American public high school education has become very poor for the past several decades in a competitive world producing mostly unemployable graduates. In 2016, 74% of those who graduated with a high school diploma were not ready to be trained for a job beyond minimum wage. From 2017 on, they will be increasingly replaced by robotic automation.
”The mind is everything.
What you think,...you become.”




INTRODUCTION

Updated March 28, 2020

Please read the entire introduction first. It includes explanations that are very important in order to understand fully what we present.




Our future as a nation depends on our public education becoming one of the best five 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!” You are where you are because 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 like a house of cards that are propped up by the state law guaranteeing no decrease in annual funding, regardless of performance. What the people pay in hard-earned taxes is easy money in too many places for school district management. 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 has enough smarts 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 by our education districts in their slogans to be providing “excellent world-class education” or “excellence for all children” that is absolutely untrue as the ACT scores show for 19 years. (03272020). Not a single political leader 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. Our shelves are full of products made in other countries. That is the result of poorly trained American high school graduates creating less competitive products that will lose business to better educated foreign manufacturers who can create better products because they are better educated and can learn more faster. And we see too often that most of our high school graduates are very 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 script, but only block letters, cannot communicate properly, and in the last few years 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 about 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 our teachers’ continuing education and support is excellent, so that both teachers and students are happy and want to do an outstanding job because they are interested in the subjects presented. Such motivation is the secret to success in anything. 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. 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 important because if they educate our children well, the more advanced training program in high school will be easier to learn. We found a long standing major problem that is still unresolved in Tennessee and many other states, although it was noted in 1995. That major problem was and still is being created with poor reading and poor basic math performance that went uncorrected and such students were allowed to graduate from high school. Allowing such fundamental problems to go unresolved, when many other schools have no problem with doing it well, is difficult to understand, when the school district in question claims “Excellence for all children.” 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 depends 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. 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 terrible physical treatment of teachers by students. I even heard of student throwing feces at the teacher after he went to the man’s room during class. AND THE SCHOOL MANAGEMENT WAS WORRIED ABOUT LAW SUITS FROM THE PARENT. We cannot afford to be nice to children if their action disturbs entire classes or are hostile against teachers in any way. The punishment has to be strong enough not only to discourage the offender, but would discourage 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, and our country's tax income declines. When that happens, we as a nation must borrow money. And that becomes the national debt. Our national debt is very high above 23 TRILLION DOLLARS. The total interest we have to pay on it is one third of the total debt . 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.



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 will be needed or because they were not doing a good job. We must realize that to have a safety net we are totally dependent on the quality of our public education having created an outstanding workforce and highly competitive products and services to have enough money in reserve to survive without being forced to borrow money. For that to happen, we would need to enforce having a much better trained and managed public school system where misbehavior and low standards are not tolerating the poor quality we have today.



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 IS 8 TRILLION DOLLARS! The COVID-19 virus problem will incvrease 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. IT IS OBVIOUS THAT HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION MUST BE INCREASED ASAP TO A NATIONAL 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 school district alone is costing us $500 MILLION dollars per year. So Tennessee must be costing what? 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 for 3-5 years. 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 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). BUT THEY CANNOT EVEN DO THAT AND THEY GRADUATE THE MAJORITY OF OUR CHILDREN NOT EVEN ACT READY.

Who is responsible for that?

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. 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. That is why their expenses and salaries are guaranteed by law, and it is one of the highest expense per child 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. And we hired a consultant again.









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 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 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 the effort to learn what they don’t know, and they are not able to do the job well. The 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, how 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 in order to get to where you want to be. We must REALLY TRY to graduate 95%, but...with all graduates “ACT Ready”, and that would take an average ACT score at or above 27 in 2021. There are several nations that 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 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. IT IS IMPORTANT THAT WE ALL 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 loosing several products to companies in other countries, we started loosing 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, and we all saw more and more foreign products in the 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 losing 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. 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.



Not knowing precisely what competitors or opponents are doing, and thinking that you are the best, is a prescription for certain failure. We did and we do exactly that even today. We did not do our homework on foreign competitors and we are not doing it at all even today in a very important area, called public education. . Many other countries passed us. That explains why our industries’ competitiveness dropped; in fact 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 are covering examples in the upcoming sections. 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 in 2023 with cognitive robotics, nanotechnology and space science, with a huge impact on education. We are two years behind according to college professors who are dealing with yesterday's and today's high school graduates.



