"ACT READINESS"
WHAT IS IT?

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



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



Of all children we graduate from high school, more than 80% are not even ACT ready in Tennessee and about ten other states. That means that 80% of the students we graduate are below 25% subject knowledge on all benchmark subjects. Our schools graduated students a few years ago with all high school courses being passed at 60% or higher subject knowledge. Therefore MORE THAN 80% of today's graduates with a diploma would have been failures.This was a very foolish creation by the department of state education in every state, because more than 80 % of graduates do not have the knowledge to be employable. ACT readiness is at such a low level of product knowledge that by 2023-2024 they will be replaced by robots as well. What we will need coming out of high school today are graduates who are "STEM ACT ready" with an average 26 or higher ACT score. It is not only for engineering jobs. It should be our standard for all high schools now because it will be required for all jobs after 2024. Robots will take over the jobs that require less than STEM ACT Readiness who graduate from high school. Why do we graduate them and give them a high school diploma to imply that they are ready to become self-supporting when they are not?! Our high schools in Tennessee destroyed any chance for them! We respectfully requested that our governor explain why he is allowing our education system to perform this poorly. No one ever replied.



ACT's score range is 1-36 in everything. The most important part of ACT scoring is the understanding of ACT READINESS. It represents the percentage of subject knowledge that corresponds to the score. For example, an ACT score under 20 is a level of knowledge, that is not enough to make a living. 30-36 is outstanding and brilliant knowledge. THAT IS WHERE THE TEN BEST COUNTRIES' AVERAGE PERFORMANCE IS. ACT READINESS is nothing more than passing only four subjects (ENGLISH/READING/ BIOLOGY/MATHEMATICS) with an ACT score of 18-23. If one checks with ACT, one will find that passing the readiness level represents only 25% or less knowledge of each of the four subjects. That is a low knowledge level. Not too long ago we had to pass ALL high school subjects, not just four subjects, at the 60% knowledge level (60% good answers on any tests in all high school subjects) to graduate. About 20 of the highest performing nations also require a "matriculation" exam at the end of high school with 80% correct answers ON ALL HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS TO GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL. And that score counts as 50% of your graduation average score. Today about 80% of those children we graduated FROM HIGH SCHOOLS ARE NOT EVEN "ACT READY." THAT IS NOTHING MORE THAN VERY POOR PERFORMANCE IN KNOX COUNTY and other counties, in TENNESSE and many other US states. We WILL move to the STEM ACT standard with a stronger curriculum, stronger in sciences (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Advanced Algebra, Trigonometry, solid Geometry and Calculus with a minimum 26 ACT average in each. Only that offers more time in employment, with jobs that will take much longer to be replaced by robots. Graduate degrees in mathematics, sciences and economics will be the most immune to robotic replacement. Don't have any concerns over this. When your classes are boring, as they are, it is because teachers are not trained well enough in the subject they teach (not their fault), it takes a high IQ, a Master's degree in the subject they teach, and the type of personality that loves the subject they teach, and they are doing it with infectious enthusiasm that the students love. THAT MAKES LEARNING A LOT MORE EASY, THAN THE WAY WE TEACH THE BORING CLASSES TODAY.



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



“ACT READINESS” is a very low target for public education, and it will not get any student into a position of remaining employable longer than a few years, unless the student graduates with an average ACT score at 27 minimum today in 2020. The reason for this is the countries with which we compete to achieve a satisfactory national income, have a better trained workforce, than we have as a result of our declining high school education. Those countries graduate children from high school with average performance that is in the ACT 28-32 range, depending on the country. The reason for this is the fact that the success of all industries in any country depend on the training level of workforces in those industries, and that is dependent on the education level of high school graduates.



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Before 2010, a student could graduate from high school only if all high school courses were passed above 60% good answers! Big difference in the knowledge of American high school graduates then and now. A bigger problem is the even bigger difference between the top 30 internationals and us today.



What we need today is 95% of our children graduating from high school with a 27 ACT score average. Impossible? That is how people feel who have been performing badly for decades. But even the 27 ACT average is below what the high performing nations are doing. They are doing an average ACT equivalent between 28 and 31. Obviously we could do better, but not with the same standards in teacher selection and training, not with the same laws, not with the same untrained management, not with the same elected school boards guidance. The high performing countries score tests not only based on the answers being correct, but you have to also explain how you arrived at the answer. In addition they cover more information than we in every subject, in some of the top twenty countries they have to be fluent in two languages and a few with four languages. To graduate from high school all students must take a matriculation exam covering all subjects required in four years of high school which counts as 50% of your final grade.



The Benchmarks show that ACT Readiness is not enough as the minimum requirement for graduation from high school. IT SHOULD LEAVE NO DOUBT THAT WE ARE BEING DUMBED DOWN PURPOSEFULLY. IT IS NOT SOMETHING THAT A FRIEND IS DOING. IT IS AN ENEMY’S WELL THOUGHT OUT PLAN EXECUTED AND ALMOST COMPLETED. IT IS NOT GOOD PERFORMANCE. IT MEANS THAT THE STUDENT HAS A 50-75% CHANCE TO PASS THE SAME FOUR SUBJECTS ONLY ON THE LOWEST FRESHMAN LEVEL IN COLLEGE. THAT IS ALL THAT ACT READINESS IS. It is not enough knowledge to be prepared for the future. The schools tell the parent that ACT calls this "College and Career Readiness” (to have a 50-75% chance ONLY to pass ONLY those four specific freshman courses ONLY). But we hand out high school diplomas to not only ACT Ready children but to FOUR TIMES AS MANY CHILDREN WHO ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY! We see that if anyone only sees the words "ACT College and Career Readiness", and does not read the ACT explanation for it, then they will have the wrong idea about what ACT Readiness is. We had to call ACT to verify all this. ACT is in a tough spot. They depend on getting paid for their services for and by THE SCHOOLS. BUT the great majority of schools do a very poor job. The schools have a lot of money, and the legal expenses of the schools are not shown in the schools' budget or expenses. For example, the Knox County, Tennessee school district annual spending is over HALF BILLION DOLLARS. That's more than $500,000,000, and it does not include the legal expenses, or the mortgage expenses and perhaps more. The mortgage liability is another half billion dollars, and the mortgage interest could be close to $25,000,000 additional expense per year. And what do we get for that? 85-90% of the students graduate. Of those who graduated, ONLY 17% are ACT Ready, which is the same as the old F-level performance. The rest of those graduating: 83% of those F students getting a diploma are not even ACT Ready. THAT IS NOT WHAT WE NEED FOR A GOOD FUTURE IN OUR COUNTRY. ACT has another test called STEM ACT, and it requires that the student have a 26 ACT average score. The school system will tell you that STEM ACT is only for those who want a college degree in engineering or science. The schools also will tell you that "Not all children were created by God for college training, but your child could learn to become very good in a trade and make a very good living." It takes a lot of nerve to deliver such a message, when you graduate from high school close to 90% of a class, and you give a graduation certificate and a high school diploma TO 80% OF THE GRADUATES WHO ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY, AND COULD EVEN HAVE “GRADUATES” WITH ONLY A 5% ACT READINESS! WE ARE VERY SORRY, BUT THIS IS VERY UPSETTING ABOUT THIS SITUATION, BECAUSE THE POOR AND MINORITY STUDENTS' AND THEIR PARENTS DO NOT UNDERSTAND THAT THE EDUCATION SYSTEM IS NOT HONEST WITH THE PUBLIC. THE SCHOOL SYSTEM RAISED THEIR HOPES HIGH, WITH THE COMMENT THAT “NOT ALL STUDENTS ARE CREATED BY GOD FOR COLLEGE, BUT VOCATIONAL EDUCATION WILL PROVIDE A GOOD INCOME.” BUT SOON AFTER THEY GRADUATE, THEIR CHILD WILL NOT BE ABLE TO GET A JOB, HANDLE THE DANGEROUS CHALLENGES OF LIFE, TO WHICH THEY WILL HAVE TO ADD UNEMPLOYED FOR LIFE. MOST IF NOT ALL VOCATIONAL JOBS WILL GO TO ROBOTS.



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



We will show later in detail how our education declined against foreign competitors. Big impact on national income.



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



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



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



It is very important to understand that neither the parent nor the teachers can force a child to learn. Learning will happen only if the child is excited about it and wants to learn a subject. That depends on the teachers’ personality, level of subject knowledge, love of the subject the teachers teach, a desire and decision to learn always how to produce better results, and the friendliness of the classroom environment. Artificial intelligence will enable robots to become outstanding teachers by matching the teaching methodology to the child in an optimum way, and all such robots could "learn” anything new in a few seconds with a simple downloaded update. The poor performance of our schools is accelerating such developments, that will be available by 2013-2014, enormously accelerating home learning, coupled with very secure testing. The lab portion of science courses can be simulated perfectly as part of the course.



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



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



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

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

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

WHY IS THAT?

BECAUSE NOT A SINGLE PERSON KNOWS IN EDUCATION MANAGEMENT AT ANY LEVEL, HOW TO IMPROVE THE RESULTS. OR...THEY SIMPLY DO NOT WANT OUR CHILDREN OR OUR COUNTRY TO SUCCEED.

OUTSTANDING LEARNING TOOLS

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



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



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



4. Open Culture, great educational resources.



5. The best math resources for teachers



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



7. List of study/learning skills



8. Teaching without lecturing



9. MIT OpenCourseWare covering high school



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

ACTIONS NEEDED URGENTLY IN OUR SCHOOLS

• Good results depend on well-educated workers WHO ENJOY THEIR JOBS doing excellent work. However, THAT IS NOT ENOUGH. Reaching a 90% graduation rate REGARDLESS OF ACT READINESS is created only by IRRESPONSIBLE people who do not want to be measured on performance. Only those do not want to be measured on performance who do a very bad job. "But we have an ACT 21 goal also" they will tell you. Yes, they had that 21 ACT goal for more than 15 years and never reached it. ACT 21 is equal to knowing only 23% of what a graduating high school student is supposed to know. That used to be a huge badly failing performance. Not too long ago a student had to score MORE THAN 60% correct answers on all tests to pass any course with a "D" score. Passing students at 23% good answers in any test means that we are now passing a huge number of students who were failures before. THAT IS A HORRIBLE RESULT. Why does a state do that? Because the education districts have poor teachers, poor management and the governor has no idea how to fix all to do a much better job. But there are many ways the public education system informs the population with overly optimistic information. One cannot change results in any job if employees keep working the same way as for years before. One needs a single objective to focus people on the most important thing: the key indicator of success or failure, like an ACT score, or a GPA monthly, that is 10% higher than the prior year's actual average ACT score. THAT IS AN ACT ANNUAL OBJECTIVE with monthly GPA objectives for backup. The annual ACT objective must be backed up by monthly academic objectives, like a year-to-date GPA objective on all supervisors and managers, principals and teachers to support the annual ACT objective, so that we catch any performance problem in any month without a surprise at year end. The GPA objective must also be 10% higher than the prior year's actual GPA achieved. It is the schools that achieve the results in any school district. Yet we never had them operate under specific objectives and operating plans in the schools. The focus must be on them. All support must be focused on them and they must operate under specific measurable academic objectives in order for the school system's results to improve. Poorly performing organizations cannot recover without using "Management by Objectives (MBO).





• We need measurable MONTHLY objectives that are a key indicator of how our children are doing in every class, GPA (monthly) and ACT (yearly) based, in every classroom, school and school district and state, available to the public on the Internet. When the results are bad like ours, focusing the entire school district on academic achievement objectives is the only way to improve. What the school districts are doing is not learning how to improve education from the poor level we have. We think that the experimentation with untrained, inexperienced people in the school districts, and no tutorials from the state education department, it cannot be done. It is a most serious question as to how could such poor performance be allowed by the state for 20 years without a solution. Get rid of the 90% graduation goal. It shifts the necessity to improve to the last month of the school year, and too many people prefer to cheat to look better. Focusing on graduation invites cheating in the last moment, and it creates a big rush during the last month of the year to make more children's grades good enough to pass. Graduation rate with a low ACT score of 21, creates the wrong low-performance results, without improving the children's knowledge. As a result, we graduate 80% who are not even ACT Ready. ACT READINESS is a very low qualification, representing a 25% subject knowledge in 4 subjects only, and 80% cannot even meet that, and we graduate them?! THIS DESTRUCTIVE PRACTICE MUST BE DISCONTINUED.





• Children cannot learn in a boring classroom. I found in the USA as well as in the high performing countries, that the teachers subject knowledge has to be at the Master's level, and coming from the top 10-30% of the Master's programs. Teacher candidates must have a high IQ, love their subject enough to keep on top of any new developments in the subject, can give examples about many different jobs within his/her field, and so enthusiastic about the subject that his/her students are infected with his/her enthusiasm. 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.





• I attended 29 high school science and math classes. Children were bored in these classes. Such children will get conditioned to dislike the subject that way. The teachers did not love their subject and did not know the subject well enough. This is not the teachers' fault. It is a reflection on their training and certification standards. We must test teachers for a psychological match to the profession.





• We also need to change significantly the science and math courses in the high school curriculum. In preparation for the technological changes by 2023-2024 with cognitive AI-driven robots, space sciences, and nanotechnology, the curriculum on the high school level must include not just Biology, but also Chemistry, Physics, and Economics, plus Calculus and all its prerequisites. We graduate children who are poor readers and poor in basic math. That certainly limits their learning ability. The key to children doing much better is a better-educated teacher who loves the subject he/she is teaching and enjoys talking about the subject with the students with infectious enthusiasm. We used to have those subjects as prerequisites for graduation during the 1960s in quite a few states. Our curriculum is too weak today, and cognitive robotics with AI will replace jobs that do not require those subjects. The surviving jobs will be those with graduate-level science, mathematics, and economics training. Future jobs will be highly specialized in narrow areas of graduate degrees in those fields. That is why teachers need to be tested for personality compatibility with teaching and be educated further about the subject he/she is teaching.





• Management training is extremely important for principals, superintendents. It is extremely weak in education at all levels, and that is always a major reason for poor performance.

One cannot argue with such poor results that our public education is good enough. It is terrible enough to make most of our children unemployable and getting worse. We will explain this in detail later. How can people who deliver such poor education to our children in most public schools at the highest cost in the world, lie and claim that "We provide excellence for our children"? No one can succeed unless they face the truth and speak the truth first.



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 27 (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. If you agree, stand up and speak up if you want our schools to improve to ensure that your child will be able to get a job. Our taxes are paying the highest rate in the world per student, and the high percentage of graduates, who are not even ACT ready, is unacceptable.



Excellent school performance is mandatory for a nation and its children to succeed in the future. Good workers do not stay in poorly performing organizations. EXCELLENT PERFORMANCE IN OUR SCHOOLS, AS WE DEFINED IT, IS BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB FOR ANY NATION, AND WE ARE NOT AN EXCEPTION.



