Introduction

The A.C.T. score shows what our children learned from grade one to twelve. The A.C.T. Readiness (4 subject benchmark) percentage shows what percentage of graduating students has a 50-75% chance to pass the four different first-year college courses with the same subject name as the benchmark. Those not A.C.T. Ready, have only a chance for short-term minimum wage jobs. Please read here what "A.C.T. Readiness" means

The A.C.T. score shows what our children learned from grade one to twelve. The A.C.T. Readiness percentage shows what percentage of graduating students has a 50-75% chance to pass a first-year college course. Those not A.C.T. Ready, have only a chance for short-term minimum wage jobs. Please read here what "A.C.T. Readiness" means

Contrary to what some believe, one cannot get reliable information about schools by speaking with people who work within the school system. The reliable information about a school system's performance is their ACT or SAT test results over a ten year period. This is not a negative comment. People are proud about their work place, as they should be. If a stranger asks about their work place, they will say only good things. You can find any school district's performance with Google, in any state's report cards. Please look at the simple chart example below. It shows the average ACT scores for the state of Tennessee that students take at end of high school. The ACT is a national test that cannot be altered. The state tests can be altered by the state to show better result, and they do that. The ACT shows how much a child has learned from grade one to twelve. The ACT score-range is 1-36. But what does it mean? An average score of 22 or less means a life of poverty for your child. An average ACT score of 26 or higher means that your child is ready for the future. 22-26 means a question mark, with decreasing chance of success each year, as the jobs become more sophisticated, and the simpler jobs go to robots. The chart shows one of Tennessee's largest school districts called Knox County Schools, in addition to the state for each year from 2007 to 2017. It also shows the high percentage of graduates WITH A DIPLOMA each year who are Not Ready to be employed (minimum wage jobs only until 2022 unless they continue to study very hard). "Readiness" by ACT depends on a four-subject benchmark whose results ACT compares to employer needs prior to the test being taken. But the more professional jobs require university training with a much higher ACT math score than the ACT benchmark's math score. Today, the jobs that do not require more math, are candidates for robots. See in detail what "Readiness" means, by clicking here.   The ACT or SAT are the best annual tests to show what our children learned from grade one to twelve. ACT also indicates if a child is ACT READY, a minimal knowledge level to survive. But both of these standards are based on two year old information, and does not take into account the impact of new technologies, and university requirements in mathematics. Both of these represent an increase in knowledge beyond ACT Readiness. The reality is that for the future, today's ACT Readiness will not be enough. Public education always focused on the past. But today we must focus on the future. The benchmarks will not go lower. They will go higher and faster than before.   The TCAP and now TNReady, the state test are provided by a company whose tests meet the curriculum requirements of the state by law. But the state lowers the pass/fail boundary to pass children who would otherwise fail, to make the scores look better. That is how the Dept. of Education dumbs down the state tests and the students, so that more children graduate, although they know a lot less. We on this website consider not only what children have already learned in school but also new technologies that are coming in less than five years. They necessitate an increase in what our children need to learn. Not a decrease, as in the past, compared to the leading nations in education who increased the knowledge of their high school graduates. New technologies always eliminate low end jobs and create much higher paying jobs but they require much more education. The eliminated jobs are and will be replaced by robots. We dropped significantly and our schools will have to teach much more in every future year to satisfy the knowledge required by our employers as new technologies appear. THIS IS NOT HAPPENING YET, A MAJOR CONCERN, SINCE NO GOVERNOR HAS TAKEN STEPS THAT INCREASED THE KEY INDICATOR OF WHAT CHILDREN LEARNED IN HIGH SCHOOL, THE ACT OR SAT TEST. Click here to see the official ACT-SAT scores equivalence from the Collegeboard organization. Please take a very close view of the following two charts, because our public is not well informed about how good our schools are. Please make sure that you read the "Readiness" page first.

 

 

 

 

"WHY ARE WE DESTROYING OUR CHILDREN'S ABILITY TO MAKE A LIVING?" is a strong statement on purpose because we are saturated with good news about education. Some truth and mostly fiction. The graph above tells you the real truth based on actual test results for many years that our average school performance is not good enough when we look at average ACT performance on the school district, state or even national level. However, on a school district level you may find a few schools who are good. Find them, based on ACT or SAT performance only. Fight if necessary to put your child into the best school. Most of our political leadership and education management are not doing a good job. That is why the ACT results are so poor. They are not poor because the schools are doing a good job. They have not done it for decades, and there is no guarantee that they will get better. That is why we, as a nation, dropped to 40th place internationally by 2016, from the top in 1970. But you the parent can take control and fight if necessary. As a parent, you keep an eye on your child, and make sure that he does his homework. You must believe that the teachers tell you the truth about your child. They have nothing to gain if they lie to you. But your little Johnny, if he did something bad in school, will not tell you the truth. Be tough with your child. Tough Love. Do not believe it if anyone in the school system tells you that "Not all children are made for college". This is a rude, untrue comment. 80% of graduates WITH A DIPLOMA TODAY not being ready, points at the school's poor work. Forty years ago or so only those received a diploma who could go on to college or job training and 90% or more graduated with a diploma. Today, only about 20% would get a diploma if we did not change. Today 80-85% "graduate", and of those 80% are not prepared to learn a job that pays more than minimum wage, and robots will replace them. You the parent has to make sure that your child works hard in school so that he can have a good life. As the quality of education and teacher preparation dropped, the schools and governors did nothing to restore them, and improve them beyond what they were before. Many nations passed us. Only around 15-25% of our children who graduated from high school are Ready today to learn some jobs or to continue studying without two more years of remedial training! WHY HAVE WE TOLERATED SUCH POOR SCHOOL PERFORMANCE FOR OUR CHILDREN WHEN WE HAPPENED TO BE THE COUNTRY THAT SPENDS THE MOST IN THE WORLD PER CHILD FOR EDUCATION? OUR EDUCATION MANAGEMENT ON THE STATE LEVEL AND GOVERNORS WERE AWARE OF THIS BIG PROBLEM, BUT DID NOTHING THAT WOULD INCREASE THE ACT OR SAT SCORES. All claims made by them for improving education were a waste of money if they did not increase the ACT scores. IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THIS QUESTION FULLY IF THE PROBLEM IS TO BE FIXED. Teachers complain about poor compensation and a very unpleasant work environment. We agree with them. To be fair, their work environment MUST BE CORRECTED. Compensation needs to CONSIDER THE RESULTS they deliver and the level of compensation in the surrounding counties. The results achieved to date are poor. Only 3-6% of African American children are Ready when they graduate from high school. That is shocking and UNACCEPTABLE. We lie instead to the public that "All is well."   Why are the states not fixing the teachers' work environment problems? Why are the states accepting such low teacher and school performance and are paying the highest rate in the world per student for such a bad job?! PLEASE READ THIS PARAGRAPH ENTIRELY: WE ALLOW ABOUT 13,500 SCHOOL DISTRICTS TO DESTROY THE LIVES OF THE MAJORITY OF OUR CHILDREN, AND THERE IS NO ACTION TO SOLVE SUCH A POOR RESULT? If anything, such a poor job by any education district and state education management should be punishable very seriously. This is what happens when people are not accountable for the results, BUT THEIR COMPENSATION IS GURANTEED. This is what happens when a sample of the local population, an elected board makes all operating decisions, without the necessary knowledge and experience. They also interview and hire superintendents, but have no idea as a board majority how to deliver better results and find out what the candidates ACHIEVED, and are yet to hire a superintendent in many decades who can improve the ACT test results. Please don't misunderstand. To be a board member in any organization, one needs management experience, know or learn exactly how well or how poorly our schools are performing and why, what needs to be improved and how to raise ACT results by at least ten percent annually, and know a significant amount about how to interview superintendent candidates, and how to diagnose and resolve organizational problems while making sure that education results rise instead of falling or rise because they have been very low for decades. The elected board could not deliver in any of these important areas, and we have not met any school board member who decided to read and learn these things so that they can develop a reasonable knowledge to judge school district performance. The education system's failings were recognized a very long time ago, yet it was not corrected. WHY NOT we wonder?

 

Please click on READINESS for a detailed explanation and future outlook. Those high school graduates who are NOT ACT READY will not be employable for long and we need to understand what short-term future events require much better high school preparation for our children today. Just like in the past, readiness to get better jobs kept increasing the required knowledge of high school graduates as the years passed. In the future that process will increase faster.     When we look at individual high school ACT performance within Knox County Schools from the above chart, the average ACT performance is poor, and the individual high school performance, the high schools varying in a very broad low-to-average performance range, is an indicator of very poor or untrained management at all levels within the school district and also above them, not only the elected board and superintendent, but also the education management above the school district on the state level. The graph above or below shows this exactly. JUST LOOK AT THE RESULTS! WE, THE PUBLIC SPEND THE MOST MONEY PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD AND FOR THAT HUGE AMOUNT OF MONEY, WE THE PUBLIC RECEIVE THE WORST EDUCATION FOR OUR CHILDREN IN THE INDUSTRIALIZED WORLD! WE DROPPED TO 40TH IN MATH IN THE WORLD AS OF 2016. Please look at two 8th grade final exams: one is from 1895, and the other is from 1912. We are ashamed to say that we live in a much more advanced society than what we had more than 100 years ago, with the exception of our public schools. Our children would need to have a much more complex 8th grade exam than the two very old exams from the past. But we do not, and the great majority of high school graduates are not prepared to be employable. But...we are one of the biggest spenders per student in the world. These old tests could be a challenge to a lot of high school graduates today. Considering the fact that today's world requires better communications, more mathematics and science for high school graduates to succeed, it appears that our schools in the first eight grades are not performing as well as our schools more than 100 years ago. That would not have happened if governors were interested in our children's education, and ensured higher performance every single year. School districts' management and the state education departments know that: The ACT results represent what a child learned from grade one to twelve, Although 85-90% of students graduate, 75-98% of those graduating are NOT ACT READY, meaning that SOME OF THEM are prepared only for close to minimum wage jobs, short term. Companies are planning and have started to replace employees with robotic solutions to improve product quality, customer service and/or to lower cost. BUT not just employees who are not ACT Ready graduating from high school, but those with a university education (e.g., anesthesia robots) also. The above public education is paid for by the taxes that the public pays, and international comparisons show that our education districts under state direction do not spend our public's tax dollars as efficiently with as good results as most other nations do. We are becoming worse with time. Our education districts pretend under state education department's guidance, that they are doing well, celebrating any minor gain, with poor actual ACT performance that is the true indicator of performance. They are using the people's money, to convince the parents of their students to believe that all is well. If a private school did this to its students' parents, would it not constitute fraud under the law? But because public schools use tax funds, it is not fraud? For more than 50 years, education spending per student skyrocketed, without improvement in the ACT scores, leaving the majority of students unprepared, increasing poverty. Later we are using poverty as the reason for low school performance, poverty that we created through poor education. In addition, the state department of education does not provide sufficient legal protection to schools and teachers to eliminate bad student behaviors, that disturbs entire classrooms repeatedly, limiting the teachers' ability to educate our students. There need to be law changes and a stronger message to the public that our schools are for children who behave properly, and have the legal right to dismiss a badly behaving student for extended periods for weeks or months by law. It is negligent of the state to both not manage school districts to far better results and to allow behaviors by old laws that prevent teachers from doing a better job. The reality is that we cannot guarantee a good education for every child, and we do not achieve such promise by forcing children to go to school. Our children's education currently comes from schools that do not use proper result-based objectives, like an ACT score, that is increased 5-15% from the prior year's results under a proper operating plan in each school per year. By not using such measurable objectives, school district management can easily hire or promote friends and relatives, think up a job for them in central management, because poor performance will not show. The use of proper objectives and operating plans identify low performers who can be hidden forever without them, so this is VERY IMPORTANT.