WHAT IS ACT COLLEGE AND CAREER READINESS?
YOU MUST KNOW THIS VERY WELL



ACT College and Career Readiness (ACT CCR) needs 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.





ACT Benchmark reference. This page covers a series of ACT tests called ACT ASPIRE for each grade from grade 3 to grade 10 as a predictive test to the actual ACT benchmarks used after grade 11. For example if you take the 5th grade ACT ASPIRE test, its result shows what your ACT results will be in grade 12, if the student keeps working the same way in coming years. If performance changes, ASPIRE will show it, making it very useful in order for the child to recover. The actual ACT benchmarks for the final ACT test is scored on ACT’s 1-36 scale, with each of such scores also representing a percentage of readiness meaning the percentage of the subject that the student knows - percentage of subject knowledge. The benchmark scores of 23 or lower represent subject knowledge below 25% correct answers in a test or more than 75% incorrect answers in a test. We think that it is a fact that ACT READINESS represents a rather low 25% knowledge MINIMUM in the benchmark subjects. Furthermore ACT defines ACT READINESS as a 50-75% chance only to pass up to 4 freshman level courses in the same subjects as the four benchmarks are, and nothing more. We feel that ACT Readiness therefore is not a satisfactory indicator of the level of knowledge to learn enough to be employable beyond a few years. Why? Because the knowledge required for minimal job entry with employers is always increasing when the employer starts using a new technology. 2023 will bring much bigger such changes than the computer industry did.



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 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 from 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!”









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. AND THEN WE ALL JUST TRIED TO FIGURE OUT WHY THEY ARE NOT RESPONDING AND WHAT THE FAILING EDUCATION SYSTEM WILL DO TO EVERYTHING IN THIS BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY OF OURS. THE THINGS THAT SHOULD BE DONE VERY WELL WAS 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 EVERYTHING IS DONE PURPOSEFULLY. EXAMPLES:



  1. In the last few years, 74% of those students we graduated 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.




  2. 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.




  3. 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.




  4. WHAT IS REALLY DISTURBING, IS THAT 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 WEELL, THAT IS A TEST THAT COVERS ALL SUBJECTS COVERED DURING THE HIGH SCHOOL YEARS.




  5. 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.




  6. 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. Everry 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.




  7. WE NEED TODAY 95% OF OUR CHILDREN GRADUATING FROM HIGH SCHOOL WITH A 27 ACT SCORE AVERAGE. EVEN THAT IS BELOW WHAT THE HIGH PERFORMING NATIONS ARE DOING. They 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 four languages, and to graduate from high school all students must take a matriculation exam covering all subjects required in four years of high school at 90% correct answers.





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. They 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. 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”! “WE ARE STOPPING ANY INCREASES UNTIL YOU SHOW SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVED ACT AND SAT SCORES ANNUALLY FOR THREE YEARS! UNLESS YOU START MANAGING EDUCATION AS WE TELL YOU, AND WE MEASURE CLASSROOM AND SCHOOL PERFORMANCE AGAINST MEASURABLE EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES, AND WE START DELIVERING EXCELLENCE WITH A MINIMUM 10% INCREASE OVER THE PREVIOUS YEAR.” Such a change is really not as difficult as it sounds. Just look at what we have been delivering in ACT scores to date without any real monthly objectives, 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 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.


  • 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 6th grade, 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. 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 SPENDING THE MOST MONEY IN THE WORLD PER STUDENT FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION? TO HAVE 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?



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 WILL THAT DO TO THE FUTURE OF THIS 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. 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 to read by grade 4, 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 preferably 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 IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAN THAT WAY. YOU WILL CONTINUE TO FAIL, AS WE HAVE FOR MANY DECADES, YEAR-AFTER-YEAR.



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 $300K salary because someone 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 in public to raise his image 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 master’s 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 deciding what they want to become as soon as they start high schools. 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, because the education guidance is creating another brain developmental problem that the use of calculators and not teaching music and art along with reading and basic math created at a time when the learning mechanism in neuronal interconnection in the brain did such work at an earlier age about twenty times faster than after twenty years of age, making a correction impossible.

Teaching is a vitally important job. The excellent teachers have some unique 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 are not the best choices for teaching. High performing countries in education, test teacher candidates' suitability for the teaching profession.

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.


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 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 exercise. 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, 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 as low as 28% or less good answers. 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, who 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? 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 fleas 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.