We see frequent negative comments constantly about different educational systems by the public education system. Very strange, when they are performing so poorly. For example, if a school is a profit-making school, that's very bad - they say. Please explain why this is a bad thing if they perform better than the public school system? Why is it bad if it costs the same as our public schools per student but educates our children much better? I would dare to suggest that if they can educate our children better than our public schools with ACT or SAT score improvement by at least 5% per year, THE BETTER PERFORMING SCHOOLS ARE A BETTER CHOICE. What do you care if they make some money from taxes or donations so that they can pay their employees a bonus, instead of dumbing down the state tests to increase grades by dropping the knowledge level of our children? Doesn't it make better sense to teach our children better so that they can learn more? With better education, more children graduate successfully, instead of destroying their future by making them unemployable. ISN'T IT MOST IMPORTANT TO IMPROVE OUR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION BECAUSE OUR COUNTRY'S FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT? WE NEED TO RECOGNIZE WHAT IS FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE SILLY COMMENTS OF THOSE WHO PERFORM SO BADLY. THEY ARE RISKING OUR CHILDREN'S FUTURE WHEN WE PAY THE HIGHEST RATES PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD. Look at the actual performance on the chart for 19 years! The great majority of public schools do destroy today about 80% of those children who graduate by making them unemployable! About 95% of our schools are that bad compared to the schools of nations with whom we compete. We will make that very clear further down. IF YOU DO A BAD JOB, IT IS NOT A GOOD IDEA TO MAKE UNTRUE CLAIMS AND ACCUSATIONS ABOUT OTHER SCHOOL SYSTEMS. THOSE WHO ARE DOING A GOOD JOB DO NOT NEED TO BE DEFENSIVE. IF AN EMPLOYEE IS DOING A BAD JOB AND DOES NOT IMPROVE WITHIN 6 MONTHS, HE WILL BE FIRED. PUBLIC SCHOOLS WHO DO NOT GRADUATE AT LEAST 80% OF THEIR GRADUATES WITH A MUCH HIGHER AVERAGE ACT SCORE THAN 22, MUST BE REPLACED WITH A BETTER SCHOOL WHERE ALL WORKERS ARE WELL TRAINED TO EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN BETTER. NOT EASY. WE ARE NOT ASKING FOR EASY. WE ARE NOT ASKING FOR BAD PERFORMANCE, BUT THAT IS WHAT WE ARE GETTING SO FAR. Our schools need to compare themselves to the best in the world and with total honesty to the public. Total honesty about "where you are" is very important for improvement without wasting a lot of time and money.



People may not be aware that our public education has been declining at a slow rate that the great majority of people will not notice. Such a development dumbs down the public. Older people can see this in young high school graduates. College professors and employers have been noticing this for more than a decade. It started in the late 1800s or before. Many people tend to blame "the front line troops," the teachers. It is not the teachers' or principals' fault. Teacher education also declined at the universities, but other majors did not. One wonders who arranged such a stupid move and why. New state superintendents of education come and go, and the reliable national tests show our test results not improving decade after decade. New governors appoint a new manager of the state department of education. The results just get worse. Neither of them knows what to do or are afraid of something if they change anything in education. Education-related organizations do not want any change. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon with a lot of technological changes, but the education leadership changed little if anything. The governors either do not allow their selection for heading education to improve anything, or they both do not have any idea about how to improve education. BUT THEY BOTH PROMISE WHEN RUNNING FOR OFFICE, THAT THEY WILL IMPROVE EDUCATION. With a lot of flags waving for up to three years, the new governor announces that "Fantastic news! We graduated 89% of our seniors in high school!!" What he does not tell you is that the department of education lowered the pass/fail percentage points in one or more subjects on the state tests from 60% good answers to 20% or less to show more students passing. What the governor does not tell you is that 80% of the children who graduated high school will not be able to learn any job, cannot read and write the script anymore, can read and write only block letters but not well, do not know basic math, and they cannot fill out job applications. If hired they have a bad attitude on the job, most likely because the school promised a good trade job after graduation, and the child does not understand what he has to do in the job because he/she was not educated well, and feels that no one likes him, and quits. The parent was told by the school that "God did not create all children for a college education, like your little Johnny. But he will learn a trade. He can become very good at it and make an excellent living with it!" Unfortunately, this is not true. The results are poor to date. The use of calculators and the dropping of music and art classes created disabilities in mental math, critical thinking, and decision-making. The education system is thinking of teaching critical thinking and decision making to children. Successful decision making requires knowledge of the problem area and related subjects where a decision is needed. They must be well understood by the child or adult. Otherwise they will make marginal-to-bad decisions all their lives.



We see this shocking evidence of extremely poor education every month now. A few months ago, I paid $23.00 with a $50 bill. The cash registers did not work, and three cash register operators who were high school graduates could not figure out what change I should get back. This kind of disability is evidence of a much bigger disability than the simple math of subtracting 23 from 50. The brain is very efficient. The brain shares basic math functions by many other areas automatically in thinking and decision making. Cannot use the calculator for such brain functions. The thinking and decision making is poor as a result.



The high school education of about 80% of the graduates decreased when the countries with whom we compete improved their education, and passed us by 2016 in mathematics. They passed us in general knowledge long before then. We did the opposite. We made our public education worse, year after year. We will explain it all below in this website, and we will also suggest what needs urgent improvement in the order of priority and why. We spend more money per student than any other country, except for four. We do not include all expenses under education expenses, such as huge mortgage expenses for school buildings, legal expenses for school-related lawsuits, and others. Other countries report ALL as education system-related expenses. If we included all, we would be THE HIGHEST SPENDER IN THE WORLD. More than 30 countries have better results than we do. We have more than 13,500 school districts in the USA. They are constantly asking for more money. We are already the highest spender in the world. But our results dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries. Giving more money would be a big mistake. The results are poor because we have been making huge mistakes in hiring at all levels. We are wasting huge amounts of dollars. We get enough money per student that is guaranteed regardless of how poorly our schools are educating our children. Strangely, the college education in teaching did decline as well. Why? Teaching-college students' training is not good enough. It is not their fault. Teachers' certification exists in every state. The certification should be ensuring that their training is more than enough. BUT IT IS ONLY A STAMP OF APPROVAL FOR THE LOW TEACHERS' COLLEGE TRAINING. Click above for more information. But other fields of study at the universities did not decline - and this is very strange.



Our teachers are less educated than the teachers in the many countries that passed us. Our teachers come from the bottom 30% of university performance. Many left their originally selected major because it was too hard, and went into teaching because it is easier. I investigated and visited several countries that had much better results in education than we do. Teachers OR ASSISTANT TEACHERS who teach above fourth grade have both BS/BA and a Master's degree in the same subject they would teach. The best countries in education hire graduates from the top ten percent of their classes in some countries and not lower than the top 30% in others. They are matched psychologically to the teaching profession before acceptance into teaching. They are not put into a different subject class for which they were not educated to teach as we do. They become a senior teacher after 15 years of teaching under a senior teacher. Their teacher turnover is 1-3%. Ours is sky-high. Their results are far better than ours. But we must remember that not being as well educated is not the fault of the American teachers. Neither is the fact that teaching requires the right personality for which some countries test potential teachers for compatibility with the teaching profession. Neither is the fact that teaching needs continuing education because some subjects like the sciences and even mathematics can change as new technologies appear. That, in turn, changes the jobs of employers. High school graduates must be ready for what employers need. But these are not changes that those who want to go to a teachers' college can determine. But a university program could and should, but does not in the US. It is the job of the states' Department of Education to make changes that improve the delivery of the right education to teachers FIRST so that they can deliver to students at a level that the students enjoy, and employers need. Change teacher certification accordingly to ensure our children's employability. But we found during the past eight years that every single problem that we found with K-12 education is the work of the states' department of education, not the teachers and principals. And it makes our schools worse than our competitor nations' schools. Teachers cannot do anything about that. We will detail these below. We need to find out why the states are doing things that are producing bad results. Or why they are hanging on to 150-year-old practices that do not work today. Example: "Elected local school boards are the best choice to direct the performance of school districts to get the best results." GOOD ENOUGH RESULTS UNTIL ABOUT 1890 BUT INDUSTRIAL AND SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENTS CHANGED THAT. THE NATION STARTED TO REQUIRE HIGH AND COMPETITIVE STANDARDS THAT YOU CANNOT ACHIEVE WITH LOCAL GUIDANCE, TO ENSURE A NATIONALLY COMPETITIVE EDUCATION SYSTEM. WHY IS IT THAT WE ARE THE ONLY NATION THAT COULD NOT FIGURE THIS OUT YET, BUT ALL OTHER NATIONS DID?! Since they are directly under the state's governor, the governors must be responsible.



In the high-performing countries, teachers have preparation time for their upcoming classes. They are not loaded with unnecessary paperwork and other duties that eliminate well-prepared teaching activities. American public education completely disregards the fact that for children or even adults, they will learn more if they become interested in the subject that the teacher teaches. The words I heard from students the most is that "spending 6-7 hours a day in school is boring". I attended several science and math classes in 17 school districts. OUR CLASSES ARE BORING, and our teachers are not treated well. Teaching requires a unique personality, a high IQ, and a high level of subject knowledge and excellent support. The result is bad. In many other countries, teachers are very well respected. Respect depends on the results. IT APPEARS THAT IN THE USA OUR LEADERS PURPOSEFULLY DUMB DOWN THE PUBLIC. OR THEY WERE FORCED TO DUMB THE EDUCATION DOWN. THAT IS A PATH TO NOTHING LIKE FREEDOM, BUT TO SLAVERY FOR THE PUBLIC. But..." Psst! It's a SECRET!" So what is the counter to that? It is not more dumbing down. It is an INTERNATIONALLY EXCELLENT EDUCATION FOR CHILDREN. THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY DEPENDS ON THEM. School slogans like "EXCELLENCE FOR ALL CHILDREN," in any form, is a BIG lie when the results are as bad as ours. Look at the ACT results. THEY ARE THE TRUTH. Learn what they mean. AND STAND UP FOR CHANGING THE BAD EDUCATION TO ONE OF THE BEST IN THE WORLD, WHATEVER THAT TAKES!



The competing countries implemented such changes a few decades ago. We resist any change and any fixing of shortcomings within the education system, and politicians fear the possibility of the education lobby having them voted out, so no laws get even proposed that would improve the education results. Without it, our children will be unemployable. It appears that some people in power want us to fail by disabling our children's education even with its management structure. OR, they do not know what to do. All of this and more we will show below.



The results are poor to date, and declined slowly for longer than five decades. The use of calculators and the dropping of music and art classes created serious disabilities in mental math and relational decisions. Lack of classical music and art studies resulted in insufficient neuronal brain interconnections that create decision making about problems and the inability to recognize patterns of activities that is an important function in decision making. The education system is thinking of teaching "critical thinking" and "decision making" to children. They seem to have no idea that such a skill requires significant knowledge of the problem area and related subjects that must be very well understood by the child or adult, otherwise, they will make bad decisions.



The high school education-based knowledge of about 80% of the graduates decreased significantly, when the countries with whom we compete dramatically improved their education, and passed us by 2016 in mathematics. They passed us in general knowledge long before then. We did the opposite. We will explain it all on this website, and we will also suggest what needs urgent improvement in the order of priority and why. We spend as a nation more money per student than all other countries, except for four. More than 30 have better results than we do. We have more than 13,500 school districts in the USA. They are constantly asking for more money when we spend more than anyone else in the world per student. We get enough money per student that is guaranteed regardless of how poorly our schools are educating our children. Our teachers are blamed for our poor results. Strangely, the college education in teaching did decline. Why? The teaching college students assume, and rightfully so that they are trained well enough. But they are not, and that is not their fault. Teachers are certified in every state. The certification should be ensuring that their training is more than enough. But the teacher certification is way too low. The teachers are not trained well enough. It is not their fault. The teacher qualification and standards for the training and qualification are way too low. Click above for more information. But other fields of study did not decline at our universities - and this is very strange. Certification is on a very low level set to ensure any teacher's passing. Our teachers are less educated than the teachers in the countries that passed us. And this situation clearly shows that political management either has no idea about what to do or is afraid to do anything.



I investigated and visited several countries whose education systems are the best. In those countries, teachers OR ASSISTANT TEACHERS who teach above fourth grade, have a BS/BA and a Master's degree, both in the subject, they would teach and graduated from the top ten percent of their classes in some countries and not lower than the top 30% in others. They are matched psychologically to the teaching profession before acceptance into teaching. They are not put into a different subject class to teach, like our teachers. They, who are so well educated, become a senior teacher after 15 years of teaching under a senior teacher. Their turnover is 1-3%. Ours is 16% (leaving the school they teach in, plus leaving the teaching profession). Their results are far better than ours. But we must remember that not being as well educated is not the fault of the American teachers. Neither is the fact that teaching requires an exceptional person for which some countries test potential teachers for acceptance into a teaching program. Neither is the fact that teaching needs continuing education because some subjects like the sciences and even mathematics can change as new technologies appear. That, in turn, changes employers' jobs, and high school graduates must be ready for what employers need. But these are not changes that those who want to go to a teachers' college can control. One would think that it is the job of the states' Department of Education to make changes that improve the delivery of internationally competitive education to teachers FIRST. Then they could deliver to students at a level that employers need and change teacher certification accordingly. It is a conflict of interest for the state education department to set its standards. The standards need to be set NATIONALLY AND NOT UNDER THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION IN THE STATE OR NATIONALLY TO AVOID CONFLICT OF INTEREST ISSUES. THERE IS NO REASON FOR DUPLICATING STAFF TO HAVE DIFFERENT STANDARDS IN CONNECTICUT VS. TENNESSEE. IF YOU THINK THAT THE STANDARDS SHOULD BE DIFFERENT PLEASE LET US KNOW WHY. THINGS THAT ARE MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE ARE NOT NECESSARILY BETTER.



The responsibility and loyalty are to the employers WHO PROVIDE THE JOBS, whose needs the education department is to satisfy with the students. The student is the product of the school. The customers use a product, and the student product must work very well for the employers/"customers" to satisfy what THEY NEED. What we have in public education today is like the following example. Only one company designs and manufactures cars. They dominate the entire automobile market with standards defined by the same company. They are one of the most expensive cars in the world. 75-80% of the vehicles are delivered, but they break down within days. You paid for it in advance. The vehicles meet only the manufacturer's standards; you received it, you have no right to get your money back or to exchange the car. And there is NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO. THAT IS EXACTLY HOW PUBLIC EDUCATION WORKS TODAY. HOW CAN WE BE SO BLIND THAT WE JUST STAND THERE AND DECADE AFTER DECADE WE KEEP PAYING FOR SUCH CARS (=schools), AND THEY ARE GETTING WORSE AND WORSE!



We found that during the past eight years, that the state departments of education created every single problem with K-12 education, not the teachers and principals. These make our schools worse than our competitor nations' education system. Teachers cannot do anything about that. We will detail these below. We have a good idea of why they are doing things that are producing bad results and why they are creating problems that weaken the jobs our teachers are doing. In high-performing countries, teachers are not loaded down with unnecessary paperwork and other duties that make their jobs more difficult. American public education completely disregards the fact that children or even adults will learn more if they become interested in the subject that the teacher teaches. The words I heard from students the most is that "spending 6-7 hours a day in school is boring". I attended several in 17 school districts. OUR CLASSES ARE BORING, and our teachers are not trained well enough and are not treated well enough. Teaching requires a unique outgoing personality, a high IQ, and Master's level subject knowledge and support that they receive. THEY ARE TESTED FOR AND MUST MEET SUCH CHARACTERISTICS AND REQUIREMENTS IN THE HIGH PERFORMING COUNTRIES. The competing countries implemented such changes a few decades ago. Unfortunately, we resist ANY change and ANY fixing of shortcomings within the education system, and politicians fear that the education lobby has them voted out, so no laws get even proposed that would improve/change the education system. Without it, the great majority of our children will be unemployable. Some people in power want us to fail by disabling our children's education, even with its failing education management structure. We will explain more below.