Education organizations are very weak in management knowhow and experience. The following quote from someone who was outstanding in management, is very important. “People do what you inspect, not what you expect.” Louis V. Gerstner Jr., Chairman, IBM When an organization's results are bad, like in most of our public school districts: 1. Money is being spent on the wrong things and on unqualified people without proper objectives and an operating plan. EXAMPLE: central management is bloated. It must be reduced to less than 2% of the total employees of the organization. It is not just 25% higher than normal. It is 500-700% of normal. But nationally 3 out of 4 high school graduates are not ready to survive with a job. Poor job, very high cost, the highest in the world per student. It shows statistically 4th highest in the world because we do not show relatively large expenses for schools in education expenditures like capital expenses, mortgage expenses. In the school district we use as an example, that is an expense representing mortgage obligations that exceed $500 million. Other countries include this in school expense reporting. 2. People who work in school districts do what THEY think is right, NOT what the organization needs to create graduating children, 80% or more of whom are prepared to learn a job and keep learning to be employed. EXAMPLE: Objectives set are not applicable to education, are unmeasurable AND too low if measurable. Operating plans do not exist so that they can measure where they are monthly and where they should be, in order to make timely changes to deliver annual improvement. Nothing improves, it just keeps getting worse without an appropriate objective (needed are an ACT or SAT score objective that is 10% higher than the one achieved the year before annually, and GPA monthly).   Did and do our political leaders and teachers' unions want our children well educated? If they did, changes would have been made to raise the ACT scores. THE ACT AND SAT NATIONAL TESTS SHOW ACCURATELY WHAT A HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE LEARNED SINCE GRADE ONE. STATE TESTS CAN BE ALTERED, DUMBED DOWN, TO SHOW HIGHER GRADES BASED ON LOWER SCORES.   OUR SPENDING PER STUDENT BECAME THE HIGHEST IN THE WORLD! OUR HIGH SCHOOL PERFORMANCE DROPPED TO THE BOTTOM OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES.   WHAT PUBLIC EDUCATION DID, IS SHOWN IN THE 19 YEARS OF ACT HISTORY. IT SHOWS THAT OUR TEACHING STANDARDS ARE POOR AND MANAGEMENT TRAINING AND EXPERIENCE DOES NOT EXIST. THIS IS NOT A GOOD OUTCOME. WHY DO OUR CHILDREN HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO LEARN? Doesn't that come naturally? It does, but there are several faster ways. We go to school to learn so that we can have a job that we enjoy, a job that will provide us with a good life. Learning as much as our children have to learn to succeed can be hard or easy. That decision is in the hands of political leadership unfortunately. Our schools do not teach how to learn in the early grades, which is very strange. But our children could learn how to learn more easily using excellent tutorials that are available on the Internet. There are different methods of learning and there is an easier way to learn than what we have been doing. Some countries (e.g., Japan) teach how to learn in grades 3-4. Anybody could learn it. That tells us that we could learn a lot more and much easier and faster. That means that there is a way for our children to learn more with less effort to get into a really good job that they could not reach otherwise. Read here about the various methods and USE COMBINATIONS OF METHODS THAT APPEAL TO YOU.   WHEN SHOULD WE START EDUCATING CHILDREN? The answers are with those countries whose education systems are doing far better than ours, between 2-6 years using educational games. Why? A medical doctor with pediatric neurology as a specialty will tell you that learning begins at birth at the highest rate during anyone's life. "Learning" results from the SUBJECT OR SKILL SPECIFIC neuronal (brain cell) interconnections. Intelligence, however, is defined earlier by the physical development of the amygdala in the brain of the child. Public education must take advantage of the highest learning period, after the child starts communicating (from age 3 to 6) like the best education performing nations do. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT IN VIEW OF THE FACT THAT FOR DECADES NOW PUBLIC SCHOOLS HAVE BEEN DOING A VERY POOR JOB IN TEACHING OUR CHILDREN HOW TO READ, WRITE, COMMUNICATE AND BASIC MATHEMATICS. TEACHER EDUCATION HAS BECOME POOR IN THE LAST 50 YEARS AS THE EDUCATION RESULTS INDICATE THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL, AND THAT NECESSITATES A MUCH BETTER FOUNDATION. THIS IS HAPPENING RIGHT AT A TIME WHERE AN EXCELLENT FOUNDATION NEEDS TO BE DONE FOR FURTHER LEARNING BECAUSE ROBOTICS AND NANOTECHNOLOGY BY 2022 WILL CHANGE THE JOBS REQUIREMENTS AGAIN. We have people in government and legislation who claim that it is a waste of money and it has been unsuccessful in the past. But they forget that we are one of the highest spenders per student in the world but in educating our children we dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries by the time they graduate from high school. We have done a poor job with education in general at high school level and below creating a poor foundation for the learning that is necessary for life. But with spending the people's money, we are the highest in the world. We just do not spend it on the right people in the right functions. We are one of the worst countries in K-12 education. One should never decide anything on the basis of the poor performers. Especially those who spend too much money on bloated central management in the school districts that are 4-6 times normal in size. Boards and superintendents create new management positions in Central Management and promote "friends" into it. Why? Because with not having ACT or SAT objectives, individual performance becomes impossible, and friends and relatives can be given high jobs when they are surrounded by other incompetence. The performance problem would show rapidly within a management by objectives (MBO) based system using the ACT or SAT for annual objective, backed up by a monthly objective with GPA-based numbers to identify any poor performance early to fix it to save the year. Without it the results do not improve, but such positions are not eliminated. As a result the reader will find below that we deliver poorly educated students in our public schools but we tell the public that we provide "Excellence for all children" or other similar untrue slogans. No governor and legislator created a program and law for school districts in a "truth in advertising" fashion to tell the public the unvarnished truth only. The damage is so great on our children and families, that any counter by public education-related organizations who base their argument or evidence from a poorly performing nation, like the USA, need to be considered in view of their poor performance making them questionable in judgement. Central Management organizations in education districts need to be lean and filled with high levels of expertise in order to constantly improve results, instead of with unsuitable people who are relatives or friends. The poor results themselves point to having too many employees who have no idea what to do. The millions of dollars gained by removing poor performers does not hurt organizational performance, and will do a much better job in the schools themselves who are to deliver the better results. THIS IS NOT HAPPENING, AND WITHOUT IT, THERE CAN BE NO IMPROVEMENT. Not a single governor took action that raised the ACT and SAT scores since 1970. We must change urgently. More specifics as they happen later.   WE MUST REMOVE A MAJOR OBSTACLE TO LEARNING: The great majority of high school graduates are poor readers, do not write or speak well enough with good grammar, do not even know basic math and have a bad attitude on the job according to employers. All schools teach these subjects very well in the first 3-4 grades worldwide. Very few do it successfully in Tennessee and some school districts and even states cannot solve these problems alone for two decades now. They graduate from high school 85% of the children who entered high school. BUT MORE THAN 80% OF THOSE WHO GRADUATED WITH A DIPLOMA, (e.g., Tennessee, Kentucky and some others) ARE UNPREPARED FOR LEARNING MORE IN THE JOB MARKET. HOWEVER, THE SCHOOL DISTRICTS TELL AND WRITE THE PUBLIC IN GOLD LETTERS THAT THEY PROVIDE "EXCELLENCE FOR ALL CHILDREN". LOOK AT THE BAD RESULTS! As an example, our schools in Knox County, Tennessee, have not done a good job to date in grades 1-4 teaching our children how to read and how to do basic math. This problem existed as far back as 20 years ago. HOW CAN A STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ALLOW THIS PROBLEM TO CONTINUE UNRESOLVED FOR 3 YEARS, LET ALONE FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS! More than 80% of students (and more than 95% of African American students) who entered high school here, graduated from high school not ACT Ready, meaning that they are unprepared to learn ANY JOB beyond minimum wage employment. We need much better academic results. No one can learn without reading and that is one reason for most of our children graduating high school unprepared to learn jobs. Are the teachers and school district management so bad that they could not overcome such a basic requirement in reading and basic math? It appears that way. We would like to offer right here a website listing of the ten most effective on-line tools for academic classes at any level. Let us show you further down in this website what we found after several years of investigating what happened in education in every state, and the top three countries in education in the world. There are several practices in US states that are actually hindering possible good results from emerging in the school districts. And legislative education committees are not presenting any laws that would increase the best indicator of education progress, the ACT and SAT scores. Very puzzling. Some legislators expressed concern about being replaced at election time by education lobbies, if they do anything that the education lobby does not like.   ANOTHER VERY IMPORTANT REQUIREMENT FOR STUDENT-LEARNING IN ANY SCHOOL IS TO HAVE WELL-TRAINED TEACHERS FOR THE SUBJECT THAT THEY TEACH. Their personality matched to teaching, knowledge of the subject he/she is teaching must be as high as the international competitors', interest in the subject he/she is teaching and the knowledge and ability to make the learning experience exciting and very interesting to students are all very important. To present a subject in an excellent manner the subject knowledge has to be at master's level or above. That is what the top performers hire for teaching above fourth grade. Successful teaching requires many skills on a high level: presentation skills, understanding human behavior well, compassion, must be an excellent motivator, a friend and an advisor, but very firm when needed. The teacher must have the right personality to achieve that and also must love the subject that he/she teaches. Our teachers' personal qualification for teaching and teacher training at colleges and universities must improve. Current teacher training programs at our colleges and universities are very weak. Top performing countries in education hire teachers who have a master's degree in the single subject that they will teach, come from the top 10% of the master's programs, and are an excellent fit psychologically to the teaching profession. US teachers generally come from the bottom 30% of BA or BS programs in general education. Top performing countries in education also maintain a continuing education program for teachers until retirement, teaching is not the highest paid job in the top countries in education, but they are happy in their profession, and have a very low turnover in schools. In such countries, teachers are very highly respected in society. US teachers are significantly below the teachers of highly performing countries, most do not have the qualifications to do as good a job, and that is not the teachers' fault. Click here for more information.   What knowledge public schools teach you is needed, but it is far from enough. What subjects and their levels, and values public schools teach you, needs a lot of work. Every person has a special calling, a special area of activity and work where they will be happy and very good. YOU WILL DO THE BEST WORK IN YOUR LIFE IF YOU ARE IN A JOB THAT YOU LOVE; A JOB THAT MAKES YOU HAPPY. You can find out what that activity or job is with two tests correlated, the the Smart Interest Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Intelligence Inventory but such tests have to be taken after age 18. Or one can find out also, like Steve Jobs did. One cannot become more successful than he did. Steve Jobs, founder and president of Apple was a fantastic person who could see what the future needs. How did he accomplish that? Steve was adopted by a car mechanic and his wife. He had excellent grades in elementary and high school, but he inundated his teachers with questions. He dropped out of college, went to India for a year with a friend to learn some Buddhist practices from monks, like meditation, to be able to learn things very fast, to relax at will, to comprehend very clearly what is happening, to become very creative, and to concentrate on doing anything well. Both Hinduism and Buddhism are very old religions, 3,000-5,000 years old with knowledge flourishing there past and present, knowledge about how to control your mind and body to be more effective and do things better and faster. He recommended to his friends the following: 1."Think while you walk alone." Walking can increase creative output/learning by 60% according to our own medical research. 2."Meditate." It takes practice, but learn it. It does wonders for your intuition, problem solving and ability to learn. 3."Pursue different interests also and become good with them". Learn about things that interest you - seriously. You will be surprised by how much they will contribute to your success. "And the dots will somehow connect in your future about what you should be doing, AND where you will be the happiest" - he said. Steve Jobs, Founder and President, Apple, Inc.     Most public schools, in addition to being boring, are pushing children to graduate fast with shortcuts galore. It appears that the state education departments dumb down the state tests with a method called Cut Scores (lower the passing grade for students who would have failed otherwise) so that the students produce higher grades with the school system telling the public with a straight face how great the children are doing. But more than 80% of the graduating children from high school WITH A DIPLOMA cannot communicate properly, cannot read, cannot do basic math, have a bad attitude, can write only block letters, and cost the public in taxes $200,000 or more per student for twelve years, and will be replaced by robots by 2022 the latest. THE ROBOTS already started to replace workers at fast food companies. Supermarkets and others are planning the same.   Among African American students, not 80% but 97% of those who graduated with a diploma are not ready, unprepared after graduation. This is revolting and inexcusable. IT IS THE SAME AS DESTROYING A CHILD'S FUTURE. In view of slavery in USA history, and with USA racial interaction still not being good enough, it has become a very dangerous situation that must not be ignored. But it is being ignored, just like public education. Bad attitudes toward those who are different can produce hate. Hate can result in anger driven destruction and death. Destruction and death creates long-term feelings of revenge that creates perpetual hostility. Increasing knowledge is the only thing that can break this vicious cycle. Look at human history. It is full of wars, hate and conflict. Decreasing education quality that we are well into experiencing, serves those who want to make money out of more conflict and wars. It does not create peaceful, friendly coexistence. Just imagine that you are an extra terrestrial who is observing this beautiful planet called earth. You are about 200 million years ahead of people on earth, and your beings have lived together in peace for hundreds of millions of years. Would you want to get involved with humanity as we behave with too much hate against each other and having to spend huge money to maintain a military to kill each other? Back to African American students, Success Academy Schools started in 2006 in Harlem, NYC. Today in 2019 they have 46 schools, and all of them are scoring above 90% WITH POOR, INNER CITY AFRICAN AMERICAN children, passing even most private schools. Let me repeat, we have only two schools with inner city African American children, we spend per student more than two times as much as in the other schools we have, we graduate them, and 94-97% of their graduates, who get a diploma, are not not prepared with basic math and reading to learn any job! POVERTY is being blamed for the outrageously poor results. We spend about $25,000 per child per year in the two lowest performing schools. Their readiness upon graduation is only a very poor 3-6%! We have a private high school school, the annual tuition is $20,000, They average 30 on the ACT test, which is above COLLEGE COMPLETION READINESS, EVEN IN ENGINEERING OR SCIENCE. WE CANNOT LEARN ANYTHING FROM THESE SCHOOLS TO QUADRUPLE OUR READINESS. WHY? POVERTY??? WE CREATED POVERTY BY LOWERY THEIR READINESS AND GRADUATING THEM! How could that happen?! Let me tell you how. Since 1970 education spending skyrocketed, but education results dropped like a stone, while many countries passed us. All governors noticed it, stood up, kept standing for ten minutes without saying anything. Then they sat down. And changed jobs. Many probably went into stand up comedy. That did not work either. And became real politicians. Or in reverse. OTHER COUNTRIES IMPROVED EVERYTHING IN EDUCATION TO HAVE BETTER RESULTS. They "cleaned our clock." We dropped to 40th place in mathematics internationally by 2016. Did that make the public smarter? Or did we become dumber? We were dumbed down by our public schools AND WE DID NOT EVEN NOTICE IT BECAUSE THE EDUCATION SYSTEM WE HAD/HAVE LIED TO THE PULIC. I will never forget the superintendent we had in 2014 was asked by the press "Mr. JM, how are our schools doing?" To which he answered "Very well, a strong B average!" and that was far from the real truth. The state lowered the state test pass/fail percentage to raise grades and to pass a fair number of children who would fail otherwise. The method is called Cut Scores. Our earning power decreased for those less educated, because we lowered the passing point in addition to doing these other things, which raises the easier to pass new grades to make things look better for the child, but does it? That is why our poverty level is so unusually high. Our education system and those running it had a lot to do with it, all the way to the top. Such things do not happen accidentally. They have not been doing a good job so that most students become normal wage earners. They increased poverty instead with the bad results. We can at minimum say that our education system contributed to poverty very significantly by degrading the education system itself. Not only such a thing does not happen accidentally, but it has to be directed to do so.   The news from employers is already spreading. That will happen by 2020, two years away. And our schools use POVERTY as the reason for poor performance?! WHAT IS HAPPENING TO US FOR THIS TO HAVE HAPPENED? By not getting educated well, we become poor. And by getting educated well, we leave poverty behind.     For the past ten years I heard from employers that our teachers cannot teach the children how to read, write properly and they don't know basic math. Just today I bought something for $23, paid with a $50 bill and the cashier could not figure our the change I should get. Called another employee over, and he could not subtract $23 from $50. They graduated from high school a few years ago. So they both told me that they will not need math. That's what we graduate. We hear the same thing from college professors and employers. This is a serious handicap in learning. WHY is it that smart people could not solve the reading problem in more than 22 years or longer? It is because they are NOT SMART...OR THEY HAVE NOT BEEN BETTER EDUCATED. The teachers were not taught properly enough about teaching methodologies and the subject that they would teach. We do not use any effective testing of potential teachers to find out how suitable they are psychologically to be a good teacher. OR THE TEACHERS WHEN THEY WERE TRAINED IN COLLEGE NEVER LEARNED HOW TO TEACH A GOOD TECHNIQUE TO TEACH CHILDREN AND HOW TO TEACH READING... OR BOARDS AND SUPERINTENDENTS EXPECT TEACHERS TO DO IT, BUT DO NOT MAKE SURE PERSONALY THAT IT IS DONE. Now THAT sounds like willful ignorance of an obligation that schools must have by the very nature of their work for which one of the highest tax dollars are paid by the public in the world. Any other answer is impossible. Do we have laws to ensure mandating penalties in case of such violation THAT DUMBS DOWN CHILDREN? Why don't we investigate such events? Our children's education has been declining since 1970. More than 80% of our children who enter high school and graduate with a diploma, are not prepared to learn a job that would survive robotics.     Among African American high school graduates, it is 94-97% of the children who are not ACT ready. 94-97%!! WE THINK THAT THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS! ESPECIALY WHEN THE PRINCIPAL WITH THE WORST RESULTS IS PROMOTED TO HEAD ALL OF 89 SCHOOLS! Yes it happened! And nothing improved after many years passed. He improved nothing! Let me tell you that with such poor education we are facing an increasing emergency, and the education districts are taking it easy and cannot figure out how to teach our children to read well enough to survive? What do we have to do to wake up all people in public education management? We think that it is time to hold education management people in public education responsible for the poor performance as all of us are responsible in any business organization.   So how could we learn faster? We searched the Internet for a solution. There were many tools available to teach reading. We looked them over and picked one. There are many. Click here and find out about about them. Repeat the first video only until you understand it totally. At first, stop the video every time it presents something, make sure that you understand it, then continue. In fact our schools may be doing the wrong thing to learn accidentally. But their material is useful also. So watch how fast you can learn, and get much better grades if you stick with these methods exactly. This can be the most important thing you ever learned. If you do, you will WIN big time! And the school will win also.   "Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is TO TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO LEARN!" Peter Drucker, 1909-2005, Father of 21st Century "Management By Objectives"     Imagine the education of any person from birth to end of life. We learn every hour of every day when awake through actions, observations, doing things, making things, thinking about things and figuring things out. We learn not just in schools where learning is directed, and not very well "directed" in public education. In the US, poverty is unusually high. GUESS WHY.   US public schools are perhaps the biggest money-wasting machines. WE ARE ONE OF THE BIGGEST SPENDERS PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD, AND WE DROPPED TO 40TH IN THE WORLD IN MATHEMATICS. WE SPEND MORE THAN OTHERS PER CHILD, BUT OUR PERFORMANCE IS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES. WHEN THIS HAPPENS, THE MONEY IS GOING TO THE WRONG PEOPLE AND/OR TO THE WRONG PLACES! Most public schools appear to be wasteful, poorly managed organizations with their boring classrooms, and too many teachers who went into teaching because they found their originally selected majors too difficult. AND the quality of teacher training dropped at the universities, but other major studies did not drop. Teachers do not want to be measured on what their classes achieve in GPA. If one wants growth, one must focus the teams to significantly improve the ACT scores. That is the school supervisors'/managers' most important task . The governors and education committees in legislators just agree with the teachers' unions, because the teachers' union is powerful enough to replace them. WHAT A SYSTEM! School districts are managed by an elected school board who as a voting majority have no idea about anything related to education such as, what does ACT readiness mean, are we doing well enough, are our graduates trained well enough, how are children doing in countries we compete with, how well are our teachers trained, and will all our children be employable. As a result, they just cost money and accomplish nothing to raise academic performance. Public schools solve a problem by throwing more money at it. ACT performance shows that their solutions do not work. Just look at the ACT scores. They are bad. Money-solutions to problems RARELY work. We need to remember every minute that the public schools are competing for "education-time" against TV, Movies, Drugs, Entertainment, Sex and the "Friends" in the street, who are a lot more interesting and fun according to the children than the boring public school classrooms. Our public education system does not even recognize that. That has to change. CHILDREN ARE VERY CURIOUS. All these non-academic things compete with the public schools for the child's time to learn. Our political leadership does not even recognize this fact. It needs to be obvious by now that we cannot afford to negotiate with education management, teachers and their unions who have created such enormous damage if we want to save our children. We do not have the luxury to discuss a mutually agreeable solution. We have to tell the public exactly what we have, if the other side is not willing to do the right thing. Or we have to set good standards for school operations and their academic results, their objectives and operating plans, have charter schools operate as a competitor to old style public schools and provide start up funding for thousands of charter schools as competitors through an independent state education channel, and as traditional public schools lose students, transfer the total per student funding WITH OVERHEAD to charter school funding following the student. The best example I found for a charter school chain is Success Academy Schools in NYC, started with one school in Harlem in 2006, has 46 schools now, takes in only poor black and Hispanic inner city students, 19,000 families are on their waiting list, and they score above 90% per school. The President, Dr. Eva Moskowits put their curriculum, and teaching methodologies on the Internet for anyone who wants it free, for elementary and middle schools, with high schools later. New York State is the 5th best state in education in the USA significantly above Tennessee.     