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 ECONOMIC FUTURE? PLEASE LET US KNOW WHY SUCH ACTION IS SMART INSTEAD OF WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: INCREDIBLY STUPID! 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?





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




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. They put a large space station in earth orbit named after Werner von Braun, the brilliant German scientist. We have been traveling at close to the speed of light to other plans 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 bter. 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 compitive 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.





ACTIONS NEEDED

”The mind is everything.
What you think,
...you become.”
(Gautama Buddha)


Very important finding: Many see Buddhism as a religion. Buddha is not God. Buddha is a philosopher, and Buddhism is a healthy life style and good human behavior that respects life. Very highly advanced on mental health. Buddhism is a philosophy of living a healthy life developed over thousands of years. “We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.” Psychiatrists found recently in 2019 very important treatment of deep rooted problems that are the result of high stress that goes along with childhood maltreatment that was so severe that it altered the neuronal structures in brain development but not created by physical trauma that resulted in serious disabilities that were thought to be permanent for life. Recently the treatment was found by American doctors in India, where Buddhist monks existed for many centuries who are specialists in treating various abnormalities, including the mental disability we mentioned. We mentioned already that a child’s brain forms neuronal interconnections and structures as part of learning, or feeling, or experiencing; anything good or bad, and the brain responds by changing its neuronal structure very fast between birth and 6 years of age and at a slightly lesser rate as the child ages beyond 6. But as a person ages especially after 20 years of age, the brain structure modification slows down learning and practically stops by thirties. But the Buddhist monks a couple of thousand years earlier under “Ayurvedic Medicine” learned that meditation for deep relaxation (30 minutes, 3 times daily, 40 hours total), can actually trigger the formation of these new fast growing neurons and new neuronal development can take place correcting the abnormal neuronal structures in the brain, that created psychological problems. This was thought to be impossible before, that is the correction of trauma-caused neuronal structures. This is a huge discovery because the brain is suspected of having enormous power that we have not identified yet. In the above quote “The mind is everything,” Buddha says that there are incredible self-healing methods, knowledge and capabilities that can be activated through meditation for healing not only in the brain but in the entire body. The only thing that is required is to learn deep relaxation that comes only with meditation, and the best explanation and teaching comes from the Buddhist monks who dedicated their life to it. “What you think, you become” is a clue by Buddha that means that our strong belief in an outcome that is positive or negative, or focusing on a skill in which we have enormous interest, we can become extremely good at by including meditation in the training at a deep level. If you think that you love a job or task and become outstanding in that skill or job, you will become excellent in what comes naturally to you. If you believe that something will be successful, it will be successful. If you think that you will fail, YOU WILL FAIL. And meditation is the important tool to trigger this capability in the mind and guide it in a positive direction. Steve Jobs who started and made Apple a great company was an orphan. He was a very smart student, but around the end of high school, he quit school and spent a year with his friend in India to be with Buddhist and Hindu monks learning a tremendous amount about how to develop mental acuity with meditation. He returned and he could see the solution to product and business problems much faster than anyone at Apple. This of course caused some problems with employees because he was thinking much faster than they did. But Steve’s solution to any problem through meditation is the reason why Apple became extremely successful under his guidance. We should incorporate such capabilities in our education programs, and learn as much as possible from the best education systems in the world. UNFORTUNATELY WE ARE NOT INTERESTED IN WHAT BETTER SCHOOL SYSTEMS ARE DOING TO IMPROVE EDUCATION, AND OUR CHILDREN’S EDUCATION TOOK A DIVE AS A RESULT. When a person or organization focuses on how they can do something better, they will do it better. But if they do not have any such interest, they cannot stay the same. They go down. Unfortunately public education is operating exactly that way without improvement.



Our management structure and FOCUS is wrong in education, we feel. 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. Yet in actions, we do not have proper monthly objectives on the high schools and their feeder schools along with operating plans for each high schools. 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 5% HIGHER (PREFERABLY 10%) THAN THE PREVIOUS YEAR’S AVERAGE CONSOLIDATED ACT SCORE THAT WAS ACTUALLY ACHIEVED.

THAT IS HOW SCHOOLS BASED FOCUS NEEDS TO BE IMPLEMENTED. THE HIGH SCHOOLS DEFINE WHAT THEY NEED TO DELIVER SPECIFIC ACT RESULTS, AND HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL COMPENSATION MUST BE HIGHER THAN ANY MANAGEMENT POSITION IN CENTRAL MANAGEMENT.



