2. The Logic In Using Cut Scores To Fix Failing High School Performance Makes No Sense and It Is False.

Cut Scores, page 11, (Nedesky et al) Cut_Scores_Primer.pdf

"If a student has a failing grade close to the pass/fail point, there could be circumstances under which he could be passing the test." Yea! We disagree with this logic and the use of cut scores because it is clearly an instrument for raising the number of high school graduates BUT NOT by improving their knowledge

Teacher Requirements For Good Results

Within one year of any new technology or science introduction, high schools' curriculum needs to include increasing information about the new technology or Science. The Kurzweil chart shows the increase in calculations that a $1000 computer will do, and this man's forecasts are 87% accurate. Please look at this chart and remember what it tells us. We are getting very close to the $1000 PC in 2025, that can do as many calculations as the human brain does per second. In only 20 more years, the $1000 computer or PC will do as many computations per second as what all human brains could do or about 10,000,000,000 human brains combined by 2045, and the computer will be much smaller than the nail on your small finger and its peripheral equipments will be tiny. We cannot even imagine them now in 2020. Think about what that means when robots use that much computer power, with artificial intelligence that will be about a million times faster than human intelligence. Read and learn about it first, then think about what good or bad things could such technology do. It does not mean that humanity will be destroyed because we already know how to use that high computational speed to multiply the brain's power during the 2030s. But it will require a well-developed and educated healthy brain. It would not work with an undereducated, recreational drug infected brain. That could take a child who studied hard and did not get involved with drugs out of poverty very easily and could bring us into a much happier world. The big problem is the coming ten years, before 2030, during which the existing public education could eliminate the possibility because political and education management are reducing our knowledge, they are dumbing the population down. It is quite easy to show that with what we found.

Dr. Ray Kurzweil is the best technology futurist, with a record of 87% of his predictions being correct and on time. Education leadership should read his books. It would be exciting and beneficial to explain such technology trends in high school classes. More importantly, when we do not incorporate new technology changes in the curriculum or don't know how to make our education a positive experience for most of our children, our education failed us. Example: requiring only Algebra 2 and Biology for high school graduation when we needed Calculus and Chemistry plus Physics about 50 years ago, is the same kind of damaging move as lowering pass/fail points in the state test to produce higher grades. We are making a science out of "how to teach less and look better to the public as we dumb down our children and adults so that they vote for the candidate or spending that we want."

There is a very urgent need to raise the knowledge of high school graduates as soon as possible.

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

The other traditional side of education has to do with the knowledge of subjects specified in the state curriculum to make better decisions in a changing world and to be employable. But that cannot help if the curriculum and quality of education is not competitive with the best three countries in education. The majority of public high school graduates in most of our states cannot read well enough, cannot do basic math, read and write only block letters, and cannot fill out job applications. The poorly performing public education is costing us the most per student in the world. Instead of improving year by year, we teach our children less and less. We do things that stunt brain development in critical areas and use methods that worked in late 1800s but not after the industrial developments that started accelerating after WWI. Our political leadership, lawmakers, and our weak education management do nothing to improve, and the top leadership is certainly smart enough to do it correctly but has not done that for many decades. WHO IS HOLDING A GUN TO THEIR HEAD TO DO NOTHING TO IMPROVE PUBLIC EDUCATION? MEANING INCREASING THE AVERAGE ACT SCORES FROM BELOW 21 TO 29 THAT CORRESPOND TO INCREASING ACT READINESS FROM A VERY POOR 58% TO 80% SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE, BASED UPON ONLY FOUR SUBJECTS TO BE "ACT READY" OF A GRADUATING CLASS TO 80% ACT READINESS? We will show how low "ACT Readiness" is. It requires only four specific subjects' knowledge out of four years of subjects. We used to require 60% minimum knowledge of ALL high school subjects ten years ago to graduate. Consider also that in a state like Tennessee, more than 80% of those who graduate from high school with a diploma are not even ACT Ready. Our political leadership is not thinking that we should improve our children's knowledge to be employable to average ACT score 29 to achieve 80% ACT Readiness because the education management feels that such a goal is impossible. When we have low expectation objectives that are unmeasurable, yearly instead of monthly, and are not a key indicator of success or failure, it will not improve. That is what we had in place for decades, and it is a major contributor to operating education without any guidance to achieve good results.

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

Every time a new governor is elected, he/she hires a new state commissioner/superintendent of education. We have significant technological changes that the public schools do not follow. We allowed education to be controlled by politicians and to be controlled by locally elected school boards WHO UNDERSTOOD NEITHER THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES, NOR WHAT THE CHILDREN HAD TO LEARN TO BE COMPETITIVELY EDUCATED. We have 14,000 elected school boards in the nation, all doing their own thing. These are huge mistakes that can only produce failure. We will deal with this in more detail below. The national and state management structure does not work, and the current MANAGEMENT structure will not work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you want to achieve as a governor or superintendent? NOT WHAT THE PEOPLE FAR BELOW you believe they can achieve. When performance is very low like ours, and your people are not well trained and never had to change the way they worked, and you never had the experience to manage growth at a higher rate than 10% per year, it is a huge mistake to base the objective on their opinion. You should know exactly where the shortcomings are, if you don't know how to raise the raise the group's performance, you better hustle and learn, BECAUSE WE CANNOT AFFORD TO BE DESTROYED BY LOW PERFORMERS WHO HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT MANAGEMENT AND HOW TO IMPROVE THE JOBS BEING DONE. WE DO NOT NEED PEOPLE WHO SIT ON SUCH PROBLEMS FOR DECADES! BUT WE DO EXACTLY THAT. Let me give you just one example, out of many that I found. In 1997 and years prior the reading performance OF OUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES IN TENNESSEE WAS BAD, AND WE SHOULD HAVE SOLVED IT BY 4TH GRADE!! AS USUAL WE DECIDED TO THROW MONEY AT IT AND DID NOT SOLVE IT. WE BLEW A FEW MILLION DOLLARS ON CONSULTANTS, NOT RECOGNIZING THAT MANY LAID OFF PEOPLE GO INTO CONSULTING AND THEY ARE NOT THE SHARPEST KNIFE IN THE DRAWER. WE HIRED THE CONSULTANT FULL TIME. WE DID NOT FIND OUT WHAT SCHOOL IN WHAT COUNTRY IS THE BEST IN READING, AND VISIT 2-3 OF THEM TO LEARN HOW TO TEACH READING, BECAUSE MOST SCHOOLS IN THE WORLD TEACH READING SUCCESSFULLY. THE TRIP WOULD HAVE COST $10K PER PERSON, AND ONE COULD DO IT. IT COSTS LESS THAN MILLIONS. YOU GAIN A PERSON WHO BECOMES YOUR EXPERT, THERE WERE EXCELLENT TEACHING AIDS ON THE INTERNET FOR READING, SO THE PROBLEM COULD BE SOLVED IN TWO YEARS AT MOST. I DID THAT. SO IT CAME TO LIGHT IN 2017, 20 YEARS LATER, WE STILL HAVE THE SAME READING PROBLEM. SO WE DID EXACTLY THE SAME THING, THE CONSULTANT SOLUTION. How could people be so astute in school district management, and why is it that the state department of education does not have the checks and balances in place to make sure that such a thing does not happen?! Our standards are way to low. We graduate children who are very poorly prepared. Why hurry? If we cannot graduate them with enough knowledge in twelve years that they should not be graduating from high school. The objective has to be a measurable key indicator of graduating student knowledge, both monthly and annually per school, as a goal five years away, and as an objective during the coming fiscal year. What level/percentage of ACT Readiness is to be achieved in graduating classes is a very important part of planning, because ACT Readiness is such a minimal requirement that such graduates will not be employable with the new technological developments coming in 2023-2024.
What do you need in: people, their schooling and employment history, DECISION-MAKING AUTHORITY, equipment, money, and automation of testing and actual achievement vs. the objectives of every teacher, principal and other supervisors/management people AND WHY WE NEED SUCH RESOURCES to meet the OBJECTIVES AT ANY AND ALL LEVELS. These things must be known at all levels each month, so that you know what is not working as planned, to decide what must be done to meet the year's objective.
Adjust the system nationwide, but you must achieve ACT Readiness at 100% of those who graduate short-term. The constant dropping of standards and requirements we saw during the last 20 years MUST BE ENDED NOW. THE PUBLIC MUST BE TOLD THE TRUTH and ALL OF THE TRUTH. The public's hard-earned money pays for our poor public education, and that HAS TO CHANGE NOW. UNFORTUNATELY, TOO MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT GETTING VOTES MEANS THAT THEY ARE QUALIFIED FOR THE JOB. A VERY LONG TIME AGO, IN A MUCH SIMPLER WORLD IT WAS TRUE, BUT NOT TODAY.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already passed average human levels in the USA with high school education and will rapidly pass us in most fields within five years by 2025. AI-driven cognitive robotics (they can learn faster than a human being and can obtain answers from search engines like Google about anything in milliseconds for the right decision) will replace an additional 30 million from the existing workforce in just a few years as a result of the marginal high school education they were provided by our public schools. A major contributor was and still is our poor public education system, with less than 5% exception. We will show below that our public education did not keep pace with technological developments for about 50 years, which is degrading our workforce and national income. The effect will be twofold. We graduate 3.6 million students annually who would be destined to the workforce of our various industries. The great majority of them, 74-84% are unemployable. Second, the existing workforce, 30 million will also lose their job for the same reason. All these losses could have been greatly reduced if our public education maintained compatibility with the top three primary and secondary education countries. Is that all? Not yet. We have something that is far more dangerous. It is called the "black/white problem" that went unresolved for more than 100 years now. In fact, it became worse during the last 12 years. We have been building a huge powder keg in this area by us doing a very bad job in public education. AND, WE HAVE DONE A SUPERB JOB TO CREATE A FUSE BY IGNORING OUR POOR PERFORMANCE IN EDUCATION, THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE THAT THIS INCOMPETENCE IS LIKELY TO PUT ON THE STREET AT A TIME WHEN OUR NATIONAL INCOME IS VERY LOW. STILL, OUR NATIONAL DEBT WILL BE EXTREMELY HIGH, AT $30 TRILLION BY THE END OF 2021. A RESOLUTION OF THIS PROBLEM WOULD REQUIRE URGENT ACTION UNDER CENTRAL AND NOT STATE CONTROL TO ENSURE RAPID IMPROVEMENT OF EDUCATION RESULTS AT MINIMUM 10% PER ANNUM. I AM DESCRIBING THE STEPS REQUIRED TO DO SO UNDER "ACTIONS" BELOW.