Income is generally based on the level of education. Our education declined since 1970 as many other nations passed us, although we have been one of the highest spenders per student in the world every single year. How can something be expensive and produce bad results? By not having a clue about how to do a better job and not having enough interest in doing a better job every year. Poor education is what contributed the most to poverty. We are about to become the country with the highest percentage of poverty, that was created by our poor public education. Not the other way around. Success with education is only possible with teachers who were top 25% performers at the university, who continued learning because they were interested in the subject, who get excited in the class room when they teach their subject, who are so enthusiastic about their job, that their students get excited and want to become experts in a field that they love, and have the full authority to administer zero tolerance for discipline issues to guard all children's right to a much better education than what they receive from the majority of public schools. A school is not a baby sitting service.     Unfortunately, we have a problem in Tennessee and many other states. More than 80% of those children who entered high school and graduated, are not prepared to learn a job that will survive robots and nanotechnology. WHY ARE WE GRADUATING THEM WHEN THEY ARE NOT PREPARED WELL ENOUGH BY THE SCHOOLS? Let's face it. Children who do not do well, are not enthusiastic about being in school. That's at least 80%. They would rather do something else. Because they are BORED. BUT THERE IS MORE.     The great majority of public schools, in addition to being boring, are pushing children to graduate fast with shortcuts galore. The state education departments dumb down the state tests with a method called Cut Scores so that the students produce higher grades with the school system telling the public with a straight face how great the children are doing. But more than 80% of the graduating children cannot communicate properly, cannot read, cannot do basic math graduating from high school WITH A DIPLOMA, have a bad attitude, can write only block letters, and cost the public in taxes about $200,000 per student for twelve years, 80% of whom will be replaced by robots - and THE ROBOTS already started. IT APPEARS THAT WE HAVE WASTED 80% OR $160,000 PER STUDENT AVERAGE, WITH ENORMOUS SOCIAL EXPENSES TO BE PAID DURING THEIR LIVES BECAUSE THEY WILL BE JOBLESS. High school graduates are feeding the workforce. Dumbed down graduates dumb down the work force, who then cannot do a high quality job, creating problems for industries, who then make less money and pay less taxes. So how on earth can we help those who will not be able to get a job, because of our poorly performing schools?     WE HAVE A BIGGER PROBLEM. Among African American students not 80% but 94-97% are unprepared after graduation, and POVERTY is being blamed for the outrageously poor results. POVERTY!!! How could that happen I wondered. Let me tell you how. Since 1970 education spending skyrocketed, but education results went nowhere while many countries passed us. We dropped to 40th internationally. With that going on for about 50 years, did the public become smarter? Or were we dumbed down? We were dumbed down. Our earning power decreased among those less educated. That is why our poverty level is so unusually high. Our education system and those running it had something to do with it, all the way to the top. Such things do not happen accidentally. They have not been doing a good job so that most students cannot become self supporting. They increase poverty instead with the bad results.     We can at minimum say that our education system contributed to poverty by degrading the education system itself. Not only such a thing does not happen accidentally, but it has to be directed to do so. Perhaps education became a very difficult or impossible thing to manage in the US. We found a school chain with 46 schools in New York City (Success Academy Schools) that started in 2006 in Harlem. They take only poor, inner city, mostly black children. Within three years they were 5th or BETTER in New York State math and reading tests, and today their schools score 94% or higher in all schools, in all subjects, PASSING EVEN PRIVATE SCHOOLS, and all children firmly believe what year they will be graduating from a university. I was wondering why, and I visited them, and saw a fantastic school system that any of our schools could learn a lot from. But no one wants to visit from our schools although we are failing to educate 97% of African American children, BUT WE GIVE THEM A DIPLOMA. And we use POVERTY as one of several reasons for poor performance. WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO US FOR THIS TO HAVE HAPPENED? WHY?     Why have schools? If schools have mostly poorly prepared teachers who don't know the subject they teach and 80% of the students they graduate are not prepared well enough to learn a job, then why are they allowed to waste the peoples money? If you cannot even teach children how to read, AND YOU COULD NOT FIX THAT SCHOOL IN FIVE YEARS, CLOSE THAT SCHOOL!! STOP WASTING THE PEOPLE'S MONEY!! USE THE MONEY ONLY TO CREATE SCHOOLS THAT CAN PERFORM IN THE WORLD MARKET. Schools exist for educating our children not poorly, but well. Schools do not exist to be a baby sitting service that need to deal with unruly, drug-using, trouble-making children and do not remove them. We do not have schools for superintendents who are incompetent, and overload central management TENFOLD wasting tens of millions of the people's money. We need to educate our children to be successful. We need the schools' certification/diploma to be worth a lot and not a document that guarantees that the child to be unemployable, like we do today. OUR RESULTS ARE ON THE BOTTOM OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES. IT WILL NOT BE ROCKET SCIENCE. WHAT WE HAVE NOW IS A FORMULA FOR TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF EMPLOYERS, JOBS, EVEN THE NATION, BECAUSE LACK OF A COMPETITIVE WORK FORCE CAN DESTROY COMPANIES, INDUSTRIES, TAXES PAID, AND NATIONAL INCOME. That makes education as an entity an excellent control mechanism to control people OR ENTIRE NATIONS. It can make them or break them. This could result in good or bad outcomes. It can do many things for the entity (?) that controls it. For example it can be used to dumb down the population so that they can be influenced - who will then vote very easily for the candidate that was sold to the public by the media to help the controlling entity with anything, most often enormous amounts of money made for the controlling entity. Or they could make sure that education produces employees who can match the best in knowledge in the top ten countries. In which situation are we? Not the good one. WE MUST CHANGE THAT!     Welcome to a new, very efficient method that could disable any nation. The process would take several decades to accomplish such a thing but it would be the least expensive, and there is a good chance it would go unnoticed until too late. What would make such an offensive program very easy to do, if the hostile party would have any or all of the following elements.   The only thing they need is the control of the money supply, like controlling the central bank of the USA (the FED) AND better yet, of every nation. Or control the energy oil supply (any or all: oil, gas, nuclear). Or managing and getting the profits from the War/Industrial Complex. Or controlling the News, the Press, and significant Radio and TV networks. If one has all of these controls functioning reasonably well, how could one defeat such an enemy? All things are possible. It is possible to overcome them, but the best weapon would be by raising the education of the public to the level of the ten best nations in education in the world. Why? Because the public's or any nation's best weapon is how educated they are. It is not enough just to oppose an enemy and be killed. And why is that true? Because, if the public is dumbed down, it is much easier to weaken that country. They can pay off people in leadership positions indirectly such that those people in leadership will depend on the controlling entity. They can control public opinion, have the public vote for who they want, create wars and revolts with False Flag operations, all at minimum cost, and possibly free by financing one or both sides of a conflict and the profits from weapons systems while controlling the choice of weapons. We dropped to 40th place in the the world during 50 years, as a nation in high school education. University professors and employers have been experiencing how ill-prepared our children are as high school graduates.   The public pays for K-12 education. But universities need tuition income. Political leadership is not taking any action to resolve the management issues that are creating the dumbing down of the public. Remedial training requirements will rise. With American universities being by far the most expensive and the best in the world, they will be compromised just like K-12 public education was and is. K-12 was changed approximately 100 years ago with a management structure that actually prevents growth in results. Teacher selection and training became slowly much weaker than our international competition in education. Teacher morale became low because management training was/is lacking. There are no objectives and operating plans that reflect high expectations. There is zero consideration for future technologies in curriculum planning. There is zero consideration for the necessity of nationally centralized curriculum standards, teacher and management certification standards, and for healthy operating ratios in spending, making us the most expensive per student in K-12 education in the world, with performance having dropped to the very bottom of industrialized countries by 2016. That means that we are spending enough money to become one of the best internationally, but too much of the money is going to the wrong people and the wrong places. Two major expense issues are worth mentioning, although there are more. We have 13,500 school districts in the USA with elected boards and superintendents making all decisions with very little knowhow. Second, central management is a place for friends and relatives and duplicated services. Its size is always above normal as much as 700-800%. Did you notice the impact of our schooling on children and adults? Neither party has done anything about it. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats. Education spending per student skyrocketed since 1970, but the results in public schooling went nowhere. No governor stood up during the last 50 years in all 50 states to stop spending increases until the education results, as measured by the ACT and SAT scores were corrected. None of them took action on the internal problems within the state and school districts' education system to correct any of the issues that stand in the way of excellent performance.   The major contributor to increasing poverty is declining knowledge delivered by a huge money-spending machine called Education System that does a terrible job. Who else will educate those children to survive in a tougher world? Not the schools we have in Tennessee and other states with very few exceptions. I fear the day when the population finds out that their money was taken, they were told that their children are doing well, and they cannot get a job because they cannot communicate well in English, cannot read and do basic math and had no help by the education system that ruined their future. US Education is supported AND ENFORCED by law, BUT ITS QUALITY IS NOT ENSURED IN ANY STATE OR THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BY LAW. WHY DIDN'T WE SOLVE THIS BIG PROBLEM IN MORE THAN FIVE DECADES?! It is mandatory to run it by teachers with weakening university education, and weak certification by each state. WHY DON'T WE CERTIFY A COMMON QUALITY LEVEL BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT? THE OLD SYSTEM IS NOT WORKING WELL ENOUGH. Managers who have no idea about how TO MANAGE TO GOOD RESULTS are hired by elected school boards, whose majority also has no idea how to educate our children better, AND DOES NOT EVEN DISCUSS AT BOARD MEETINGS THE BAD EDUCATION THEY ARE PROVIDING WITH A DESIRE TO IMPROVE IT. But they are experts at driving our schools into the ground in almost all public schools, spending the most money per student in the world, but 80% who "graduate" are not prepared to do any job after they earn a diploma. THE SCHOOLS GET PAID REGARDLESS OF THE RESULTS THEY CREATE. THEY DO A VERY BAD JOB, AND THEY GET PAID THE SAME. There is a teacher certification system by any state that enforces exactly what we said, by people who are purposefully not educated completely to understand what needs to be done to increase test results. PERHAPS not purposefully. They need a job like anyone else to survive, and they believe that they are doing the right thing for the public. They are paid well, and are ensured every year that they are doing a good job. Would they tell anyone if they believed that they are doing a bad job? Of course not. But more than 80% of children who graduated cannot satisfy what employers need, and have a bad attitude about their entitlements to boot. THAT, I am afraid, goes back to teachers and parents. Schools do exist even for poor, inner city black kids, who turn them into winners. For example the Success Academy Schools in New York City do better than even private schools and do it with such poor children to boot. That, I believe, puts the blame on schools more than parents. The money has been increasing rapidly for education and the knowledge the schools delivered is less and less judging from ACT and SAT scores and has been decreasing for fifty years now compared to 39 other countries. But not a single governor, over 50 years since 1970 or about 500 of them in all states, stopped the spending increases, demanding a fix to and increasing of education results such that the ACT or SAT tests would show an increase, confirming the knowledge-increase in children. But that's not enough. If we think of education as all things that educate our children, then consider the effect of TV, Movies, Drugs, Entertainment and sex occupying a huge part of the day for children or adults, some of these delivering the wrong values, the wrong ambitions to children, and again, the classes are boring, most teachers are boring, the school is an unfriendly place in most cases for those children who are not doing well. Try it. We did sit in on 16 classes in science and mathematics. Political leadership does nothing about it in any of the states. There is not enough time left in the day for these poor children. DO YOU THINK THAT ALL THIS IS ACCIDENTAL OR NOT TRUE? YES? INVESTIGATE IT THEN! BECAUSE IF IT IS TRUE, WE ARE GETTING DESTROYED SLOWLY BUT PURPOSEFULLY BY SOME UNIDENTIFIED GROUP. IF WE ARE INCORRECT, PROVE THAT WHAT WE FOUND BELOW IS NOT TRUE. AND SHOW THAT WE HAVE BEEN EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN AS WELL AS COUNTRIES LIKE FINLAND, SINGAPORE, JAPAN, THE TOP TEN IN THE WORLD! PLEASE! EDUCATION HAS TO BE SUCCESSFUL FOR AT LEAST 90% OF OUR CHILDREN: purposefully coordinated courses in the curriculum nationwide, decided by the best brains in the country, to provide an excellent foundation in our children for their future growth. Mathematics, the sciences, English communications and reinstatement of music and art on a higher level than before are vital for a fast changing world. Art and music are vital to the development and connection of both brain hemispheres for improved brain function.   Our idea of getting guidance from the elected public school boards to decide what we should be teaching our children is a main reason for falling behind. The average population has been dumbed down with this idea damaging progress. Employers opinion of our high school graduates has been increasingly poor and very concerned. Lets call the knowledge of the average population "average", and the top level highly educated professionals " the most knowledgeable". Consider also that in today's world the entire country must be brought up to a much higher level in knowledge, because much better than average knowledge makes any future learning very easy, whereas poor knowledge from prior years makes the learning of new things very difficult. Our approach in public education makes the learning effort much more difficult when you are a low performer. To increase the problem, a state education department, as in Tennessee, set more than five years ago a goal of achieving an ACT score goal of 21 in ten years initially and could never reach it. The new management in 2019 again set the goal at ACT 21. All this when in management it was well known that low objectives do not motivate and you miss them. But with high objectives that are a good stretch, people rise to high expectations and produce better results. ACT 21 means that 75-80% of the graduating children are prepared for minimum wage jobs only, that will be replaced by robots within a few years, leaving that poor person jobless for life. So that philosophy of managing education makes the learning much more difficult, and it has been a contributing factor to dumb down the public. As one does that, you set up a progression long-term that dumbs down the public This seems like a very stupid thing to do. It is not the only such thing that is being done. But very smart people created it, not stupid people. We believe that it is a fair guess that this system was set up to slowly dumb down the population: WITH GUARANTEED FUNDING WITH THE PEOPLE'S MONEY, PAYING THE HIGHEST RATE PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD. And they keep doing it for decades, the defense being that "this is the wisest thing to do". That means that the public was already dumbed down by then, or their attention was diverted to other hazards of life. Like jobs disappearing, or promises like "Hope" without telling us what that means and without a measurable plan that could show how we are achieving the objective. In addition without a measurable plan to resolve a century old problem that is like a big fuse in a large powder keg for the country inherited from slavery.   The decision making majority of elected boards of 13,500 different school districts, with guaranteed funding and the local population's opinion controlling each of 13,500 school districts does not and cannot provide the best quality graduating students. JUST LOOK AT THE LAST 50 YEARS' RESULTS! The last 50 years show a deteriorating public education, same with teacher education. We dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries by 2016, and we are not solving even the elementary problem of high school graduates having reading problems today. We wasted millions on consultants. We noticed that this problem has not changed since 1995. We cannot have successful education with reading problems, basic math problems, and many serious additional education issues we cover below that create more difficult lives today for the new generation. Teacher training also deteriorated during the last 50 years. We cannot remain as a good baby sitting service, without zero tolerance for discipline problems. Unfortunately this is where we are today with the exception of very few schools. Our schools cannot be all things to all people. Strategically this is the greatest vulnerability for the USA. High school graduates create the workforce for all industries, creating and servicing their products. They compete with international suppliers whose high schools deliver much better educated graduates. We are not acting on this problem such, that the ACT and SAT test results show improvement. And that is the proof of the poor quality of our children's public education. THE PERFORMANCE OF AN EDUCATION DISTRICT CANNOT EXCEED THE QUALITY AND TRAINING OF THE TEACHERS IN THAT EDUCATION DISTRICT. That automatically means that a few students may get to learn the subject as well as the teacher knows it, but the great majority will not. So the average knowledge of a subject by a class of students will always be significantly below the teachers knowledge of the subject. We found many sources that indicate that teacher knowledge of subjects, especially in science and math has declined, and very significantly declined compared to the teachers of several dozen nations. It is a fact that with such a trend the population's knowledge has declined over fifty years, but the spending per student increased aggressively. This is confirmed in a CATO INSTITUDE study that we are referencing further down. Education is managed in all areas by each of 13,500 school districts independently, by an elected board who are not well informed about the competitiveness of education, without the management and financial knowhow that would be required and without a uniform, internationally competitive curriculum, with standards and coverage of each subject specified, and verified. Each of the 13,500 school districts solicit opinions and ideas from the local people for what they should accomplish during the coming school year, instead of from the best experts on the subjects and understanding of what competing international school systems are accomplishing. Such decisions produce bad results if each school district is doing its own thing, and creates significant duplication in manpower at high expense. We have kept arguing very foolishly that the best planning will come from the local public. Even after 50 years of failing results, we still keep doing the same thing. As the public is getting dumbed down, very obviously the education system also get's dumbed down. Dumbing down the immediately following generation makes our education system self-destructive, because with such a method it can only go down. That is why we have poor results. Superintendents, and most don't know what to do to improve education, get $150,000-400,000 PER YEAR and elected boards also get paid, whose voting majority has no idea about where their school district stands in performance relative the top ten percent of countries in education. The leading education systems in the world also know that teaching is a complex profession that requires specific skills and a specific personality in making everything interesting for the students so that they want to learn more about the subject. It requires a Master's degree in the subject they teach, and the teacher candidate has to be very intelligent, not lower than being in the top ten percent of his/her Master's program. A teacher candidate needs to have genuine interest in the well being of the students, caring about the future of all students, but he/she must be excellent at handling discipline issues well. Unfortunately, our teacher training programs at universities are very weak, with few exceptions. Sadly, an Education Major at universities is a favorite choice of those who cannot handle the workload for their originally selected major or are unwilling to work hard for their originally selected major. For this reason we are not getting the best students into teaching. We are not correcting the performance issues and we just keep dropping lower and lower each year. And that supports the first statement in this paragraph. The high performance of other countries compared to us on education, is a clear indicator of the fact that they are producing better educated children because their teachers have a master's degree in the subject that they teach, and their teachers come from the top ten percent of the master's programs. Our teachers come from the bottom 30% of their General Education programs, with very few exceptions, without enough education about the specific subject that they teach.   We are using Tennessee as an example. A few US states are worse. Many are a little better but not competitive enough internationally. Why? Because new technologies appear more and more frequently. As a result low level jobs also disappear. More new jobs appear but they require more education/knowledge from the workers. The international high performers keep increasing the knowledge from pre-school to end of high school, so that all their students enter the work force much better educated than our children, along with continuing education, such that the knowledge gap resulting from technological changes can be closed much faster. There are high schools like that in the US, but they are rare and they are charter or magnet schools, which are also public schools. Our national tax income depends on the sales of all US corporations, in all industries worldwide. That in turn depends on the knowledge of our work force, which depends on how well our high schools prepared their graduates.     The reliable key indicators of what our children learned from grade one to twelve are the ACT or SAT scores at the end of high school. As of 2018 there has been no improvement of any significance in ACT and SAT scores but 39 nations did a better job than we did and passed us. Job requirements have been increasing and will continue to increase. Unless we improve public education significantly, our children will be unemployable.     Teachers' knowledge created by their personal interests and the training received at a university is the limit in what students may be able to learn. It appears from the enclosed references that the teacher training programs became very weak in the USA. By being one of the easiest courses of study, when a chosen major for college students becomes too hard, they switch to teaching. A Teaching Major has become a course of study that attracts mostly low performing students in every state. This in turn contributes to producing worse students than our international competitors. We are using old books in the high school classrooms that are very expensive. We are also one of the highest spenders per student in the world, delivering the worst results in the industrialized countries. The Internet has been full of far superior educational materials for more than a decade, like the presentations of the best teachers and professors in the USA about any subject, and fantastic tutorials also about any subject, all at a very low price or free. But teachers are not interested in that either. These tools along with robotics could replace them. I saw assistant teacher robots in Japanese classrooms during the past three years, the children really liked them. We are still struggling with poorly trained teachers, very expensive education, superintendents who know only how to decrease performance as if we were participating in a Race To The Bottom. We have no objectives in our schools so that our children's education improves. We do not seem to have smart people in education management who could modernize K-12 education with much better results at a lower expense. USA Public education fell to 40th place in the world in mathematics of 15 year olds in 2016 (OECD PISA Test). This was a devastating drop.   Having researched public education in every US state and several of the leading nations, the problems we are describing are very similar in all US states, a few worse than Tennessee, and others a little better. Having sat in on sixteen different high school classes in mathematics and science, we are sorry to say that all sixteen teachers had no enthusiasm for the subject, some had to look in the textbook to answer student questions. We were surprised to find that virtually all teaching majors at the university level are learning only a small amount of material in 5-6 subjects, whereas those internationals who perform well and passed us, are hiring teacher-candidates who are in the top ten percent of Master's programs in the single subject for which the schools need a teacher. Only after the candidate is tested for and is a good psychological match for teaching, do they get job offers. In the US we use a couple of "test" presentations per candidate, whose results are not suitable to be predictive of success in teaching. Also in the US, too many university students change their major to teaching if their originally selected major is too hard. To our surprise we found many articles that confirmed our feelings in this area: if we want our schools to improve, teacher training must improve significantly and teacher candidates need to be matched psychologically to the profession, because of its importance.