Good results depend on well qualified workers doing excellent work. One cannot change results if one keeps working the same way as before with the same people. One needs a single objective to focus people on the most important thing, that is the key 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. 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.





ACADEMIC FOCUS: VERY IMPORTANT: ELIMINATE "90% graduation objective" and use instead "last year's ACT score plus 10% minimum for the 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, as for many years, simply cannot work. In Tennessee a 21 ACT score means that the goal is an unacceptable 25% ACT Readiness, with 75% OF THE GRADUATES NOT BEING READY FOR ANY JOB FOR LIFE! 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. 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 psychological match to the teaching profession, raising subject training (what they will teach) to Master's level, using Intern-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.



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%. THE ANSWER TO THAT FROM THE 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 TOOK ACTION THAT RAISED THE ACT READINESS AND THE S.A.T. 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 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' "Core Plus 2" plus honors courses, s 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 properly.





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.





Our goal of 80% ACT READINESS requires not spending money on other than an excellent education, technology, and maintenance of improving ACT scores 10% per year. Reduce central management staffing to 2% of total school district full-time employees who do a good job. We must keep only those who do a good job. For that, measurable objectives must exist for all employees. If that cannot be defined, why hire them?





Any school district must communicate only the truth and nothing but the truth. Currently this is totally ignored.





Plan the coming year well, with monthly measurable G.P.A. objectives to deliver much better results by students than in the past.





Provide a financial incentive and recognition plaques to teachers and principals who exceed a 10% higher G.P.A., than last year's, or 3.5 GPA, whichever is lower.





Evaluate together every month which and what teacher-created the best results and how it was done.





Graduate only those who are ACT Ready, keep those who are not, for up to two more years.





Require specific management training for Superintendents.





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 knowhow. 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 knowhow 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 S.A.T. 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, S.A.T. or N.A.E.P. (primary school test) scores. Or find out which 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.



WHY MUST WE DO ALL THIS?



THE PUBLIC IS PAYING ONE OF THE HIGHEST RATES IN THE WORLD PER CHILD, IN GOOD FAITH, TO EDUCATE ITS CHILDREN, SO THAT THEY CAN, AT MINIMUM, EARN ENOUGH TO SUPPORT A FAMILY OF FOUR. For our future citizens: our children's and grandchildren's economic survival.





High school graduates feed the workforces of all industries.





The training of our industries' workforces affects the quality and profitability of the companies in our industries. We compete today with international competitors at home and in most countries.





Poorly prepared high school graduates, like most U.S. graduates today, lower our industries' income, and also our national income. We do not have enough national income, and our national debt skyrocketed.





Our high schools, therefore, must be competitive with the best countries in education. We are far from them today.





ACT depends on the education community for income. That is likely to influence their test results to show the best possible "picture" with their test results. The purposeful dumbing down of the public unfortunately exists.





We are told that the US Constitution does not provide any guidelines for education in areas that needs centralization, such as MINIMUM STANDARDS THAT ARE INTERNATIONALLY COMPETITIVE FOR: PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM’S TEACHER UNIVERSITY TRAINING, TEACHER STATE CERTIFICATION, K-12 CURRICULUM, HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS MEASURED BY ACT AND SAT NATIONAL TESTS, SUPERINTENDENT ASND PRINCIPAL SCHOOLING REQUIREMENTS AND CAREER TRACKING, AND CLASSIFICATION OF RETIRED BUSINESS EXECUTIVES WITH EXTENSIVE MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE WORK EXPERIENCE TO INCLUDE NEW MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCES THAT WILL BE ESTABLISHED AS A RESULT OF NANOTECHNOLOGY AND SPACE SCIENCES. WE CAN NO LONGER DELEGATE ALL DECISIONS ABOUT A NUMBER OF SUBJECTS TO ELECTED SCHOOL BOARDS WHO DO NOT HAVE MANAGEMENT SCHOOLING AND SCHOOLING EXPERIENCE ABOUT THE NEW STANDARDS RELATING TO A HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA QUALIFICATION. Individual state constitutions and laws delegate all spending and education-related decisions to locally elected school boards. There are more than 13,500 such school boards in the U.S. The decision-making majority of such boards lack the necessary know-how. The U.S. Constitution not covering public education is not a good reason for no standardization nationally on the most important things in education. For example high school graduation requirements, advancement, student requirements to each grade, minimum curriculum in K-12, teacher and superintendent qualification revised, prerequisites for entry into a teaching program in any college or university, single-subject focus with a BS/BA and MS/MA in the subject that a candidate will teach above grade four, with a plan to achieve such a qualification. If that is not possible, expect cognitive robotics with Artificial Intelligence to replace education as we know it, because what we have is destroying our children's ability to make a living.





