget.   Read this website. Verify the sources. Decide where the truth is, and what they don't tell you. "WILL MY CHILDREN AND GRAND CHILDREN BE EMPLOYED?" Your child's future depends on them. "Things may come to those who wait...but only the things left by those who hustle!" Abraham Lincoln THE NATIONAL PLAN IN 2008 - THAT WAS IGNORED TO DATE: Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-Class Education Click on the title to read the plan. A report by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, Inc. Action 1: Upgrade state standards by adopting a common core of internationally bench marked standards in math and language arts for grades K-12 to ensure that students are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to be globally competitive. Action 2: Leverage states' collective influence to ensure that textbooks, digital media, curricula, and assessments are aligned to internationally bench marked standards and draw on lessons from high performing nations and states. Action 3: Revise state policies for recruiting, preparing, developing, and supporting teachers and school leaders to reflect the human capital practices of top-performing nations and states around the world. Action 4: Hold schools and systems accountable through monitoring, interventions, and support to ensure consistently high performance, drawing upon international best practices. Action 5: Measure state-level education performance globally by examining student achievement and attainment in an international context to ensure that, over time, students are receiving the education they need to compete in the 21st century economy. THE ABOVE PLAN WAS APPROVED BY MORE THAN 40 STATES AND THE US GOVERNMENT. This plan was not created by the US Government. The intent was clear: study the top international performers, determine what made them more productive in education than the US, and implement the new practices and standards in the states to produce significant improvement. Nothing of significance was implemented as of August, 2015. If implemented, the ACT (and SAT) scores would have risen significantly. They did not increase and went down in many states like Tennessee, where we set an all time low ACT score. Look at the results below.   The Success Academy Schools of NYC, having achieved top one percent status in the entire State of New York with 32 schools of poor black inner city children in 2013, is an example of what is possible, when everywhere else the same children are on the bottom. Look at the example for turnover analysis below. It is very costly. We are not showing total turnover expense, but only the portion that could be saved with better hiring practices. Sadly, we are killing the country and don't want to change in order to save the jobs of those who are creating the problem.   The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has an Education Department that tracks the performance of 15 year olds in 73 countries and presents excellent reports on where and what improvements are needed. Key indicators of success per country: http://www.oecd.org/edu/educationataglance2013-indicatorsandannexes.htm#Annex3. Test results (PISA) and detailed reports per country (USA Status Report, http://www.oecd.org/edu/EAG2014-Indicator%20D4%20(eng).pdf). Per country education analysis and polices: http://gpseducation.oecd.org/Home. What countries' teachers spend the most hours teaching (compare to top performing countries Finland and Korea): http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/48631419.pdf. Class size makes a difference in outcomes if less than 20 students: http://www.classsizematters.org/research-and-links/.   A presidential project, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5 (2010)", concluded that "disparities in U.S. K-12 education compared to those of many other nations, impose the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession - one substantially larger than the deep recession the country is currently experiencing." You can read it here.   Good education is the only certain way out of poverty. Unfortunately, our education system has become so poor that it can drive even children who are not from poverty, into poverty.   For years now, our education system in Knox County, Tennessee has been creating more than 80% of the students from 9th grade who are not prepared for jobs beyond minimum wage after leaving high school, according to ACT. The State is worse at 86%. They will be replaced by robots by 2025. WHY WE MUST IMPROVE URGENTLY: It Is A Good Idea To Peek Into The Future With The Videos Below To Understand Why Better Education Than What We Currently Have Is Absolutely Vital For The Future Existence Of Our Children. Dr. Michio Kaku, world famous scientist, in "America has a secret weapon": ...and if you would like to understand more about the future in depth, here is Dr. Ray Kurzweil,a brilliant man, head of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Google (http://www.kurzweilai.net/) a world famous scientist, whose accuracy of forecasting future events and developments has been more than 85% accurate. Copyright © 2019 V. Spencer This is a work in progress. Remedying early K-12 education problems in India: http://economics.mit.edu/files/9907 After the bad news, you may want to read my jokes. And then, we must fight for the right thing.