Having said all that, we are making enormous advances in biological computing as well, and in 5-8 years, it will be possible to use brain implants to increase IQ, thinking, and learning. We should also remember that we can do far better even today if we enjoy the teacher who is very interesting and his explanations are fascinating, and his/her behavior shows that he really cares about helping the children to enjoy his subject. The future from 2030 on will solve the education problem. I have already seen teacher robots and others in Japan, being tested in the real work environment. Buddhist monks had significant achievements in neurology, focusing on making human beings happier, healthier mentally, and correcting physical brain abnormalities that were created by early childhood trauma. According to them, we all have within us some unique capabilities that show up during the teen years, and they are likely to lead to work that we will enjoy the most. That is the vocational area where we will be the best. Steve Jobs went to India, spent one year with such monks, and it had an enormous impact on him professionally. I met him a few times, and as a friend, he was very nice and brilliant and could see things in life that the average person could not. The Indian experience speeded up his mental performance enormously, and that made him difficult to have as a boss because in meetings, he could see immediate solutions to problems, and he wanted to see the problems solved immediately. So the mechanism is within us to be doing something that we are going to become very good at. But the education we get is a "one formula fits all", and it cannot be optimized to the unique individual talents. The basic math, science level does need to be developed in school, and we are not doing it well. But developing them much faster along with the unique emerging talent will be possible within 8 years with AI driven cognitive robotics that will be here by 2023-2024. With their teaching robot by 2028 we will educate much better faster than any human being could do, matched psychologically to the individual student. It will be affordable by any family and will be the right tool to reverse poverty growth. If people in education today do not want to improve much faster than they have been doing to allow our children's deterioration, they will not have a chance for improvement for future jobs, of which there will be many. Big changes are coming between now and 30 years of now, much bigger than what we can imagine for the better unless we destroy ourselves.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING!"

Edmund Burke, Irish/American statesman, 1776

Those good men, our political leaders and law makers of BOTH parties, did NOTHING that raised the ACT scores!

URGENT ACTIONS NEEDED

TO TURN PUBLIC EDUCATION AROUND

Education (the high school curriculum and graduation requirements) needs to track the technological improvements AND the average of the top three nations in education. Why? Because our industries will adopt the technological improvement quickly because technological improvements are released for them to reduce expenses. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon! That carried many technological improvements that mandated the incorporation of pre-calculus mathematics and a year of Calculus, plus Chemistry and Physics. To this day, we have not added them to the curriculum. In a number of states like Tennessee, we are graduating children who cannot read or do basic mathematics well. Our goal of 80% ACT READINESS IS TOO WEAK WILL SUFFICE ONLY UNTIL 2024 AT MOST. THE TECHNOLOGICAL ACCELERATION THAT WE WILL SEE FROM 2020 WILL BE MUCH HIGHER THAN ANYTHING WE HAVE EXPERIENCED BEFORE. A GROUP OF NATIONS ARE ALREADY READY FOR IT, BUT WE ARE NOT BECAUSE OUR EDUCATION AND STANDARDS WERE ALLOWED TO STAY LOW AND DETERIORATE. Any improvement by us will require us to achieve a much higher standard because the only jobs that may survive robotics UNTIL 2025 AT BEST will be those that will require an MS in Mathematics, Science, Engineering, or Economics. To achieve that will not be more difficult for students, but teacher development will require frequent upgrading in education methodology and subject knowledge to a much higher level by 2024. IF WE CANNOT ACHIEVE THAT, THE COMING TECHNOLOGIES WILL BE ABLE TO PRODUCE SUPERIOR EDUCATION ROBOTS BY 2025-2028 TO REPLACE OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS, because our schools demonstrated that they do not want to improve.

WE SHOULD not be spending money on other than an excellent education, the needed technology for networking, and the presentation of best teachers and professors in the nation to be used in all classrooms, for maintenance of improving ACT scores 10% per year MINIMUM. But it must be part of a written fiscal plan per school.

One cannot improve without helpful tools the way one works after 20 years of poor performance. There must be a measurable monthly GPA objective in every school and in the school district, which is also 10% higher than the prior year's annual GPA everywhere. When performance is not planned, not measured and not visible, you get no improvement. When performance is 25% below normal expectation, you can bring it up only with Management by Objectives. What should be our readiness for our graduates to be employable? At or above 80% minimum. The education community cannot be acceptable when they did not produce but only 17% readiness in Tennessee and 26% nationally. Such children will not be employable within a couple of years. We have to be internationally competitive in order to raise our national income high enough to pay off the national debt and improve sufficiently the workforce of all our industries to make our products and services competitive. THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, AND PEOPLE WHO PRODUCED POOR RESULTS IN THE PAST NEED TO BE REPLACED. WE ARE AT A VERY DANGEROUS POINT IN OUR DEVELOPMENT. WITH A NATIONAL DEBT AT $30 TRILLION, AND HAVING A PUBLIC AS POORLY EDUCATED AS WE ARE IN 2021, WE NEED HIGHLY DISCIPLINED MANAGEMENT TO SURVIVE. Reduce school district central management staffing to UNDER 2% of total school district full-time employees who do a good job.

Teach all principals how to do a zero-based monthly budget and GPA-based monthly performance planning to achieve a 10% annual increase in the annual average ACT scores.

All principals and superintendents must have management training. All people who do a non-management job but are excellent do not NECESSARILY make good managers, YET THAT IS HOW WE PROMOTE. We have too many of those. And those who managed 50 people with outstanding results may not do well with 500 people under them. The management job gets more sophisticated as the number of employees under the manager grow. This applies to experience with Military management as well.

American teacher training at universities declined as well during the past 20 years. Our teacher colleges must select mathematics and science teachers from the top 10% of the Master's PROGRAM graduates from both BA/BS and Master's level programs in the single subject they will teach, with close attention to the ideal qualification/personality match for teaching all children above 4th grade. We cannot improve teacher results without doing this. And we cannot improve teacher pay without far better results.

We must keep only employees who deliver FAR BETTER RESULTS THAN IN THE PAST. Use of zero based budget planning is very important for performance planning FOR ALL MANAGEMENT AND SUPERVISORY PEOPLE. Start with all high schools first against an ACT score objective that is 10% above the prior year's average ACT SCORE achieved.

Justify all jobs based on how they contribute to a high school's operation to increase the ACT score at least 10% over the prior year's average ACT score. If that cannot happen, why keep them or hire them?

Any school district must communicate TO THE PUBLIC, ESPECIALLY TO PARENTS, only the truth and nothing but the truth about education achievement. Currently, this is totally ignored.

Provide a $100,000 financial incentive for each of the top ten high school principals in the state who exceeded 10% ACT growth, and recognition plaques to teachers and all principals who exceed a 10% higher GPA than the prior year's GPA, or more than 3.5 GPA, whichever is lower. Do not dismiss the power of incentives. In Dubai plus two other countries, a single $1,000,000 annual incentive to the best teacher brought fantastic results for 2018 and 2019.

Graduate only those who are ACT Ready, keep those IN HIGH SCHOOL who are not, for up to two more years. BY 2025 WE HAVE TO TRANSITION TO STEM ACT READINESS, BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT WILL INCREASE JOB SURVIVAL.

Keep a voting-public record of all elected school district board members on all votes that would reduce spending or (or except for those that) increase education results. Locally elected school district boards of education do not and cannot contribute to improving our education system. Their voting majority does not have enough know-how. Appointed boards can be very helpful (e.g., in the form of US Public schools is one called a "charter school").

K-12 Education MUST BE INTERNATIONALLY COMPETITIVE because high school graduates feed the workforce of all American companies from design to manufacturing. The quality and price of our products depend on the training of the workforce. We have to compete internationally with our products, and as our high school education declined compared to other countries, our profit margins declined, and so did our national income from about 14% to 4%. We are one of the top spenders in the world per student, but we dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries in performance. We decide K-12 curriculum and depth of subjects within it, teacher qualification criteria, teacher training curriculum competitiveness require very well qualified people on the national level. We delegated everything under education to the states, who delegated almost all decision-making to the more than 14,000 school districts' elected school boards. There are several big problems here. One is enormous duplication of staff, and all of them not the best in the country. Most of them would not understand what we are talking about here. A very flat large organization that depends on locally elected boards cannot have the right management know-how to be successful with the existing prerequisites and experience. And the explanation in its favor that the best advice for how education needs to be improving comes only from the local population probably worked 150 years ago, but today it can only fail. Just look at the record we have documented here. What is most dangerous for the nation is the fact that no correction has taken place in the last 100 years in everything relating to education: management structure and methodology, standards in every job, performance and spending management, employee competence and level of performance internationally in a competitive world.

Public schools dominate about 80% of the K-12 education in every country. That makes them a "monopoly". A monopoly can control the country to ensure that no other type of school system can enter the country. A monopoly does not have to do an excellent job of staying in control. They can be doing a poor job in most schools as education is in the USA. They promote themselves to the public as a school that is much better than they really are. Understand ACT or SAT scores so that you can understand how well they are doing. Do not trust the state test scores because most have been dumbed down. They say bad things about any other different school, even if they are much better at educating your child. We will tell you more here. Be single-minded about the school for your child. Care only about how well educated their students are by comparing ACT, SAT or NAEP (primary school test) scores. Or find out which is the best high school is with ACT scores, and ask the principal about which primary school is best.

It is not possible to turn around bad performance without ALL OF THE ABOVE STEPS. In 2016, we were the highest spenders per student in the world. We dropped to 40th in mathematics internationally that year, among 15-year-old high school children, and that is very bad news. We spent and kept spending the people's money for public education, our hard-earned tax dollars. But the poor job we did and do in public education will result in massive joblessness for our children and grandchildren for life. Whose job was it, and is it to deliver one of the highest results for the high spending in education? The money was enough, but where did it go? Certainly not for the right people in the right places in education districts. The remedy would be a forensic audit of medium to large school districts and changing people and projects that have not been productive.

Reference: Click here for ACT College and Career Readiness/benchmarks.