 

 

 

Look at the percentage of those students who are NOT A.C.T. READY in the graduating classes of Knox County, Tennessee and the state itself. Of those who entered high school, MORE THAN 80% GRADUATE NOT READY! If you ask the schools about what these high percentages mean, they will tell you as if it was perfectly all right that "not all children are college material" as justification for bad performance. We will explain here where the truth lies. Then if we look at a school in NYC called Success Academy Schools, who take in only poor, inner city African American children, who score between 94% and 99%, AND OUR BOTTOM TWO HIGH SCHOOLS ARE SCORING ONLY 4% TO 6%, THEN THE CHILDREN ARE NOT THE PROBLEM, BUT THE SCHOOL DISTRICT MANAGEMENT AND THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION ARE. WHY DO WE KEEP PEOPLE WHO ARE SO INCOMPETENT? Our schools are not doing well, because the elected board, the superintendent, the principals and teachers ARE NOT DOING WELL. You have seen their students at cash registers as long as 30 years ago. They could not make change. Also 25 years ago there were many complains about our students not being able to read. We responded by spending millions on consultants. We eliminated learning script from the curriculum, although script is much faster than writing block letters. They still cannot read 25+ years later. In 25 years the problem was not solved, but a lot of money was spent on "experts". Let us explain something. Whose problem is it that they cannot read? The parents? The students? No, it is the school's responsibility, and therefore it is the school's fault. This is a basic problem-solving method that is used even in very sophisticated large companies. To find out how anything is done very well, visit the organization that can do it very well. To improve reading, find out what the very best schools are, visit the best, and watch how they teach reading. The teachers there engage the student's imagination by reading and they teach them gradually how they, the student, could read and "experience" a good book through imagination. Do the same in a second excellent school, and you will know more than any consultant.     "NOT ALL CHILDREN ARE COLLEGE MATERIAL!" Or so teachers and education management people will tell you from your school district. This statement is incorrect. "We could not do a good enough job to get our students interested and teach them well enough" is much closer to the truth. Most parents work today to make ends meet. Schools blame parents as the most important reason for the child's poor performance. I heard the same opinion from professional people who make more than $150K/year. They are both wrong. About 110 years ago, we had people who made buggies in the horse and buggy days and most worked jobs in agriculture. If you Google "8th grade test from 1895", you would find that today's high school graduates could have trouble with it and most could not pass it. If you researched it, you might find that the education children received was more than today's eight graders, but the demand for math, science and communications knowledge required for the jobs was much lower than for today's jobs. The knowledge required for job performance has been growing much faster today than in 1895. Today 80-85% of students in a graduating class get a diploma, but only 25% of the 80%, OR 20% would know enough to be hired for the low end jobs. Less than one percent of the American high schools do as good a job as all students are doing in the high schools of the ten countries with the best education systems in the world. Today's high school graduates must know much more than those 100+ years ago, BUT THEY KNOW FAR LESS THAN WHAT IS NEEDED BY EMPLOYERS INSTEAD. WE TEACH THEM LESS, WHEN EMPLOYERS NEED MORE. Therefore the comment to parents that "Not all children are college material" is a pitiful self-serving excuse for the public schools themselves, that we can clearly see from what we already presented about teacher training being far below what is needed and the poor student performance shown in the above chart. The training that teachers get in the countries that academically passed us is far better than ours. In addition, US teachers are not treated as well and have much more teaching and non-teaching demand on their time than the teachers of the high performing countries. The state education departments in the US appear to dumb down the state tests significantly to generate higher test scores to look better, when the test-creating organization prepared such tests to agree with the state curriculum's requirements. The state education departments do this with something called CUT SCORES, where they drop the passing grade of a subject test from the usual 60%, to 30% or lower, which will raise the test scores, but will also lower the students' knowledge significantly. Unfortunately the student getting a B or Master grade in high school means nothing when trying to get a job. Employers already know how bad our K-12 education is, so they will test the candidate's knowledge. Today the high school graduates are not at a level that employers need. More about this below.   The cardinal rule in managing any task to success is "IF YOU FAIL TO PLAN PROPERLY, YOU ARE PLANNING TO FAIL." Click here for a brief introduction to management, and what operating plans must include.   How fast is new technology progressing to bring subject knowledge increases in high school to increase the readiness of high school graduates? Let us get an idea about how fast technology is developing because that will have a big impact on the changes we will experience in education. Technology changes always eliminate low end jobs, and create new, better paying jobs that require more education. Nanotechnology, that we will start seeing in 2021 will have a much brother impact. It will eliminate a much broader range of jobs. The only way to survive that is by ensuring that children learn much more in both mathematics and the various sciences in order to reduce the amount of time that would be needed to get the additional education needed for the new jobs. Parents could assist by getting directly from the Learning Company lectures from the best professors so that the child will learn more than what the high schools offer in mathematics and the sciences. How fast is hardware technology moving? Today's $1000 notebook computer can do about the same number of computations as a mouse brain (about 10 to the 10th power calculations per second). By 2025-2030, the $1000 computer will be much smaller with as much power as the average human brain (has about 100 billion neurons, doing 10 to the 15th power calculations per second). By 2040-2045 the $1000 computer system will be very tiny, less than one cubic inch with all input and output devices, and will be able to do as many computations as ALL HUMAN BRAINS COMBINED IN THE WORLD. Technology will continue to speed up. Most other technologies will also accelerate the same way. Biological computing will also become a reality, with possible brain implants to enhance and speed up brain functions, as well as correcting abnormalities It will do about 10 to the 25th power calculations per second. Hardware does nothing by itself. There are two huge software modules going along with the hardware. Artificial Intelligence (AI) passed average human intelligence in 2015 and it is growing faster. Second software module is the application software that actually does a specific job. Reference: Ray Kurtzweil PhD, Director of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Development, Google.   It appears that we human beings have a physical and a spiritual side. We always fought each other for survival. We evolved not trusting each other, sometimes for the dumbest reasons, like differences in appearance, in religions, and sometimes for different opinions that do not have much value. We have killed each other for such differences and some religions evolved to be non-tolerant advising to kill others, and other religions evolved as tolerant, to temper our old, conflict focused nature. Some very old religions, like most of Buddhism and Hinduism focused more on spirituality and medicine with great accomplishments, peaceful coexistence and improving inner mind-body harmony/health. A good education system can accelerate our development to develop equally a physical and spiritual balance as humanity. A poor education system is setting us back. Unfortunately, that is what we have. We are getting closer and closer to advancing in hostilities, and some are focused on this as a way to acquire enormous wealth. And if we keep focusing on this only, our sciences have evolved high enough to develop weapons that could destroy us. We hope that this will not happen and toward that end, we must improve our failing education system.   Nanotechnology is a new science and manufacturing technology that can create things with 1 to 100 nanometer precision. This is atomic and molecular precision. One nanometer is one billionth of a meter (one meter is about 3 feet). The diameter of a hair is about 75,000 nanometer or nm. Starting in 2021 the latest, with nanotechnology we will be able to create anything, with 1 to 100 nanometer thick "atomic layers" at a time, eliminating assembly expenses, and reduce manufacturing expenses as much as 80%. Nanotechnology will have a very broad impact on virtually everything, it will revolutionize robotics and computer technology, it will change the manufacturing and service industries, it will eliminate more jobs than any other prior technology has done, but as usual it will require more education. We will be able to build robots only ten years from now, that are too small to see, that are self replicating, can fly, can be inhaled to do great things or bad things, can be programmed for a specific target such as a person or a specific organ of a person or much more powerful computers or machines. By 2021, robotics already replaced almost all low end jobs. This development does not leave us with much time to improve our K-12 education. What that means in terms of ACT measurement is that if we are not producing high school graduates with an average consolidated ACT score of 26 by 2021, 80-90% of our high school graduates will be unemployable. We human beings have a trait that can be used and is used against us. If something very important, like education declined for a prolonged period, like ten years, we become comfortable with it to the extent that we view it as normal. If it is education that declined, we get dumbed down without even realizing what happened. When we get dumbed down, we tend to make bad decisions because we do not realize what we know for sure and what we do not know. This is especially visible when elected school boards interview superintendent candidates and one hears comments like "He must know how to do XYZ, because he was a superintendent at three other school districts before." They don't know what questions to explore, and what to check in their background.

 

 

PLEASE LOOK AT THE ABOVE CHART. WE ARE WRITING THIS IN 2017. THERE IS NO POSSIBILITY OF MORE THAN ONE PERCENT OF HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES WHO CAN HOPE FOR ANY JOB TRAINING AND EMPLOYMENT BEYOND 2025 UNLESS THEY EARNED A MASTER'S DEGREE IN A SUBJECT THAT WILL BE IN DEMAND, AND OUR PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS CHANGE AND UPGRADE TO A MUCH HIGHER LEVEL CURRICULUM AND PERFORMANCE, DELIVERING 80% ACT READINESS (ACT 27), FROM THE CURRENT 17-30% ACT READINESS IS TERRIBLE PERFORMANCE. Looking at the above chart, the two major components that define robotics are computational power in the above graph, and the quality and speed of artificial intelligence, that already passed average human intelligence in 2015. It is also improving faster than human intelligence. The processors' solid state circuits also diminish in size about 50% every three years. But the largest increase in speed and size reduction we will see through nanotechnology within less than five years, around 2022. Nanotechnology will be able to build anything with very thin layers that are one atom or molecule wide. For robotics that means that some robots will be so small that one will not even see them with the human eye. Nanotechnology will bring many new very interesting jobs because it will influence what all industries are doing, but the education required for creating and working with them will have to be a PhD in most cases, and a Master's degree in a related field plus robotics. EDUCATION FOR OUR CHILDREN WOULD HAVE TO BE CHANGED SIGNIFICANTLY FOR THEM TO BE EMPLOYABLE. THE HIGH PERFORMING INTERNATIONALS IN EDUCATION HAVE ALREADY STARTED MAKING THE NECESSARY CHANGES IN ANTICIPATION OF FUTURE NEEDS.

 

 

We live in a world where we need to understand that competition is very important and competition decides what and who survives, and what and who fails. Two concepts are important to consider here. One is that our schools produce a product, called the student. All schools in the world produce a product called the student. The student-product is completed when he/she graduates from high school. Who are the customers for such products? Those who would accept them for further learning, but the most important customers for them are the employers who pay them for the knowledge that the customers need. Some schools in the world produce excellent student-products who know what most potential employer-customers need, and there are those schools that mostly produce student-products who do not know enough of what the customer-employers need. That is the exact situation that we have in the USA. That is why our high school graduates dropped to 40th place in the world. Our employers in companies and industries compete with their products and services against similar products and services everywhere in the world. We see many products in the USA that were designed and made by foreign companies. There was a time about 45 years ago and before, when I saw people buying mostly USA products everywhere, in almost every country. I travelled every year to more than 65 countries three or four times then every year, and personally saw this everywhere. I saw some places where certain US products were "worshipped". For example Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay about 45 years ago was loaded with ANTIQUE American cars from about 1910 to 1935 IN SHOW ROOM CONDITION, with modified carburettors. At least half the cars on the streets were like that. It was a beautiful sight. The quality and competitive pricing of products and services depend on the work force of various companies in all industries, and they design, make, and test all products and produce all services in every country. Before 1970 the reputation of our high schools was better, and those who graduated went on to a university. There was no distinction between high school graduates who were "ready" or not. Those not ready did not graduate. The quality of the work force depends on the quality of high school graduates everywhere. THE DECLINING QUALITY OF AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES WERE THE CAUSE OF US LOSING ENTIRE INDUSTRIES TO FOREIGN COMPETITORS, WEAKENING OUR NATION. IT IS FOR THIS REASON THAT WE MUST CORRECT OUR WEAK PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS URGENTLY. NEITHER REPUBLICAN NOR DEMOCRATE LEADERSHIP DID SO TO DATE.

Control of education is delegated to the elected school-board of 13,500 school districts' board members who do not understand what needs to be done to be effective, and do not make the effort to learn. I attended many school board meetings over the years, "how we could improve our bad results" was never discussed, but voting on spending money and paying invoices was a major part of every single meeting. They do not understand where we should be vs. where we are, do not know how to set the required objectives for growth, do not have a school district operating plan to achieve the objective if one existed. There is too much variation in decisions from school district to school district. That makes it impossible for education to succeed. In fact, such a structure results in progressive failure year after year, and the dumbing down of the population. BRILLIANT method to kill the education of 80-90% of the US public slowly so that the public does not notice it, with excellent application of public psychology manipulation and dumbing down the public about 40% over 50 years, but dumbing down the future generations at twice that rate. I was amazed when I looked over specific subjects and how their content was reduced to make them very difficult to understand, and correlated it with teacher training, and what the state education departments do and do not do. Unfortunately, this will destroy the USA unless we change our schools. State Education Departments do not provide appropriate guide lines for the objectives, operating plans, management guidelines, thereby actively contributing to failure. They dumb down the state test by lowering the failure points in tests to pass and graduate children with less knowledge who otherwise would be failures. They also misinform the public about how the children are doing using the dumbed down state test results. "BRILLIANT" contributing factor to kill the education of 80-90% of the US public slowly so that the public does not notice it, with excellent application of public psychology manipulation. US teachers are one of the most poorly trained in the world, and education management did not have management training that was good enough to teach them about how to elevate the students to improve year-to-year. Most teachers subject knowledge is weak and that is the maximum boundary that limits how much the children will learn maximum. School district central management organizations are generally 8-10 times normal size, "eating up many millions of dollars" that could be better used by principals to improve the poor results. BRILLIANT contributing factor to kill the education of 80-90% of the US public slowly so that the public does not notice it, with excellent application of public psychology manipulation and dumbing down the public about 40% over 50 years, but dumbing down the future generations at twice that rate. Absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately, this rate is excessive by a factor of 3 and will destroy the USA. There is no interest in visiting higher performing schools and school systems, although we are far behind them. There is no interest in continuing education in the subjects teachers teach, in teaching methodologies, and in learning techniques, yet they all improve every year. BRILLIANT contributing factor to kill the education of 80-90% of the US public slowly so that the public does not notice it, with excellent application of public psychology manipulation and dumbing down the public about 40% over 50 years, but dumbing down the future generations at twice that rate. Absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately, this rate is excessive by a factor of 3 and will destroy the USA. Student discipline issues are handled very weakly, which cuts significantly into the teachers' work. BRILLIANT contributing factor to kill the education of 80-90% of the US public slowly so that the public does not notice it, with excellent application of public psychology manipulation and dumbing down the public about 40% over 50 years, but dumbing down the future generations at twice that rate. Absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately, this rate is excessive by a factor of 3 and will destroy the USA. Superior teaching tools, tutorials by the best people, and the subject presentations by the best teachers and professors are available on the Internet, but not used. BRILLIANT contributing factor to kill the education of 80-90% of the US public slowly so that the public does not notice it, with excellent application of public psychology manipulation and dumbing down the public about 40% over 50 years, but dumbing down the future generations at twice that rate. Absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately, this rate is excessive by a factor of 3 and will destroy the USA. A first class major multi-billion business owner and two sons interviewed a superintendent candidate who presented himself well, but had only minor management experience for the job of managing a troubled school district with 86 schools and about 8,500 employees, a huge management task. I did a quick check on the candidates background taking less than two hours including two telephone calls. This candidate was teaching three different subjects for a total of one year in an elementary school, managed food service for some years, managed school security, managed accounting for a school district but his resume stated that he was "Operations Manager" at the school district, implying in his resume and talk that he was responsible for the performance of the schools which was not the case. The few people who oversaw schools at his school district, had a title that started with Assistant Superintendent. The job this candidate had was "eliminated" by the lady who was the superintendent at the time. His maximum management span was only 100 employees. The job pattern he had is not an indicator of successful career direction or acceptable management training and experience for the opportunity with a large school system like ours. A candidate with his experience cannot do well jumping to a job managing 86 schools with 8,500 employees and he will fail and did fail. When I called his old school district someone said that they held a number of parties to celebrate his departure. When we hired him I received a call from the same person who told me that they held even more parties and never laughed so much when they found out that we hired him in Tennessee. It is not possible that this highly experienced business family did not know in advance that this candidate lacked the experience necessary to succeed. Yet they sent a letter to the school board recommending this candidate to be well qualified for managing the large school district. The board hired the candidate with one of the top 10 highest salaries for about 13,500 superintendents in the USA. It is not possible that the business owner and sons believed that this candidate can succeed. It is high probability that they were "leveraged" or "convinced" to recommend such a candidate by some major group with substantial influence to convince even the president of a country to make decisions that will progressively destroy the quality of education. This was a good example of what can happen when elected boards hire a superintendent. Good people but not experienced in some important areas that can be very damaging. This has been going on for many decades. A purposeful deterioration of our education since 1970, although we were the biggest spender per student in the world, and dropped to 40th place as a country by 2016, was cleverly covered by an education PR program nationwide that has been feeding the people a false story saying the "We are doing well, but there is room to grow". During the last 50 years we dumbed the public down significantly, by weakening the state tests, the curriculum, lack of guidance for elected school boards, mismanaging education by handing decision making to the inexperienced elected school boards, at the highest expense per student in the world to the public whose money has been paying for it all. And all this has been done by the state education departments.     The above points in total represent brilliant strategy to destroy the USA economy and the country from within by weakening the public schools, thereby weakening the workforce, and that is weakening the products and services of all industries against foreign products, as well as population reduction by dumbing down the new generations more and more, that will reduce their income followed by joblessness. Nanotechnology will be instrumental in this entire area, and it started already with high altitude distribution of boron/aluminum products to reduce "global warming" but the effect on people's health is problematic. Injection of an oblong microchip has started in our military on a large scale. It can serve as a locator to find individuals, it shows vitals of individuals, and it can be directed selectively to change the vitals of the person, whereever they are located. Those objectives fit only one group that we shall leave nameless. The current result is approximately 85% graduating of those who entered high schools, and only 20-26% of those who get a diploma are minimally prepared after graduation for job training or further learning. The above findings are common in all states. There is more supporting data for the same conclusion, but the above are sufficient.