Our future as a nation depends on our public education becoming one of the best in the world. We were there before 1970. But we dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries. One cannot become good by constantly parroting to the world slogans like "We are the best in the world!" or "Excellence for all children!" because it is not true. The chart we have here shows Tennessee and the US with extremely poor ACT results. However, there are a few states with excellent public education results such as Massachusetts and Connecticut. You are where you are because of what you learned, and the quality of the job you have or have not done. The national test shows poor results getting worse in public education. Unfortunately, most of our schools are not schools. They are "Failure Factories" that operate as a house of cards that are propped up by the state law guaranteeing no decrease in annual funding, regardless of performance, with the teacher unions wealthy enough to defeat any representative who proposed any action that would make any change in the way our poorly performing schools operate. EXAMPLE: There are two high schools in a school district with almost all black students in these two schools. Their performance is dismal. 97% OF THE CHILDREN THEY GRADUATE ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY, WHICH IS A VERY LOW TARGET. THEY WILL BE UNEMPLOYABLE. WE WILL EXPLAIN "ACT READINESS" LATER. For more than the past twenty years, the school board allocated TWO TIMES THE MONEY THAT THE OTHER HIGH SCHOOLS GET PER STUDENT, BUT THEIR SCORES DID NOT IMPROVE IN 20 YEARS!! TWENTY YEARS!! How about tripling the money? Or quadrupling the money? I am sorry, but throwing more of the taxpayers' money as a solution to a significant problem is JUST STUPID. But that's what people do who have no idea how to solve a problem. It simply does not work!! It did not work for twenty years! YOU KNOW WHY? Because the money is going to the wrong people in the wrong places, for the wrong things, because they did not find the right problem to correct. The problem is that performance is bad in entire school districts, but the schools where black children are, are even worse. To stop this, the superintendent promoted the principal of one of these two worst schools to manage all schools in the school district because "he has good ideas." Nothing improved. What the people pay in hard-earned taxes is easy money for school district management. They cannot recognize management problems, so they throw money at it. But not for teachers, who work hard, poorly supported, with poor treatment. The teachers' unions focus only on pushing teachers to complain about money and more money. And no one is smart enough to say: "First you have to deliver better results because we are paying the highest rates per student in the world, and we get the lowest result for it in the industrialized countries AND THAT IS A BAD JOB BY YOUR CENTRAL MANAGEMENT!" Not just falsely claiming in our education districts in their slogans that "We provide excellent world-class education" or "excellence for all children" is untrue as the ACT scores have shown for 19 years. (03272020). Not a single political leader or state or federal lawmaker stood up to correct this damaging situation. The ACT results for 19 years show that our public education produced unacceptable results. Many other nations passed us. We lost several industries to other nations who improved their education. AND WE WILL NOT ONLY LOSE MORE, BUT WHEN 80% OF THE PARENTS DISCOVER IN A FEW YEARS THAT THEIR CHILDREN WERE "SO WELL EDUCATED" THAT THEY CANNOT GET ANY JOB, ESPECIALLY THE AFRICAN AMERICAN CHILDREN WHO ARE GRADUATED 95% UNPREPARED. NO ONE ACTING ON THIS HUGE PROBLEM THAT RISKS OUR COUNTRY'S FUTURE POINTS TO POLITICAL LEADERSHIP WHO DO NOT WANT TO BE MEASURED, DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH VERY FEW EXCEPTIONS, AND GOVERNORS DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO OR ARE AFRAID TO ACT. THERE IS NO COURAGE AND KNOWLEDGE TO TAKE ANY RISKS TO IMPROVE.



Our shelves are full of products made in other countries. That is the result of poorly educated American high school graduates creating less competitive products as part of the workforce. Such a company will lose business to better educated foreign manufacturers. Because they can create better outcomes because they are better educated and learn faster. And we see too often that most of our high school graduates are poorly educated. Close to 80% of those who graduate from high school today cannot read and perform basic math or basic mental math that should have been fixed by the end of fourth grade! They cannot read and write a script, but only with block letters. They cannot communicate properly. And in the last few years, they cannot even fill out a job application, because the fundamental subjects that our schools taught them, were not delivered well enough to excite the children's interest, without which learning cannot take place. This is not the teachers' fault, but their university education declined, and their morale is low because their work environment is problematic. We are one of the top spenders per student in the world. It is time to recognize that the problem of education management on the highest level, does not care enough or does not know how to improve our children's education. Isn't it fair to say that if they were interested, our children would be better educated?? It is time to make sure that education management from the very top on down is replaced with people who know what to do, make sure that our teachers' continuing education and support is excellent so that both teachers and students are happy. They want to do an outstanding job because they lover the subjects presented. Such motivation is the secret to success in anything. IT CAN MAKE ANY SUBJECT SO INTERESTING THAT IT BECOMES ENJOYABLE LIKE PLAYING. In any job, we must learn to become better at teaching the children very well after what has been happening, or we as a country will be finished. It is extremely important for all of us to demand in the strongest possible way that American political leadership do exactly that.



It is very important to understand that high schools are the most important pipeline that feed the workforce of all companies in all industries, all government activities, directly or through vocational schools, colleges and universities. It is a highly qualified workforce that can create the highest quality and most profitable products. A poor K-12 public education system, like we have, unfortunately, creates the opposite: failing of entire industries (all electronics, heavy machinery for manufacturing and construction, and others), that other competing countries take over. That also creates a loss of jobs, poor profitability, and dropping national income that necessitates borrowing huge amounts of money that creates the national debt. It is education quality that creates a very healthy economy with good living standards, OR poverty increasing, social problems, increasing crime, and worsening living standards. All of this is the result of the quality of public education. To be more specific, any training that is creating a foundation for subsequent more advanced training, for example, elementary school for the high schools, is even more important because if they educate our children well at the lower level, the more advanced training program in the the school will be easier to learn. Unfortunately, we do the opposite. Most of our children leave the eighth grade not reading well, and not knowing basic mathematics either and have a bad attitude. And no one seems to understand that a child's brain learns the quickest before six years of age, and after six years, it starts slowing, making learning harder each year, especially with the poor results WE have. For this reason, the most important time for easier learning is between 3 and 6 years of age. But our lawmakers do not feel that this is so. If you speak with a medical doctor called a neurologist, brain specialized, he/she will tell you the truth. We found the poor performance of public schools a long-standing major problem that is still unresolved in Tennessee and many other states, although it was noted in 1995 and before. Why? Because people at all levels of the education organization don't know such things to this day but think that it is a weakness if they admit not knowing something. They act as if they know everything because they won an election or because they were given the job. And "that surely means" they believe "that they can do the job." Also, instead of visiting the best IN THE WORLD to learn how they achieve great results or getting some guidance from a pediatric neurologist about the brain development of a child, they are guessing and make big mistakes. That major problem was and still is being created with poor reading and poor basic math performance, and ignoring the necessity of teaching music and art on the classic level that is also beneficial for brain development in several key areas. Our children are very important for parents and for our country to succeed. Elections on the school district level for school boards do not produce the right people. This situation went uncorrected for many decades to this date. More and more students were allowed to graduate from high school without being ready to learn any job. Allowing such fundamental problems to go unresolved is damaging to students when many other nations' schools have no problem with doing it well. When a nation or state has very low school standards as we do, they are damaging the workforce and the country. THAT, MY FRIENDS, CAN DESTROY THE COUNTRY.



Lenin, the creator of communism, said often that "If you repeat a lie a thousand times, the masses will accept it as the truth." That is how Disinformation Theory was formed and became the fundament of psychological warfare against masses of people. The Education community is using it because they have no idea what an excellent organization is and how to become one. When a school district in question claims, "Excellence for all children" in writing or another similar grandiose slogan, they know that they are poorly performing and you can bet that they are not what they claim. Why do we tolerate them to lie to the public at all levels about their own performance, and pay their huge expenses using the people's money to dumb down the people? Too many poor people believe it in the population, and their children are pushed deeper into poverty. And there is no governor or ANY politician who stands up and dares to act to eliminate such destructive behavior in our country.



THE MOST EFFECTIVE TOOL TO FORCE IMPROVEMENT IS THE CREATION OF COMPETITION THAT OPERATES WITH THE CORRECTION AND BUILD IT TO 10% SHARE OF THE EDUCATION MARKET. BUT THEY HAVE TO BE EXCELLENT, BUILDING ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE TO 26 AVERAGE ACT.



Having read many papers that our founding fathers wrote, none of them would just stand by like today's politicians, who do not care as they let this great country's education crumble. But their hand is always out for more money.



Our success as a nation depends the most on how profitable and competitive our various industries are in the world market with their products and services against the top three most profitable and competitive foreign industries and corporations in the same or similar fields. But both profitability and competitiveness depend on how well trained our workforce is, and that training depends on how well our high schools trained their graduates compared to the best three nations in secondary school performance. We found during the last two decades that our school systems have no idea how well our competition is doing. The high school output needs to be compared to the best countries in secondary education in the world. For high school entry, the preschools' and primary schools' output must deliver excellent performance, and they must not be deficient in any area like they are today in reading and basic mathematics. The quality of our high school graduates is the most important element in the “education chain” of high school - colleges - universities - graduate schools. If the high school graduates are poorly prepared as many are today, it brings down the entire education chain for them and the country (education chain: failing elementary education, results in more high school failures, which results in even more college failures, and less competence on the jobs one takes). And that makes or breaks the quality of our workforce in every industry. The picture on the left is very rare, but we are getting closer to it every year. In the last ten years I heard about the terrible physical treatment of teachers by students. I even heard of students throwing feces at the teacher after they went to the man's room during class to entertain their classmates. AND THE SCHOOL MANAGEMENT WAS WORRIED ABOUT LAWSUITS FROM THE PARENT. We cannot afford to be nice to children if their actions disturb entire classes or are hostile to teachers. The punishment has to be strong enough to discourage not only the offender, but also any other person from trying the same. A school cannot be all things to all people. And the school must be dedicated to education and protected from interference, and do an outstanding job as their mission, or we must take corrective action. IF AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES ARE VERY WELL EDUCATED, they will be able to make our products and services more competitive and profitable. ON THE OTHER HAND...if our high schools' performance is worse than the other countries' high schools with which we compete everywhere, including in the USA, our poorly performing high schools weaken our workforces in every industry. Our products' and services' quality and profitability declines, we make less money. Our country's tax income declines. When that happens, we as a nation must borrow money. UNFORTUNATELY, THAT IS WHAT WE HAVE BEEN DOING FOR MANY DECADES. And that becomes the national debt. Our national debt is very high above 23 TRILLION DOLLARS as of March 2020. The total interest we have to pay on it within this amount is one-third of the total debt. VERY HIGH. We could use that money better today, than having to pay interest on the national debt. But here we are. We will have to pay off the loans. That means that we will have less money to spend. To have enough money, we have to become more competitive in products and services, and that means that we must make our public education not just better, but the best. That means putting an end to the mediocrity in public education everywhere and in every single part of public education to restore and enhance all the corners that we have been cutting with people who did not even know the impact of the questionable decisions. And even that will not be enough. We also have to learn that tax dollars are a precious resource. But in education, we waste a lot of it without improving anything. We must learn in public education to plan the coming year to do the right things AND USE ZERO-BASED BUDGETING TO ENSURE THAT IT HAPPENS.



We have a good idea why this happened. In many countries, certain things like education standards being centrally set for the curriculum, teacher selection, training and certification standards, national performance standards of schools in every subject that only go up based on what the international leaders in education, the nations whose products and services are beating our products and services, do. They are our competitors. One needs to do that centrally with the best people in the country and not based on political guidance. THE BEST AND SMARTEST PEOPLE IN THE COUNTRY MUST BE THE ONES TO SET STANDARDS IN EDUCATION FOR THE ENTIRE COUNTRY, IF YOU DO IT BY STATE IN 50 STATES WITH THOSE YOU CAN GET, WHO DON'T EVEN CONSIDER INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION, YOU WILL GET WORSE RESULTS AT A MUCH HIGHER EXPENSE BY DUPLICATING THE SAME FUNCTIONS IN EACH OF 50 STATES, DILUTED BY POLITICAL INTERFERENCE. 150 YEARS AGO, IN AN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY THE ONE ROOM, SINGLE TEACHER SCHOOLS DID THEIR OWN THING, AND IT WAS AN EFFECTIVE SYSTEM THEN. BUT BY WWI MANUFACTURING WENT INTO HIGH GEAR, AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES STARTED APPEARING AS WE WENT FROM THE HORSE AND BUGGY TO THE MOON IN A HUNDRED YEARS. THAT STARTED THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORE AND MORE SCIENCES, REQUIRING IMPORTANT SUBJECT BASED INCREASES IN PUBLIC EDUCATION. SO ALL STATES DELEGATED MUCH OF THE PUBLIC EDUCATION-RELATED DECISIONS TO 13,500 DIFFERENT SCHOOL DISTRICTS WITH INSUFFICIENT EXPERTISE ON THE SCHOOL DISTRICT LEVEL. BIG MISTAKE. OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION STARTED DECLINING.



Example: The Tennessee state board of education members are appointed by the several Tennessee governors. Now look at the ACT score chart. It is flat at best, in a very poor ACT READINESS are that reflects only 20% subject-knowledge. That is a very poor result. Now think about how important education results are. DID THE STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION IMPROVE THE ACT SCORES? DID THE GOVERNOR IMPROVE THE ACT SCORES?



Other nations improved their education systems with more expertise, 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 formation of the USA 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 virtually all management and other decisions to the elected boards of local school districts. We have more than 13,500 of them in the USA, 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 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 IT TO AN INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONAL GROUP OF RETIRED LARGE COMPANY CEOS WHOSE COMPANY IS INTERNATIONALLY SUCCESSFUL, AND RETIRED MATH AND SCIENCE GRADUATE SCHOOL FULL PROFESSORS 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 in order 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 eight-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 MORE NEW JOBS WERE CREATED BY THE BIG CHANGES. 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 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 of the education-related decisions more and more after WWI, and 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 literally 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 put on the breaks 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 members of Congress, 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 the decision making of Congress for specific interest groups or industries. We are not a Democracy that we try to sell to other countries. Even the Greeks decided about two thousand years ago that democracy creates huge disorganization and conflicts followed by failure. BUT WE HAVE BEEN SELLING IT TO OTHER COUNTRIES, combined with creating incredible losses of our young people and leaving the country in an economic mess. In Japan and Germany we stayed and helped to rebuild the countries. We benefitted economically by doing so. But most importantly we created close friends and allies from two powerful enemies. But in many otherr cases we left quickly after destroying the countries. without help to recover. Reminds me of Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and others. They have to rebuild. Something to think about.



By WWII we were the only one of the industrialized nations who stayed with this old 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 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 exists a limit at which point we can drop down to the "level of cavemen, and lose 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 the annual performance of your top ten competitor countries in the same period - it doesn't look good.



The philosophy born 200 years ago, about managing education is exactly 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 totally lacking any management know how to change the way the organization works, without which the results cannot change. The truth is that we are not going to get smarter ELECTED school board members in ANY OF THE 13,500 - 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 are educating them. BUT more importantly, OUR COUNTRY's ECONOMY depends totally on our children's education of today. Having elected school boards during the last 100 years is one of several reasons 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 blessing of the governor - everywhere. In addition, the elected local school boards duplicate functions where decision making SHOULD BE uniform for the nation, and it is duplicating staff in more than 13,500 school districts, with good people who do not have the right education and experience for decisions that vary among them. This is almost like 13,500 blindfolded people getting into their cars, but have absolutely no idea about where to go - but even if they did, there is no way they can succeed. You do not need any more proof than the poor ACT records for decades, that are among the worst in the industrialized countries. The state education departments and the governors as well as law makers who are not brave enough to stand up to the education lobby. No laws were proposed that would require changes within the education 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 what the nationally centralized INDEPENDENT management group directs in objectives, monthly operating plans within each and every 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, 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 a multitude of 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 that 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 questions and answers. Such tests can steer the result to a conclusion like "we need more money." 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 without exception, the state education organization without exception, most superintendents, but we are not including principals and teachers, who are trying hard 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, and with majority voting decisions within a board, they were not experienced in management, 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 bottom of the industrialized countries. 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 do not know how bad the performance is, have no idea how to fix it other than throwing money at any problem. You see, having a boss who is totally 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, but the majority of an elected board is not trained and experienced well enough to direct even a 50 person organization, let alone one that has 100-10,000 employees. With political influence without "measurable academic achievement objectives" in every single school with a national test and not a state test, 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 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 ELERMENTARY 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 THAT 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 to be 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 ARE 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. Like a bloody revolt when tens of millions of people can no longer get a job because their educators did not teach the information that 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 is not creating good results. We set the wrong standards, with 13,500 school districts' elected boards. 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, and do not want objectives, or to 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 ACT performance does not improve, just stays in a poor performance area.