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76-84% OF CHILDREN WE GRADUATE TODAY (94-97% OF BLACK CHILDREN!!) ARE SO POORLY PREPARED THAT THEY WILL BE UNEMPLOYABLE! Anyone can keep denying this fact, but our education results are unacceptable for any demographic group. We have been paying the highest rate in the world per student for this unacceptable poor performance. I love my country and will do my best to prevent its destruction, or would be the happiest if some responsible people could show me that I am wrong. Our education is a major civil disorder creator. Are we creating it purposefully to "reduce the population?" In two years time, the public will discover that they paid for education the highest amounts in taxes in the world for decades and their children cannot get a job after 2024. Our "black/white" history has been going on for more than hundred and fifty years, unresolved, and education having the smell of being fraudulent (expense per child from our taxes is the highest in the world, but the results dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries, purposefully dumbing down the population), what we are doing has to be the all-time dumbest strategy that would be the worst problem-solving solution, but here it is! Please, someone, explain this to me in detail and in writing if I am incorrect. Some will have to pay, but if we do not admit first, it will be discovered soon, and the reaction will be violent. I hope that I am wrong.

As a result of our public education, we fell from the top to the bottom of the industrialized countries in important subjects, especially in mathematics. We were told how well our public schools are doing by our education management everywhere -- and now we find that what they told us was not true. THERE HAS NOT BEEN A SINGLE PERSON IN PUBLIC EDUCATION LEADERSHIP WHO STOOD UP TO FIX IT IN MORE THAN 20 YEARS OR LONGER. NOT ONE! Our parents are told by the schools that we are doing fine as students when we are not. If that is untrue, many children may be unemployed for life because we are already two years behind, according to discussions with college professors. Did any governor care enough to do some things that raised the poor ACT scores? NOT ONE. WE HAD THOUSANDS OF GOVERNORS SINCE 1970, BUT THEY ALL PROMISED WHILE RUNNING FOR OFFICE TO FIX EDUCATION AND TO RAISE THE ACT SCORES AND TO MAKE OUR CHILDREN EMPLOYABLE. NOT ONE OF THEM STOOD UP SEEING THE QUICK INCREASE IN EDUCATION EXPENSES. STAFF GROWTH AS THE RESULTS WERE DROPPING AND SAID THAT WE ARE NOT GOING TO KEEP INCREASING THE SPENDING UNTIL WE FIND OUT WHY WE ARE NOT IMPROVING. AFTER WE SEE THE APPROPRIATE IMPROVEMENT, WE WILL DISCUSS WHAT EXPENSES WE CAN CUT AND WHAT EXPENSES COULD GO TO IMPROVE THE EDUCATION RESULTS. NONE OF THEM TOOK STEPS TO CORRECT THIS SITUATION.

In 1997 I noticed that we are graduating children from high school who cannot read well and cannot do even basic math. This negligence IN EDUCATION MANAGEMENT handicaps students through high school and for life to this day 23-24 years later. Instead of visiting a few schools anywhere in the world at some minimum expense compared to what the indirect cost of this problem will be without quick resolution, education districts hired consultants without looking at a good school that did the job very well, which is the best and also the least expensive solution to solve such problems. Few consultants are good. They are generally people who lost their jobs, and they do consulting until they find a good job again. The spending went into millions, but the problem went unsolved for more than twenty years now. But we are starting again with the money-wasting consultant approach. After rediscovering the problem again, we did the same thing. The problem went unsolved. Teaching reading is not a complex problem. The most effective and least expensive solution is to visit a couple of schools that have the best results both in reading and in all subjects, in the USA or anywhere in the world. It is important to visit and see the best in any field. Find out exactly how they do it. In parallel, find and read a few good articles about how they teach reading and math in countries with an excellent education system, like Singapore, and Finland. They are much better in education than we are. Then you know what you have to do and how. I found an excellent school network called Success Academy Schools in New York. They take poor inner-city black children, for less money than what traditional public schools get, AND THEY GET HIGHER GRADES THAN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN NEW YORK. I walked into a lunch room there, picked out a lively table of 8th graders, and just said hi, telling them how hard their job is that they have to read 50 books every year. This tiny girl jumped up, told me that I was wrong and described what the teacher did to engage everyone's imagination and the fact that 3 days later they could "see" what was happening in their mind in the story, and it was better than TV. That was a fantastic and very specific introduction to teaching reading. When I left, the little girl yelled after me that she is on the 87th book this year!! And I learned the trick to teaching reading from an excellent witness. They all loved reading and talked about what university they will go to and graduate what year. They referred to each other by name and what year they will graduate from their university. By that time, we had a bunch of very enthusiastic children around us. It was a fantastic experience! One always learns best by observing the best people in the best performing group in the best nation, and then doing it yourself. Much better than any other method, and it may cost the school only $3-4K. Hiring a consultant will cost the school $100K-1,000K. It will not work, because to successfully hire anyone, you have to know how to do the job well and what has to be done. How do you determine otherwise how good the consultant is? We become the best in something by brain-learning, but to become really excellent we actually have to jump in and do the job to train the brain, the motor nerves or any other part of the brain to become really excellent about the task. Unfortunately, in most schools, they know a lot less than what is required for excellent performance. When the 20-year ACT record is as bad as it is on our chart, you generally do not have the right people on top for high performance. High performing people do not stay in a poorly performing organization. We will further explain a much more serious problem: the use of calculators created in children in mental mathematics is very important for autonomous mental mathematics that is vitally important in decision-making and analytical thinking in adulthood. We managed to paralyze it by using calculators. It is not too much for a voice response, but in tasks that require fast, automatic calculations like decision-making, which all human beings need.

The following information is to explain some things for the ACT chart and graph below. The ACT measures what our children learned from grade one to twelve. As an annual national test, the ACT is the test of choice for about half of our states, covering about 55% of all graduating students. It appears that most state tests are not good indicators of performance because the state departments of education alter them to show higher grades for less subject knowledge, by dropping the passing points to get a result that graduates more than 80% of graduating children. They call the method Cut Scores in state education departments. We wrote to some governors as much as three times, and we did not get a reply from anyone.

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

The OECD PISA test is the most respected international test whose results cover the 79 countries' educational performance plus the best four Chinese cities/provinces but not the average best result of China. The best countries in education are among them. I would suggest a few things for consideration for adaptation to our culture. Japanese, Chinese, Hong Kong, and another 3-4 large Chinese communities with excellent results, Taiwan, and Korea all produce outstanding results. A major influence that drivers those results is a parental pressure like no one else has, that results in a slightly higher suicide rate than what is common. I preferred to focus on the others for this reason. About 50 years ago, I traveled on business to about 90 countries annually for about 40 years. 50 years ago, I saw American products valued the most in every country because they were indeed the best. We were operating our industries in an international market then, both in the USA and in other countries, and even more so today. Our public education declined more since then, but we poured more and more money into it per student, and we became the highest spender in the world per student. Other nations improved their public education better than we did and passed us. Today, when you go to most stores, you see that most products are made in other countries. We lost entire markets to them (e.g., all heavy machinery, all electronics, and others). Look at any product. We became the highest spender nation per student, which dropped our children's education and, therefore, our country's future to the bottom of the industrialized nations. Why? Because our education system and schools do not think that our schools compete with other nations' schools. THIS IS A HUGE MISTAKE. The high school graduates become employed by the workforce directly or through university education of various employers. IT IS THE EMPLOYERS' COMPANIES WHO KNOW BEST WHAT LEVEL OF EDUCATION THEY NEED TODAY AND IN THE FUTURE FOR THEIR WORKFORCES. US Education Management never seems to pay attention to this important fact or to things like how the brain's neuronal network operates, where unique capabilities develop at a specific age "window" and in a specific sequence, between birth and about 20 years of age. Learning is possible later, but it is much more difficult unless you kept up learning. Such is the impact of using calculators in school instead of learning math very well. The brain is used for fairly complex mathematics and pattern recognition when critical thinking and decision making. And this is only one example of what kind of decisions have been made in our public schools. It is the workforce of companies and entire industries that create the products and services. If our workforce was educated well, if we kept our schools one of the best than other nations, we would be doing much better. If they knew what the best international education systems are planning and achieving so that our education system would be among the top three in the world, we would be doing much better financially as a nation. That also means a good tax income for our state and federal government. Today our national income is struggling around 3-4%, when it should be at 13-15%. To pay off our huge national debt, which will be $30 TRILLION by the end of 2020, we would need an additional 4% raising the needed national income to 17-19%. Many would say that this is impossible. People who are used to poor performance for decades always believe that they are doing their best. They don't know that the results always mirror how everyone does their job, and they all work very hard. What they don't know without extensive management training, which does not appear to exist in education for some reason, that they are working hard with 19th Century shovels instead of 21st Century machines that can accomplish a hundred times more with one worker with an easier job. Doing a job in an excellent, smart manner and creating excellent results is easier than doing a job that turns out bad.

Our country's future depends on how well our children are educated today. 15-25% somewhat prepared, like today, is far from enough. Why is it that those good men and women who are our political leaders, our public school management, and our lawmakers of both parties did nothing to increase the ACT and SAT scores to be among the best five countries in education when our spending per student is the highest of all nations? SOME OF THEM TOLD ME THAT THERE IS A THREAT FROM THE "EDUCATION PEOPLE" TO VOTE US OUT IF WE PROPOSE ANYTHING THAT THEY DO NOT LIKE. THEY ARE NOT FROM "SICILY", THEY JUST WATCHED

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

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

About 84% of the children we graduate from high school in Tennessee are not even "ACT Ready." Not too long ago, we graduated students ONLY if they had a higher than 60% subject knowledge IN ALL HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS. That was called a D or better grade-performance in all subjects. Many employers and colleges did not accept graduates with such low performance like a D. The current level of performance for being "ACT Ready" is much worse than that. We wrote to governors about this huge problem in states like Tennessee 3-6 times, and no one replied. Too many people from the political leadership and education organization tell the public "tall stories." TOO MANY OF THEM ARE CONMAN who just make money from the poor performance of schools and they take the donors for a ride. No response from a governor three times is not good news. A person who is doing well responds proudly with facts. A strong leader who knows what is happening in his/her organization is honest, truthful, has a good plan to solve the problems, and welcomes suggestions because they may learn something significant and useful. An election is a contest of self-promotion. Just think about how well you knew the candidates before you voted for them. Their message captured you. Our governors promise to fix public education certainly captured me. But his lack of action, and not even answering letters certainly educated me, and such experiences should educate everyone. What good are they doing "beside basking in the lights, as the government is playing their favorite songs?" The education problems are not important for them. THEY ARE VERY BUSY DOING OTHER MORE IMPORTANT THINGS THAN OUR FAILING EDUCATION.