Too many politicians believe that if they suggest changes, the education entity will have them voted out.





OBSERVATION: Jobs are getting more sophisticated. The less demanding jobs are going to robots. It is a tougher world out there. The jobs require more knowledge. When things were easier, both schools and parents were tougher with the children in the school and at home. So, we made everything easier for children, with much less pressure in school and at home, allowing children to misbehave and learn less than before. WE DID THIS FOR OUR CHILDREN, FOR A TOUGHER WORLD THAT REQUIRES MORE KNOWLEDGE IN THE SCIENCES AND MATHEMATICS...

Go figure...Have we been dumbed down this much?!



Please note that being just "ACT Ready" does not indicate that a child is prepared for the better paying future jobs even on the lowest level, especially jobs that relate to any future science, engineering or economics courses. It must be obvious that those students who are not ACT Ready, are likely to remain unemployed most of their lives.




HOW FAR ARE MOST AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOLS BEHIND?





In 2018 the university and college professors told us that our high school graduates require two years of remedial education to start their freshman program.



Let me tell you how fast technologies are moving ahead in the coming years. Ten years ago in 2010 a $1,000 computer had the same computing power as a mouse brain. By 2025 a $1,000 computer will be much smaller, but with the same computing power as a human brain. By 2045 the $1,000 computer will be very tiny; it's peripheral devices will change very significantly, brain implants will be used for raising IQ and knowledge levels. By 2045 the $1000 computer computing power will exceed the power of ALL HUMAN BRAINS ON THIS EARTH COMBINED (source is Ray Kurtzweil, PhD, recipient of 21 honorary doctorates, Google's V.P. of technology). His forecasts 30 years ahead of the date he made the forecast, have been MORE THAN 70% accurate for the past 30 years). Today's children will be alive then, and so will be our grandchildren. Robotics is advancing just as fast as computers, along with many other technologies, and will replace the jobs of those students who are not ACT Ready by 2024 or before. Many college education based careers, such as accounting, nursing, teaching, and many more, unless such individuals continued an earnest learning effort to stay ahead of robotics for employment. Our high school education is already seriously behind many nations as of 2019, and there is no sign of any improvement. Japan started this serious continuing education 30 years ago. We do have a couple of dozen high schools with close to 100% ACT Readiness, but some states like Tennessee do not have any, and if one writes to the governors of the low performing states, there will be no answer from anyone. We will see a huge group of new sciences and technologies become very active by 2022: nanotechnology that will change most engineering design and manufacturing activities with major cost-reduction, robotics with nanometer resolution of components in design (nanometer = one millionth of a meter) including invisible and cognitive robotics at a much lower cost, and space science, whose high speed, antigravity engines among other things will create even greater benefits than the automobile industry did - IF WE TURN AROUND OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS SIGNIFICANTLY. OTHERWISE, OTHER NATIONS WILL BENEFIT, THOSE WHO MAINTAINED AN EXCELLENT K-12 EDUCATION SYSTEM. IN SUCH A CASE, THE AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOLS WILL BE FOUR YEARS BEHIND THE TOP TEN NATIONS BY 2024.





Technology changes always eliminate low-level jobs with robotics, and bring many jobs with better pay, but requiring much more education. We fell behind in education and that will create a big problem that we are already feeling.





ACT already has a new term for READINESS for jobs that will ensure a proper income for a family of four longer-term.

It is called STEM ACT, it includes Calculus, Chemistry, Biology and Physics and the ACT score must be at or above 26, which will gradually increase. The education systems were teaching all this in the higher-performing international countries and in some Northern US states 40 or more years ago.





Our public education has fallen behind starting more than 50 years ago. We became the highest spending country per student. We dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries in 2016. Our governors and state departments of education leadership did a terrible job. All governors spent more money on education since 1970, but not on things that would increase learning as measured by the ACT scores. Those sciences that are coming in a couple of years, will need even more, far better prepared high school graduates.