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 are taking 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 about $10 million. 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% 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 MINIMUM 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 a 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 TOTALLY 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." In the future, you will end up with less money, 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 19 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 19 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 be able to get a job for more than minimum wage until 2023. Cognitive robots with Artificial Intelligence that passed average human intelligence will replace 95-98% 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?

Is it Joe's pizza shop??

No...

Is it the parents?? Some say so...unfairly.



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. That is what their mission is. Look at the chart. The education results are bad. Is THAT the reason why the expenses and salaries of school districts 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. Yet they always want more money!! During the 1990's we found that the children we graduate could not read properly. So 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 find out 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 or not. Many are just unemployed. But...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 and after that. 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 workforce of all industries is being damaged by the current education system. 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 able to do 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 what 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 to be leading a class of students in a subject for which they were not trained. Unfortunately, we do. Their personality and IQ is matched to the teaching position to ensure that teaching is what they would 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. So that 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 and so on. 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 the fact 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 EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE DOING, WITH WHAT RESULT, 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. AND ENJOY BEING THE BEST AT WHAT YOU DO.YOU CAN BECOME REALLY EXCELLENT AT WHAT YOU ARE DOING 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 (THAT'S LEGAL). 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. In public education, we did not do our homework on foreign competitors, 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 4 years behind the international competition by 2023-2025, and then the national income drop and



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

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



“ACT READINESS” is a very low target for public education, and it will not get any student into a position of remaining employable longer than a few years, unless the student graduates with an average ACT score at 27 minimum today in 2020. The reason for this is the countries with which we compete to achieve a satisfactory national income, have a better trained workforce, than we have as a result of our declining high school education. Those countries graduate children from high school with average performance that is in the ACT 28-32 range, depending on the country. The reason for this is the fact that the success of all industries in any country depend on the training level of workforces in those industries, and that is dependent on the education level of high school graduates.



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

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





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





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





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





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





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





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

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



Before 2010, a student could graduate from high school only if all high school courses were passed above 60% good answers! Big difference in the knowledge of American high school graduates then and now. A bigger problem is the even bigger difference between the top 30 internationals and us today.



What we need today is 95% of our children graduating from high school with a 27 ACT score average. Impossible? That is how people feel who have been performing badly for decades. But even the 27 ACT average is below what the high performing nations are doing. They are doing an average ACT equivalent between 28 and 31. Obviously we could do better, but not with the same standards in teacher selection and training, not with the same laws, not with the same untrained management, not with the same elected school boards guidance. The high performing countries score tests not only based on the answers being correct, but you have to also explain how you arrived at the answer. In addition they cover more information than we in every subject, in some of the top twenty countries they have to be fluent in two languages and a few with four languages. To graduate from high school all students must take a matriculation exam covering all subjects required in four years of high school which counts as 50% of your final grade.

The Benchmarks show that ACT Readiness is not enough as the minimum requirement for graduation from high school. IT SHOULD LEAVE NO DOUBT THAT WE ARE BEING DUMBED DOWN PURPOSEFULLY. IT IS NOT SOMETHING THAT A FRIEND IS DOING. IT IS AN ENEMY’S WELL THOUGHT OUT PLAN EXECUTED AND ALMOST COMPLETED. IT IS NOT GOOD PERFORMANCE. IT MEANS THAT THE STUDENT HAS A 50-75% CHANCE TO PASS THE SAME FOUR SUBJECTS ONLY ON THE LOWEST FRESHMAN LEVEL IN COLLEGE. THAT IS ALL THAT ACT READINESS IS. It is not enough knowledge to be prepared for the future. The schools tell the parent that ACT calls this "College and Career Readiness” (to have a 50-75% chance ONLY to pass ONLY those four specific freshman courses ONLY). But we hand out high school diplomas to not only ACT Ready children but to FOUR TIMES AS MANY CHILDREN WHO ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY! We see that if anyone only sees the words "ACT College and Career Readiness", and does not read the ACT explanation for it, then they will have the wrong idea about what ACT Readiness is. We had to call ACT to verify all this. ACT is in a tough spot. They depend on getting paid for their services for and by THE SCHOOLS. BUT the great majority of schools do a very poor job. The schools have a lot of money, and the legal expenses of the schools are not shown in the schools' budget or expenses. For example, the Knox County, Tennessee school district annual spending is over HALF BILLION DOLLARS. That's more than $500,000,000, and it does not include the legal expenses, or the mortgage expenses and perhaps more. The mortgage liability is another half billion dollars, and the mortgage interest could be close to $25,000,000 additional expense per year. And what do we get for that? 85-90% of the students graduate. Of those who graduated, ONLY 17% are ACT Ready, which is the same as the old F-level performance. The rest of those graduating: 83% of those F students getting a diploma are not even ACT Ready. THAT IS NOT WHAT WE NEED FOR A GOOD FUTURE IN OUR COUNTRY. ACT has another test called STEM ACT, and it requires that the student have a 26 ACT average score. The school system will tell you that STEM ACT is only for those who want a college degree in engineering or science. The schools also will tell you that "Not all children were created by God for college training, but your child could learn to become very good in a trade and make a very good living." It takes a lot of nerve to deliver such a message, when you graduate from high school close to 90% of a class, and you give a graduation certificate and a high school diploma TO 80% OF THE GRADUATES WHO ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY, AND COULD EVEN HAVE “GRADUATES” WITH ONLY A 5% ACT READINESS! WE ARE VERY SORRY, BUT THIS IS VERY UPSETTING ABOUT THIS SITUATION, BECAUSE THE POOR AND MINORITY STUDENTS' AND THEIR PARENTS DO NOT UNDERSTAND THAT THE EDUCATION SYSTEM IS NOT HONEST WITH THE PUBLIC. THE SCHOOL SYSTEM RAISED THEIR HOPES HIGH, WITH THE COMMENT THAT “NOT ALL STUDENTS ARE CREATED BY GOD FOR COLLEGE, BUT VOCATIONAL EDUCATION WILL PROVIDE A GOOD INCOME.” BUT SOON AFTER THEY GRADUATE, THEIR CHILD WILL NOT BE ABLE TO GET A JOB, HANDLE THE DANGEROUS CHALLENGES OF LIFE, TO WHICH THEY WILL HAVE TO ADD UNEMPLOYED FOR LIFE. MOST IF NOT ALL VOCATIONAL JOBS WILL GO TO ROBOTS.



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

• We will show you later in detail how our education declined against foreign competitors. Big impact on national income.



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



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





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





• It is very important to understand that neither the parent nor the teachers can force a child to learn. Learning will happen only if the child is excited about it and wants to learn a subject. That depends on the teachers’ personality, level of subject knowledge, love of the subject the teachers teach, a desire and decision to learn always how to produce better results, and the friendliness of the classroom environment. Artificial intelligence will enable robots to become outstanding teachers by matching the teaching methodology to the child in an optimum way, and all such robots could "learn” anything new in a few seconds with a simple downloaded update. The poor performance of our schools is accelerating such developments, that will be available by 2013-2014, enormously accelerating home learning, coupled with very secure testing. The lab portion of science courses can be simulated perfectly as part of the course.



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



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

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

WE HAVE A VERY HIGH, FAST GROWING POVERTY RATE.
WHY?

WE HAVE A VERY HIGH, FAST GROWING POVERTY RATE. Our children’s future depends on the quality of our leaders and workers today, and their quality depends on their parents, their health from conception on, their upbringing, their value system AND EDUCATION, both in and out of school during their entire life.



Our ability to learn depends on how our brain develops during pregnancy and especially from birth onward. What IS amazing is that our political leaders AND THOSE WHO MANAGE PUBLIC EDUCATION AT VARIOUS LEVELS are denying that our public education is very poor, but we know that income is approximately proportional to education achieved, AND THAT IS THE REASON FOR THE FAST INCREASE IN POVERTY. But our political leaders blame the low school performance on poverty.



WE HAVE NEWS FOR THEM! LOOK AT THE ACT CHARTS RIGHT HERE. LOOK AT WHAT ACT READINESS MEANS RIGHT HERE.



WHAT KIND OF LEADERSHIP ALLOWS SUCH POOR RESULTS TO GO ON FOR THE PUBLIC’S MONEY FOR 19 YEARS?! They are very smart people. They would know what to do. But they do not. Something or some group is controlling them.



WE SPENT AND WE SPEND THE MOST MONEY IN THE WORLD PER STUDENT FOR THOSE 19 YEARS, AND LIKELY MUCH LONGER! WHY when the results are so bad that 80% of today’s high school graduates are not trainable, when we graduate children who could not decide what change I should get back if I am paying $23.00 with as $50.00 bill. Just had this experience with not one but three high school graduates at a market. THAT SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN. And it is getting more frequent.



WHY ARE WE AMONG THE TOP FIVE SPENDERS IN THE WORLD PER STUDENT FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION THAT PROVIDES ONE OF THE WORST PREPARATION FOR LIFE? THE POOR PUBLIC EDUCATION THAT IS CREATING THE FAST GROWING POVERTY IN THE USA. Just look at the impressions we are creating worldwide.



HOW CAN THE MOST ADVANCED NATION ALLOW SUCH POOR SCHOOL PERFORMANCE? BY BECOMING LESS ADVANCED. GET USED TO IT UNTIL IT RECOVERS - IF EDUCATION RECOVERS.



HOW CAN THE LEADERSHIP OF BOTH PARTIES IGNORE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DECLINING PUBLIC SCHOOL PERFORMANCE THAT IS SO LOW THAT IT GUARANTEES UNEMPLOYMENT FOR LIFE TO 80% OR MORE OF OUR CHILDREN? AND WHAT THAT WILL DO TO THE FUTURE OF OUR COUNTRY IN JUST A FEW YEARS?



It is amazing how a totally dumb answer can come out from the education leadership to attempt to cover up the poor job that they are doing. But that begs for an answer to another question: "WHY DID PAST PRESIDENTS OF THE COUNTRY TOLERATE SUCH A POOR EDUCATIONAL PERFORMANCE FOR THE HIGHEST PRICE IN THE WORLD PER STUDENT? AND WHY DO WE ALLOW THEM TO KEEP DOING IT?



WHY IS IT THAT IF WE WRITE TO OUR GOVERNORS ASKING FOR ANSWERS TO OUR QUESTIONS ABOUT PUBLIC EDUCATION MULTIPLE TIMES, BUT WE CANNOT GET A SINGLE ANSWER FROM ANYONE?"

A healthy baby is born with about 100,000,000,000 brain cells called neurons. Many neurons start interconnecting from birth in specific functional areas such as vision, hearing, emotions, feelings, math, reading, stress and so on. Stress can be destructive to brain cells. For this reason the education system in Finland designed a very effective teaching methodology that produces very high results in all minorities as well (gypsies, Lapp tribes and African immigrants) by end of high school. This is how learning improves brain functionality. You can read more about it by clicking here.



Fast connections form during the first three years of a child, in basic functions like vision, hearing, speech and so on. Then other most advanced areas start interconnecting and forming at a slightly slower rate with timing depending on the specific developmental sequence of the functional areas within the brain, THE AGE OF A CHILD. By the end of the third year of life 15,000 neuronal interconnections have taken place by each single neuron, and the baby has 100 billion neurons! That is 1,500,000,000,000,000 interconnections in only 3 years! The rate of neuronal interconnections start slowing more around six years of age, but it is still increasing at a high rate. The areas of the brain that have to do with vocational preference will not be ready until age 18-20.



The slower these interconnections are forming, THE SLOWER WE LEARN. If a child does not learn basic math and to read by grade 10, learning becomes harder and the child is not likely to learn later. The chances are that being a poor reader will become a handicap for life. Not being a good reader will make learning anything more difficult. Things we do not do well or at all, like mental math, reading and writing script, basic math, reading, and other things, we are to learn when learning is easier, because if we do not learn it then, it will become much more difficult to learn later when the neuronal interconnections’ formation becomes 10-20 times slower.



That makes pre-school between the ages of 3 and 6 a very important period to start learning. The emphasis needs to be on games introducing very basic things in math and science in public pre-school. Also art and music that we discontinued in the USA, develop most right hemisphere neuronal interconnections that are very important for critical thinking and decision making. Learning is much easier during these early years and start getting more difficult between fifteen and twenty years of age, depending on specific areas of the brain that cover the same function, like hearing, seeing, mathematics, and so on.



Unfortunately, things like allowing the use of calculators in school, graduating more than 80% of our children who are not even ACT Ready, and not teaching subjects like art and music, reading well and so on, create lasting disabilities that will create big problems for the child during the adult years. Graduating many children who cannot communicate, will create significant problems for those children for the rest of their lives. We would urge parents to supplement the children's public education, by getting some of the excellent tutorials that are available on the Internet to bring the children's knowledge up in reading, writing, all pre-calculus mathematics and chemistry as well as physics, before they graduate from high school. The more they learn now, the better their future will be. If they do not learn enough now, they will not do it later when learning is more difficult. ALL SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE TO LEARN IN LOWER GRADES ARE VERY IMPORTANT BECAUSE THEY ARE PREREQUISITES FOR FURTHER LEARNING.



The public noticed since 1995 that high school graduates who worked operating a cash register, could not make change or do any mental mathematics if the cash register lost power. This was the result of governors and state education managers deciding to allow the use of calculators in school. This decision ignored the necessity of mental mathematics developing, limiting the formation of some neuronal interconnections in children's brains. In other words the use of calculators at an early age prevented some brain cell connections to be formed, reducing the brain's ability to perform some brain functions in mathematics.



Today, 25 years later, according to employers and college professors and ACT: nationally more than 74% of high school graduates (Tennessee 83%) cannot read and write well enough, and don't know enough basic math. They read and write only block letters, cannot fill out job applications and have a bad attitude on the job. The overly optimistic opinion of the school performance by teachers and principals and superintendents to “encourage” BOTH STUDENTS and parents are welcome - if they are telling the truth. This is what happened. As a result of the “saving children’s self-esteem” movement about 40 years ago, the schools/teachers/principals told minority children and their parents, that “All children are not created by God for college education, but little Johnny will learn a trade, and will do well.” Then little Johnny graduated from high school poorly prepared and was accepted for a job. But he could not do anything and thought that he just has to go to work on time. Supervisors and other employees became very unfriendly, and he started hating his job because most people in every company “treated him badly”. It was the school that created the problem both for the employer and for the employee. This has been happening on a large scale. All of this is a symptom of a huge negative impact on the brain development of a child at a time when the brain cell (neuronal) interconnections are NOT being formed for life in specific functional areas.



The following is a very interesting area. Imagine the body as if it was a huge computer system with billions of high speed computers everywhere. On the “outer side of the body”, in the “sensors”, like the eyes, the ears, the skin, the finger tips and so on, the computers do something called pattern recognition at very high speed, and they send the results to a specific area of the brain for “final decision” and action. Groups of neuronal interconnections take place in very specific areas of the child's brain as a result. Recreational drugs present in the mother’s body 90 DAYS BEFORE SHE BECOMES PREGNANT and malnutrition DURING PREGNANCY will reduce the number of neurons a baby has at birth. Various groups of neurons are specific to do certain talents or jobs. “If you don’t use it you lose it” applies. You have to keep using your brain to solve the most difficult problems and learn the difficult subjects, become the best AND EASIEST learning happens when your brain is flexible enough - when you are young.