The ACT results are solid evidence of how much a child learned between grades one and twelve. So what? Your child's ability to make a living depends on it. And the future of the entire country depends on it. And they all believe that they are doing a good job. Welcome to our public schools. Honesty with the students and parents so that their expectations for employment are realistic would be most helpful. But they are telling parents that "God did not make all children for college work. But your little Johnny is smart, he can learn a trade, and do well!" is an unadulterated lie because all such jobs will go to robotics within five years, by 2024. I attended 29 classes in 15 different school districts in Science and math. The new state superintendents always attend three classes, preannounced in the newspapers. The most common complaint we heard from high school students during the past 15 years was that the classes are boring. After finding a few interesting things about our education programs, I visited the best three public education countries to learn how they are getting better results. They were averaging an ACT equivalent score between 29-34. Half of the final graduation grade is a test that they take on all four years of ALL high school courses.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING!"

Edmund Burke, Irish/American statesman, 1776

Those good men, our political leaders and law makers of BOTH parties, did NOTHING that raised the ACT score.

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

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

The high schools' job is to create a "product," called the high school graduate, who is employable in a job that pays enough to maintain a family of four. Think of the employer as the "customer" for the "student" It is essential to understand that what the high schools teach must be what the employers need, and our schools must teach it very well. NOTHING LESS, preferably more. The reality is dismal in public schools. Read about "ACT Readiness" below. 80% ACT Readiness or an average ACT score of 27 is the minimum for "well enough trained high school graduates today" for tomorrow's jobs until 2024 only. We have a huge technological impact coming in 2023. The employers' needs from high school graduates are increasing with changes in technology. The schools may argue with you about this, but obviously, for your child to be employed, his/her employer must be happy with your child's education/knowledge. By 2023 we will have three major new science groups, A.I.-driven cognitive robotics, space science, and nanotechnology, a change much bigger than what computers created. Every time new technologies arise, they will influence the way employers work and change their jobs. There will be a big change in jobs, emphasizing Mathematics beyond Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics is becoming the most important Science. Reading and good mental Math, English Composition, and Economics are also subjects that today's high school graduates need to master very well. Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will replace many jobs. That means that most of our schools are not doing a good job. The parents must supplement the children's education using a great supply of outstanding and inexpensive learning aids and tutorials on the Internet. We are providing a list of the best below. In the ACT performance chart, the Internet's teaching material is vital because teacher training became weak. The important thing is that the "customer" for the "products" that high schools graduate are the EMPLOYERS. OUR SCHOOLS MUST SATISFY THE NEEDS OF THESE EMPLOYERS, WHO HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING ABOUT OUR POOR HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION TO GOVERNORS FOR THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, WITHOUT ANY HELP BY THOSE GOVERNORS TO RAISE THE ACT SCORES. ANY MONEY SPENDING THAT DOES NOT RAISE THE ACT SCORES IS WORTHLESS IN IMPROVING OUR POOR RESULTS. EVERYTHING IS GETTING MORE COMPLEX AROUND the US PRACTICALLY EVERY MONTH. THE WORKERS NEED MORE KNOWLEDGE, BUT OUR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION, THE ACT SCORES SHOW, IS NOT GOING UP. THAT IS NOT GOOD NEWS.

This is our biggest problem. The signs are all around us. The old American courage is gone. The ACT results have been too low for 20 years or more. Neither party did anything to fix it. The ACT scores remained low. Our founding fathers' great ideas are trampled. Money is king. Too many of us worldwide hate and even kill each other for ridiculous reasons like different opinions, appearances, languages, or religious beliefs. We have been struggling with a historical black/white problem for more than 100 years. A good education would be critical to fix it. Why is our children's education not important enough for the governors from either party to raise the ACT scores for 20 years or more?! UNBELIEVABLE! Have we all become slaves to something evil? People with extreme wealth and the best education in small numbers can control anything. Not necessarily bad. The key to our survival is "our public schools must be among the best three worldwide in education." Read here how poor we are. And we human beings could have fixed all of this on a large scale, with the right leadership in every state. Poverty in the US is growing at a high rate instead of decreasing. The education system blames poverty for the bad education results. Not true. Bad education creates graduates for low paying jobs only. Bad education creates poverty. US public schools became the most expensive per student in the world. Most of our public schools' education became the worst in the industrialized world. We should not have slogans like "Excellent education for any child!" How about "POVERTY FOR EVERY CHILD!" It is a lot closer to the truth. The American public education system has been declining for a very long time, dumbing down the high school graduates, and "misinforming" parents and the public. The international PISA test shows us too far behind. An article in one of the major American education publications claims that we are number 1 in the OECD PISA tests worldwide. A huge lie, and without any government agency taking any action whatsoever to apologize for delivering poorly educated children who will be jobless. They could be fixing it instead. But they don't. WHY? Politicians propose something because "the American people want it, deserve it or need it." NO THEY DON'T! Their "representatives" convinced the public with promises that are not kept to give them money for advertising to fight and deliver the promises made. This kind of behavior is not so common. EXCEPT FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION. From governors on down, they delivered NOTHING that raised the ACT scores. Our public education is in bad shape, perhaps with only 5% exception. How come we do not hear any support from politicians for actions that increase the ACT scores? Is it the parents who want their children unemployed in the future?? "SPEAKING FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE" must be it! Or is it the governors? Why is it that governors do not make changes in our public education that raise the ACT scores?. Why do you allow education publications to publish not just small lies but major ones, like America is number one in the OECD PISA international tests in mathematics, when we were 25th at best in the past, closer to 40th most of the time? ACT Readiness benchmarks pass you at a 23 ACT score at best, which represents only 22-24% good answers on a test, in 4 high school subjects only, which is very low performance. Why do you allow 74-84% of children who do not even meet ACT Readiness to graduate from high school? And for black students, you graduate 94-97% who do not meet the low ACT Readiness!! Our education system should make sure that 90% or higher ACT Readiness graduates. Not just 16-26%. They cannot even hang on to jobs for a month that way. A decade or so ago, we used to graduate only those students from high school who passed all four years of high school courses above 60% good answers in every single high school subject. In the last few years, 74-84% of high school graduates do not even meet the four subject benchmark test that passes only 25% of subject knowledge called ACT Readiness. Do our political leaders and governors want our children unemployed? And you allow people with such low performance to be employed or to be decision-makers on our education. We are doing what Edmund Burke warned us about in 1776. Such low performance has been dumbing down our children in public schools

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

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

In business, there is a natural control to help keep the organization healthy. If you do a bad job, like the great majority of our public schools, your customers disappear within a few months, and you are history. No one will use you, and public education would be gone, and someone better would take the bad schools' place. Why do we treat poorly performing public schools preferentially? Their money is guaranteed by law, regardless of the results. AND! The law says that your child must go to one of them, EVEN IF THE SCHOOL IS DOING A POOR JOB ACCORDING TO THE STATE. THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE STATE'S DEFINITION OF IT APPEARS THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS DO NOT HAVE ANY CHECKS AND BALANCES BETWEEN THEMSELVES AND THEIR CUSTOMERS, THE EMPLOYERS. ALSO, THERE IS NOT ENOUGH OVERSIGHT OF SPENDING, AND THEY WASTE A LOT OF MONEY. THAT IS WHY WE PAY THEM THE HIGHEST AMOUNTS PER STUDENT, BUT THEY ARE DELIVERING THE WORST EDUCATION. PUBLIC EDUCATION SHOULD NEVER EVALUATE THEMSELVES. IT IS THE EMPLOYERS WHO SHOULD JUDGE HOW WELL THE HIGH SCHOOLS ARE PERFORMING BASED ON A NATIONAL STANDARD THAT IS COMPETITIVE WITH THE TOP 3 COUNTRIES IN HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have a major problem because our future as a nation depends on today's high school graduates. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon! Our public education has been regressing relative the technological increases in all industries, and it did not keep up with all the new technological developments that employers needed. To make it worse, we are graduating from high school children who could not read and write well enough, read and write block letters only, could not fill out job applications, and could not learn simple things. 76-84% of those children who are graduated with a diploma do not even meet ACT Readiness, a very weak qualification level because ACT Readiness is based on meeting only four benchmark subjects at less than 60% knowledge level of those four benchmark courses. THAT IS A VERY LOW STANDARD. We have two 8th grade final tests below as examples, that are more than 120 years old. Many high school graduates could not pass them today. Having attended many high school science and math classes, they were boring. NO PERSON, YOUNG OR OLDER, WILL LEARN ANYTHING IN A CLASS THAT IS BORING. Difficult to believe unless we sit-in at a few school board meetings and look at the past 20 years of ACT performance. Go to a school board meeting, please. Ask how they are doing and what needs improvement. Write down the answers. It will be "we are doing OK, but we need money." Then, write down how much time they spent on "how to improve our children's education." Ask at the meeting what actions they are planning, who is to do what by what date, to improve the ACT scores. Make notes on what they say. You will be asking very good questions after you read this website.

Teachers' unions and other education-related unions: you are party to the poor public education performance of our public schools. Our country's survival depends on the education of today's children. Are you doing things to dumb down our children? I hope not. Like it or not, you are a very influential part of public education, and public education is doing very poorly. I would think that it would be very important for you to ensure that our high school graduates are competitively educated if compared to the top three countries in education, but we are far below them. Why are you not helping us to become one of the best three countries in the world in education? Why are we giving diplomas to 80% of the graduating children who are not even act ready?