INTERESTING OBSERVATION: SINCE 1970 WE SPENT MORE EVERY YEAR TO THIS DAY AND BECAME THE HIGHEST SPENDER IN THE WORLD PER STUDENT. BUT THE KNOWLEDGE OF HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES DECLINED. YET QUITE A FEW GOVERNORS WANTED TO BE REMEMBERED AS THE "EDUCATION GOVERNOR". We wrote to our current and prior Tennessee governors specific questions about our poorly performing public education system during the last ten years. We did not receive a single response from them or anyone else for them. Not a single letter. BUT THERE WAS NOT A SINGLE GOVERNOR IN MORE THAN 50 YEARS, WHO SEEING THIS TREND SINCE 1970 STOOD UP TO INITIATE A FORENSIC AUDIT (THIS IS AN INVESTIGATIVE AUDIT) TO EXAMINE WHERE THE MONEY GOES. WHEN PERFORMANCE IS BAD, YOU HAVE TO CORRECT INTERNAL PROBLEMS WITHIN THE ORGANIZATION, INSTEAD OF SPENDING MORE MONEY AFTER THE CHILDREN GRADUATED FOR SOME FORM OF SUPPLEMENTAL TRAINING. REVERSING A POOR 12-YEAR EDUCATION COSTS A FORTUNE, AND IT DOES NOT MAKE MUCH DIFFERENCE IN THE POOR GRADUATION RECORD.



Who is going to "pay" for making such a huge mistake?



Let's look at the high schools' performance also in the Knox County School District in Tennessee. What becomes obvious right away is the fact that performance of the high schools varies between mostly poor and some average, but less than one percent are in a high enough performance area that delivers 90% ACT Readiness. In some countries all public schools are in this high performance area. Ours is the result of teacher and principal skill levels being too low, teacher subject education, selection and how well they fit the teaching profession does not exist and both elected boards and superintendents not being trained well enough. This is not the teachers' and principals' fault. It is the fault of low standards by the state education department, and ultimately the governors. This is a huge problem that is unaddressed to this day.





Excellent high school graduates with 90%+ readiness are very important for any country. We do not have enough of them. But we do have many in high school and even in college graduates who are far from being ready. College professors and employers are complaining about the poor training of high school graduates: they cannot read and write properly, don't know basic math and have a bad attitude. Public high school graduates "feed" our universities and all of our industrial and governmental workforces. We have been paying one of the highest rates per student in the world in elementary and high schools, but our public high school performance fell behind other industrialized nations, with only 25% readiness. That means that your child may have received a diploma but not enough education to be prepared to be self-supporting.





Please look at the graph above.A diploma is a promise by any state or nation that indicates the recipient to be ready to become a productive member of society with the future needs of employers. I am very sorry, but this performance in Tennessee or nationally is so bad, that around 74% of those to whom we give a diploma are not ready nationally, and more than 80% of high school graduates with a diploma in Tennessee are not ready. The public pays in taxes one of the highest amounts per student in the world and receive a totally unacceptable job for it. The state education departments do things that make the grades look better than the students' knowledge warrants by far, to keep graduating students in school to graduate them, who know less and less. If such misrepresentations were done with the public's education using the public's money to damage the public's children, THEN WHAT HAVE WE BECOME AS A NATION? CERTAINLY NOT A GOD-FEARING NATION AS WE WERE, BUT A NATION OF SATAN'S PAEDOFILIA WITH THE KILLING OF BABIES WITH FAMOUS NAMES IN POLITICS ENJOYING IT AND NO TRIALS FOR SUCH MURDERS. We showed that the readiness definition of high school graduates is too optimistic for official eyes, but the truth is significantly worse. The public is not informed of this, and is told false stories by the political and education leadership. WHY IS IT THAT WE TOLERATE SUCH PEOPLE IN ANY LEADERSHIP POSITION? ARE WE JUST ACCEPTING AGAIN STATUS QUO BECAUSE IT IS TO HARD TO FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT THING?