One could say that brain cell INTERCONNECTION ACTIVITY is LEARNING, and one could think of the already formed neuronal interconnections as KNOWLEDGE itself. Learning music and art interconnects neurons between the two hemispheres of the brain, and also within the right hemisphere. Not having these courses in school has a big negative impact on critical thinking and decision making within the child for life. Not teaching to read and write script, and we graduate children without reading well enough has a similar impact plus it handicaps learning itself. Teaching less in most subjects during the school years also has a similar impact. The formation of neuronal interconnections starts slowing down in the brain around 20 years of age and keeps decreasing, unless the young person studied hard and received the best grades always. But if he or she did not, it becomes an impossibility to learn all the things that he or she did not learn at an early age. That is why learning becomes much more difficult as we age. Talk to a neurologist to verify these facts, read books written by them. We use only 4-6% of our brain “wired” or interconnected. Einstein used 8%. CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW FANTASTIC LIFE COULD BE FOR THOSE WHO COULD LEARN ENOUGH TO INCREASE INTERCONNECTIONS IN THEIR BRAIN JUST TEN MORE PERCENT? It is very unfortunate that our public education is doing the opposite.



American poverty grew to the second highest in the world. Education Management will tell you that “Children in poverty cannot perform well” as THE REASON for poor school performance. That is NOT TRUE. Success Academy Schools, a charter school chain in New York City produces much better results than public schools and most private schools in New York (with New York state being the 5th best performer in US education) WITH POOR, BLACK, INNER CITY CHILDREN! Poor school performance is not the result of poverty. POVERTY IS THE RESULT OF POOR EDUCATION. It is not the result of parents not doing what they "should". The parents that do not, simply cannot. Where poverty rules we will not find a lot of well educated people. We spoke to many parents in poor inner city areas. The most common story we heard in such areas was “I did not finish high school. When he found out that I was pregnant with his child, he disappeared. Since then I had to work my fingers to the bone every day, and I am just too tired to look after my little Johnny.” They were not fortunate enough to get a good education. AND OUR CHILDREN ARE NOT GETTING A BETTER EDUCATION YET, EXCEPT FOR FAMILIES THAT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY. AND ENOUGH MONEY COMES ONLY AS A RESULT OF GOOD EDUCATION. It is not the result of bad teachers. It is the result of declining teacher training programs everywhere in the US, management people in education who never had management training and cannot solve management problems. Very interesting that while we found the teaching major curriculum in colleges deteriorating, no other college program for a different major declined. As a result, K-12 teacher turnover is sky high, teachers are not treated well in the most important job on which our future depends, AND WE ARE NOT RECOGNIZING THE PROBLEM. THAT IS THE RESULT OF OUR SCHOOLS HAVING DUMBED DOWN THE PUBLIC OVER MORE THAN THE LAST 50 YEARS.



THIS cannot be accidental. Talk to a doctor called a neurologist if you do not believe what we write about brain development impact. Was this all part of a state effort to make school report cards look good to everyone as our children's knowledge was actually decreased? It certainly looks that way. Unless it was the objective to have the population dumbed down so far that they will not realize what is happening until nothing can be done about it. Very sad.



Why can't we fix the public school performance without dumbing down the children? We are one of the highest spenders per student in the world. That means that more money is not the solution. That means that money is being spent in the wrong places in the school budgets and on unqualified “friends” that they promote from within or hire. That means that our standards are not increasing but decreasing and are based on our staying "qualified" to spend the high budgets. Success in the education of our children only comes if our standards are based on the COMPETITION, the top five countries in education. They are not. This is the biggest contributor to OUR teacher turnover being the highest in the world. And that points to poor, untrained management. Not more money. Most of our schools are not fun places to work or learn. They are boring to the students for six hours a day. I sat in on many classes in 16 school districts. We should not call them schools. "Failure Factories" would be a more appropriate name as you will see later.

AMERICAN EDUCATION HAS BEEN DECLINING FOR A VERY LONG TIME.

WHY?

THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION DEPENDS 100% ON THE GOVERNOR OF EACH STATE IN THE USA. The governors decide and hire the head of their department of education who will report to the governor hiring him/her. Looking at the states that use ACT scores (59% of USA high school graduates), the average ACT scores are very poor in those states. That means that governors are hiring the wrong people for their departments of education or preventing them from doing the right things. This huge problem exists in the USA Department of Education, the state Education Departments, and in all 13,500 school districts nationwide.



Normally organizations would hire people who have a history of demonstrated success. The problem is that when performance is poor, as it is today, too much effort goes into making performance look good, when it is not good. Since it is the public’s money that is paying one of the highest amounts per student in the world, what percentage of ACT Readiness would be reasonably acceptable to the public? Since ACT Readiness is a very minimal measure of what percentage of readiness should be acceptable for high school graduates, we feel that no child should be graduated from high school, if they are not ACT Ready. We also feel that 95% of students who entered high school, should be educated well enough to be ACT Ready upon graduation. In public education, this important fact is ignored and political behavior rules. Example: A person who was never even a school principal and never managed more than 50 people, was backed by the wealthiest family in the state, and was hired as superintendent to improve the performance of 89 schools with 8,000 employees. He befriended the principal of the lowest performing high school who was teaching physical education before he was promoted to principal. He could not improve the extremely low performance of his high school over 6 years (ACT Readiness only 6%) and the superintendent promoted him to manage all 89 schools to improve their performance. For 8 years the 89 schools performance did not improve, but they graduated 88% of the children, and 4 out of 5 children are getting a diploma who are not prepared to get any job. The entire state of Tennessee is even worse.



Employees MUST have a clear understanding of what the organization’s objective is, and exactly why they have to focus on specific things they have to achieve. By the way, in management "goals” and “objectives" are different. They must be measurable, as a number, they must be the key indicator of success or failure. No one has such objectives in the USA Department of Education, in any state Education Department, or in the school districts. NOT ONE! The difference between goals and objectives is that objectives are for the current fiscal year, measured monthly and must be planned so that one achieves them. A goal on the other hand has to do with what one is planning to achieve in 5-6 years. There is no such planning.



Management must hire employees who are well educated to do the job and who will be happy to do their best in their job. That is also a very important task for which management training is necessary and the potential employee’s qualification and past performance must be tested.



What you must not have is the opposite - no specific measurable objectives and everyone just works the same way based on what they think is best. That is exactly what we do in education today to produce the bad results.



The organization needs monthly objectives in writing for every single operating unit, in this case every single school, and an operating plan for each such unit that details in writing with mutual agreement between bosses and employees who work for them, what the MONTHLY objectives are.



Such plans then are consolidated for the individual school districts, and they are consolidated for the state and the states are consolidated for the country.



If an organization has less than 100 employees, and if the top manager is very well organized and educated, he or she may be able to focus all employees to ensure that a plan is clearly understood by everyone about what the employees must achieve in clear measurable terms, that cannot be misunderstood.



Objectives must be measurable in numbers so that they cannot be misunderstood. The objective must be a key indicator of success or failure for individual supervisors, or managers. If such an objective is not met monthly, then it is the boss of the manager or supervisor who has to decide if there were circumstances that could not be met and why, in writing. When you do not have such objectives in writing, then no one is going to focus on improvement, and people just come to work and they do the same thing every day, the same way, and performance will not change.



We were shocked to find that the objectives used by school districts, states or even the US Department of Education, sound very nice but are unmeasurable. An objective or goal must be a key indicator of success or failure, and it must be measurable. The objectives or goals used in education are neither a key indicator of success or failure, nor measurable. How do you plan operationally and financially? HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU SUCCEEDED OR NOT?



IF ONE DOES NOT PLAN PROFESSIONALLY THAT WAY, YOU WILL CONTINUE TO FAIL, AS WE HAVE FOR DECADES. WHEN YOU FAIL TO PLAN, YOU ARE PLANNING...TO FAIL.



REMEMBER THIS! Every single year the education system told us that “WE KNOW WHAT TO DO, AND WE WILL INCREASE OUR PERFORMANCE NEXT YEAR FOR SURE!” It never, repeat NEVER happened, and never will without major change in how all the employees work. Performance is always mirroring how all employees work from the top on down. If one wants to increase performance because it is too low, one has to change the focus of all employees from the top down, and the way one can achieve that most effectively is with monthly objectives on all supervisory and management employees, that contribute to achieving the organizational main objective at year-end. The US Education Department in its objectives specifically excludes any method used in business, that is totally incorrect. The method we described is management by objectives, and it applies to all organizations that are under performing. It is not needed in education when both teachers and managers are highly trained to the extent that teachers can operate totally independently and all of them can deliver 90%+ results, as Finland operates. When we deliver nationally one of the worst results among the industrialized nations in education, the education system itself is proving every single year that they cannot improve. If they cannot show significant annual improvement of 10% when they are that low, one cannot recover by taking the education system’s advice, and the standards and management systems must be changed as we are describing very firmly, without arguments. In addition, without measuring GPA performance in the classrooms and schools WHO ARE PRODUCING THE RESULTS, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DELIVER GOOD RESULTS. If we do not have an objective that is THE KEY INDICATOR of educational SUCCESS OR FAILURE, we cannot succeed. The objective must be an ACT or SAT average that is 10% higher than the one achieved the year before, and also a MONTHLY GPA average in every school, similarly 10% above the previous year, all of which could be or should be generated automatically, including the objectives themselves. If that does not exist, the ship of education is totally LOST. IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE AT ANY TIME, YOU CANNOT REACH ANY TARGET OR DESTINATION OR OBJECTIVE. In addition, since it is the schools that produce the results, an operating plan needs to exist for each school that shows the measurable objectives of each supervisory and management person MONTHLY, that is important for the GPA achievement. If we do not have that in ANY TYPE OF ORGANIZATION with the key indicator of positive or negative performance, it is not only an AIMLESS SHIP, BUT IT IS SINKING WITH OUR CHILDREN ABOARD IN THE CASE OF EDUCATION, WHILE THE “CAPTAIN” IS TELLING EVERYONE THAT “EVERYTHING IS FINE, EVERYONE IS DOING A GOOD JOB, WE ARE HEADING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION”. And that is the only news that the public is getting, who is paying for this “cruise” for their children THE HIGHEST RATE IN THE WORLD. No organization can be other than a failure without having such measurable monthly objectives and operating plans for the same fiscal year. WITHOUT MAJOR CHANGES, there is no possibility of improving the poor results we have with such huge mistakes at all levels in public education. When you do not plan with such detail, you are actually planning to fail.



The performance reviews must be based on meeting measurable objectives. This is viewed as a very difficult, very high and IMPOSSIBLE at first. It looks that way only to those who are poor performers. We said before that when a long poorly-performing organization that had no measurable objectives to meet, no operating plans to focus everyone on what needs to be achieved, looks at itself, and they feel that they are good, what choice does anyone have? THEY FAIL EVERY YEAR. Management must explain clearly why we have to change to performance measurement: past results for decades were bad. Why? Because people slip back into their comfort zone, which is bad performance in this case. So we must change. If we keep working the same way, our children will be replaced by robots. Use incentives. Improve teachers and principals and help them become experts of a new way, because the old way does not work, and will not work. Like always, good people rise to high expectations, and in a couple of years you will have performance like you could never imagine before. Poorly performing employees do not want to change. When we experienced bad results for decades, or for even two years, why did the failing management and workers deserve an open forum? We have been allowing this situation to destroy a very large percentage of our children’s AND OUR COUNTRY’S FUTURE. IF GOVERNORS CANNOT DO BETTER AS A GROUP, SHOULD WE JUST TURN A BLIND EYE TO THAT? Change is inevitable. IF YOU CANNOT GO WITH THE CHANGE, YOU PERISH.



When people are not trained even to know only this much about management, they cannot succeed.



When it comes to spending, you see specific numbers, however, spending that has not been planned with similar monthly detail about what CORRECTIVE ACTIONS NEED TO BE DONE WITH A SENSE OF URGENCY TO MAKE MAJOR CHANGES TO OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM, to eliminate the high failure rate and overspending.



Such poor results as we have, guaranteed to happen without having the right management talent without management education and experience at all levels. They were dumbed down and are directed from the top nationally by similarly “prepared” political management. The method OF MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES has been developed, tried and worked well since WWII.



Public opinion can be manipulated with “educating” the public, while dumbing down the public. Lenin of Russia started this method by frequently preaching that “If we tell people a lie a thousand times, they will accept it as truth!”. This method has been used for a long time by leaders before Lenin, BUT EVEN MORE SO TODAY and with lies.



Another example: The majority of a school board hires a superintendent with a $250K salary because someone very wealthy, with high influence recommended the person. The candidate never managed a single school, he was jumping around in different jobs, never managed more than 50 people, and in the new job, he has to improve the results of 89 schools, with 8,000 employees. Such a person will not improve anything because he was not trained for it in management and has never done it. He also misrepresented a few things on his resume and the school board believed the headhunter’s background check who was receiving a $130k commission for him. Somebody kept organizing constant flag-waving for the first three years, to elevate his public image, calling the candidate a “miracle maker” in the newspaper, a “saint”, and this “celebration” went on for 3-4 years without saying anything about his poor results. And he even received a plaque naming him the best superintendent in the state from a group. But the man’s results were poor, and through the newspaper his image created is that of a saint who is a genius. We are mentioning this to show how the public can be manipulated. Our children’s future depends on such people, and no one raised the most important question about “how are the student results improving?”. Always focus on the improvement in the results, his past results for 5 years before he is interviewed, and ask the tough questions. Our children’s future depends on it. BUT WE FAIL TO DO THAT AND STAND UP FOR IT.



Well qualified people do not like such a poor environment as can be found in most school districts and leave within a few years at most. I believe that it is vital for us as a nation to investigate public education using forensic audits and other methods to see where money goes, and the quality and personality fit to education/teaching and education level of people compared to the best performers in the world. Create new laws to punish behaviors that have been and are producing the bad results and to undertake such action totally disconnected from the existing public education, but with full access to their records. We no longer have the time and option to make modest changes in the right direction, and no nation can survive without a competitively educated population any more. Our very survival depends on it.

As we just explained, the number of employees increase above 100 under a manager, the more management knowledge compared to “product” knowledge (e.g., teaching experience) is needed by that manager. If the top manager works in a poorly performing industry such as education, the top manager such as a state or school district superintendent should come from the best performing country or industry to improve performance. Anyone who is excellent, will quit within two years a poorly performing organization OR WILL BECOME AS BAD AS THEY ARE.



ALL GOVERNORS PROMISE TO FIX EDUCATION WHILE RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR. WHAT DO THEY HAVE TO DO? RAISE THE ACT AND SAT SCORES (DEPENDS ON THE STATE). These tests are the indicator of how much our children have learned. But after the election, they spend more money but no changes are made within the education district to raise our children's ACT results. The ACT is the national test that shows how much the children have learned from grade one to twelve. state tests are not reliable because state education departments change the scoring system to show higher grades with less knowledge. We wrote to the previous governor of Tennessee (2011-2018) seven times; not one reply from anyone. Look at the ACT performance in the chart during his years. We wrote to the current governor in 2019 four times, identifying problems and suggesting solutions for them. Again, not a single response.

• NO ONE IMPROVED THE DETERIORATING TEACHER TRAINING PROGRAMS AT OUR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES AND THAT IS A MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR TO OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION PROBLEM. Teachers enter the teaching program with the best of intentions. They believe that the teachers college meets an appropriate curriculum and rigor. They assume that the state certification also ensures that the teachers are trained to an internationally competitive level, because we have been competing internationally for decades. They also believe that the teachers work environment and respect is at a professional level. UNFORTUNATELY, none of that is true. Read here about the facts reported by other organizations. That is why such a high percentage of teachers, 6% leave the profession every year.



• It would be very important for our teacher colleges at universities, to improve the teaching programs aggressively. Professors already complained for more than a decade about how poorly prepared the American students are and the huge difference between the American and foreign students in performance. The American public schools are guaranteed the funding regardless of performance. But the colleges and universities need tuition income to survive. If our high schools do not improve, the universities will have to lower their academic standards to survive (allowing lower and lower prepared students accepted with marginal success because the neuronal interconnection rate slowed down making learning ten times more difficult than in the first five grades leaving a gap in brain development for life), and load their curriculum with years of remedial programs. Will that help? Yes, but not enough. That is why it is very important to ensure excellence in learning, every year from preschool on when learning is much easier. Teachers' colleges also need to improve the selection criteria for teachers. the high performing countries in education hire from the top ten percent of students who completed a BS/BA and masters program in the subject that they would teach, and pass a psychological assessment to ensure that the teacher candidate is an excellent match for teaching.