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

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

We have another very serious problem. Only better education could solve it. I did not find this problem in other countries. Too many white and black people believe that the other is inferior. Our public education level is responsible for that. In Tennessee and many other states, 94-97% of the graduating black students are NOT EVEN ACT READY! IN TENNESSEE, 84% OF THOSE WHO GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL ARE NOT EVEN "ACT READY," WHICH IS A VERY LOW PERFORMANCE INDICATOR. Moreover, we spend twice as much in schools PER STUDENT than in those with white students. SO I FOUND A SCHOOL CHAIN CALLED SUCCESS ACADEMY SCHOOLS, WHO TAKE ONLY POOR INNER CITY STUDENTS. GUESS WHAT KIND OF GRADE THOSE CHILDREN ACHIEVE? THEY SCORE ABOVE 90% AND ARE BETTER THAN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS. IF THEY CAN DO IT, SO COULD WE IF WE HAD LEADERSHIP WHO ACTED IN COUNTRY'S BEST INTEREST. The locally elected school boards believe in those states that money is the solution, and in most problem solving, including this one, money is not the solution. That just means that elected school board members have no idea how to solve performance problems, don't want to learn how to solve such problems, but they do want the extra $25,000 dollars every year to spend on themselves. Better education requires better teachers trained on the Master's level in the subject they teach. Teachers who come from the top 30% of their university training. Teachers who are a good psychological match for the profession, working under management trained in management, had excellent results. That is the most important solution to this problem in most of our states. A good education is the only remedy to fix both our education and our old black and white conflict problem. We found a charter school with 46 schools in New York City, that takes only poor minority children, the majority are poor black children. They are scoring higher than most private schools! A public education system that operates as poorly as ours can destroy the entire country.

The poor education for black folks and other minorities will be the fuse that WILL BLOW US APART. We warned about this problem as very urgent in 2010. Education would be the only remedy to solve it, but very interestingly, both our politicians and education management would prefer to do nothing about these two huge problems. We need to fix our non-existent teacher selection program, our poor teacher training programs, the lack of management training in education, and why no governor has done anything to raise the ACT scores. PUBLIC SCHOOLS MUST DELIVER MUCH BETTER EDUCATION IF WE WANT OUR COUNTRY TO SURVIVE. Look at the ACT results. The great majority of public schools are destroying our country.

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

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

Those good men, our political leaders and law-makers of BOTH parties, did NOTHING that raised the ACT scores!

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

Other nations improved their education systems with more expertise, and improved teaching methodologies. The reason given for this was that delegating total education responsibilities to the states happened "because it was not in the US Constitution at the USA's formation and approved in 1789. Why was this a bad reason? Because the results are BAD. LOOK AT THE ACT SCORES! The US Constitution was amended as needed since then, 27 times! The first ten amendments are known as the Bill of Rights. Then all states delegated all management and other decisions to the elected boards of local school districts. We have more than 14,000 of them in the USA. They are all doing their own thing without centralized standards, and we hear even today from them that we control education on the school district level because "THE BEST GUIDANCE FOR OUR SCHOOLS AND CHILDREN COME NOT FROM THE NATION CENTRALLY, BUT FROM THE ELECTED LOCAL SCHOOL BOARDS REPRESENTING THE LOCAL POPULATION." THAT REASONING IS FROM THE MID-1800s. It was appropriate then. But after we went from the horse and buggy TO THE MOON, other nations kept education up to date with the huge technological advances. It is difficult to understand why such a very limited decision still dominates US education, with politicians in control who do not seem to understand that their actions are damaging our economy on a large scale. This idea worked well until about 1900, for more than a century. PLEASE CHANGE SUCH DECISIONS TO ONE INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONAL GROUP OF RETIRED LARGE COMPANY CEOS WHOSE COMPANY IS INTERNATIONALLY SUCCESSFUL, BECAUSE THEY REPRESENT THEIR FUTURE EMPLOYEE NEEDS THE BEST. THOSE ARE THE KIND OF PEOPLE WHO COULD APPROVE NATIONAL STANDARDS: TO CONTROL GRADING AND TESTING STANDARDS, TEACHER TRAINING STANDARDS, TEACHER SELECTION, AND QUALIFICATION STANDARDS, K-12 CURRICULUM, TEACHING METHODOLOGIES, TEACHER COMPENSATION POLICIES, TEACHER PERFORMANCE EVALUATION STANDARDS NATIONALLY. The education results have been poor for 19 years or more under state political control. The entire nation's standards need to be raised to improve results. The standards need to be made by an independent, highly educated standard, and the states are to improve the education results under those standards.

The small single-classroom school houses did a good job in mathematics and English focused on mostly agricultural production, and very simple manufacturing. Please look at two 8th grade final exams more than 120 years ago: one is from 1895, and the other is from 1912. We are showing here how much tougher the 8th-grade education and tests were more than 120 years ago. Many of today's high school graduates could not pass these eighth-grade final tests. But then, something happened after WWI. We started advancing in more and more areas of sciences and mathematics, AND WE WENT FROM THE HORSE AND BUGGY TO THE MOON, AND THESE EFFORTS RESULTED IN MILLIONS OF NEW DISCOVERIES IN THOUSANDS OF NEW SCIENCES, ENGINEERING, MEDICINE AND WE COULD GO ON FOREVER. MANY OLD JOBS DISAPPEARED, BUT THE BIG CHANGES CREATED MORE NEW JOBS. EDUCATION HAD TO INCREASE FOR THE NEW JOBS AT ALL LEVELS, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL AND HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL, UNIVERSITY LEVEL, AND GRADUATE LEVEL LIKE DOCTORATE PERFORMANCE IN MOST FIELDS. AFTER WWII, EDUCATION ON THE ELEMENTARY AND HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL INCREASED ACCORDINGLY IN MANY COUNTRIES. BUT NOT IN THE USA. When hiring people within school districts or on the state level, those hiring have no idea how to check the background and how to interview. In many cases, they think they know what the problem is, but have no idea within school districts what they need to change to get better results, and don't know what kind of talent they need to hire. BS is the rule of the day. Political control and political management influenced all education-related decisions more and more after WWI. Even after the millions of technological advances, we stayed with the old slogan of "The best decision can only come from the local population's elected school boards to improve education." This idea worked well in the agriculture-based economy of the 1800s, but not after WWI when we went from the horse and buggy to the moon, with incredible technological discoveries that are accelerating faster and faster as you are reading this report.

But American public education broke with the old belief of the 1800s coupled with the power of law-making politicians whose fuel became the worshiping of money FROM LOBBYISTS. Lobbyists are generally retired Congress members, who changed from being paid off by lobbyists to being the lobbyist for more money. Not all of them, but enough in numbers to control Congress's decision-making for specific interest groups or industries. Are we a Democracy that we try to sell to other countries? Even the Greeks decided about two thousand five hundred years ago that pure democracy creates huge disorganization and conflicts followed by failure. So several different democracies exist by different names. BUT WE HAVE BEEN SELLING IT TO OTHER COUNTRIES, combined with creating incredible losses of our young people and leaving the country that we left after capturing them, in an economic mess. In Japan and Germany, we stayed and helped to rebuild the countries. The American generals in charge were outstanding in doing so. But most importantly, we created close friends and allies from two powerful enemies. But in many other cases, as of late, we left quickly after destroying the countries, without help to recover. This reminds me of Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and others. They have to rebuild. Something to think about. Vietnam did an excellent job to recover.

By WWII, we were the only one of the industrialized nations who stayed with the late 1800s's belief of "The best decision can only come from the local population's elected school boards to improve education," that held us back as others passed us. And important to note that politicians always propose something in the name of the people. "The American people want "XYZ" that I am proposing." It's possible that 0.0001% of the public heard something about it. There is a limit at which point we can drop down to the "level of cavemen," losing everything with these old beliefs as we are getting dumbed down. We are only halfway there in 2020 - exactly. The closer we get to that point, the more difficult recovery will be. We are too close to that point, beyond which recovery is impossible with a law making body of former lawyers mostly, who can argue for and be part of either side that pays more. This is not negative thinking. It is called trend extension in decision making. In this case, you look at a reliable measure of annual performance (ACT) trend for ten years minimum compared to the trend of your top ten competitor countries' annual performance in the same period - it doesn't look good.

The philosophy born 200 years ago, about managing education is the same today: "The best decision can only come from the local population's elected school boards to improve education," is the most damaging to our future success. Why? Because it applies to all planning, if any, all management of execution to non-existing measurable objective, and lacking any management know-how to change the way the organization works, without which the results cannot change. We will not get smarter ELECTED school board members in ANY OF THE 14,000 school districts, with their incredible duplication of people and expenses, and the education results that will make almost all of our children jobless! You simply cannot get well enough educated school board MAJORITY by electing them, who are experienced enough to make equally good decisions today, that is competitive with the best nations in education. Our children's highest success or dismal failure in school depends on how well our schools educate them. BUT more importantly, OUR COUNTRY's ECONOMY depends totally on our children's education today. Having elected school boards during the last 100 years is one reason why our public education is dropping like a stone. But we found ten other actions that ensure failure, performed by the state education departments with the governor's blessing - everywhere. Besides, the elected local school boards duplicate functions where decision making SHOULD BE uniform for the nation, and it is duplicating staff in more than 14,000 school districts, with good people who do not have the right education and experience for decisions that vary among them. This is almost like 14,000 blindfolded people getting into their cars, but have no idea about where to go, but they push the accelerator down anyway, and there is no way they can succeed. You do not need any more proof than the poor ACT records for decades, which are among the worst in the industrialized countries. The state education departments, the governors and lawmakers who do not seem to stand up to the education lobby. No laws were proposed that would require changes within the educational organizations. Why not? The poor results are created within those organizations with the "help" of education lobbyists, who could vote out any politician whose proposal they do not like. This is a classic, bad management structure that can only go down, where the education organization is poorly performing, obviously because of poor, insufficiently educated self-serving decisions. Such decisions must be made centrally as in every country, except in ours, with the best people we can find, with this central decision-making group's responsibility to set standards IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST! The education organizations MUST be implemented with excellent performance: the nationally centralized INDEPENDENT management group directs in objectives and monthly operating plans within each school. If many other countries figured this out by WWII, WHY COULDN'T WE?! We are spending a fortune on duplication of people in every state AND EVERY SCHOOL DISTRICT BOOSTING THE SIZE OF CENTRAL MANAGEMENT IN ALL OF THEM, without knowing exactly what they are to do and how to do it. This just makes every school district worse. There are standards for the size of central management organizations, like 4 people plus one percent of the total number of employees, and if they grow beyond it bad things happen with performance. Operating with silly unmeasurable objectives backed by a very low-performance target like ACT 21 creates many problems that also drop performance. We do not seem to have the management experience to know anything to create good results from the top down. Worst of all, most people in the education communities' management think they know enough because they were hired. No person in any school district wants to visit school systems that perform better, and they do not want to learn anything to create better results, BECAUSE THEY THINK THAT SUCH VISITS WOULD INDICATE THAT THEY DON'T KNOW ENOUGH TO DO THEIR JOBS WELL. Morale is bad and justified. The results could not be worse. The structured satisfaction surveys that the states use are not a good choice because the outcome is limited to fixed multiple questions and four possible answers. Such tests can steer the result to a conclusion like "we need more money" and the real problem remains hidden. When morale is bad or unknown, one needs an open-ended test where the employee steers the test. Such highly secure online tests are available. The responsibility for bad results rests with governors, the state education organization without exception, most superintendents, but we are not including superintendents, principals and teachers, who are trying hard to do the right thing without much help from above.