 The product, service, and work quality of all industries depend on how good a job a country's public education is doing. Many other countries improved much better their public high school education to have a better workforce then we did. A better educated workforce can create better products and services and increasing profitability that in turn creates more tax income for their country. We compete with foreign companies' products at home and in any other country. We see our and foreign products everywhere.WE HAVE BEEN COMPETING WORLDWIDE FOR MANY DECADES. LET THERE BE NO DOUBT THAT FOR THIS REASON, OUR HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION MUST BECOME MUCH BETTER TO BE COMPETITIVE WITH THE BEST IN THE WORLD. WE ARE NOWHERE NEAR THAT. PEOPLE WHO DO NOT KNOW AND BELIEVE THAT WE MUST IMPROVE OUR EDUCATION RESULTS, SHOULD NOT BE WORKING WITHIN PUBLIC EDUCATION OR ABOVE IT.We did not improve. Lower high school education hurts our workforce, and our national income cannot be sustained that way. We could not generate enough national income, necessitating borrowing that becomes our high national debt, on which we have to pay interest to the "controlling outsider group". More about them later.







 We have a major illiteracy problem in the USA everywhere and we are doing nothing about it. Why? Please click on it to read it. Just answer this: how can your child learn and live if the school graduates him, but he cannot read, cannot do basic math and he thinks that the world owes him a much better living?





 New technologies have been increasing more and more rapidly over the years. New technologies replace some old jobs and create some new jobs for which employees need more technically educated workers. Our high school performance must keep pace with technology-related improvements. Unfortunately, we fell behind.





 New technologies are the tools that enable our industries to develop more competitive products and services in a global mark. Any country we visit internationally, we see products and services from many other countries. Several decades ago, I traveled regularly to many countries. American products were the most popular then. We lost that edge.





 For any medium-to-large American corporation of any industry, the sale and service income that comes from other countries is important enough to make or break that corporation's or industry's survival. We lost several industries in the past, that we dominated, such as consumer electronics, heavy machinery, and so on. It also impacts the income of our nation. International income for a US corporation can easily exceed domestic income. When the national income declines, we borrow more money, and the national debt must increase on which we have to pay interest. Internationally competitive education is therefore very important for successful survival.





 Our high school performance declined during the last 50 years by the state education departments, to a lower level than many other nations. Examples of these actions are objectives, and operating plans that do not work, low employee standards were allowed in school districts. As if that was not enough, reduction of pass/fail points in the state tests to show better grades, weak rules to manage discipline problems. We are showing a simple chart above and below that shows the poor performance over a 19-year period. Not a single governor stood up in 50 years to stop the expense increase annually until education results are turned around, which would be the normal thing to do without exception. Not a single governor-initiated action during this long period that increased academic results, meaning no one changed any management or operational mistakes WITHIN THE SCHOOLS that caused the poor results, as many nations’ results passed us. What creates such huge problems? "Political Management", when education requires normal large-scale organizational management to be successful. Why is such a thing happening? Because public education organizations do not understand and train school district superintendents and management people in state education departments in post-MBA management-level subjects. THIS IS A BIG MISTAKE. Such a decline means that this is not an accidental or random activity but one that is directed purposefully by a "controlling outsider group". It is combined with poor teacher training on the university level with other fields remaining on the usual high level, and major operational and financial management decisions are handed over to more than 13,500 locally elected school boards whose voting majority and school district and state management is not trained and experienced enough to solve the low performance problem we have nationally in every state. Our political leadership justifies this with the argument that the best ideas for how to teach our children and improve education come only from the local population of our schools via elected school board members. THAT may have been an acceptable idea 100-150 years ago, but less and less so during the past 75-100 years where increasing technological and scientific developments created increasingly competitive national economies worldwide that required an increase in public education to increase the knowledge of the national workforce. If a nation did not do that, the workforce is fed with less and less educated high school graduates that declines the competitiveness of a nation’s industries. What that creates is an annual decline. It is undeniable that federal high level politicians and political appointees are very smart people who would NORMALLY act in accordance with the US Constitution, and would not allow the systematic deterioration of public high school output that feeds the national workforce. Such action would weaken the competitiveness of our various industries, reducing their income in a competitive world. That in turn would reduce our national tax income and increase our taxes or more likely would increase our national debt. BUT, THE US PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS DECLINED COMPARED TO MANY OTHER NATIONS, THE ACT SCORES HAVE NOT INCREASED IN THE LAST TWO DECADES, POSSIBLY LONGER, AND “ACT READINESS”, A FAIRLY LOW STANDARD COMPARED TO INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION, IS ONLY AROUND 20% OF ALL THOSE WHO GRADUATE FROM PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOLS. THIS IS A TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE RESULT, THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS MISREPRESENT TO THE PUBLIC AND TELL PARENTS THAT “ALL CHILDREN ARE NOT CREATED BY GOD TO BE COLLEGE MATERIAL, BUT YOUR CHILD COULD LEARN A PROFESSION AND MAKE A GOOD LIVING!”>