What problems have been created by the decline of our K-12 education since 1970? The USA public schools have been purposefully dumbing down the population for at least five decades. Declining job opportunities do not reduce poverty. They increase poverty. If the education of young people has been declining for fifty years, then a large percentage of adults' knowledge has been reduced quite significantly.   What would be the effect of a reduction in peoples' knowledge IF IT IS DONE SLOWLY LIKE 1% LESS LEARNED PER YEAR? THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT.   The public will not notice that the knowledge of the population is being reduced, since we have been dumbing down high school education for a long time. The number of jobs that our employers could not fill are up to six million, because they could not find the right candidates with the needed experience and education. The school performance chart points to education not going up, when the need for more education has been increasing for many decades. As a result the public becomes less aware or unaware that their thinking is not as clear and the decisions they make are not as good as before, but pride gets in the way. That in turn will make it easier to control the acceptance of changes that a higher authority, like government leadership decided. Since a dumbing down effects almost everyone, the government and political decisions become not the best. Advertising has become very sophisticated. Advertising any idea will be accepted by the less educated people. Lenin ("Repeat a lie to the people 1000 times, and they will believe you!") and Hitler turned this side of "communication" into a science. Why? Because people will not accept if anyone thinks that they were dumbed down. People like it if decision makers consult them to accomplish anything. Management of the public becomes part of managing the selling of what is important in public education, advertising and many other fields. Will the public's memory be manipulated? Absolutely! Everyone wants to put their ideas in the best light in order to benefit. That's normal. However, the very wealthy have the resources to make a huge impact. Will the public remember exactly what they recommended 1-2 years before? Not too well. This is a very interesting side of behavioral psychology plus communications skill, together. Con men use very cleverly the sensitive and very fragile ego of people. Politics and law attract and also push politicians to become very good in this area. Would any human being be effected by such a person? The great majority of the public would be. The public itself cannot fight such skills. But one individual against a few others can. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING WHEN ONE IS IN SUCH A SITUATION is to recognize where you know and do not know the facts, and where you know enough facts about the subject being discussed. Too many people will fight for what they believe because they heard it from a famous person on television, or from a friend, or someone with a respectable image. Think about elections, about how well you know the subject of the discussion, and most importantly learn as much as you can about that subject. This is a very important area that is not perfect on any side, and if you allow your ego to play with your feelings, you cannot make reasonably good decisions. I find elections very interesting. Just think about how much you really know the candidates. We all use our gut feelings about a candidate, they all promise a lot - not necessarily what people and the country needs, and we really do not know much or enough about them.   Education is the ONLY cure for poverty. Our education leadership claims that poverty is the cause of poor education/learning. Isn't it true that income depends on education in fields that are in demand? CONCLUSION: POOR EDUCATION FROM THE MANY "FAILURE FACTORIES", CREATES MORE POVERTY THAT CREATES LESS EDUCATED CHILDREN. THIS SPIRAL BEGINS WITH AND CAUSED BY POOR EDUCATION. We have been purposefully focusing for decades on 90% graduation rates that are worthless without greater focus on academic achievement we call ACT Readiness, that became very low (15-25% of graduating students). CONCLUSION: FOCUSING ON GRADUATION RATE IS COUNTER PRODUCTIVE WHEN THE ACT READINESS OF THOSE GRADUATING IS VERY LOW. AROUND 80% OF GRADUATES NOT BEING ACT READY SIMPLY AIDS AN EFFORT TO DUMB DOWN THE PUBLIC AND TO PARALYZE THE BOTH EMPLOYMENT AND INCOME TAXES FROM COMPANIES THAT EVENTUALLY CHOKES GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS. The graduation requirement needs to include a minimum ACT score achievement of ACT (e.g. 26) and each high school and school district must have a single performance objective that is 10% higher for the new school year than the average ACT score achieved in the prior year. Robotics guarantee unemployment to those not educated well enough by our public schools. Robotics save companies, who are failed by the poor schools we have, and Artificial Intelligence for robotics is growing faster than human intelligence. So we would love to know what the reason is for dumbing down future employees as actively as our schools have done in a world that would require increasing knowledge of high school graduates. 1. THE PUBLIC'S DILEMMA Let us describe a big challenge we have. Educating the public's children is the highest priority because it is the public's money via taxes that pays for the public schools and all public services. In addition it is highest priority in our opinion, because our industries compete internationally, and workforce competence depends on the quality of high school education that has been deteriorating since 1970. Yet yet during 50 years, none of 50 states' governors initiated programs that fixed the K-12 problems, and raised the ACT and SAT scores as a result. How can it be that 22 years ago we had major reading problems that carried through high school graduation, and the problem still exists with our high school graduates. We spent millions on consultants. And today, 22 years later the reading problem is the same, we spent millions but learned nothing. Our public is paying one of the highest expenses for public education in the world, and our children's knowledge when graduating is on the bottom of the industrialized countries today. Our children are NOT educated well enough in today's competitive world, the school districts misinform the public about "21st Century Education", "Excellence For All Children", and about their results, with such comments being vague for promotion and are untrue. 74% of the children who graduate from high school nationally and 83% who graduate in Tennessee are not ready according to ACT the testing organization. That means minimum wage jobs that will be replaced by robotics in a few years followed by increasing unemployment. The damage from this is enormous to the public but not fully realized. Our school district in Knoxville, Tennessee, spends $150,000 to $300,000 for one child's K-12 education. The poorly performing schools are allocated 2.5 times as much money per student than the better schools for 12-13 years of education, WITH NO IMPROVEMENT IN RESULTS EVEN AFTER 15 YEARS! After that, more than 80% of children WITH A HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA will qualify only for minimum wage jobs for a few years before they become mostly jobless for the rest of their life. Robotics will replace them. We used to be one of the best in the world in high school education around 1970. We dropped to 40th in the world in 2016.   The welfare and social support expense for decades will far exceed the education expense, most of it a loss. Just consider that they will be making babies who will not grow up Nobel Prize winners. They will get hungry and get into unlawful activities. THEY WILL WANT TO HAVE FUN AND GET INTO MORE BABY MAKING AND MORE ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES. All of which will cause skyrocketing expenses. Our huge $21,000,000,000,000 national debt is one symptom that is going even higher. We pay an enormous interest rate on it. THAT IS WHAT OUR POOR PUBLIC EDUCATION IS CREATING. The curriculum of public schools is set for all schools districts and schools nationally in all high performing countries. The curriculum covers the subjects to be taught to every child, and exactly what is to be covered by each subject. In the USA we do not standardize the curriculum country-wide. Each of the 13,500 school districts can modify their own curriculum, duplicating staff to do this work, with input from the state and federal government. We can also have differences in how much of a course is covered from one school to the next in the same school district. Such a structure ensures that the schools can only create dumber and dumber children. The ACT results certainly show that. Public education is guaranteed to receive per school district the same amount of money as what they spent the previous year by law, regardless of performance. The spending therefore goes up. The spending has been increasing aggressively since 1970, while the test results went nowhere but down, and many nations with whom we compete in the marketplace to generate our own tax revenue and we are degrading the workforce with poor high school performance. Public school districts are spending the people's money (tax dollars), graduate 76-87% of our children without preparing them well enough to survive, and then lie to the public saying that "We are doing pretty well in education, a solid B average!" (said the superintendent JM who left after 8 years in 2016) The "solid B" was the result of only 46% correct answers on the dumbed down state test, which is actually a big "F" since they really did failing work. We dropped from the top in 1970 to a very low 40th place in mathematics in the world among 73 nations in the 2015 OECD-PISA tests according to the Washington Post. "The United States cannot long operate a world-class economy if our workers are, as the OECD statistics show, among the worst-educated in the world." Just think about this. Someone uses the public's money, does a terrible job that will make 77-87% of graduates plus dropouts in addition most likely homeless within a few years (read the section on robotics please), and then they lie to the public, WHO PAY FOR IT ALL, about "doing pretty well". What is this kind of behavior called? No one in political leadership did or does anything about this, meaning any action that would raise the ACT scores. It is the ACT score that measures annually what the students learned from grade one to twelve. With that poor result, we are one of the highest spenders per student in the world. That in turn means that education has enough money, but enough of it goes to the wrong places to create "Failure Factories" instead of creating at least 80% of high school graduates who are prepared for further higher level schooling or vocational training, instead of graduating only 13-17% of the graduates prepared. It appears that our state education departments and school districts do not understand what they are to accomplish with all the money they spend. Our money. We will show below conclusively why the above statements are correct. 2. MINORITY, ESPECIALLY AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDENTS' DILEMMA Based on what we are showing you on this website: American K-12 education declined since 1970, starting possibly earlier. African American families have a very large percentage of "single parent" families, where the mother had the baby very early, and the "father" just left. The mother had to work hard to survive, with limited education, in poverty. The school tells most such mothers that little Johnny is doing well. Granted, the parent in such a case believes the school. If the mostly single parents are not told the truth, they will get very angry and frustrated, because they work long hours and have no idea what to do. Several told me that "when I got pregnant, his father just ran away. I did not want the kid, and I do not want him now. I live one day at a time, and I can barely make it." We need to understand their situation rather than be critical. All children have a need to belong. They go home from school in the middle of the afternoon, and the mother is at work. It is impossible to ensure that the young student does not get approached by gang members and some get involved with a gang on the street. The drug culture makes an effort to recruit any young student in our schools, even before the street, and they re-educate the child about what is important in life, why the child should not trust his/her parents, and the drugs initially make that young child feel happy and powerful. The poorer and more unavailable a parent is to the child, the more the young child will be susceptible to listening to the same kind of children who formed a gang. Obviously there is a great need within our society to educate all children better, and to resolve also some old historical racial conflicts, but our teachers are not prepared well enough to do well with any demographic group, with the exception of those children, who have both parents with sufficient income, who have no survival problems on the scale of a single parent we described. American teachers are not as well educated on the university level as teachers are in the high performing countries, and the teaching environment is not a happy environment for the great majority of USA teachers. They do their best, but that is not enough. There is an outstanding charter school system in New York City with 41 schools in 2017, who take only poor, inner-city minority children, and they are scoring in the New York State Common Core tests TOP 1-3% PASSING EVEN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS! Obviously, they are doing many things right that could be duplicated by our poorly performing public schools. Obviously, our elected school boards could gain a lot if they visited them, but they told us that they are not interested. THAT PUTS THIS PROBLEM SQUARELY IN THE HANDS OF OUR POORLY PERFORMING STATE EDUCATION MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATIONS. Such attitudes cannot be tolerated on the part of elected school boards, or teachers, and superintendents. Never judge based on what they tell you. Judge them based on WHAT THEY DO. There are major errors or plans that are destructive in school district strategic plans in many states: the impact of the latest robotics on employability of high school graduates is totally absent. Although the schools produce the results for each of many school districts in the state, there are no performance objectives or operating plans to reach the performance objectives in any school of any public school district in Tennessee. They are required, but the elected boards cannot do them without specific guidelines. One cannot improve poor results without the appropriate performance objective and a professional operating plan to reach that objective. It is simply not possible to create better than poor results, unless we discontinue focusing on 90% graduating, and instead we focus totally on achieving an A.C.T. score objective for the school district that is 10% higher than the previous A.C.T. score achieved. Create also a similar A.C.T. objective for each and every high school, that is also 10% higher than the previous A.C.T. score achieved. At the same time, our teachers must significantly improve the way they motivate and educate our children and get all children excited by what they teach. How? Teachers must be able to raise specific job examples to show the students how, what they are teaching would be used in jobs the student may be doing later in life.  The best example of teaching methodology would be the one that is used in Finland's education system.

 

3. THE EMPLOYERS' DILEMMA

The companies that provide most of our national income, generate about half that national income directly or indirectly by selling products and/or services internationally. That means that we have to be competitive internationally, because we are competing with very successful foreign products both domestically and internationally. For our companies to be competitive with their products, their workforce have to be better, more competitive than the majority of the competition. For the workforce to be competitive, the high school graduates must be competitive with the high school graduates of our international competitors. Having dropped to 40th in mathematics in the world, and achieving only 17-27% average ACT Readiness in Tennessee and the USA respectively, we gradually lost the competitiveness of our high school graduates. The result is the $20 trillion national debt that is costing us a fortune and likely go higher, and loss of more business and tax income, which reduced our national income. To solve this problem we must improve the quality/knowledge of our high school graduates. To achieve THAT, in turn our teachers must be better trained by our universities compared to the top performing nations' teachers in education, like Finland, Singapore, Japan as examples. Our children's education is limited by the teachers education. Unfortunately our research shows that the university education of our teachers is not good enough. Click here for references about US teacher quality.

The school system develops a student "product". The education burden was already paid by the parents (the public) by paying taxes. Who needs the student "product"? The employers' workforce does. Today more than 80% of graduating classes cannot do the job to employers' satisfaction because of bad attitude, bad behavior or poor knowledge. They left high school with not enough knowledge, a bad attitude and the feeling that the world owes them a living. Some propose a free two-year junior college program for two years after high school. That would be a remedial program to make up for what the high schools would do normally. Such a proposed program will not correct the problem, but ideally it may correct the general education gap only in a few under educated children. What we actually need is to correct the K-12 education system itself with a stronger curriculum, and better educated teachers to the level of the best international performers. One cannot gain enough with such a program without fixing the problem from pre-school to high school graduation. What we need is 80% of students graduating with ACT Readiness plus the free two years of additional education.

There is no quality control in classrooms to teach an entire curriculum subject in each subject, and never less. We even had an example of a family with two children in different high schools taking the same subject and one school covered much less than the other. We are asking for each school having academic objectives and operating plans to reach the objectives using GPA data to raise education and ACT scores ultimately. The schools produce the results and they are not measured in performance. The answer they gave was that there is too much cheating going on to have the GPA as reliable data, and now we have to wait for a new state test. Not a valid reason to ignore GPA, but it is a surprising admission.

The employers do not have too many options to stay alive and survive. They spoke to the Governor about this without a good enough result. They are holding cash back, because to survive they need a good, well educated workforce. The high school student "product" is not good enough in both knowledge and attitude and costs a lot in business. Fast food pilot studies showed in the fast food industry that the new robots as of 2016 can do an outstanding job, customers like them better because of that, and cost less. So other major employers of low end jobs like supermarkets and others will do the same thing, and so will many more. Robots with artificial intelligence passed average human intelligence in 2015. That is what we have with faster than human improvement and decreasing cost. You cannot stop technological improvement and more is coming faster and faster. So...our political leaders decided it seems to do nothing about our public schools to get them to perform better and raise the ACT and SAT scores.

Those are the tests that show realistically how much our children have learned from grade one to twelve. The states' department of education and political leadership know that these two tests are showing bad results, but they do not want to do anything to fix them. So they changed the state test in Tennessee, but they have to wait. If it looks bad, they will just change the result through a translation table called "cut score" that assign alphabetic grades (e.g. A-F) for the percentage scores, like they have done with the old state test, the TCAP. Translating a 45% grade, which would be a big "F" under 60%, to a "B" and celebrate how well we are doing. I can tell you that employers are very upset about this situation.

Since universities are feeling the effect of the poor quality graduates from high school, we presented our facts to one of them, but found no support of presenting a program to top management. Their responses were political. They hired the previous superintendent from the school district whose ACT performance we charted above, and most likely they want the credit, especially one department, and put that gentleman in charge of improving the performance of surrounding school districts' performance. If he did not do it for the school district locally during his eight years as superintendent, it is very unlikely that he can do it anywhere. The management know-how was missing. It appears that education even in a state university is political, and anything but results oriented based on what its graduates achieve by a fixed number of years after graduation.

4. THE UNIVERSITIES' DILEMMA

Our universities produce teachers who are not as good as the high performing countries' teachers are. Students who cannot or will not make the effort to do well in their originally selected major, transfer to an education major because it is easier. In the top performing countries internationally, a master's degree in the single subject is required that they will teach, and the candidates have to be in the top 10-30% of the master's program. After testing the candidate matching to the profession, they are hired and then they teach them the latest teaching methodologies used worldwide. The candidate is an assistant teacher for 6-15 years before they are considered fully qualified as a teacher. Some will argue this from the education department of some universities. We would ask them to explain first why U.S. education dropped to 40th in the last OECD PISA tests in mathematics, AND why a 41 school charter school in New York City called Success Academy Schools is achieving TOP 1-3% results passing even most private schools, with poor, inner-city African American children, when nationally African American children are in the bottom 6%, and some states like Tennessee are producing bottom 3% or less performance for them. Under such conditions, with additional listed references if anyone wishes to improve, it will not happen without recognition of where one stands in a competitive activity.

 

In the US teacher candidates sign up for a teaching-major four-year degree that covers six subjects and teaching methodologies. The teacher candidates are in the bottom third of the four-year degree programs in a junior college or a university. They are qualified as teachers in less than a year after graduation. Assistant teachers in the USA are typically educated for two years beyond high school.

Poorly trained teachers in subject knowledge and teaching methodology produce poorly prepared high school graduates, who tend to be poor even in English communications and basic mathematics. Weak teacher curriculum at American universities get students from majors that they cannot handle. In addition, poor student inflow to teacher programs is too common, because teacher reputation in the USA is not good. As in other countries, excellent teacher reputation always follows excellent student performance, as with any product.

Student results are limited by the training quality of the teachers. Poorly trained teachers in the US create poorly trained high school graduates. It cannot be poverty or minority, because Success Academy Schools of New York perform above most private schools and were made the best charter school in the nation in 2017, with 14,000 poor, inner city black children, and a waiting list of 19,000 families. Consider also as no study on the subject did, that American K-12 education substantially declined during the last 50 years although its expenses skyrocketed. Decreasing education cannot sustain an inflation-compensated income level. It is therefore impossible that the declining U.S. education is not a significant contributor to poverty, especially among minority families. To correct the high school education problem, we must raise significantly the US teacher training programs at our universities toward an approach used by the high performing nations in education first, then let them raise the high school results. To get better students into teaching waiting for an end result will take too much time. Suggest universities to improve their teaching department curriculum and promote it along with the importance of teaching.

Since universities are feeling the effect of the poor quality graduates from high school, we presented our findings to one of them but found no support about presenting our findings to top management of the university. Their responses were political. They hired the previous superintendent from the school district whose ACT results were poor (chart above on this website), and put that gentleman in charge of improving the performance of surrounding school districts' performance. If he did not do it for the school district locally during his eight years as superintendent, it is very unlikely that he can do it anywhere. It appears that teacher education even at a state university is not results oriented, based on what its graduates achieve by a fixed number of years after graduation.

As long as we produce poorly prepared teachers, we will get poorly prepared American students into our universities. We further degrade the university graduates, creating a perpetually declining quality in the university output and not just in teaching. The solution presented for this problem is free two-year college education, increasing the cost of education, instead of fixing the problems with K-12 education, because the free two-years become remedial education doing what the K-12 education did not do. It does not solve the bad attitudes that developed during the formative years, and it is doubtful that the two-year education offer will result in enough cost-effective change to improve significantly the poor ACT Readiness that is a very large 83% of a high school graduates in Tennessee. It is K-12 itself that has to be improved. For that to happen, teacher training must be improved significantly. Foreign graduate school students used to stay in the USA, and that made up for the American shortage for highly educated needs in research and development jobs. For the past five years they have increasingly decided to go back home for better opportunities.