School boards started gathering a bad reputation by the late 1800's. Relying on the important decision's of standards, curriculum, and elected school board members having the highest authority for decisions, when they know far less about education than an assistant teacher. With majority of voting decisions within a board, who were not trained and experienced in management. Same in subject knowledge, in determining if we need to improve and by how much per subject. Or in teacher training, or interviewing people to be the new superintendent, who has a history that demonstrated increasing the national test or any measurable results, such an elected board as a group decision, simply cannot do well. But to give such authority by law to such a group shows not enough skill from a governor on down to change with the times. So, American education became the most expensive per student and dropped like a stone to the industrialized countries' bottom. Not being able to improve teaching but making teachers' jobs more difficult, not being able to hire good superintendents whose future depended on the elected board, who have no idea what bad performance is, have no idea how to fix a problem by throwing money at it. You see, having a boss who is unqualified will not be able to attract good experienced management talent who can improve things. The board members are good people who want to do good. Still, most of the elected board is not trained and experienced well enough to direct even a 50 person organization, let alone one with 100-10,000 employees. With political influence without "measurable academic achievement objectives" in every school with a national test and not a state test, it is not the path to success. Having untrained, inexperienced people for the jobs to prepare our children for building a better tomorrow is not the path to success. The qualifications, standards and objectives within education must be centralized with the best highly educated and experienced people who are independent of public education. The education of our children cannot be based on those organizations who could not deliver better results for decades and presented to the public a much better picture than reality was. They lied to the public, "purposefully misleading the public, who pay for it all." It is a fraudulent action that needs to be investigated. And to prove our point, look at the evidence presented below, and after you do, YOU DECIDE what you want for your children, grandchildren, and your country. But you have to focus on ACT score results. The ACT score shows what the child learned from grade one to twelve.

THAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT TASK THAT OUR HIGH SCHOOLS ARE TO ACCOMPLISH. THAT WILL HAPPEN ONLY IF THE ELEMENTARY AND MIDDLE SCHOOLS' PERFORMANCE IS OUTSTANDING. DO NOT LET ANYONE MISGUIDE YOU BY SAYING THAT "THERE ARE OTHER THINGS THAT ARE JUST AS IMPORTANT." BETTER EDUCATION IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING FOR BOTH: OUR CHILDREN AND OUR COUNTRY. THE CURRENT LEVEL OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IS EXTREMELY POOR. WE WILL SHOW BELOW ALL ACTIONS APPEAR TO BE PAST AND CURRENT ACTIONS, DONE PURPOSEFULLY, TO DUMB DOWN 95-99% OF OUR NATION. We will explain to you what you need to know to pick a good ACT score target. Never let anyone tell you, referring to your child, that God did not make all children for college. What is true is that God did not make MOST children jobless. BUT OUR STATE PUBLIC EDUCATION DEPARTMENTS UNDER THE GOVERNOR CERTAINLY DID BY NOT TAKING CORRECTIVE ACTION! OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS HAVE BEEN DECLINING FOR A LONG TIME AND GETTING WORSE. THEY ARE DOING IT AT THE HIGHEST COST IN THE WORLD PER CHILD. YOU SHOULD ASK YOUR GOVERNOR VERY POLITELY IN WRITING ABOUT WHY CERTAIN THINGS IS DONE, BECAUSE IT APPEARS TO BE DAMAGING, and YOU WOULD LIKE TO UNDERSTAND IT. WE DID NOT GET AN ANSWER. MAYBE YOU WILL.

A VERY IMPORTANT POINT: We, and probably every country, can have emergencies that take more money to survive, at a time when we are disabled to make more money. It could be an infectious disease for which no defense exists when it breaks out. It could be a natural disaster that comes as a surprise, like a major earthquake or a volcanic eruption, that is not predictable. Or it could be believable, but we dismiss its possibility. It was like a bloody revolt when tens of millions of people could no longer get a job because their educators did not teach the information they needed. We must realize that to have a safety net, we are dependent on the quality of our public education, creating a boring school that does not create good results. We set the wrong standards, with 14,000 school districts' elected boards just doing their own thing. For that to happen, we would need to enforce having a much better trained and managed public school system that operates with the right objectives and follows an annual operating plan with monthly GPA objectives that are 10% higher than the prior years' actual performance. We must understand that people who worked in a poorly performing organization view their performance as normal, do not want objectives, or be measured, and view anything above 2-3% improvement in performance as an impossibility. Look at the chart covering nineteen years. We never managed to increase the performance more. Schools never operated under a performance objective with monthly operating plans focusing them on what they must accomplish. School employees just came to work, doing things the same way as they did a hundred years ago. When you do not change the way you work, you will keep getting the same results. That is why the K-12 public school performance did not, and will not improve until we introduce major changes. As a result, we just stayed in a poor performance area for much longer than 20 years.

Charter schools are a different version of public schools. They are also USA public schools. Traditional public schools like to publicize "facts" like charter schools are not better they take money away from your children's public schools. All of which is "true" (wink, wink). Please understand that when the truth is bad, the offending people have to make up "facts," they lie, and they DO NOT WANT TO CHANGE. VERY UNPROFESSIONAL. As a result, they are destroying the employability of most of today's children. So what do you have to do to look better? You follow uncle VLADIMIR LENIN'S ADVICE, WHO SAID MANY TIMES THAT "IF YOU LIE TO THE PUBLIC A THOUSAND TIMES, THEY WILL ACCEPT IT AS THE TRUTH." And disinformation theory was born. Charter schools have an appointed board of business leaders and members of the local public school management and teachers - UNFORTUNATELY. The traditional public schools have an elected board of local people AND PAY THEM in most cases. To win a school board election, it will cost about $15,000 in advertising. To win a governorship, you need to spend $10-15 million in self-advertising. In one case, a governor candidate spent $3 million to get elected. His opponent spent $15 million and won. AND INTO POLITICAL OBLIGATIONS WE GO IF YOU DONATED ENOUGH TO THE CANDIDATE. HOW GOOD THE CANDIDATES ARE, DOES NOT MATTER. All of them promise to fix education when running for office. AND NONE OF THEM DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. Please do not object. Just look at 20 years of ACT scores and the fact that about 80% of we graduate are not even ACT READY - and that is a very low measure of knowledge compared to what employers needed. The traditional public school board member gets $25,000 per year, as an example, in Knoxville, TN, for at least four years, and there are no term limits. Naturally, the school board member does not care about the money (wink, wink), and will understand what they have to do to improve the already "excellent" performance of the school system (wink, wink, wink!) by screaming, "We need more money!!!". The prerequisite is a high school diploma, and the candidate does not know anything about education and how to improve it. Look at the comparison of charter vs. traditional public school performance right here. The charter schools get less money than the traditional low-performing public schools do. Black student performance is generally very low, with a MINIMUM of 94%, not even ACT Ready. I heard all kinds of ideas about why. I decided to find one that accepts only poor, black, inner-city children. A charter school started in 2006 in Harlem, called Success Academy Schools. Today they have 46 schools and a waiting list of 19,000 families. Their results are excellent, and they passed almost all private schools. I visited them, but I could not convince any school districts to visit and learn. NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON VISITED THEM FROM TRADITIONAL PUBLIC SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. They even put their curriculum and teaching methodology on the Internet free for any school. There are too many people in most traditional public schools who are taco short on the combination plate. IT IS RECOGNIZED THAT THEY ARE DOING A POOR JOB THAT DAMAGES THE CHILDREN "THEY EDUCATE POORLY." THE HUMAN IGNORANCE AND BIG EGOS MOSTLY BY PEOPLE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION WHO REFUSE TO LEARN AND DID NOT KNOW ENOUGH WHEN THEY STARTED, TRYING TO HIDE BAD PERFORMANCE THAT IS NOTICED BY MORE AND MORE PEOPLE IN PUBLIC. WHY IS IT THAT BOTH PARTIES AND ALL GOVERNORS AVOIDED MAKING CHANGES IN PUBLIC EDUCATION THAT WOULD INCREASE ACT AND SAT PERFORMANCE TO INTERNATIONALLY COMPETITIVE LEVELS?

We would like to explain something very basic about debt and excessive spending in general. If you must pay for something right now, but you do not have the money, you can borrow that money. But the amount you must pay back will be higher. The difference is called "interest." You will end up with less money in the future because you will have to keep paying interest on the money you borrowed ages ago. That's not a good thing. How big or small is the total interest due? Is it insignificant? When I found out, I was shocked. Our national debt is 23.6 TRILLION dollars on March 24, 2020. The total interest IS ONE THIRD OF THE NATIONAL DEBT AT 8 TRILLION DOLLARS! The COVID-19 virus problem will increase it more rapidly because we had insufficient money in reserve. AND THAT IS A BIG PROBLEM. THAT BIG PROBLEM IS OUR POOR HIGH SCHOOL PERFORMANCE THAT HAS BEEN WEAKENING THE WORKFORCE IN ALL INDUSTRIES AND THAT REDUCED NATIONAL INCOME, RESULTING IN THIS SITUATION. WHAT WILL WE DO IF A HURRICANE HITS THE EAST COAST OR A VOLCANIC ERUPTION OR A BIG EARTHQUAKE HITS US? ALL OF THEM ARE HIGH PROBABILITY EVENTS FOR THE USA. HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION MUST BE INCREASED ASAP TO A NATIONAL AVERAGE 27 ACT, BECAUSE THE CURRENT LOW PERFORMANCE IN BOTH PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION, WITH 3 OUT OF 4 GRADUATES NOT EVEN MEETING THE LOW "ACT READINESS" STANDARD HAS BEEN WEAKENING OUR NATIONAL WORKFORCE FOR SEVERAL DECADES.