 When people are part of a poorly performing organization for 2-4 years, they get used to it and accept it as normal, or even as a good organization. That is where we are. We know from the ACT graph that poor performance existed for at least 19 years and likely more. That means that a turnaround in performance with the same poorly performing people would be possible only with very firm management, not allowing for any compromise between the old and new practices. That would require new management methods that work in every school district, with retired managers from other industries to get the necessary experience. How much of a problem would that be? No problem at all. The low high school performance appears to be least understood by politicians and people in education at all levels. If they understood the problems in our education, and if they had ACT or S.A.T. score-based standards, with annual objectives, and annual operating plans in each and every school with measurable monthly academic objectives (e.g., GPA based) for each supervisory or management person, then we would have seen increasing ACT and S.A.T. scores.





 Our website, www.education100.org is about how we could fix our failing public education. Public education is the most important national strategic problem that is more destructive than any other external enemy could be. We see a trend emerging among corporations and government to take over high school education initially because Public Education is not improving, does not graduate well-prepared graduates. The Internet is full of excellent tutorials, and also the presentations of the best university professors' presentations, and outstanding tutorials on any primary or secondary school subject, and a growing number of undergraduate university-level subjects that are getting improved with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to increase a child's or adult's interest beyond what a teacher could do with existing teacher training. We present some of these below. Several of our best universities, like M.I.T., Stanford and others already offer a high school diploma for a very low cost through the Internet, including even "laboratory exercises" using simulation and Artificial Intelligence. It appears that our public schools do not want to improve because they have done so poorly for many years and probably cannot change because what must be done they see as an impossibility. We do not need to keep asking them to improve. There are already far superior systems in the works to replace them, and as they lose students, and as the public discovers the poor job most of them are doing, better solutions will take off like wildfire.





 We often hear from Washington politicians speaking in the name of the public. "The American people have been asking for xyz" that the politicians are proposing. However, most of the time, we have not read or heard ever American people asking for what the politicians are proposing. We hear many public comments about our children's poor education, government regulations choking medical services with regulations, but we do not hear legislators proposing anything about those. Although several governors spent millions on education projects, just to be known as the "education governor" after they leave, the ACT or SAT scores did not improve. It could be predicted from the start that such programs will not improve the high percentage of children, like 80% (increasing and not improving) who were graduated unprepared. Our education system declined since 1970 as our spending per student became the highest in the world. Not a single governor, nor any president, nor any Republican or Democrat has done anything to improve the ACT or SAT scores. Not one! The day is not far when large groups of American parents will find out that they have been dumbed down, and so were their children. About 80-90% of their children graduated from high school and received a diploma. However, more than 80% of the 90% that graduated are unprepared with minimum wage jobs that will go to robotics within a few years. One wonders why we are spending the most money per child in the world, wasting many billions of dollars every year for a poor education system.





 It is a basic human characteristic to give priority to short-term problems and the noisiest crowd demanding anything, delaying action to fix much more serious long-term issues. That is a problem. We have already wasted many years to fix public education without any change. That means that there will be a price to pay, but not as high as it will become if we continue to ignore the public education problem.




Copyright(c) 2008-2020 V. Spencer
This is a work in progress.


notes 03272020-However, what we are finding everywhere is that education on the public school-district level has been set up a very long time ago to operate with insufficient training, management structure, laws that support poor performance, and quite unusually with operational instructions for which even superintendents are untrained, and instructions that result in poor performance to school districts along with disinformation to confuse friend or foe situations for the school district, AND TO ENSURE PURPOSEFULLY POOR PERFORMANCE. In our opinion such a situation cannot be accidental or random. Actions from the state education department and governors not responding to repeated questions support the same. They did and continue to do things that dumb down the public’s children. End notes-03272020
What is "ACT Readiness"?> - What are "Cut Scores"? - Major Threats - Urgent Actions needed - Do not push children in a vocational direction in high school - Ignoring New Technologies' Impact in High School Education - Continuing Teacher Education - Critical Thinking - Space Science - Management - Robotic Automation Is Here OECD: What makes school systems perform well? - Con Men Promise, and Nothing Happens -

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