• The school districts waste a lot of money. For example, many of them graduate most children from high school with reading problems. If one wants good results, first investigate the internet for the best training tools and methods for reading. Then find on the Internet the schools that produce the best reading results in the world. Visit them, sit in on classes that teach reading and observe/learn how they do it. Before you hire anyone, you must know first how to do the job very well. How can anyone select a potential employee who will be successful in the job, without the hiring manager knowing how to do the job in an excellent manner? That is impossible, but we keep doing it, we spend millions and the reading problem goes unsolved. “We will hire a consultant. They would know.” How can you tell that the consultant knows what to do? Again, we hire people who know nothing, unless we learn how the best schools in the world teach reading first. But we don’t learn first how to teach reading. And that is just plain stupid. YOU DO NOT HIRE PEOPLE ON THE K-12 LEVEL WHEN YOU, HIS/HER BOSS, HAVE NO CLUE HOW TO DO HIS/HER JOB IN AN OUTSTANDING MANNER. People become consultants, because they cannot get a job. Can they help you? Some cannot, some want to impress you enough to be hired by you. Will some or many consultants be learning how to teach students to read when you thought they are experts of already? Sure. Will you get your money’s worth? ONLY IF YOU DO FIRST WHAT WE ARE SUGGESTING. ONLY IF YOU RESEARCH AND LEARN FIRST WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ALREADY: AND THAT IS HOW TO TEACH CHILDREN HOW TO READ, OR HOW TO DO BASIC MATH. AND THE METHOD OF HIRING AN “EXPERT” IS ONLY ONE WAY OF HOW WE CREATE EXTREMELY BLOATED CENTRAL MANAGEMENT IN ALMOST ALL OF THE 13,400 SCHOOL DISTRICTS IN THE USA, BECAUSE WE WERE TOO LAZY TO LEARN IT OURSELVES. SUCH FRIVOLOUS HIRING IS ONE OF SEVERAL METHODS SCHOOL DISTRICTS USE TO SOLVE MISSING KNOWHOW, THAT SHOULD NOT EXIST. THAT IS HOW THE CENTRAL MANAGEMENT OF SCHOOL DISTRICTS BECOME TEN TIMES LARGER THAN WHAT THEY SHOULD BE.



• Teaching is known among college students as the easiest degree to obtain. So, they switch to teaching if they cannot or do not want to work hard enough. In the US teaching programs, they teach the teaching college student a little about 5-6 subjects. In the US schools it is not uncommon to switch a teacher to a class with a subject that the teacher knows nothing about. Who loses? The student. Among the high performing nations in education, they hire a teacher candidate from the top 30% (some countries from the top 10%) of the master's program for the one subject that they will teach from 4th grade on up. They never turn a class over to a teacher who is not fully trained for that subject.



• No one reduced the massive paperwork that eliminates teacher preparation time for their classes.



• We are literally choking teacher performance in many ways. Lack of money is always a superficial reason. They have 6-8 TIMES MORE people in central management than what is normal. When you do not have real measurable objectives, the place with the highest salaries gets stuffed with friends. If you fired them all, there would be no change in the low performance. All that extra money should be invested in making the teachers more effective. They create the results! But when the superiors and colleagues treat you like the lowest factory worker because there is no real well-trained management presence, how can teachers be happy?



• 8% of American teachers leave their schools for another school every year. An additional 8% leaves the profession every year. A total of 16% leaves their jobs is the national USA average; extremely high. Employee turnover is very expensive. Declining performance, decision to leave, time to find a new teacher and training the teacher to be productive (most new teachers are inexperienced just out of college) costs a school system more than one year's salary with overhead expenses. The skill level is in decline because the new teachers are inexperienced college grads who leave teaching within 7 years to be replaced by inexperienced teachers, BECAUSE SUPERINTENDENTS IN EDUCATION ARE UNTRAINED IN MANAGEMENT. This is part of the real big problem, which is lack of real management training, part of which is the need for measurable objectives and operating plans to make sure that your results are on target every month, instead of not having them and you get surprised by bad results at year end.



• The teachers' unions are of no help in the above areas to teachers, and that damages our children's education.



• Teaching is a very important and unique job. For someone to be a good teacher they require several unique personality traits and a high I.Q., yet we do not test to qualify potential teachers before acceptance into teaching programs.



• IN TENNESSEE, schools are to achieve a 90% graduation rate with a 21 ACT score that is too low. Such a score represents only a 20% readiness or subject knowledge, and 80% of those we graduate cannot even achieve the very simple ACT Readiness. Schools need to achieve a 80% ACT readiness rate! That means an average 27 ACT score. Quite a few countries are performing above that level.



• The 90% graduation drive puts enormous pressure on teachers and management during the last month of the school year to pass as many children as possible. There have been lawsuits about advancing children prematurely and pressuring teachers to pass children, but there are many who need their jobs and will not report such actions.

These are just a few things that happen in most of our schools. More later - unfortunately.

Our average ACT scores are stuck in a bad performance area because too many children, the great majority are not educated well enough to learn any job, and the state of Tennessee gives them a diploma! The qualification the state of Tennessee sets for a diploma is a low 21 average ACT score. ACT Readiness (the percentage of a four-subject ACT benchmark) by ACT itself indicates that either an individual student or a group of students know only 20% of the four benchmark subjects to qualify for an ACT 21 score. The education establishment constantly talks about high expectations, excellence for all children, and providing a world-class education for our children. I checked and we have the lowest education performance in the industrialized world. When people have a low expectation goal of ACT 21 score achievement, and cannot even reach that, that obviously means that they have no confidence in knowing how to plan for better results and MAKE THEM HAPPEN. They do not even know where they should be to make 80% of the four benchmarks subjects known, and what teacher qualification and student curriculum would be needed to be at 80% ACT Readiness. We investigated that internationally and can tell you that a minimum 27 average ACT score would be required TODAY. We also explain further on exactly what objectives and annual operating plans would be needed, along with the qualifications needed by key personnel to achieve them.



PEOPLE RISE TO HIGH EXPECTATIONS, AND MEASURABLE MONTHLY OBJECTIVES AND OPERATING PLANS THAT ARE A STRETCH, COVERING ALL MANAGERS’ AND SUPERVISORS’ MONTHLY OBJECTIVES TO FOCUS THE ENTIRE ORGANIZATION. PEOPLE MOSTLY IGNORE LOW OBJECTIVES, THEY KEEP WORKING EXACTLY THE SAME WAY AS BEFORE, AND THE RESULTS WILL BE THE SAME AS BEFORE. Under our previous grading system, knowing less than 60% of a subject was a huge FAILURE or “F”, AND A STUDENT COULD NOT GRADUATE AND GET A DIPLOMA THEN, UNLESS ALL OF THE COURSES THEY TOOK IN HIGH SCHOOL SCORED HIGHER THAN 60%! BUT TODAY WE GRADUATE THEM IF THEY SCORE AT 20% (THE READINESS AT ACT 21)! For 15 years Tennessee’s Department of Education selected that low score as the goal that we could not reach and had a slogan on letters and everywhere that was a huge lie: “EXCELLENCE FOR ALL CHILDREN!”. LENIN, THE FAMOUS COMMUNIST HAD A FAVORITE SAYING: “IF YOU LIE TO THE PEOPLE A THOUSAND TIMES, THEY ACCEPT IT AS TRUTH.” Sadly, we do that very well. The charts show no improvement. The public schools are dumbing our children down. But one hears lots of excuses, false positive statements to the public, blaming others and playing political games and the truth about public schools remains elusive. Our education dropped to the bottom of the industrialized nations. Clearly parents have to learn how to separate truth from fiction.



WE THE PEOPLE MUST STAND UP TO GET A MUCH BETTER EDUCATION SYSTEM FOR OUR MONEY! We have been paying one of the highest rates for public education in the world, and our education results have been one of the worst in the industrialized world for many years. We deserve better for our country's survival. And we deserve far better for our children since we were and are paying for it, while public education lied about how our children were doing. It was easy for them to mislead the poor and uneducated especially, while the public education systematically increased our poverty to the second highest in the world by poorly educating our children for decades. We are only asking for fairness for our children to ensure a bright future for them, our states and our country.



ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND IS WHAT A CHILD WILL NEED TO KNOW BY HIS/HER HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION IN ORDER TO MAKE A REASONABLE LIVING. We have several important new technologies coming and that ALWAYS raises employer requirements in employee education. We are already behind with high school graduates, requiring two years of remedial training. Teacher morale is bad, but the schools produce a multiple choice guided survey that shows morale is good. Such a morale survey is invalid. The real survey for such issues has to be confidential by an outside firm, and must be open ended instead of structured, multiple choice. Our teacher turnover is 16%, the highest in the world, that raises our education expenses very high. Since many employers met with governors during the last 15 years complaining about our poor education, and governors did not respond to correct the problem, work intensified to create superior teacher robots with artificial intelligence in a handful of years at most.

THE IMPORTANCE OF TEACHERS,
THEIR SELECTION FOR TEACHING AND
THEIR CONTINUING EDUCATION

The school results depend the most on how good and well educated the teachers are and remain through continuing education. If someone wants to become a teacher, the potential teacher cannot ensure that he is the right type of person for teaching. Such qualification needs to be done before the student enters any teaching program in the high performing countries, or when the student becomes 20 years of age, whichever is later. The brain is not fully developed for vocational fit assessment until age 20. We start pushing children in public schools about what they want to become as soon as they start high school. But look at the ACT chart! Their performance is very poor. THAT IS THE PROBLEM THAT WILL LIMIT THEIR JOB PROSPECTS! The brain of a child is not going to be well developed in the vocation-related areas until twenty years of age. Such pressure on younger children than 20 years old, when pushed in a different direction than what naturally evolves by age twenty impacts the formation of neuronal pathways that are specifically dedicated to form the natural vocation-related traits. Consult a neurologist. The education system's vocational guidance is creating another brain developmental problem. The use of calculators and not teaching music and art along with poor reading and basic math already created a big problem.

Teaching is a vitally important job. The excellent teachers have some unique natural characteristics. Matching a potential teacher to the teaching profession through tests that existed for many years but not used for potential teachers, would be of great help to determine a candidate's fit to teaching (e.g., Strong Interest Inventory and Myers-Briggs Intelligence Inventory correlated, can be downloaded from the Internet for about $100 total for both tests). We have too many children who could not do well enough in college or did not want to work hard enough in their originally selected major. They switch to teaching, because it is well known among college students as the easiest major. Those children are not the best choices for teaching. High performing countries in education, test teacher candidates' suitability for the teaching profession with psychological tests.

Beyond 4th grade, in the higher performing countries, a successful teacher requires:

• A high I.Q. and high energy,



• In the high performing countries teachers come from the top 10-30% of university graduates, who have a Master's degree in the subject they will teach after the 4th - grade. Teachers are never transferred to teaching a different subject. US teachers come from the bottom 30% in performance.



• A personality matching to the teaching profession is very important: the candidate needs to be very open, friendly, but firm,



• Loves the subject he/she teaches so that he is aware of technical developments and the job possibilities within it.



• He/she teaches with infectious enthusiasm because that teacher loves the subject they teach.



• Keeps learning on his/her own about new teaching methods, AND IMPROVES HIS/HER RESULTS EVERY SINGLE YEAR.



• He/she wants to be the best at whatever he/she does,



• Very interested in knowing first-hand how his job is done in countries that are very successful in education. All because of his/her drive to become better.



• Uses on his/her own the new, better tools available on the Internet to improve his/her results.

A test combination correlated like the Strong Interest Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Psychological Inventory are $100 in total on the Internet and a vocational psychologist's single session to correlate them worked for me perfectly in about 700 cases. The candidate should be at least 20 years old to take there tests because of brain development timing. Unfortunately, we found after years of investigating that all the above areas have to be satisfied to create a good teacher, for which the teacher trainee cannot be responsible. To make things worse, the working conditions for many teachers are also not good enough, making a teacher's job unpleasant, because they are not treated well.

THIS IS NOT MAGIC! LOOK AT MORE THAN A DOZEN YEARS OF ACT SCORES FOR TENNESSEE AS AN EXAMPLE. THE STATE TEST HAS BEEN DUMBED DOWN. OUR RESULTS ARE VERY POOR. THE ACT HAS NEVER BEEN DUMBED DOWN. THAT IS WHY IN SOME STATES THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION MAKES IT MORE AND MORE DIFFICULT TO FIND THEIR ACT SCORES AND ACT READINESS PERCENTAGES!

The population assumes to date that the state ACT goal is high enough. It is very low. For more than 15 years, the state goal was at an average ACT score of only 21 that shows that the student KNOWS ONLY 20% of the four ACT Benchmark subjects individually or as a group. And the Tennessee school system graduates such students with a diploma! In other words children are graduated if they know only the average of 17-20% of the four benchmark courses only! We graduated children not too long ago who had to pass every single one of 20 courses with knowing more than 60% of all of those 20 courses. Not having that is a huge drop in graduation requirements than more than 30 countries who graduate above 95% children who are all prepared to a much higher standard than the ACT 21 goal that Tennessee had so far.

Our standards are too low and not competitive. We purposefully set standards too low based on the fact that we graduate children with such a poor minimum education level that it guarantees homelessness for most of them. It would be less costly if we cannot educate them properly, to keep them in high school 1-4 years longer until they test above 90% ACT Ready.

Click here for more information about teacher preparation.

HOW TO DUMB DOWN THE POPULATION AND KEEP IT A SECRET?

More than 60 years ago you had to get a C or higher grade to pass. That meant 70% correct answers minimum on your tests IN ALL SUBJECTS to get a diploma. Then we changed to D being the passing grade. That meant at least 60% correct answers on tests IN ALL SUBJECTS to get a diploma. Then in the last fifteen years we started to devalue the high school diploma even more by reaching for ACT 21 as a goal, that equals ONLY 23% of the graduating students being ready or prepared, that is equal to ONLY KNOWING 23% OF THE SUBJECTS YOU TOOK IN HIGH SCHOOL, and dumbed down the state test to get there. And now we don't even call the grading F for FAILING (meant that the student had 60% or less correct answers average on all tests more than 6-7 years ago) and above passing D, C, B and A (means that the student had 60-69%, 70-79%, 80-89% and 90%-100% correct answers in the test). I spoke to ACT to confirm the scores and their subject knowledge equivalence. The old grading system was pretty simple, we had it for many decades. No confusion. THE NEW GRADING SYSTEM SERVES ONE PURPOSE: CONFUSE THE PUBLIC WHILE DROPPING THE PASS/FAIL POINTSTO SHOW HOW WELL LITYTLE JOHNNY IS DOING - AS WE DROP THE KNOWLEDGE LEVEL OF HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES SO THAT THEY BECOME UNEMPLOYABLE. WE WILL PROVE THIS TO YOU. IF THE EDUCATION SYSTEM IMPROVES MORE THAN 10%, THEY COULD SERVIOVE. WE CAN PROVE TODAY THAT THEY DROPPED THE KNOWLEDGE LEVEL AT WHICH THEY GRADUATE CHILDREN, MORE THAN 30% WHILE SPENDING THE HIGHEST RATES PER AMERICAN STUDENT IN THE WORLD, AND WILLFULLY LYING TO THE PUBLIC. PLEASE LOOK AT THE ACT CHART AGAIN. EVEN WITHOUT CONSIDERING ALL THE MIDSINFORMATION GIVEN TO THER PUBLIC FOR 20 YEARS, IT ISDESTROYING THE NATION ALONG WITH THE NEW GENERATION. HOW? WE ARE ABOUT TO COVER THAT.