Please look at the graph below. For now, concentrate on the three horizontal lines in the middle of the graph, and what they are. They are 20 years of ACT scores for the USA, Tennessee, and the Knox County school district in Tennessee. These scores are a fact, the real scores for 20 years. Just think about what they tell you. This single school district alone is costing us MORE THAN 500 MILLION dollars per year. So Tennessee must be costing what? Many Millions. And how about the entire USA? BILLIONS!! It appears that 80% of the children will not get a job for more than minimum wage until 2023. Cognitive robots with Artificial Intelligence that passed average human intelligence will replace 95-98% of low-end jobs. Just think about this situation, as we investigate below to find out why and what we must do. By the way, the national debt is now above $210,000 per person IN 2019 including our children. Only a very healthy economy could pay it back. BUT THAT REQUIRES A HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION WITH CHILDREN WHO ARE ALL "STEM ACT READY," WITH AN AVERAGE 26 ACT SCORE TODAY AND RISING WITH THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES. "STEM ACT READINESS" (75%, MINIMUM 26 ACT AVERAGE) IS WHAT OUR SCHOOLS SHOULD ACHIEVE. NOT JUST ORDINARY ACT READINESS (MINIMUM 18-23% ACT READINESS, representing only 0%-24% subject knowledge in four subjects only, a very poor performance level). BUT 80% OF THE CHILDREN WE GRADUATE CANNOT EVEN ACHIEVE THAT. LET ME SAY IT AGAIN: THEY GRADUATE THE MAJORITY OF OUR CHILDREN, NOT EVEN "ACT READY." THAT MEANS NO POSSIBILITY OF EMPLOYMENT. WE WILL PROVE THAT BELOW. EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW THIS.

Who is responsible for such low public school performance?

The inner city folks, many times single parents, limited education, working hard manual jobs, not enough money. I spoke to them. We have no idea how difficult their life is. The most common answer they told me was that "My boyfriend got me pregnant. When he found out, he ran away. I could not finish high school. I work my fingers to the bone every day. I am dead tired by the end of my work every day. I don't understand what the schools tell me about my child." Very sad. The well-to-do parents can help their own children easily. How does anyone propose we increase poor children's performance?

Education results are the responsibility of state governors. Look at the chart. The education results are bad. Is that why school districts' expenses and salaries are guaranteed the money by law, regardless of the job they do! We have one of the highest expenses per student in the world, but our education results are the lowest among industrialized countries. During the 1990's we found that the children we graduate could not read properly. We spent a few million dollars on consultants instead of getting a few teachers educated to teach reading. Today in 2020, we have the same problem that never changed. We hired a consultant again. Today's poorly performing school districts do not go to high-performing schools to determine how they teach subjects where performance is too low. They do not search the Internet for some fantastic education tools that we have there. The result is that they have no clue what they are doing wrong, and with such laziness, they hire a consultant, and they don't know if that consultant can do the job. Many are just unemployed. By hiring a consultant, the elected board doesn't know any better. The new expense will increase the school spending, and the "maintenance of effort law" in education guarantees that level of spending for the following year. The elected board members majority and education management at almost all school districts just sit there without updating the education laws because the lawmakers are afraid of being replaced at reelection time by the education lobby.

We first raised the problem to governors about education ten years ago in Tennessee. Wrote to the previous governor seven times and the current governor four times, but not a single response from anyone. Not even one. The states are continuing to make no changes that could raise the ACT and SAT scores. We need a 30% improvement in them now in 2020. To solve the education problem, it will be possible with cognitive robotics with artificial intelligence. It will be far superior to what we have today in 2020. But it will be possible only 5-8 years from now. We cannot wait with changes, because Covid-19 will hit our economy hard. The national debt is likely to rise to at least $30 trillion in 2020 alone. The current education system is damaging the workforce of all industries. The public anger that will result from it will keep the destruction alive, pumping the national debt much higher. That could break us. For that reason, we believe that we must get our public education to a STEM ACT readiness level to 27 average ACT score urgently. We waited too long without improvement.

It appears from many years of poor performance that the management people from the local school boards and superintendents to the state superintendents of education and governors have no idea what to do or are afraid to change anything when performance is bad. The US Department of Education website even has a comment about no business practices are applicable to education. The fact is that the best modern business methods relating to achieving objectives, hiring and managing people and financial operations are used not only in business but in ANY SUCCESSFUL GROUP ACTIVITY where the money is spent to achieve anything, Not using and preventing such methods in public education where the academic results are below the results of the top ten nations in education is extremely negligent and must be changed.

The biggest mistake perhaps that one makes in organizations is this: hiring someone, without the hiring manager knowing exactly how to do the job, or hiring a consultant to find out both what the problem is and how to do the job. That means that the great majority of management people not only don't know the job, for which they are trying to hire a person, but they don't know what they have to achieve in measurable terms in their own job and they interview the potential employee without being able to ask the right questions to find out if the potential employee can do the job or not. Such employees do not even make an effort to learn what they don't know, and they are not doing the job well. Public education organizations are full of people like that. The results are bad, and they have no idea how to fix it. The same goes for hiring consultants. If you don't know precisely what a potential employee needs to do, what he/she needs to achieve, and to what standard, you will not hire the right person.

To make the national debt-related interest payments disappear. We have to be able to make enough money to pay off that debt. To make that a reality, our high schools must graduate far better-educated students than we graduate today. What does that mean? Today, our high school graduates have an average ACT readiness (explained below) of only 24-26% nationally. That is not good enough, and will explain below why. The schools may tell you that we are doing fine. They may tell you that I am pessimistic. You be the judge. One thing is a fact. To go anywhere, including achieving anything, you must know honestly and precisely first WHERE YOU ARE, where you stand, exactly. Without that, you cannot decide what to do and plan the monthly or weekly steps you want to achieve to get to where you want to be. We must TRY to graduate 95%, but...with all graduates "ACT Ready", and that would take an average ACT score at or above 27 in 2021. Several nations perform better than what ACT 27 represents. But they have excellent controls over education, and we have none. For example, their teacher candidates are from the top 10% of Master's programs in the subject that they would teach. They do not appoint a teacher who was not trained actually to teach that subject. Unfortunately, we do. The teacher's personality and IQ are matched to the teaching position to ensure that teaching is what they love the most as a profession. Then they are under the guidance of a senior teacher in that subject who demonstrated success for 12-15 years. WE WILL DESCRIBE BELOW WHY AND HOW THAT CAN BE ACHIEVED. WE ALL must UNDERSTAND THAT FIRST. Only then can we start improving our workforce everywhere. So that our industries can win more business with higher profits. So that they can pay higher wages and more taxes wisely. So that we pay down that huge national debt. So that we have the money to IMPROVE LIFE AT HOME, and also to do more good in the world where too much suffering exists.

I remember that around 1970 and before, I saw great demand in about 90 countries for American-made products, IN ANY PRODUCT AREA. Everyone thought that American products are the best. Obviously they were at that time.

If something changes slowly in our lives, like a 1-5% annual change, we human beings do not notice such a small change.

After 1970 we slowly started seeing foreign products that the public liked better. A few years after losing several products to companies in other countries, we started losing entire industries to other countries. We became very vocal and blamed the lower wages in those other countries. I saw during my international trips that we were wrong. Most big winners automated manufacturing much faster than we did. And then I saw that we started losing entire industries, like electronics, heavy machinery, textiles, etc. We all saw more and more foreign products in American stores. Decades later, I found out that the countries whose products passed ours started to improve their public education system immediately after WWII. But we did not recognize that we were competing internationally with our products and services and losing business to other nations. Yet we kept telling our children and to each other that we are the best in the world in everything. AND WE WERE. SOME TIME AGO FOR ABOUT TWO DECADES.

IF YOU DO NOT KEEP YOUR EYE ON YOUR COMPETITORS, BUT THEY KEEP AN EYE ON YOU SO THAT THEY KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, YOU DO NOT STAND A CHANCE. THEY WILL WIN. Someone in our country got us into the habit of telling our children that "Johnny, you will win! Because YOU ARE the best!" That's like telling the one-legged man that "Johnny, you can win the 100-yard dash at the Olympics, if you believe that you can!" The truth is that you will win if you study hard and practice a lot to become the best-educated, and you always keep learning during your life to be the best. YOU ARE BLESSED IF YOU ENJOY BEING VERY GOOD AT WHAT YOU DO.YOU CAN BECOME EXCELLENT AT WHAT YOU ARE DOING ONLY IF YOU LOVE WHAT YOU ARE DOING. WE FOCUS ON MONEY A LITTLE TOO MUCH IN TODAY'S WORLD. FOCUS ONLY ON WHAT YOU ENJOY DOING. THE MONEY WILL COME.

Not knowing precisely what competitors or opponents are doing, and thinking that you are the best, is a prescription for certain failure. We did, and we do exactly that even today. We did not do our homework on foreign competitors in public education, and we are not doing it today. . Many other countries passed us. That explains why our industries' competitiveness dropped; we lost entire industries to competition (e.g., television, electronics, heavy machinery, and others), because the workforces of many other nations became better educated. They started improving in 1946. We have not started improving our education system yet. But we started destroying public education without any delay when others improved. We will explain examples in the upcoming sections of this website. New technologies always require more education in the workforce AND IN OUR SCHOOLS. The computer industry hit our jobs hard. We are going to experience even bigger technological changes from 2023 on, with Cognitive Robotics, Nanotechnology, and Space Science as a start, with a huge impact on education. We are two years behind as of 2018, according to college professors who are dealing with yesterday's and today's high school graduates. If the high school ACT average does not rise by 10% minimum annually, we will be four years behind the international competition by 2023-2025, and then the national income drop and resulting unemployment could destroy us.

Please click on this video and listen to it all the way to the end. Are you impressed? What do you think?

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

“ACT READINESS" became a very low achievement for public education. It will not get any student into a position of remaining employable longer than a few years unless the student graduates with an average ACT score at 28-29, minimum today in 2020. The reason for this is that the countries with which we compete to achieve a satisfactory national income have a better-trained workforce than we have due to our declining high school education compared to our technological advancement. Those countries graduate from high school with average performance in the ACT 29-34 range, depending on the country. This is because the success of all industries in any country depends on the training level of workforces in those industries, and that depends on the education level of high school graduates.