The lower quality student flow into universities increasingly create less educated high school graduates impacting not just teaching, but all majors at the university level, unless the university increases the ACT score requirement for its various majors or puts them into remedial courses as long as two years. They did but teaching is not among those majors anywhere. That trend will not increase the reputation and survival of universities, and will degrade them or even close them given enough time. The revenue pressures will be forcing an increase in student acceptance, also dropping the quality of university output.

This presents a significant danger to universities, while the damage is still manageable today. If not acted upon, the damage will become as big as it is in our public schools.

5. TEACHERS' DILEMMA

So far the way we perform our public education has not changed significantly for close to a hundred years, but the quality of high school graduates has declined. Many nations changed their own systems in every area to become better than others after WWII. We ignored those changes. In fact, we fragmented the system. We made it dependent on the opinion of 13,500 ELECTED school district boards making independent decisions about everything, with the idea that the public's wisdom through the elected school boards will produce the best results. That was a good idea a hundred years ago - perhaps. But today's world is much too complex to leave the quality of education in the hands of an elected sample of the local population.

We reduced the knowledge with which high school students graduated. When you do that for decades, you are dumbing down the population. Our public schools did that very well. The education system dumbed down the public since 1970 aggressively. We dropped in high school mathematics from the top to 40th place internationally and took no initiative to learn from others to become better. For more than 15 years employers have been complaining about the declining workforce competence, and the fact that our high school graduates cannot communicate properly in English and cannot even do basic math. That is what happens when your funding is guaranteed, there is no management training for managers within school districts and teachers have no interest in becoming excellent by learning from high performing education systems. They would argue with what we just said. How else could the student results be so bad that more than 80% of graduates will become unemployed in a few years?

 

Good or not, the teachers get the same pay depending on how long they have been working. They do a poor job instead, and those who lose are our children. That is exactly what the charts above show. Teachers do have legitimate complaints about their ability to perform well, and the school districts need to correct these at minimum. Teachers do not have enough authority to handle and assign punishment for discipline problems that disturb the teacher and the class. American teachers have the highest number of class hours IN THE WORLD that the teacher must perform. There are too many tests and paperwork taking time away from teaching. There is no uniform possibility to assign slower students to afternoon hours to catch up as higher performing countries do. Teachers spend their own money for teaching aids and materials to be used in the classroom. There is some unprofessional treatment by central management. There is no expense reimbursement for continuing education to name a few. Management must resolve such issues to teacher satisfaction. Click here for references about US teacher training quality.

Teacher dissatisfaction with their job is almost three times the national average. This indicator points to insufficient management training in schools or central management of school districts. See the graph below about the Knox County, Tennessee school district.

Student results cannot exceed teachers' knowledge and ability to teach. School results are limited by the subject knowledge of teachers and their ability to motivate the students. Student scores are the results of our teachers' work. Click here for references about US teacher training quality. US teachers are handicapped somewhat by the largest number of classroom hours in the world, too much testing in especially Knox County, Tennessee beyond what the state requires and too much paperwork that could be automated. Their union is not helpful to resolve such problems. There are excellent teachers and some who would be happier in a different position. Quite a few college students changed to teaching in college because it was an easier major to study. However, teachers need to understand that they, as a group are not as well prepared as the best in the world. That is why we have dropped to 40th in the world by 2016. The superintendent stopped supporting teacher efforts to get a Master's degree: a big mistake. Teacher subject knowledge and teaching methodology needs updating to the top ten internationals' level. They require both the B.S. or B.A. and a Master's degree in the same single subject that they will teach, they must be a good match psychologically to the teaching profession, and have to come from the top ten percent of their Master's class in some countries like Finland. American teachers qualify with a Bachelor's degree in education at most that covers several subjects very lightly. Some obtain a Master's degree and a few even a PhD in Education, but it is rare. Why are we wasting our money on public education with an 83-87% failure rate? McDonald's is in the process of replacing 25,000 stores in 2017 with robots that do a better job than our high school graduates. Other fast food companies are doing the same. Our employers feel that they cannot survive using our current high school graduates. As early as 1998 employers complained that high school graduates cannot communicate properly and cannot even do basic math. That is why they are automating with robotics today in 2016 onward. We could safely say that the failure rate of our public school system is higher than 80%. NO OTHER BUSINESS OR ACTIVITY COULD EXIST WITH EVEN ONE TENTH OF SUCH A FAILURE RATE, OR THEY WOULD BE OUT OF BUSINESS. IT IS INCREDIBLY DESTRUCTIVE THAT PUBLIC EDUCATION IS FINANCED WITH THE PEOPLE'S MONEY EVEN FOR A DAY AFTER SUCH A HIGH FAILURE RATE, LET ALONE FOR DECADES. SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG WITH EDUCATION ON THE STATE LEVEL TO ALLOW SUCH WASTE OF THE PEOPLE'S MONEY. We, on the other hand, keep financing our dismal public education system, decade after decade, regardless of the result. We do not care about the quality they deliver...that has not improved, with a failure rate above 80%. We have been paying for it with our hard-earned tax dollars, that is the fifth highest amount paid per student in the world. Should we accept such a high failure rate from our high schools, but not from any business or activity? Businesses survive only if their customers are satisfied with the quality of their products and/or services. Schools survive because they get paid regardless of the quality they produce. The same is true with the education department of universities that produce teachers. 80% rotten fruit from the supermarket we would not accept, but we accept this from our public schools FOR OUR CHILDREN? There are a very small percentage of American public schools that compare to the average of the top ten countries in education results. The general public simply does not know the truth because public schools present a picture that is better than reality. THEY ARE LYING TO THE PUBLIC. However, you will learn on this website how to find out the facts. Do your homework about the schools for your children, and believe only national test scores for public schools. It is time to act and demand much better public education from state leadership. If we do not, our children will pay a terrible price with unemployment. A school district OBJECTIVE needs to exist with an annual operating plan to reach that objective, in order to improve our results. We could use an average ACT score for a school district objective, that is 5-10% higher than the previous ACT score achieved, BUT WE DO NOT. Teachers do not want to be measured about the job they have done. School districts do not want to be measured. Elected school boards definitely do not want to be measured. Such objectives do not exist today. It is the schools that produce the academic results. Wouldn't it make sense to measure class/school achievement against an academic objective like an average GPA, measured year-to-date every month? Of course it would, but we never measured individual school performance! NEVER! No wonder we have poor performance at any grade level in most schools. Let us repeat again. To increase the ACT score, that shows what our children learned, we need to know what is being achieved every single month in each school as a management tool. We have never done such performance measurement monthly or even annually in the individual schools and never created an annual operating plan to reach an objective that is a specific test score achievement. That changes the principals' job. The school principals are the key people to improve education. For that reason, we need to have the biggest incentive compensation for them. Very strange that we do not have that because it is the schools that generate the results. We also never focused management on the individual school's performance. We need to see how each school is progressing every single month and that means that we need to have an objective every month, a GPA objective could be good enough for such objective, that we use to measure on a Year-To-Date (YTD) basis by calculating the ACTUAL average monthly GPA YTD. If we are not reaching the GPA objective in any school in any month, the principal may be able to take action to find out why and raise it to save the year. That is why we need a monthly objective. To set a GPA objective, we need the average GPA for each of the preceding five years per school and per class as tools for the principal's planning. As an example, we would suggest a significant incentive award for the high school principals to get them to focus on achieving the ACT and GPA objectives. $10,000, for one or more high school principals who not only meet their objective but deliver the greatest ACT percentage growth during the last fiscal year, and one or more $5,000 award(s) for the non-high school principal(s) who deliver the highest GPA increase beyond the objective that was set. If there is any effort made in any school to cause the school GPA to be higher than by legitimate testing, that school's principal may not be considered for this incentive. In view of robotic entry we would use a ten percent growth from the prior year as minimum growth in the academic achievement objective. To get the best results, principals need to be able to change their resources and make decisions. To that end, it would make sense to delegate from Central Management, accounting, and financial decisions as long as his budget has not been exceeded, HR decisions about employees, budget preparation, and presentation, and Central Management needs to ensure that the spending difference among schools on a per-student basis shall not exceed 50%. For example, there is no point in allocating 150% more money per student to a school that had very poor performance for more than a decade if that school did not improve its results within three years. There must be a single objective for every supervisory or management position in every school and in Central Management to help achieve the performance objective of their own school or each and every school (GPA) if their responsibility covers several schools and the school district (ACT), if they work in Central Management. We need to raise the ACT Readiness of the school district from 27% only in 2016 of those graduating (only 3% for African American students!) to 80% average ACT Readiness within four years at most. 80% ACT Readiness for ALL minorities as well. Visit Success Academy Schools in NYC who are producing top one percent results passing even most private schools with poor, inner-city African American and Hispanic children only! Also visit Finland for the same purpose and see how one of the best systems in the world works. Three principals to visit each and prepare a report on their return about what these destination schools are doing differently to achieve significantly higher results and what we should implement in our own schools. Nothing is cast into concrete. The objective is to increase education performance. It is very important to try new ways that others tried and you saw working elsewhere with excellent results, if one wants to improve significantly. When one is 40th in performance, it is not possible for such people to come up with methods that will result in significant gains, because they dropped to 40th because their mental preparedness and experience is not at a level where one would need to be to take large enough steps. Just to review because it is new, since the ACT is used only in 11th grade: we need a different test to be used by the schools themselves, both monthly and annually, for example a grade point average or GPA. Schools never had an objectives-driven operating plan, although it is the schools that produce the education results. So this is what we need to do, because the dropping of our education quality is now facing aggressive opposition by robotics. Employers want the robotics, because current high school output cannot provide a large enough competitive workforce that is well trained on basics. No wonder! Schools never had to meet performance objectives. That has to change. Look at the average year-end GPA for each of five years, and compute their average. Take the average ACT score for the same five years, and compute their average. Divide the average five-year ACT score by the average five-year school district GPA. The answer is the mathematical relationship between the ACT score and the school district GPA. This will give us about plus or minus 10% accuracy when we use GPA tracking to where we are relative ACT performance, and that is good enough for GPA tracking to the ACT score. Now take the average ACT score that is your objective for the school district, e.g. 10% higher than the previous average ACT score. Divide it by the mathematical relationship between ACT and the school district GPA. The result is the school district GPA that you want to beat in every school by year end.

These are the ACT results above from each Knox County high school for the past thirteen years. Too many children are graduating unprepared (NOT ACT Ready).