The state EDUCATION DEPARTMENTS purchase new tests periodically from one of five companies that create them in accordance with the curriculum. This is a $100-200 million dollar expense, plus a hundred people working for 18 months. That does not seem to be a problem because they spend our hard-earned tax dollars for very interesting things that could use a forensic audit. They run the tests once in all state schools, but do not release the results. If the results look bad, and they always did so far, the state delays running the tests officially until they change the pass/fail points selectively such that the results don't look so bad. That took two years the last time around 2015. AND MANAGEMENT PEOPLE AT THE SCHOOL DISTRICTS USED THIS AS A JUSTIFICATION TO NOT DO ANY ACHIEVEMENT PLANNING. They dumb down the tests with a method called "Cut Scores". The last "dumbing down" the state tests took two years to "adjust" before using it, and they changed the grade names "A" - "F" to the following: "BELOW". Below what?! "Below" means failing. "Failing" is too harsh. Self-esteem and all that. Not long ago, failing was 60% or less good answers on a test. "BELOW" goes from 60% to 28% or less good answers passing many children who otherwise would fail. Let us say it again. If the pass/fail point is moved from 60% good answers in a test to only 28% good answers, we will graduate with passing grades many children who would have failed before. The mostly single parent family, that is living in poverty, who never graduated from high school, will feel good, because her child graduated. He can read and write only block letters, he cannot do basic math. He cannot read and write script. He doesn’t have to remember all the “useless stuff” the school forced one to learn before, but people hate him more and do not want to give him a job.

WE ARE GRADUATING MANY CHILDREN WE DID NOT EVEN CONSIDER FOR GRADUATION BEFORE, BECAUSE THEY DID NOT KNOW ENOUGH. WE ARE DROPPING THE KNOWLEDGE OF HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES. WE ARE LOWERING AN IMPORTANT STANDARD: ONE THAT FEEDS THE WORKFORCE OF ALL INDUSTRIES ON WHOM THE COST AND QUALITY OF OUR INDUSTRIES' COMPETITIVENESS DEPENDS, BECAUSE ON THAT COMPETITIVENESS DEPENDS OUR DECLINING NATIONAL INCOME. THE ACT CHART SHOWS VERY POOR PERFORMANCE WHERE WE GRADUATE ABOUT 80% OF THE CHILDREN WHO ARE NOT READY AT ALL. GET READY FOR EVEN WORSE ACT RESULTS WITH THE NEW SYSTEM WE ARE DESCRIBING. The state can change this new system for any high school subject or all subjects every year. The next grade, the schools call "APPROACHING". And the next grade after "APPROACHING" is called "ON TRACK"! Whose track are we on? NOT THE RIGHT TRACK FOR SURE. If I was a parent today, I would worry about my little Johnny and what track he is on. Both APPROACHING and ON TRACK are made up of very large percentage blocks. And finally "MASTERED"! I was worried that with A, B, C, D grades my child will be homeless. THANK YOU LORD FOR THE BRILLIANT PEOPLE WHO CHANGED IT TO "APPROACHING" and "ON TRACK" that leads to "MASTERED"!!!! But “MASTERED” is about as tiny as a flea's front leg. Only one front leg.

What all this appears to mean is that the school system wants to reduce its failing students, without the school system having to do a better job. They graduate in Tennessee a lot of children who would otherwise fail because they are not prepared well enough by our public schools for the future.

IS THIS HOW THE SCHOOLS WANT TO IMPROVE?!

WITHOUT THE SCHOOLS IMPROVING, THE RESULT TODAY (March 2020) IS GRADUATING CHILDREN WHO KNOW LESS EACH YEAR. THEY WILL BE UNEMPLOYED MOST OF THEIR LIVES.

IN PARALLEL, THE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT'S MANAGEMENT CONFUSES THE PUBLIC WITH THE NEW SCORE NAMES AND BY CHANGING THE PASS/FAIL POINT ANNUALLY.

This is not the teacher's doing. This is done by the state's department of education with the governor's approval, and they can change the pass/fail point of students in one or more courses every year.

OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS graduate as many as 83-85% of our children in Tennessee who are NOT EVEN ACT READY, cannot read, write, fill out a job application, do not know basic mathematics, and have a bad attitude on the job.

The schools fib to the parents by saying that "Not all children are made for college, and little Johnny will be doing fine with a trade-related job." Yes, they are lying. Why? Because Even ACT Readiness means ONLY that the child has a 50-75% chance of passing only four freshman courses that are the same introductory subject names as the four ACT Benchmarks are, THAT IS ALL. The reason for this is simple.

Our public school education is so poor that if ACT set its Readiness benchmarks at a level that employers want, and that is what counts, then we would see less than 5% of public school graduates passing ACT Readiness, instead of 26% nationally. Less than 20% of our high school graduates in Tennessee are ACT Ready. We are already graduating children whose average Readiness can be lower than 5%!! We do this at a time when major new technological developments will be unfolding in three years in 2023. We are already far behind in 2020. The bad attitude of the child at work is the result of the school not informing the parent and the child truthfully. With that as a background, any parent or child would find the child's work environment awful, because they want the child to do things that he or she cannot do.

Cognitive robotics (that can learn) will replace many vocations very soon. Nanotechnology will change the design and manufacturing on practically everything. Materials science for almost everything together with nanotechnology will lower cost significantly. And space science will bring huge positive changes, much bigger than the change from the horse and buggy to the automobile.

We have a critical job to do in many areas to improve our public education. Do not blame the front-line troops, the teachers, for the bad results. They have enough bullets aimed at them unfairly. We treat them almost like laborers. But we better put the magnifying glass on the state departments of education to clean up "low expectation" attitudes, not being truthful with the public. They are so used to poor performance that without a governor pressing them with specific requests, they consider everything going along as they have for decades. The problem is with them AND THE GOVERNORS, who don't ensure the kind of experience that is required to run education in a competitive world and hire all too often the wrong people for the task. THIS IS A HUGE PROBLEM. The voting public assumes that if someone wins by popular vote and has the title, such a person would know what to do. BAD ASSUMPTION. GENERALLY THEY DO NOT. BUT BY DUMBING DOWN THE PUBLIC, THEIR JOB BECOMES EASIER. AND THE DATA CLEARLY SHOWS THAT THE PUBLIC HAS BEEN DUMBED DOWN SLOWLY SINCE 1970. Look at the ACT results chart for two decades to see how poorly we educate our children. Do you think that it can be improved without the recommended changes within school operations statewide? Unfortunately, the majority of such candidates, don't know what the job will need, but we like their smile. Click here if you are interested in learning more now.

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO US AS HUMAN BEINGS?

Some nations teach ethics in high school as a course - a very good idea. Some teach art and music. they happen to be very important subject for right brain half development, and to interconnect the two brain hemispheres. Very important for learning and decision making. Incredible! High level decision makers in education are not interested in learning from other successful school systems or from other professions who are experts about human development, like clinical psychiatrists and neurologists. As a result, very bad mistakes have been made in our public schools that unfortunately impacted many children’s learning ability negatively.

The state education departments, schools and all individuals within them are part of a low performing education system. It used to be one of the best and in 50 years dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries. The children graduating from high school become part of the workforce within our industries, whose needs our public schools have not considered for decades. It is fair to say that our school districts need to satisfy the needs of our industries, who have been complaining to governors since about 2000. When an entire industry like education is poorly performing like ours, they do because their leaders in the departments of state education are not interested in becoming better, doing a better job and be competitive - they get paid even for the poor job that they do. OR, MOST OFTEN THEY JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO AND EVEN IF THEY HIRE SOMEONE GOOD, THEY DO NOT HAVE THE CONFIDENCE TO TRUST THOSE WHO WORK FOR THEM. The elected school boards cannot be expected to know what to do. Their voting majority is neither schooled nor experienced in management on a scale that is needed. Teachers are blamed by the public and they have nothing to do with the school systems producing bad results. Why? Because they went to a teacher’s college not knowing how good their curriculum is, or how good the teacher certification is, or how good their management is above the principals. And these three are far from being as good as in the countries with which we compete. For these reasons, the teachers and principals jobs are very difficult. The result is a very high turnover rate, that costs the education system 12-18 months of salary AND the school gets a new inexperienced teacher for the experienced one that left. So in all our wisdom we would rather hire a new superintendent for a medium to large school district than a retired vice president from a good company who understands what the work forces need and who has been using good management know-how for decades, exactly what a superintendent should know but does not. Furthermore, the governors themselves hire for state superintendent people from the poorly performing teacher training or school district environment, who having come from the poorly performing education industry, cannot improve anything, and pay them an enormous salary. Just maybe, we better give this some serious thought because things are getting worse.

A different but important trend: Dec. 27, 2019, NYC. Man Beaten to Death for $1 - and No One Stops to Help! Multiple people, cars and even a bus drove by his body, and not one stopped to check on the man lying in the street.

Sept. 19, 2019. I bought something. The total came to $23.00. I paid with a $50 bill as the power went out at the store. Three cash register operators could not figure out what change they should pay me. Quiet conversations among them. I told them that my change would be $27. Later I asked them where they graduated from high school. All three named one local school, later I verified one name. That one told me that "We are not math majors. And besides, we will not need to know math in the future." A fourth grader should do better. We graduate today too many who cannot communicate properly, cannot read or write except for block letters, and cannot do any mental mathematics. Just ask employers and college professors. We need much better results out of high schools for our workforce!

People recognize the big problem we have with education. 50 years ago many would jump up and speak up to those in leadership. Today the most common response is: "It is very bad. but it is beyond my pay grade." Today people do not want to get involved. But they know what's happening. That's very bad because the day will come when all those feelings will explode. We see such situations more and more. What is happening to us? Something is very wrong. Not caring about each other as human beings shows more and more. Both of the above leads to end of life: one is violent, the other is slow and can end life in extreme poverty and misery. We do not want to get involved and help when something bad happens to someone we don't know. We don't even care about what happens to our children, except for our own. And even there we trust the schools self-evaluation of their performance, and we will show what we found. Please give this some thought.

CAN U.S. PUBLIC SCHOOLS KEEP UP IN THE FUTURE?

THEY CAN, BUT ONLY WITH MAJOR CHANGES.

We went from the horse and buggy to the moon in a hundred years. Think about this because many new technologies are coming into play that will increase the level of training necessitated in high schools even in the highest performing nations by 2023, and USA training is already two years behind in 2018.

Our public education did not keep pace with technological advances like the high performing countries' education systems did. It starts with the fact that our teacher training programs have not changed enough with the times at our colleges and universities, the teacher training curriculum is the weakest and easiest, attracting under-performing students. American teachers are coming from the bottom third of their university performance. Other nations take them from the top third, and even from the top 10% ONLY like Finland. The university training must be A FULL BS/MS PROGRAM IN THE SUBJECT THEY WILL TEACH above 4th grade, and are matched to the teaching profession before they are hired. This is a huge difference between us and the nations with medium-to-high quality high school education. They are prepared well to be excellent teachers, their teaching performance brings excellent results, and such results create the highest respect from the public. We can see how good our school performance is in the ACT and SAT results and the international tests. Our state tests are weak because the curriculum is weak, and the Tennessee STATE TESTS HAVE BEEN DUMBED DOWN SEVERAL TIMES TO PASS MANY STUDENTS WHO WOULD OTHERWISE FAIL. WHY IS A GOVERNOR SUPPORTING SUCH ACTIONS? DOESN’T HE KNOW THAT SUCH AN ACTION HURTS THE STUDENTS’ FUTURE AND ALSO HURTS THE STATE’S AND OUR COUNTRY'S ECONOMIC FUTURE? PLEASE LET US KNOW WHY SUCH ACTION IS SMART INSTEAD OF WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: INCREDIBLY DESTRUCTIVE! Teachers are not to be blamed for this. It is the state education departments and governors who created and allow this bad situation.



No one can produce excellent results, unless one is totally truthful with all concerned about the work they do, both good and bad, and specifies in a written plan, those who have to achieve and what every month in the organization to achieve the objective. Objectives must be measurable, and they must be the key indicator of success or failure, with every single important action to be achieved.

New technologies increase employer requirements and that change is not reflected in today's high school education, such as making Algebra II, Geometry, Solid Geometry, and Trigonometry in mathematics, and adding Chemistry and Physics as well at MINIMUM to the Curriculum. Those we compete within an international environment complete a year of Calculus as well as part of high school education. The choice is not complex. Our results are poor because our teacher training became poor, and management training does not exist for principals and superintendents. Management know-how in the state departments of education is lacking and in some governors it is also absent. ON THE SCHOOL DISTRICT LEVEL ESPECIALLY, WE NEED PROFESSIONAL MANAGEMENT KNOW-HOW IN EDUCATION INSTEAD OF POLITICAL BEHAVIOR AND POLITICAL METHODS THAT HAVE CREATED POOR RESULTS IN THE PAST.

What did he mean?

Our employers have been complaining since 2000 about high school graduates not knowing how to read, write, follow instructions, don't know even basic math and have a bad attitude on the job. Our employers cannot find enough potential employees who are trained well enough now for more than ten years. Example: Two different high school graduate cashiers could not figure out recently what change they owe me if I pay a $23.00 item, with a $50.00 bill. When I asked them why, they told me that "We are not math majors, and we will not need math in the future." They said that the teacher told them. No school in the entire country should graduate a single student like that.

How advanced are we as a country? We already started with very serious space activity with the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, and their subcontractors BEFORE 1970. They reverse-engineered crashed U.F.O.'s during the prior ten years. They developed 65 space vehicles with antigravity engines and two mother ships by 1983 with presence in space. We have been traveling at close to the speed of light to other planets for the past few years. This information has been recently declassified. President Trump announced the formation of a sixth branch of the US Military, The USA Space Force in September 2019. This is important because new technological discoveries or releases into our business environment affect what public schools must teach. The ACT performance chart we have here clearly shows that this fact has been ignored by our public education system.

That part of our world, having operated under THE "black budget", is fifty years ahead of what the general public is aware of in new technology related to interstellar travel. We are about to take a much greater technological step than at any time before, starting in 2023 with cognitive robotics, space technology, and nanotechnology. The impact will be enormous worldwide. If we do not catch up with our public schools, most of our children will be jobless for life. We could not depend on our schools to do this. It is possible that our school system will not improve like in the past 50 years. Parents need to learn to ensure a much better education for their children. DO NOT DEPEND TOTALLY ON THE SCHOOLS THAT THEY WILL IMPROVE, BECAUSE THEY DID NOT IMPROVE IN THE PAST. Remember that no one will volunteer and admit to you that they or their organization is doing a poor job. Especially when the government guarantees their income.

Our space and robotics efforts have been advancing many areas of science. That will also add to the pressure very soon to raise high school graduates' employability standards for public high schools. We have fallen behind during the last few decades. Our high schools were already behind a dozen other nations around 1990-2000, contributing to a weakened workforce. We lost several industries that we used to dominate (e.g., computers, radios, T.V., automobile - partly recovered, heavy machinery, and many more). Why? Because education performance declined. New technologies generally require automation. Automation is expensive. Our competitor countries created a much more liberal tax policy for depreciation of " capital equipment". China, for example, automated on an enormous scale both design and manufacturing, reducing the big expenses of innovating with new products. They also created super excellent high schools to educate many excellent high school graduates. For this reason, the new technologies coming in 2021-2022 will have a much greater technological impact on what our children should be learning in high school. By now in 2019, because the robotic impact on jobs will be massive on high school graduates and much greater than expected on many jobs that required a university degree.

Future jobs that will be most immune to robotic takeover will be those jobs that require in any combination, advanced degrees in sciences, mathematics, and economics, with excellent communications skills.

So far, as we see in the ACT test results chart, we have not been educating our children well enough for more than TWO DECADES. However, we started increasing education spending since 1970, possibly earlier, but the results went nowhere. The future new technologies WILL make most of them jobless, as well as creating a big employee-deficiency problem for employers. THAT WILL RAISE THE DEMAND FOR COGNITIVE ROBOTICS HIGHER. This will be the immediate result of our state political leadership being misinformed about major technology advances for lack of interest in state organizations.