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

The challenge is that 74% nationally and 84% in Tennessee of those who graduate high school with a diploma, are not even ACT Ready. Nationwide...the children learn some subjects in any school year, and forget too much of it each year. One has to learn how to learn first, and THEN learn in different and fun ways in all subjects and keep playing with it so that it becomes fun. In the high performing countries they know very well what qualifications have to be for a successful teacher. Any teacher, including assistants, has to be high IQ, who completed a 6-7 year Master's program in the subject he/she would teach. The teacher has to be in the top tThirty percent of his Master's program, loves his own subject, can give many examples of fun work with his subject today and in the future. Such a teacher has enormous fun as a teacher, making his/her classes the most interesting and better each year, because he or she loves performing for the children and learn more about his/her subject every year. The great performers do not mind if their performance is measured against objectives. They WANT to find ways to learn how to become better.

URGENT ACTIONS NEEDED IN OUR SCHOOLS

PLEASE NOTE: The term "goal" and "objective" are not interchangeable. Under Management By Objectives, a goal is a measurable, long-term key indicator of performance, e.g., five years away. But an objective is the measurable key indicator of performance in the next fiscal year. Monthly objectives in the same year are very important and are measured in Grade Point Average or GPA.

We have about 14,000 school boards in the US, and our education is far from what it should be. The school boards did not help to create well-educated children. Look at the ACT results. The education departments need to focus on delivering much better educated high school graduates per the standards defined by a group like a national board of employers. When you mix defining standards in the groups that are doing work to deliver to those standards, you will not get the best quality. It is a conflict of interest. We must separate those two. Employers have been complaining to governors about high school graduates since about 2010. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO GET UNIFORM HIGH-QUALITY RESULTS WITHOUT UNIFORM HIGH STANDARDS NATIONWIDE, WHEN EVERY SCHOOL BOARD MAY HAVE DIFFERENT OPINIONS, HOWEVER SMALL THOSE DIFFERENCES ARE. I can tell you this. Hostile intelligence services, like the Chinese or Russians, have enough financial resources and very smart people like we do in ours. They would help any of our problems to become bigger. Look at the OECD PISA international test results we display here. WHO IS ON TOP? CHINA! Think about it. There is strength in a nation that establishes standards for anything on the highest level. BUT WHEN 14,000 DIFFERENT SCHOOL BOARDS CAN MAKE EVEN TINY CHANGES, WE CANNOT IMPROVE. GET RID OF ALL INEFFECTIVE OLD PRACTICES. YOU WILL SAVE A LOT OF MONEY FOR IMPROVING THE AREA THAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT, OUR SCHOOLS! OUR EDUCATION STANDARDS ARE NOT THE SAME IN EVERY STATE. MOST ARE VERY POOR. THAT IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DO NOT ENFORCE NATIONAL STANDARDS, AND EACH OF 50 STATES ARE DOING THEIR OWN THING. WE MUST SET ALL EDUCATION STANDARDS CENTRALLY IN THE US. EDUCATION IN EVERY STATE MUST DELIVER IT WITH THE WORK THEY DO IN EVERY STATE. "THE BEST IDEAS TO IMPROVE EDUCATION COMES FROM THE LOCAL SCHOOL BOARDS" WHO DELIVERED VERY MIXED POOR RESULTS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA TODAY. IT IS A VERY STUPID IDEA THAT CHINA LIKES VERY MUCH.

Eliminate URGENTLY the push for a 90% graduation rate because it is worthless. USE THE ACT FOR GRADUATION. The graduation rate depends on the state test results, that can be and ARE manipulated by the states every year to pass children in one or more subjects toward graduation, who otherwise would fail. Management also creates enormous pressure on teachers at year end to pass children who would otherwise fail to meet the 90% graduation rate. Indirect measurement schemes do not work. Graduation rate would be indirect. But the ACT score is an accurate measurement of what children learned from grade one to twelve. It measures that knowledge without anyone being able to manipulate the test to show better result. But they miss the idea of keeping an eye on monthly progress and that makes the year end result a BAD surprise. The ACT needs to be supported for that reason by monthly GPA objective. Our objective must be to make children from poverty and minorities trainable and employees were looking for a minimum B average for a long time that is equal to 80% ACT Readiness which is the same as an average 29 ACT score. It looks high and impossible because we did not do a single thing to improve teacher training, changing teaching methodology up-to-date, graduating children who cannot read well or do basic math by third grade, making both learning and teaching very difficult. You must measure both child and teacher results. How can you improve otherwise? You can't. We cannot reverse poverty without making sure that we do a good job educating the children.

Good results depend on well-educated workers WHO ENJOY THEIR JOBS and do excellent work as a result. However, THAT IS NOT ENOUGH. Reaching a 90% graduation rate and average ACT score of 21, has been a ridiculously low goal/objective of our school system since about 1995 but NEVER REACHED! You know why? Because it is impossible to have a 90% graduation rate at ACT 21. Focusing on 90% graduating rate is a false objective because it never worked and it opens the door to cheating. The important goal is jobs that pay enough. That depends on the education. That really means graduates whose average subject knowledge is about 23% ONLY! The subject knowledge would have to be 80% or higher, and that would require an average 28 ACT score.

We need measurable MONTHLY objectives that are a key indicator of how our children are doing in every class, GPA in every single school (monthly) and ACT (yearly) based, in every high school classroom, school and school district and state, available to the public on the Internet. When the results are bad like ours, focusing everyone in every school district on academic achievement objectives is a good way to improve, after decades of poor performance.

Children cannot learn in a boring classroom. I found in the USA and the high performing countries that the teachers' subject knowledge has to be at the Master's level and come from the top 10-30% of the Master's programs. Teacher candidates must be tested for having the right personality for teaching. Have a high IQ, love their subject enough to keep on top of any new developments in that subject. Teachers can give examples about many different jobs within his/her subject. The teachers are so enthusiastic about the subject that the teacher's enthusiasm infects the students. The classes of this teacher are always fun for the students. The great majority of US teachers are not trained well enough, may not like their subjects and his/her classes are boring. The teacher training standards declined in the US. CONTINUING SUBJECT and teaching methodology education ARE VERY IMPORTANT FOR US TEACHERS.

Management training is extremely important for principals, superintendents, I would also recommend basic management training for teachers. They have to manage a class to success.

We believe that the most important thing any public school should do, is what the schools are claiming falsely: EXCELLENCE. What is EXCELLENCE?! It is a minimum average ACT score of 29 (indicates that 80% of our graduating students are ready and not just 20% in the graduating classes) because it represents 80% readiness of the students we graduate to be employable. Today, as the chart shows, about 80% of graduates are NOT ACT ready, a standard that guarantees unemployment today.

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

We are approximately 50 years behind the high performing nations in teaching methodologies, management, student-teacher relationships. We do not match teacher candidates to the teaching profession before selection for admission to teacher training. Teacher education declined to a poor level, yet we pushed out the older teachers who were better trained, and the new young teachers' turnover rate became very high.

Copyright(c) 2008-2021 V. Spencer
This is a work in progress.

3. ACT scores and "ACT Readiness." What are they?

Regretfully, our first conclusion has to be that our public education's performance has been very poor for twenty years, AND most likely much longer.

4. One Of Public Education's Biggest Mistakes Is Focusing On Two "Objectives" That Do Not Work.

5. Our Public Education's Performance Has Been Very Poor For Much Longer Than Twenty Years. Most Likely They Will Not Change, But I Am Hopeful.

6. Our Situation Is Immensely Complicated By The "Black vs. White", And "Rich vs. Poor" Problems That We Did Not Resolve In More Than 100 Years.

7. Our Public Education Is Based On Old Practices, Most Of Which Does Not Work Anymore. Why does public education fight any change to improve?

8. Objectives Our Public Education Has In Tennessee And Other States To Improve Public Education

9. National Education Goals Based On President Clinton's Law In 1994

10. It is important to separate the setting of standards from the group that is to perform the work to satisfy those standards. This is a conflict of interest that we have within education that needs separation.

GOVERNORS, IS IT NOT TIME TO LET SUCH PRACTICES GO? NEVER COMPROMISE WHAT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT FOR YOUR COUNTRY'S FUTURE.

Important actions in management

that are missing or done poorly in public education
to ensure that public education does not improve

1. Actions We Need To Take

2. The Logic In Using Cut Scores To Fix Failing High School Performance Makes No Sense and It Is False.

OUTSTANDING LEARNING TOOLS FOR BOTH TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

Teacher Requirements For Good Results

URGENT ACTIONS NEEDED

TO TURN PUBLIC EDUCATION AROUND

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

URGENT ACTIONS NEEDED IN OUR SCHOOLS

1. Actions We Need To Take

2. The Logic In Using Cut Scores To Fix Failing High School Performance Makes No Sense and It Is False.

3. ACT scores and "ACT Readiness." What are they?

Regretfully, our first conclusion has to be that our public education's performance has been very poor for twenty years, AND most likely much longer.

4. One Of Public Education's Biggest Mistakes Is Focusing On Two "Objectives" That Do Not Work.

5. Our Public Education's Performance Has Been Very Poor For Much Longer Than Twenty Years. Most Likely They Will Not Change, But I Am Hopeful.

6. Our Situation Is Immensely Complicated By The "Black vs. White", And "Rich vs. Poor" Problems That We Did Not Resolve In More Than 100 Years.

7. Our Public Education Is Based On Old Practices, Most Of Which Does Not Work Anymore. Why does public education fight any change to improve?

8. Objectives Our Public Education Has In Tennessee And Other States To Improve Public Education

9. National Education Goals Based On President Clinton's Law In 1994

10. It is important to separate the setting of standards from the group that is to perform the work to satisfy those standards. This is a conflict of interest that we have within education that needs separation.

GOVERNORS, IS IT NOT TIME TO LET SUCH PRACTICES GO? NEVER COMPROMISE WHAT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT FOR YOUR COUNTRY'S FUTURE.

Important actions in management

that are missing or done poorly in public educationto ensure that public education does not improve

OUTSTANDING LEARNING TOOLS FOR BOTH TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

Teacher Requirements For Good Results

URGENT ACTIONS NEEDED

TO TURN PUBLIC EDUCATION AROUND

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

URGENT ACTIONS NEEDED IN OUR SCHOOLS

that are missing or done poorly in public education
to ensure that public education does not improve