WE ARE FACING FOUR MAJOR THREATS AS A NATION CREATED BY OUR POOR PUBLIC EDUCATION   MAJOR THREAT NO. 1 is to our national security (most importantly as a result of cyber warfare), that requires very well educated soldiers, civilians, operators and developers for tools, "weapons", and decision making. Everything is computer controlled for operational and economic reasons. Our electric power grid could be hacked and disabled or destroyed by a better educated enemy. Our technology developments and designs for vitally important things that cost us billions to discover/develop could be hacked and stolen free by a better educated enemy. Intelligent weapons require very well educated soldiers to use them correctly, educated beyond high school. We need a healthy economy (money) to be able to develop the best well-educated people to defend ourselves and to improve our economy. That makes our failing education strategically the most important problem that we must correct. We must change many things like our immigration laws and practices, but most of all, we must improve greatly the poor education of our children urgently. This is how a third world war would begin today, and this kind of activity already started. See: Our educational decline has been jeopardizing our national security.   MAJOR THREAT NO. 2 is the impact of poor public education on the entire population since 1970. In 2015 74% of all US high school graduates were prepared only for minimum wage jobs that will be replaced by robotics within just a few years, because these students cannot do even the simplest jobs as required. our education unions and lobbyists and our legislators who worry about losing their jobs, HAVE BUILT A HUGE POWDER KEG BY IGNORING PUBLIC EDUCATION PERFORMANCE The most dangerous in domestic affairs and education is black student performance, with 95% not being ready for any but minimum wage jobs when graduating from high school nationally (98% in Tennessee). WE HAVE CREATED THE FUSE FOR THE POWDER KEG AND WE ARE IGNORING IT The state Education Department is actively participating in dumbing down the education system with both actions and lack of actions in critical areas. We blame parents when our school performance is poor with all students. Many black students deal with more poverty and single parents than others. Granted that we saw US education dropping since 1970 and that reduced job-required knowledge of today's parents, in turn reducing their family income. As far as bad inner city environments are concerned, Harlem and others in New York are probably the worst in the country. However, a 42-school charter school in New York City's inner city areas produces top 1% results (Success Academy Schools) with the New York State Common Core tests statewide, beating even most private schools, without parental help. They are achieving this with poor inner city black and some Hispanic children since 2009! They have mostly primary schools and middle schools, now beginning to open high schools as their graduates need them. Why are we not producing the same great result? Why are we not visiting Success Academy Schools to learn how they are doing it? Or better yet, Finland. We should be ashamed of ourselves for the poor public elementary and high school results in general, and especially the black and Hispanic students' results that are even worse, for not doing anything to improve them all. Instead, the above poor results like 98% of black students not being ready when graduating from high school, very foolishly builds a big fuse for the social "powder keg", by not learning from the high performing countries how to teach successfully any demographic group. Not only we produce terrible results for an entire class, school or school district creating at least 3 out of 4 students not being prepared, but we are destroying the future of almost all black children, when the Success Academy Schools' example in New York and especially Finland clearly shows that THEY CAN DO FAR BETTER THAN WE ARE DOING NOW.   MAJOR THREAT NO. 3 is to our economy. We compete worldwide with our products and services in all industries. People and companies buy products and services based on their quality and cost. That in turn depends on how well educated each company's workforce is, from research and development PhD's through sales and service, down to manufacturing/production. How well the high school graduates are educated in any company of any country is the most important gateway to a high quality workforce that can create and make/provide the most competitive products and services worldwide. Internationally we dropped to 40th in high school mathematics, and dropped in other subjects as well. That in turn weakened our workforce by dropping their skill level and ability to learn, weakened our product and service competitiveness, and that lowered our national income and tax income. We have lost entire industries to international competition. Initially we lost to lower labor cost, but after a few years they lowered their cost by robotic automation on a larger scale than we did. For example, China replaced one million workers in one huge electronics company alone with robotics to improve quality in 2016-2017. We have been under 3% national income for ten years now, our national debt rose to TWENTY-ONE TRILLION dollars in 2018, on which we have to pay many TRILLIONS in interest. 3% is not a gain. It is only a break even level with current expenses. High school education must be improved very significantly to reverse this dangerous trend, and find a solution for those under educated in the past who will be replaced by robotics with job suitability testing, education for the best job so indicated, and help to get those jobs.   MAJOR THREAT NO. 4 is to a large percentage (60-80%) of high school graduates and today's workforce. New technologies will arrive faster and faster, offering new employment opportunities. The new jobs will require more education and addition to job retraining. The problem is that today's high school graduates did not receive enough education that would lay a proper foundation for the new jobs. With such fast changes, education becomes a lifetime learning effort, which would require a large amount of remedial education to start the new technology-related education for jobs. Unfortunately, our high schools have done a very poor job during the last four decades, making the learning of new jobs based on new technologies impossible for most. If we wish to save this sinking ship, we must focus not only the school districts on the right ACT objective that is 10-15% higher than last year's actual ACT score received, but every single school with a monthly, year-to-date academic objective (e.g., GPA) that is also 15% higher than the previous year's actual GPA achievement. We need ACT score school district objectives that are 15% higher than the last ACT score achieved, and we must also have monthly year-to-date academic objectives (e.g., GPA) in every management and supervisory position in every single school, called the Annual Operating Plan. SPECIAL NOTE: For the past 19 years many people were of the opinion that the central management of the Knox County, Tennessee school district was bloated. They were correct. We found two standards published about what the maximum size of central management should be. One is the research projects of Dr. Allan Ornstein, Dean, St. John's University's Graduate School of Education in New York City. The other was presented in a letter by the American Association of School Administrators. They both agree that central management administrators and their support staff should not exceed one percent (approximately 95 for Knox County, TN) of the total employees of the Knox County, Tennessee school system (approximately 9,000). The said school district's own published head count for Central Management has been between 300 and 400 people or three to four times the normal size. In view of this huge difference, we requested under the Tennessee Open Records Act a list of school district employees, who are neither directed or performance reviewed by a school's principal or said principal's chain of command within his/her school. That number is above 1350, or 12% of total employees, but we need to examine its organizational structure to decide what the real size of Central Management is. When we know the answer, we will publish it here. There is no question that Central Management is VERY bloated. The question is how bloated it is. We are estimating it to be higher than 8 times normal. Personal income levels depend on a person's education, if his/her education specialty is in demand by employers. Poverty is increasing but no one ties it to education's decline. But we certainly tie poor school performance to poverty. It is not a good idea to scream for jobs when one does not have education in a field that is in demand. But there is no screaming for a turnaround in quality of education, to provide a sound foundation in high school to ensure future employment for our children and grandchildren. ROBOTICS TO THE RESCUE OF EMPLOYERS WHO COULD NOT FIND WELL - EDUCATED HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES FOR THEIR WORK FORCE DURING THE PAST 10-15 YEARS   A new generation of robotics will replace not just those who are not ACT Ready, but more. It has already started. The poor education-created drop in knowledge of our children coming out of high school and a new family of robotics is already creating a major reaction. Many of our companies complained to governors starting 10-15 years ago about the poor education of our children, and having to move if they are to survive where the workforce is better educated. The ACT scores did not improve indicating no change. It is more important than ever for our children to attend schools with a high percentage of ACT Readiness among its graduates. All new technology-based products experience some delays/changes with initial use, generally not more than two years. That includes robots as well. Any such delay will not make any significant change in the 40-45 year working life of today's high school graduates. We made the mistake of NOT improving the ACT results in U.S. public education and NOT making most of our children more employable with more knowledge and better attitude for at least the last 50 years. We also turned more permissive with our children, not believing teachers and adults about our children's behavior. We made our children softer and dumbed them down in a world that is getting tougher, with the need for more education by the new, fantastic jobs that appear with each technological change, as old jobs disappear. We blame poverty for the poor schooling, forgetting that almost 50 years of dumbing down education, we actually created more poverty. The only remedy for more income is much more education and a positive, helpful attitude by workers on the job, without any feeling of entitlement. The current wave of robots that started in 2016, are non-cognitive, but are replacing many workers in the fast food and other industries. The next wave of robotics are cognitive. They can learn, speak, understand and will replace a large number of professional and semi-professional jobs, starting by 2019. The third wave around 2025 with nanotechnology that will create major cost-reductions and significantly increased performance with artificial intelligence far above average human intelligence. All these will increase robotic performance even higher while dropping their cost significantly within eight years or less. When the evidence is there that the objectives and/or operating plans have been incorrect or did not exist, and teachers keep doing their jobs the same way for decades, as is the case, one gets poor performance every time, and poverty cannot be blamed as the most important cause of poor performance. THE IMPACT OF ROBOTICS AND NANOTECHNOLOGY ON JOBS Prior to 2015, it was the low-end jobs in manufacturing mostly that were replaced by robotics and software automation. As of 2017 robotics are advancing rapidly to replace all low-end jobs. The deteriorating public high school performance has become a primary concern of employers. Artificial intelligence (AI) passed average human levels in 2015 and it is a major component of robotics. AI itself is about to become part of all applications making them easier and faster. Technology expenses dropped, making some robotic solutions much less expensive than hiring people with less education than the job requires. Robots can take many forms other than a walking and talking toy. Robotics will keep advancing higher by 2020 and beyond. That means that children with a high school education only, as education is being provided today, will not be employable longer than a few years. According to ACT, 83% of those in Tennessee, and 74% nationally in 2016, who graduated with a high school diploma are not prepared for more than a minimum wage job. Nationally that is close to three million children PER YEAR. That is a terrible result. Among African American graduates more than 95% are not prepared. THAT IS AN INCREDIBLY BAD AND STUPID RESULT. Robotics is not the reason for all this. Our poor public education is. Robotic automation is a technology that will constantly keep improving almost 100% of low-end jobs, progressing to higher level jobs through the coming decade. There is another technology that will be here by 2001 called Nanotechnology. It will revolutionize manufacturing of everything, reducing manufacturing costs as much as 80%. It will create everything with 1-100 nanometer precision, with layers of material structures that are the thickness of 1/20,000th of a hair cross section. It will accelerate enormously the use of robotics, materials science, medicine just to name a few. It will make invisible flying and self replicating robots a reality, and it will create an enormous amount of jobs. But those jobs will require more education. Many countries passed us in pre-school, primary and secondary education to increase the science and mathematics knowledge of high school graduates very significantly. They will be able to retrain to the new technologies. But our state leaders and Departments of Education dumbed down secondary education, the curricula as well as state tests, that will create too large a gap in required knowledge for the many new technology jobs. Even today, they just keep dumbing down our public education system. WE HAVE A BIG PROBLEM AS A RESULT. Naturally, there are many excuses for such poor result but a charter school chain in New York City, Success Academy Schools, is passing even most private schools! It has been scoring top 1-5% percent results with its poor, African American, inner city children AND the education management people are not willing to visit them from Tennessee to find out how they are doing it. A third of Tennessee's high school graduates did not even meet Tennessee's low graduation requirements in courses that are prerequisites for a diploma (Click here for details)! That means bad management with no controls to put it mildly and virtually no oversight of importance of the state Departments of Education. This is in addition to one of the worst education results per the ACT test that shows more than 80% of the graduating high school students in Tennessee do not know enough to be trained for most jobs. How can we be so negligent? How can that happen? It happens when the Tennessee or other state Education Departments do not pay attention to the way the school districts do their jobs and how external events are changing to effect employers' needs. We focus on and push children (and even change their grades) to graduate, even on the state level, and do not focus at all on ACT or SAT test achievement. It is damaging our school children, about 3,000,000 every year. They graduate from high school, but do not know enough as a result of their schooling to survive.   More than 70% of high school graduates with a diploma nationally (more than 80% in Tennessee) achieve such a low result that they will not be able to work any future job, then the outcome can become a devastating surprise. Why didn't any governor change that practice to focusing on achieving specific ACT test scores that are 10% higher than the last average ACT score achieved?   We believe that it would not be unreasonable to investigate the education establishment for fraud committed against both the public and the states and federal government, along with forensic audits that will show financial abuses. Why do we have bad results in public schools? High technology businesses are growing if well managed, in a highly competitive environment. The successful ones want to know and find out what their customers need and why. They find out without delay what their competitors are doing and are honest with themselves to recognize where they stand against competitors with any new development. No one guarantees them money to keep operating regardless of how good a job they do. They understand management as a science very well, as well as their jobs. They focus on what their customers need. If they do not do all this very well relative to their competitors, they will not stay in business.     Our education system has been in competition for several decades. Unfortunately, that fact goes unrecognized. Like any activity in a competitive environment, we must improve or we will have to pay dearly for our inattention to date. Our schools' product, the student, has to be competitively educated compared to other countries' best schools because high school graduates in any country will end up in the workforce. The workforce develops, makes and services the American or foreign goods and services. Our companies and industries are competing worldwide with all products and services. If any company's workforce is not educated well enough compared to the best in the world, their products and services cannot sell as well and will not appeal in price and performance to those who buy such products in any country. Our high school education dropped to 40th in the world in mathematics, a most important subject, and that is why we see the best products in most areas from other countries right here in the U.S. We lost entire industries because this fact went unrecognized. To be competitive, high schools should compare their results to the high international performers not only in their own state or country but to the best in the world, and should do everything mentioned in the paragraph above that businesses do to survive. THAT is the problem with our education system. We have not changed the way we do things in our schools for a hundred years. Other countries changed and passed us. In 2015 we dropped to 40th place in high school mathematics in the world.     Our teacher training programs are weaker at the university level than those in the top performing nations in education (click here for details). We must improve it significantly. Without that, our K-12 education cannot improve enough. The education system must change completely to be competitive with the best in the world if we are to regain our economic strength.   DANGER! We all tend NOT TO NOTICE if something is happening right in front of our noses, very slowly over many years. Since 1970 education expenses skyrocketed, but the test results went down. NOT A SINGLE GOVERNOR TOOK ACTION NOT TO ALLOW AN INCREASE IN EDUCATION SPENDING UNTIL THE RESULTS STARTED INCREASING AT A FASTER RATE. AFTER ALL, WE WERE THE LARGEST SPENDER PER STUDENT IN THE WORLDB. BUT THERE WAS AN INCREASING FOCUS ON GRADUATING AND HAVING A DIPLOMA IN THE HAND, BUT THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GRADUATING STUDENTS WENT DOWN. We wanted to do something fast. But giving the children knowledge with a teacher force that was not trained well, takes a long time. Too long.   THIS WAS GOING ON FOR ABOUT FIFTY YEARS, AND DURING THOSE FIFTY YEARS THE SPENDING PER STUDENT SKYROCKETED. BUT THE KNOWLEDGE DROPPED AS EVIDENCED BY ACT AND SAT SCORES AND EMPLOYER DISSATISFACTION WITH HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES. The state education departments focused school districts on dumbing down state tests to increase student grades with less educated children in order to make the graduation results look good. This was achieved by making teacher training at universities easier in the US, achieving higher graduation rates instead of improving teacher selection, teacher education, teaching better, improving teacher training and suitability for the teaching profession. That is similar to us going to the Olympics, and the Olympic Committee decided to award medals to all those who finished, but nothing for those athletes who finished first, second and third. The "Everybody Wins!" feel-good idea was born. Many other nations focused on hiring the best for teaching fourth grade or higher courses those who graduated in the top 10-30% of Master's degrees in the subjects that they would teach, who are also psychologically tested to be a good fit for teaching children.   The US teachers are pushed every month about the promotion rate of students from one grade to a higher one, if they are close to failing. They are pushed in some schools to even change scores and grades on some students so that they will graduate on time. The parents don't mind that little Johnny graduates instead of failing. So little Johnny graduates on time - without enough knowledge to be employed. THIS IS AN INCREDIBLY FOOLISH STRATEGY IF THE STATE WANTS EMPLOYABLE CHILDREN TO GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL. THE TEACHERS ARE PUSHED SO HARD THAT THEY ARE EVEN INSTRUCTED TO CHANGE TEST SCORES. THE RESULT IS THAT THE ACT SCORES REPRESENTING THE STUDENTS' KNOWLEDGE SUFFER, AND 83% OF THE GRADUATING CHILDREN ARE NOT "ACT READY" STATEWIDE. THEY ARE UNEMPLOYABLE. THIS IS SO STUPID THAT IT BOGGLES THE MIND. IF EACH SCHOOL DISTRICT DID TWO THINGS: 1. USE A GPA OR A.C.T. OBJECTIVE THAT WOULD BE 10-15% HIGHER THAN THE LAST YEAR'S GPA PERFORMANCE, 2. STARTED IMPROVING TEACHERS WORKING CONDITIONS AND INCREASED THEIR SUBJECT EDUCATION, THE ACT SCORES WOULD INCREASE AND THE GRADUATION RATE WOULD GO UP AS WELL EVEN IF THE 10-15% INCREASE IS NOT ACHIEVED. MAKING THE TEACHER'S JOB MORE DIFFICULT IS NOT THE RIGHT WAY. NEITHER IS THE TEACHERS' CLAIM THAT THEY ARE BEING FORCED TO TEACH TO THE TEST. HOW DO THEY PROPOSE TO FIND OUT IF THE STUDENTS LEARNED ENOUGH OF A SUBJECT THEY TEACH? I ACTUALLY HEARD A SUPERINTENDENT SAY ON TV THAT TESTING IS NOT NEEDED BECAUSE HE CAN TELL BY LOOKING INTO A CHILD'S EYES IF HE IS PREPARED OR NOT!   "Never underestimate the power of: stupid people in large groups!" George Carlin Examples: approval for students to use calculators in our schools; state education departments creating "cut scores" to raise scores while dumbing down the students; having the requirement for objectives that are meaningless and/or unmeasurable, AND CERTIFYING TEACHERS WITH POOR PREPARATION ARE EITHER INDICATIONS OF STUPIDITY ON TOP OR PLANNED DESTRUCTION OF THE NEW GENERATION THROUGH POOR EDUCATION. We have an unusually high level of poverty in the U.S. Increasing education is the only way out of poverty. However, poor education is the best way into poverty. Since 1970, our public education declined, increasing poverty. Our investigation shows that the declining education reduced the possible income progressively during the last 50 years, with poverty increasing especially for African American children. Let us repeat: INCOME LEVELS ARE EDUCATION DEPENDENT. THE GENERAL REDUCTION IN LEARNING SINCE 1970 AS THE EDUCATION SPENDING INCREASED AGGRESSIVELY, DID NOT RAISE PUBLIC INCOME BUT REDUCED IT. THAT HAD TO BE A MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR TO OUR UNUSUALLY HIGH POVERTY LEVEL. WE CAUSED IT BY IGNORING EDUCATION WHILE OTHER COUNTRIES IMPROVED IT AND PASSED US. THAT IS HOW WE DROPPED TO 40TH WORLDWIDE IN HIGH SCHOOL MATH.   A school system called Success Academy Schools in New York City has been producing TOP ONE PERCENT TEST RESULTS WITH POOR, AFRICAN AMERICAN AND HISPANIC INNER-CITY CHILDREN, PASSING EVEN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS! The children they are educating are from the worst inner city area of the nation, with poverty and single parent families who have to work low paying jobs to support their children, yet Success Academy Schools is delivering excellent results with those children. They have 41 schools with about 14,000 students, and they have 19,000 families wait-listed with their children. Clearly they must be doing many things right. Yet the Knox County, Tennessee elected school board members, who are paid $20,000-25,000 per year without term limits, and their school district spending now half billion dollars per year with the above bad results, are NOT willing to visit the Success Academy Schools in New York to learn how to achieve much better results or send others to learn how to produce those excellent results. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS? IT MEANS THAT THESE BOARD MEMBERS DO NOT CARE ABOUT OUR CHILDREN, IN ADDITION, TO NOT HAVING ANY IDEA ABOUT HOW TO IMPROVE THE EXTREMELY LOW SCHOOL RESULTS.     We are showing on this website conclusively why the public education system was and is unwilling to learn to improve. It's poor management that dumbed down our children's education as well as our state tests during the past 50 years, while their spending skyrocketed per student. THE MONEY IS GUARANTEED TO BE THE SAME FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO BE AT LEAST THE SAME AS WHAT THEY RECEIVED THE PREVIOUS YEAR UNDER TENNESSEE LAW, UNCONDITIONALLY. TO MAKE IT EVEN WORSE, THERE IS NO PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF TEACHERS BASED ON ACTUAL STUDENT RESULTS IN THEIR CLASSES. What other job exists that guarantees your income, and the performance review is based on four one-hour visits to your workplace per year to observe you? There is not a single objective about increasing the education results when our results are only a very low 27% ACT Readiness when it should be 80% of those who graduate. But your academic achievement results with the children do not count. No governor stopped this destructive behavior and spending since 1970 to date and did not establish changes that would raise the ACT Readiness percentage more than 5% best case, the test that was not dumbed down in the past. That increase has not happened yet and would be insufficient with the last ten year's trend. Governors need to get the school system fixed from grade 1, instead of spending more millions patching the bad results with two free year's of education.   We are training children today for jobs of 50 years ago, and we are not doing it as well as we did then. Robotics can do a high-quality job in environments where the jobs are boring for a human being and highly repetitive. They will replace humanity in such minimum wage jobs within 2-3 years. Robotic capabilities will improve fast to be better than human beings in more sophisticated better-paying jobs, especially if we do not make our public education better. If we do not enhance our curricula (higher math to include Calculus 1, Reading performance fixed, all three science courses to be increased with more advanced data, add music and art back to enhance right lobe brain development, that is key to good decision making, with teachers focusing on future jobs, and do a much better job teaching) the great majority of children will become unemployable. That is the decision that our political leaders must make. That decision should have been made at least ten years ago, but so far they have not made it.     Comment by the former superintendent J.M. in 2015 (Knox County, Tennessee) about Knox County having a "solid B" performance, TCAP, the Tennessee state test. It is easier than the ACT and therefore its scores are higher. But the typical scores on the TCAP were in the 35-45% (percentage of correct answers) range. Clearly, that is a failing grade. The percentage score reflects student knowledge correctly. To make such poor scores "look more acceptable to the public" and to graduate children faster, the Tennessee Education Department came out with something called "cut scores", to make poor scores look good. The cut scores are a "conversion table" that converts a 35-45% low score to a "respectable" B grade. We wonder why we decided not to fix and make the education system more rigorous because tests are always designed to test student knowledge on the basis of the curriculum for a given grade. This way, we are short-changing the student. They become unemployable in greater numbers as a result. We are changing the Tennessee state test to a new one and stopped using the old TCAP. We are told that we cannot use the new test for two years. Why? Because the state has to determine first how to set the new CUT SCORES on the new test. We have been dumbing down the population for many decades now, since long before 1970. The older generation sees the result of this dumbing down. They must be horrified when talking to most high school graduates.   "Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn." Peter Drucker, 1909-2005, Father of 21st Century Management By Objectives The changes in science and technology are coming faster, but not in our schools. We teach the same old things, the same way we did 50 years ago. 39 countries changed and passed us as of 2016. Our universities (teaching degrees) and public primary and secondary schools need to teach what is needed for future jobs following their high school graduation. Instead, they teach what was appropriate 50 years ago, with teaching methods we used 50 years ago (e.g., compare the U.S. vs Finland's education system). Robotics replacing many low-end jobs was known more than ten years ago, but the U.S. universities' education departments did not change their curricula yet as of 2017 in the high school subjects even today. The great majority of our high school graduates cannot speak or read or write properly in English, cannot even do basic math, but robots can. The international trend for teacher training is to complete both a BS or BA and MS or MA in the same subject they would teach, graduate with the Master's degree in the top 10-30% in their Master's program, be identified as the right match for the teaching profession, then hired and learn the latest developments in teaching methodologies. Almost all customers preferred to deal with the robot at McDonald's pilot test for robotic automation, instead of dealing with a human employee, and McDonald's decided to fully automate 25,000 stores. Teacher training at our universities needs to improve significantly, as well as the management of our school districts in order to achieve an average ACT score of 25 or better if we want to succeed.     74% of our high school graduates are not prepared well enough to be educated for future jobs. A new generation of robotics will bring many benefits for us but it will replace poorly educated high school graduates and workforce members within three-to-five years. It was our responsibility to ensure the quality of our education system. No one can do that for us. Internationally we dropped to the 40th place in high school mathematics from the top in 1970. Our public education declined before 1970, as our spending skyrocketed per student. The USA is now the fifth highest spender per student. Our national debt also skyrocketed to $20 trillion dollars during the last ten years, as our national income declined because our poor education weakened our workforce. Just look at where the products you are buying are coming from. We as a nation must be competitive worldwide with our products and services in all industries in order to survive. Our competitiveness depends on how well educated and experienced our workforce is, and that in turn depends on how well prepared our workforce is coming out of high school.       The ACT or SAT tests measure what children have learned from grade one to twelve. They are given annually in grade 11 of high school. They would be excellent for setting an annual objective to meet a specific score that is 10% higher than what was achieved in the previous year. They are ideal because the objectives must be a key indicator of success or failure, both, and they have to be measurable with numbers. However, to meet an annual objective, one needs monthly objectives in the individual areas that actually produce the results. Those are the individual schools. They each must have a monthly objective to achieve each month or year-to-date each month, a result that is 10% higher than last year's actual result for the same time period in the same school. A grade point average or GPA could be an effective measurement for this purpose. I can assure you that we are up against an education system that has never done anything like this and never measured individual performance as a measurement criterion in our schools, and as a result never compared themselves against the best in the world and learned how they achieved their high results to become better. Education cannot improve until we do so. More about operating plans later. They are also vitally important to make sure that the correct objectives are achieved. There is no way to improve the poor performance of the past without such measures. About 60% of the US high school graduates use the ACT for end of high school assessment. We would like to show you how to find out what these charts mean, and how they compare with what you read and heard about your schools' performance. The problem could be solved, if the public was made aware of this dangerous situation to ensure that the needed action will be taken by the school districts. Our results were so low in 2017, that a greater than 10% improvement would be needed in every future year for ten years to get the ACT readiness of graduating students from the current 24% to 80% minimum. THAT COULD BE DONE, BUT NOT WITHOUT CHANGES IN THE WAY WE TEACH OUR CHILDREN AND MANAGE OUR SCHOOLS. Our children's and our nation's success or failure depend on how good an education our children get from our public schools. Why? Because our high schools feed our workforce or higher education (who also feed the workforce). How well educated and experienced our workforce is has a major impact on how well they can design, make and support the competitive products and services they created.   THE HUGE GRADUATION (88%) vs. JOB READINESS (27%) GAP HOW AND WHY ARE OUR CHILDREN DUMBED DOWN IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS?! A few decades ago, all children who graduated from high school and received a diploma, were ready and prepared for job training or a university. What kind of education are our children getting if there is a huge difference between those getting a high school diploma (88% of those who entered high school), but only 27% of the graduating class who are prepared for job training and further education?   Why brag about 88% graduation rate when 83% of those who entered 9th grade are graduating with a diploma, BUT are unprepared to become self-supporting or to obtain more education to be so. Something is very wrong when we call this " EXCELLENCE FOR ALL CHILDREN". The school district is not talking about educating our children well.   Low to medium compensated jobs will go to robots. New technology-related jobs will require more education. To be prepared to retrain for them within six-twelve months, the high school curriculum would have to be compatible with the international high performers (more advanced mathematics, sciences, and include art and music).   Why don't we show as high school graduates with a diploma, only those who are prepared to survive in this century like other nations do?   Why are we comparing ourselves only to domestic school performers when we, the US, dropped to 40th place in the world in high school mathematics? We in Tennessee are a lot lower than that. AND COMPETITION IS INTERNATIONAL BECAUSE MOST COUNTRIES SELL THEIR PRODUCTS INTERNATIONALLY, THEIR WORK FORCE CREATES THE PRODUCT, AND THE WORK FORCE QUALITY DEPENDS ON THE QUALITY OF HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION THEY RECEIVED.   WHY ARE OUR POLITICIANS AND EDUCATION MANAGEMENT LYING TO THE PUBLIC ABOUT OUR POOR ELEMENTARY AND HIGH SCHOOL PERFORMANCE WHO ARE PAYING FOR IT THE HIGHEST AMOUNT PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD? FIX IT INSTEAD!   In 50 years we did nothing to fix it such that the A.C.T. scores would show significant growth, instead of dropping like a stone. We paid one of the highest expenses in the world per student! Instead, 39 countries whose cost of living is higher than ours, but education spending is lower per student, left us in the dust in high school mathematics! It is time to hold people responsible for such a poor job and for the destruction of our children's employability as a direct result! "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Albert Einstein BLOATED CENTRAL MANAGEMENT A BIG PROBLEM This is a huge problem-creator in large organizations above 1,000 employees. The same in education districts, but it goes unrecognized. There are many smart and well-paid employees in Central Management. They notice when their job is not needed, and embark on activities to justify their survival. The easiest for them is to go fault finding all over the organization. If top management is not management trai9n4d and experienced, which is common in education districts, such excess employees create a multitude of internal problems politically. There are specific organizational operating ratios that define the maximum size of central management. They exist in education management as well, and we present those standards here as well. One source is the American Association of School Administrators. The other is the result of a research project under Dr. Allan Ornstein, former dean of the Graduate School Of Education at St. John's University, an excellent private university in New York City. Both are presented below. Dr. Ornstein wrote more than 50 books on education management exclusively, and published more than 2,000 research papers on the same subject.   Keep central management small (less than 1% of total school district employees in administrators or employees who have people reporting to them since titles can be changed), and delegate as much decision making to the individual school principals as possible to increase the ACT results. There are two formal references for this. One is the American Association of School Administrators, read it here: "Consider the actual staffing pattern in public schools. U.S. Department of Education data show that total central-office administrative and professional staff represent less than 1 percent of the total staff of public school districts. Principals and assistant principals add only another 2.4 percent to this figure, according to data published by the National Center for Education Statistics". Decades of history shows that our bloated central management did not achieve any improvement in the poor results. It would make good sense to transfer the excess millions of dollars spent in central management to improve education in the schools, as soon as possible.   The other authority about the size of Central Administration is Dr. Allan C. Ornstein's Research on Education Management Program below. Dr. Ornstein recently retired as Dean of the Graduate School of Education at St John's University, a highly respected private university. Dr. Ornstein published more than 50 books on education management and more than 2,000 research papers on education management. His conclusions are in agreement with general management practices.   CONCLUSION ON CENTRAL MANAGEMENT STAFFING FROM THE TWO HIGHEST LEVEL SOURCES IN THE EDUCATION FIELD IS THAT WITH THEIR SUPPORT PERSONNEL INCLUDED: CENTRAL MANAGEMENT SHOULD NOT EXCEED 2% (TWO PERCENT) OF THE TOTAL SCHOOL DISTRICT EMPLOYEES. WITHIN THE SCHOOLS, THE PRINCIPALS AND ASSISTENT PRINCIPALS PLUS THEIR SUPPORT PERSONNEL SHOULD NOT EXCEED 2.5% (TWO AND A HALF PERCENT) OF TOTAL SCHOOL DISTRICT EMPLOYEES. IT IS VERY OBVIOUS THAT WE ARE WASTING THE MAJORITY OF THE BUDGET ON EMPLOYEES WHO HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT HOW TO DO A JOB CORRECTLY. THAT IS WHAT THE RESULTS INDICATE.     The actual pages of the referenced book can be examined here for the second reference by clicking here. All Central Management employees, meaning all school district employees who do not work for a school and whose performance evaluation is not performed by a school principal or the principal's staff, should not exceed 1% (one percent) of the school district's total employees. The Knox County, Tennessee school district exceeds this limit by more than eight times! Such an increase represents $35-75 million dollars that could be producing much better results in the classrooms.   These references are based on USA averages. It should be remembered that the USA dropped to 40th place in mathematics for 15-year olds in the world in 2015, and that makes us significantly less efficient than the top 10 nations in education. They are managing with much smaller central management, than what is recommended by the American Association of School Administrators (less than one percent of total school district employees including both administrators and administrator support employees). Between 1995 and 2014 Knox County, Tennessee students increased only 14% but administrators increased 130%. The spending would have been more appropriate in the classrooms. BUT THAT IS NOT ALL. Administrators hire people to work for them. The real increase ends up 650-900% instead of an increase of 130% if they hire 4-6 people per administrator for only a 14% increase in students. However, with this huge increase in management, the ACT results dropped like a stone setting an all time low record in 2013 with a score of 20.2! ACT Readiness reports indicate that as a result more than 80% (statewide 89%, nationally 76%!) of those students who enter 9th grade are ready only for minimum wage employment, the types of jobs that will disappear. It is common knowledge in management that if you increase management numbers beyond the standard operating ratios, managers (administrators) will start justifying their management positions by actually creating problems through fault finding, interference with other areas, playing politics because real objectives do not exist. Such efforts hurt results. This huge percentage of management increase was not reversed to this day, and it did absolutely nothing but cost a lot of money! So...money is being shifted away from the classroom producing poorly prepared children in large numbers. Management overhead was increased purposefully, but the results dropped like a stone. I am sorry, but the wisdom with which the public's money and these decisions appear to be handled by boards and superintendents is mind boggling. No one in leadership appears to have the wisdom to stand up and reverse such foolish spending.