A couple of changes are needed now in the areas recommended in order to minimize the damage to the new generation and to our corporations' business. This will put many jobless young people on the major social problems IF NOT REMEDIED NOW. Since the decline of public education started damaging the workforce several decades ago, our national income has not been healthy enough. We resorted to a huge increase in the national debt to survive, whose interest rates are costing us many billions. This, in turn, is seriously limiting our success in managing ourselves out of the increase in social problems, with all of this being the result of our political leadership TOTALLY IGNORING PUBLIC EDUCATION. To improve schools, investigate what we are saying here, believe what you find on your own, recognizing that the truth never comes from the organizations that are related to the problem you are investigating.

We do have some outstanding public schools in the U.S.A., who are not just 25% ready upon graduation like we are, but even 100% ready. Click here to see them. That is why the average ACT scores and ACT Readiness percentages in the chart below show that 75-85% of OUR public high school graduates in Tennessee and in a number of other states ARE NOT PREPARED for what employers needed now for more than a decade. The U.S. average is not much better. The result is that more than 80% of our children who graduate with a diploma from our public high schools are not prepared to learn any job beyond 2022 because space activities, cognitive robotics together with nanotechnology will raise the employers' technical requirements for high school graduates.

The results did, and will depend on the governors and how they improve education, especially in states like Tennessee. If they keep doing things for education that do not raise the ACT scores, as all states did in the past, they will achieve WORSE RESULTS INSTEAD OF IMPROVING PUBLIC EDUCATION. The state education departments do things that lower the knowledge of graduates, making them unacceptable to employers, like changing the state tests with Cut Scores. BUT OUR SCHOOLS WILL GRADUATE THEM WITH HIGHER GRADES AND LESS KNOWLEDGE BY LOWERING THE PASS/FAIL POINTS IN THE TESTS, AS THEY HAVE DONE BEFORE FOR DECADES.

VERY IMPORTANT: The biggest problem that always happens when among poor performers for a number of years, IS THE ACCEPTANCE OF BAD PERFORMANCE AS NORMAL. Very few organizations admit that they are doing a bad job. They accept that this is the best they can do and go out of business. And it is much harder to work under such circumstances than if the organization is doing an excellent job. Public Education is a massive organization, with a massive union, and a lot of money guaranteed by the government, therefore they do not want to improve anything so that they are competitive and our children are employable. They are comfortable. They are virtually a monopoly with a 90% "mark share." A fairly large number of companies are making money out of the fact that education performance is poor, and those organizations make money off of poor educational performance, AND IMPROVE NOTHING. We have been performing poorly with public education for decades. As a result, even governors react rather softly to education problems and change nothing. WE MUST CHANGE.

In my experience, the best organizations in the world, and their results would be a very good choice as a five-year goal at an average ACT score of 30. Today on September 2, 2019, I paid a $23 item in a store with a $50 bill. Cash register did not work. The person at the cash register could not figure out how much she needs to pay me back. A second store employee came to help, and he could not figure out the change, so I told them that the change I am to get back is $27. They both told me that " "we are not math majors! We are not going to need math in the future." They graduated from high school two years ago.

We need well qualified high school graduates today. All of them! Unfortunately, more than 80% are poorly qualified. The reason is that teacher training quality also dropped (click here to read about it). And we saw many management people in education, who had no management training and had no idea what to do. A very good teacher is a very special person and harder to find than people in many other professions. Too many went into teaching because they could not handle their originally selected major, heard that teaching was the easiest, so they changed to study teaching. It all adds together into a huge problem.

The children we graduate are the people on whom America's future will depend. We have a few American high schools that graduate students at a similar knowledge level as some of the best countries in education. However, we need about 20 times as many schools at that level to increase the position beyond what we once had in education, to increase our living standard, and to pay off that huge and potentially paralysing national debt. Without taking action urgently to achieve that, we will not survive, because too much blood will flow on our streets. Why? Because we failed to educate the children well enough for them to have jobs in an environment where new technologies are changing faster and faster employers' people needs. Please look at our results for the past 20 years. These are devastating results. Our public high school graduates needed in 2019 two years of remedial courses in order to be prepared to start a college freshman program - according to college professors. Unfortunately the great majority of American public high school graduates will be 4 years behind by 2023-2024, because new technologies are emerging much faster now that will improve and change businesses, schools and universities. All industries will require a much better educated high school output. Unless we change education to the right level, the level of unemployed will increase by the tens of millions, and they will be on the streets unable to get a legal job, hungry, and they will be making more babies in their own image. With our long-term black and white problem, that we ignored, will be the fuse for a major conflict that only better education could resolve. We ignored it. Slogans like "Black lives matter" is not a solution. What on earth does it mean? We had more than enough meaningless slogans THAT SOUND GOOD ONLY. It is a reminder of the stupid education decisions that resulted in increasing the conflict. Actually, "All lives matter! But educating those poor people to improve their lives matters even more!" All technologies are beginning the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as you read this website now. These technological areas are AI driven cognitive robotics replacing virtually most jobs that are based on college degrees, nanotechnology changing many sciences, design and engineering with major impact on new superior materials science by 2024. Lastly space science, that has been much more active than what the public believes, will create new sciences, new superior and much less expensive power, fuel sources, changing the current thinking in many sciences. The change is going to be much bigger during the coming ten years than what computers created. Many new jobs, but they will require much more education that the new robotics will deliver much faster and will be much easier to learn with them, than with our current education. But in the mean time we must improve our education system, if we want our population to prosper. We have improved nothing during the last 50 years, as the ACT chart shows. But other countries did, and passed us. We have some work to do below. If governors do nothing about it, we may be finished.

Our management structure and skills, and FOCUSING ON A MOTHLY ACADEMIC OBJECTIVE is extremely important. IT HAS BEEN MISSING TOTALLY FOR MANY DECADES. If we do not change the way we work in education, THE RESULTS WILL NOT IMPROVE. Let us explain why. The RESULTS in education come from the schools, and specifically from the high schools with specific elementary and middle schools feeding the high schools ALSO WITH EXCELLENT PERFORMANCE. Yet in actions, we do not have proper monthly objectives on the high schools (teachers and principals) and their feeder schools along with operating plans for each high school TO FOCUS THE EMPLOYEES ON WHAT EACH PERSON NEEDS TO CHANGE IN THEIR DAILY WORK. In addition, since this area is the most important in the schools, it is also the most important to appoint a person in charge of schools who actually produced excellent measurable academic results for at least five consecutive years, achieving ACT scores that increased more than 5% annually for 5 years. not people who have interesting ideas who do not want their performance measured and who do not have the ACT performance for five years as specified. This is not a job for experimenters who worry about being measured. That is what poor performers do. a poorly performing school system needs ideas that are proven by the school system to deliver good results. What you cannot afford in a poorly performing school system is leadership that did not deliver good ACT results, and or leadership in the poorly performing system that cannot produce excellent results against ACT objectives that are at least 10% higher than the previous years average consolidated ACT score that was actually achieved.

THAT IS HOW SCHOOL-BASED FOCUS NEEDS TO BE IMPLEMENTED. THE HIGH SCHOOLS DEFINE WHAT THEY NEED TO DELIVER SPECIFIC ACT RESULTS, AND HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL COMPENSATION MUST INCLUDE A 20% BONUS IF THEY MEET THE SCHOOL OBJECTIVE FOR THE YEAR.

Good results depend on well qualified workers doing excellent work. One cannot change results if one keeps working the same way as before. One needs a single objective to focus people on the most important thing, that is the key measurable indicator of success or failure, like an ACT score, that is 10% higher than the prior year's actual ACT score. This must be backed up by monthly objectives on all supervisors and managers, principals and teachers to support the annual ACT objective, so that we catch any performance problem in any month, instead of getting a surprise at year end. GPA based on monthly tests could provide that, but the teaching methodology used in Finland is even better if we select teachers with the same standards as they do. It also eliminates the need for testing until the middle of high school, and their results are great. It is the schools that achieve the result in any school district. Yet we never had them operate under specific objectives and operating plans. The focus must be on them. All support must be focused on them and they must operate under specific measurable academic objectives in order for the school system's results to improve. Poorly performing organizations cannot recover without using "Management by Objectives (MBO)." The biggest challenge is that employees who have been in a poorly performing system keep working the same way for several years in the past. They are afraid of any change, especially a change that measures their performance. However, it is not possible for a poorly performing organization to recover without monthly performance measurement, e.g., with GPA per class, teacher, school and school district. The ACT is available only annually for high school and school district. For growth the monthly performance check is important. The ACT is more accurate THAN THE GPA and it is the best tool for calibrating the GPA results. Most people who were part of a poorly performing organization cannot change easily to a much healthier thought of "what do I need to learn to get better results" and view that as a healthy challenge. That is why "MBO" is vitally important.

TOTAL LACK OF ACADEMIC FOCUS: "GRADUATE 90% OF STUDENTS". GRADUATION IS NOT A GOOD OBJECTIVE WHEN THE ACADEMIC OBJECTIVE IS LOW, LIKE ACT 21 IS. THAT REPRESENTS ONLY A 25% KNOWLEDGE OF THE SUBJECTS TODAY. PEOPLE IGNORE LOW OBJECTIVES, BUT PEOPLE RISE TO HIGH EXPE CTATIONS THAT ARE A STRETCH. ELIMINATE the "90% graduation objective," and use instead "last year's ACT score plus 10% for the current year's objective, coupled with monthly individual school academic objectives in Grade Point Average (e.g., G.P.A.) for all supervisory employees that drive ACT achievement. The push for 90% graduation rate with an average A.C.T, 21 goal for many years, simply DID NOT WORK. WITH A 21 ACT score goal that represents an unacceptable 25% knowledge of 4 subjects only, called ACT Readiness, with 75% OF THE GRADUATES NOT BEING READY FOR ANY JOB FOR LIFE, IS A VERY POOR FRESULT. In addition the "90% of students graduating" goal, for almost 20 years now, created pressures during the last month of the school year to dumb down the state test ("Cut Scores"), and to make superintendents and principals push for promoting children who would otherwise fail, by changing the pass/fail point (60% good answers normally) down, below 30% in some courses to pass and graduate many children who are very poorly prepared AND WOULD FAIL. That is why we have an extremely high percentage of graduates who are not ACT Ready. Isn't it obvious to all that what we need is an educational objective, an ACT score that is 10% higher than the prior year's score? If that goes up, so will the graduation rate.

Very important for teacher success: a test for a match to the teaching profession, raising subject training (what they will teach) to Master's level, using Internet-based teaching tools, learning new teaching methodologies, and learning to use the best lectures by the best professors nationally in the subject they teach. Good teachers love the subject enough to keep up with future developments. It would be ideal if they could alternate their jobs between teaching and business where they actually use their subject knowledge.

The American public's money via taxes is paying one of the highest rates in the world per student for the education of the public's children. but only 26% of the graduates with a high school diploma are ACT Ready nationally. Even for those few who are ACT Ready, the readiness benchmark score is equal to only 24-25% knowledge of three subjects and the 4th subject, English, passes at ACT score 18 that only 10-12% knowledge level of the subject defined by the curriculum. even ACT Readiness is not good enough preparation of our children to survive. Is that a good result? We just kept spending more money per child, but we did not teach our children well enough.



Political leadership above education hires staffing for the schools and management who are unprepared at all levels to do an acceptable job. Why? Because the hiring manager thinks that he/she does not have to know what and how the new employee has to accomplish what needs to be done - a huge mistake. More than 80% of high school graduates are not ACT Ready. They will be able to get only short-term employment at minimum wage followed by nothing after five years. Nothing! The automation plans of several industries for 2019 - 2022 will ensure that exactly, because they cannot find qualified high school graduates. Such children will not be earning enough to support themselves with legal jobs, let alone a wife and family, but will learn to make money illegally and will make a lot of babies. Our governors are not likely to know better. They did not know so far.



WHAT SHOULD OUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES' ACT READINESS BE? NOT 17% LIKE IN TENNESSEE. NOT 24% LIKE THE USA AVERAGE. In the top ten countries in education it is more than the equivalent of 90% for us. But it is more than that. They score in tests not only the answer, but also how the student developed the answer. To graduate from high school, the students must also pass a matriculation exam on all high school subjects, and the matriculation test result counts as 50% of a graduating student's final grade. The answer to that from our education organizations frequently is: "But we are so much bigger! And they do not have minorities!" Welcome to the result of being dumbed down by our education system for more than 50 years. They don't even check the facts before giving an answer. Very sad situation. In more than 50 years not a single governor, not a single education secretary or state superintendent of education took action that raised the ACT Readiness and the SAT equivalent.



Who is responsible for destroying the life of the public's children? Whose education at one of the highest expenses per child in the world was paid by the public, but the state education department with a governor picked a leader, who could not or was not allowed to do a good enough job for 80-90% of such children, so that they could get a legal job to support minimally a family of four. The governor, had no idea what to do, could not find a person in this huge country who did. Or was the governor restricted in doing a better job? We have wasted many billions of dollars and decades, and we certainly spent enough. We would appreciate getting a truthful explanation from the governor about why this is happening and why we are telling the public a false story about public education. we would like to see the governor's written plan to turn this sad situation around or explain in writing to us if we are incorrect.



ELECTED SCHOOL DISTRICT BOARDS', SUPERINTENDENTS' AND PRINCIPALS' TRAINING: Management-by-Objectives, Annual Operating Plans, Zero-based Budging training, focus on ACT's "Core Plus 2" plus honors courses, goal at average 27 ACT for 80% ACT Readiness in five years. If you achieved results with the poor, very old training and with the enormous inefficiency we had to date, the far better results will come with actually less effort if we do things right.

Poorly performing organizations can't recover without redefining the "EXCELLENCE" they claim constantly. They claim "excellence for all children" when more than 70% of graduates are not even ACT Ready. Any statements or communication in any form by a public education system, especially after our poor history, must communicate the truth and nothing but the truth on all communications to ANY recipient.

In a poorly performing environment, mediocre performance is accepted as EXCELLENT. ACT Readiness is NOT excellence even at 100%, but only "meets requirements" at best, because the curriculum is not competitive. 80% Readiness is a must in 5 years.

To that end, we must have ZERO TOLERANCE for discipline problems. Give teachers the power and authority to control their classes. Give them also the responsibility to deliver better results via GPA and ACT results. We are not doing well enough, in fact we are doing poorly making the great majority of our children jobless. In a recovery effort we do not have the flexibility to keep any old habits that can compromise student, or classroom, or school productivity.

ACTIONS WE NEED TO TURN EDUCATION AROUND

Our goal of 80% ACT READINESS WILL SUFFICE ONLY UNTIL 2022 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 FOR IT, BUT WE ARE NOT BECAUSE OUR EDUCATION AND STANDARDS WERE ALLOWED TO DETERIORATE. Any improvement by us will require us to achieve a much higher standard because the only jobs that may servive robotics in only 10 years will be those that will require a PhD in a 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. 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



There must be a measurable monthly GPA objective in every class of every school and in the school district, that is 10% higher than the prior years annual GPA everywhere. When performance is not planned 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 90%. 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. Reduce school district central management staffing to 2% of total school district full-time employees who do a good job.



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



It is extremely important that all principals and superintendents must have management training. All people who do a non-management job but are excellent, do not make good managers. 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 undfer 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 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 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 core. 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 G.P.A., than 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.

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 a 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 decline, and so does our national income. We are one of the top spenders in the world per student, but we dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries. 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 13,500 school districts' elected school boards. There are several big problems here. One is an 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 elected local boards cannot have the right level of 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 90% 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 to stay in control. In fact, 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 REALLY doing. Do not trust the state test scores because most have been dumbed down. They say bad things about any other school that makes a profit, even if they are much better in educating your child. We will tell you more here. Be very single minded about the school for your child. Care only about how well educated their students are by comparing ACT, SAT or N.A.E.P. (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.



https://www.act.org/content/act/en/college-and-career-readiness/ benchmarks.html.