 

SCHOOL SPENDING

 

COMING EDUCATION AND TECHNOLOGY TRENDS   Robotics are spreading into many different industries, replacing even college graduates, reducing high school graduates' job prospects, since our high schools are graduating poorly prepared children. Too many cannot communicate properly, cannot perform basic math, are not reliable and have a bad attitude. See robotics. VERY STRANGELY the state Education Department appears to be doing some things that dumbs down the students, and we need to clarify such areas as soon as possible. Our student performance is limited by how well teachers are educated about the subject they teach, the latest teaching methodologies, and how capable they are to teach, such, that they TURN ON AND MOTIVATE the children to WANT to learn more. If a teacher does not know his/her subject far better than what he/she has to teach and cannot get excited about the subject he/she is teaching, he/she needs to be tested for match to the profession and if he/she is a good match than continuing education would be appropriate to a Master's degree in the subject. It appears that our teacher training is weak compared to many nations. It needs to be improved and working conditions for teachers need to be improved as well. However, improvement in working conditions and income is always difficult to achieve, without measurement of excellent results, and teachers do not want to be measured. See The teachers' challenge. "Things not going well with the education of our children" is an understatement. What would you do if, in the only hospital available to you, 80% of patients became infected with an incurable debilitating infection and die? And your child is sick, requiring hospitalization. Would you be very concerned? This analogy is better than you think right now. Public schools are the only option for many. Considering dropouts, more than 80% of those children who enter public school in grade 9 are unemployable when leaving high school. Parents should be VERY concerned! The education laws guarantee the school districts that they receive the same amount of money in the current year, then what they received in the prior year. There are no performance requirements. They have been doing a poor job much longer than for 19 years straight in the ACT chart we show here. As one can see on the ACT chart, with only some of the 80% of those who graduated "Not ACT Ready" can qualify at best only for short-term minimum wage jobs. According to employers, "today's high school graduates cannot read, write, communicate clearly, don't know basic math, and have a bad attitude on the job." Something is very wrong with this picture. Our school districts performed this poorly for more than 19 years. Public school management is so poorly prepared, that they cannot figure out why they cannot teach our children, and get educated and change so that you can do what a teacher should be able to do. We have been paying one of the highest amounts per student in the world for such poor performance. When we want to change some things within public education that clearly hold our children back, they threaten the politicians and do not change. UNFORTUNATELY WE BACK DOWN. We respectfully request that we immediately increase funding for schools that perform well, including charter schools, and raise the minimum performance we need from all schools such that if their performance is under minimum then we close that school. We have too many discipline problems, but do not want zero tolerance because some parents will be complaining. So we handicap the teacher instead and deliver bad results. A student went to the toilet during class, came back and threw feces at the teacher. The offender was sent home but showed up the next morning as if nothing happened. We have enough challenges with several things that must be corrected to give teachers more preparation time to achieve better performance. When you are all things to all people because they demand it, nothing will be done at an acceptable level. Education management does not want any changes, while their performance was unacceptable for decades. So guess what? Someone above them must make the decision to change immediately after a problem is recognized, and the person above them must have the authority to hire, fire or make changes in the organization.   A school's success with students is limited by how well-trained and motivated their teachers are. Some teachers may say that "I have taught for decades but these students just cannot learn!" That's the same as if a sales person said "I have been selling for 30 years, but no one bought." In addition, teacher training in the USA needs to improve both in subject knowledge and teaching methodology, because it is not competitive with the top 20 higher performing nations in education results. Our teachers come from the bottom third of university classes. Our competitors' teachers come from the top 10-30% with a master's degree in one subject that they will teach. IN FINLAND TEACHERS VOLUNTEER FROM THE TOP 10% OF MASTER'S PROGRAMS FOR BECOMING A TEACHER , AND SUCH VOLUNTEERS HAVE AN ACT 32 OR HIGHER EQUIVALENT AVERAGE, and will maintain the same high performance all the way to a Master's degree. The drop in school performance since 1970 in the USA reduced many families' earnings, increasing poverty in the nation. We forget the dumbing down result by state education departments, the loss of jobs and earnings, when we blame the education results on poverty.   Another contributor is school district boards of education not wanting to learn what to do and why, and we have been creating less and less educated people for five decades now or maybe longer. The states' education departments did not or cannot provide appropriate operating guide lines. In the top performing countries, such help is provided country-wide centrally, and not by school district boards. We must correct this situation if we want more employable people.     Another contributor is the state Education Department who dumb down the state test that was created to meet the requirements of the state curriculum. They do this with a method called "Cut Scores" to make the test easier to make the student scores higher for the public and to graduate more children. They also do another interesting thing. They require that the elected board establish objectives, but do not prepare a tutorial for the elected boards about what objectives to use, what needs to be monthly or annually, and also what an annual operating plan is, how to prepare one to make sure that the monthly and annual objectives are met. It is a wonderful tool to raise results, IF PREPARED PROPERLY.   We seem to support the philosophy that all decisions must be made by the locally elected school districts' board, because they, as representatives of the people know best what we need to improve education. We have about 13,500 different school districts nationally with elected boards as a sample of the population, and the entire population was dumbed down since 1970 or before. Look at the poor results. In 1970 we were on top in many areas. In 2016 we dropped to 40th as a country in high school mathematics. It is difficult to believe that the old philosophy of neighborhoods offering the best guidance when it is the population that has been dumbed down since 1970. So every single school district must do the work to reinvent the wheel without professional guidelines from the state education departments, or better yet nationally, to work together to reach the same standards to improve performance. What good advice is coming from locally elected boards to improve our high school graduates to be better than other nations? They create lack of focus on the right objective, and that can bring only bad results. That is what we have. It would be difficult to believe that intelligent people did not discover this decades ago, so the interesting question is why the governors did not correct the declining education problem for 50 years since 1970.   We must create an opportunity for better education through vouchers, tax credits and charter schools because public schools are not improving. There must be a function within the state ideally, or within the school district to have actual facts showing to the public which charter, or public or private school (vouchers) produces the best results. Increase the funding in schools that continue to provide better test results, and reduce the funding in those schools that are doing poorly. States and school districts must become much better in setting the right measurable academic objectives, like an ACT or SAT score that is 5-10% higher than the last one achieved. State guidance of school districts must become much better, the curriculum must be stronger, the teachers better educated with a master's degree in the subject they teach (and with continuing education) and better supported by their management giving the prepared teacher full authority about classroom decisions. Support teacher efforts in the subject they are teaching for a PhD. We must educate significantly more of our children with university degrees that are in demand. Not just any degree. That, in turn, depends on how well they do in pre-school, and in grades one through twelve. That is where we have a big problem with the great majority of public schools. Teachers need to check all students understanding while they are teaching, several times each day, so that they do not move on with unlearned material that can accumulate and stop that student's progress. We don't check the students' understanding of the material taught with every lesson in the classroom. This is one big difference between us and high performing internationals. For example, in Finland such students are switched to additional tutoring the same day after normal school hours until 6 PM.   Elected boards of education could not develop 80% or more of our children's education during the past 20-25 years to a good enough educated level, to satisfy the needs of employers or universities. We have more than three million open jobs. But employers cannot find well enough educated employees for them. Employers have been complaining during the last fifteen years that our public high school graduates cannot communicate in English properly and cannot even do basic math. Boards of education do not know how to set proper objectives that work or purposefully set improper unmeasurable objectives so that the school system CANNOT CHANGE TO ACHIEVE GOOD RESULTS. They cannot create a good operating plan with proper objectives to improve. The state Department of Education cannot provide guidelines to school districts evidently, as they should. The end result is that in the school districts no one changes the way they do their jobs and the results just keep going down. This could not happen unless the governors, state education and school districts' management DID NOT CARE ABOUT THE FUTURE OF OUR CHILDREN AS WELL AS OUR BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY. IF THEY CARED, THIS COULD NOT HAPPEN.   But the problem is much bigger than that. Neither elected school boards, nor state political leadership noticed a key error. Who educates/produces the students who will be graduating from high school? The schools do. Yet we do not have appropriate easy to understand monthly objectives, that produce good results, GPA-based, and operating plans within each and every school.   There is another big problem as well. Since 1970 school spending skyrocketed, but test results went nowhere. This has been going on for close to 50 years. What is the end result of such a practice for ten years, let alone fifty years, when the international competition has been out-performing our schools? The population gets dumbed down without even noticing it. We dropped from the top to 40th in the world as of 2016 (OECD PISA Tests).   After all this, do we still believe that the best way to guide education is through elected boards that represent the local public? This is a gigantic problem with education laws and management oversight by the state's political leadership and its education department, as well as school districts if the others do not provide it. Increasing our children's education is the only way out of poverty. However, poor education is the best way into poverty. Since 1970, our public education declined. That in turn increased poverty and spending to attempt to maintain our living standards. Our elected boards of education are not the only ones who could not solve this problem - and they should not be the ones. This is a huge mistake by governors, state education departments and by the congressional education committees in the states. No one recognizes yet that if you do not plan properly with the right objectives and operating plans, covering the areas that produce the results, YOU ARE ACTUALLY PLANNING TO FAIL. THIS HAS BEEN VERY OBVIOUS FOR DECADES. IT IS ALSO A HUGE POTENTIAL PROBLEM IN LARGE ORGANIZATIONS. We have been doing a very poor job in public education for at least five decades. Did that dumb down the public? Absolutely. Proper objectives and operating plans in schools could have prevented that. Did the dumbing down increase poverty by decreasing income? Absolutely. Whose responsibility was to prevent that from happening: state Departments of Education and governors. Was this accidental or purposeful? Mistakes this large are not made in large organizations. But state Departments of Educations could have made this mistake.   This is not a teacher problem. Some teachers are not suited for teaching. Many are great. School districts do not check that upon hiring a teacher. Too many teachers are discouraged by school district management, instead of being motivated by them. These are big management problems. Most are not interested in learning, like anyone demotivated, whereas in other fields/industries it is very common for employees wanting to learn more, even at their own expense. People who love their job do that. Too many students who could not produce good grades in their selected major in college, transferred to an education major because it was easier. On the other hand, in the high performing countries, they accept only the top 10% performers from the master's level programs for teaching, with a major not in education but in the subject that they would be teaching. That makes a huge difference. There are excellent learning sources out there for our teachers, or students. For example the company we list as an example publishes the best lectures from the best professors in any high school or college subject, and could be an excellent source: The art of teaching best practices from a master educator. Or an excellent company that produced more than 40,000 outstanding tutorials in primary and secondary school subjects, the Khan Academy. Both of these examples had major positive impact on teachers as well as students. "Next in importance to freedom and justice is GOOD public education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained." James A. Garfield (1831 - 1881) A child is born with a 100 billion neurons (special brain cells) in his/her brain. Almost all neurons he/she will ever have in life, unless exposure starting 90 days before conception to heavy metals, certain drugs, insufficient nutrition, cigarette smoke, or genetic abnormalities prevent enough brain cells from developing during pregnancy, creating learning disabilities. The exposure of the child to abnormal family behavior, absence of a loving environment, alcohol, heavy metals like lead in lead paint, continuing exposure of what we mentioned during pregnancy, and drugs will also have a negative impact on the child's behavior and ability to normally develop for life. From birth, brain cell interconnections start developing at a high rate until age 6, and slower thereafter for life. This is how learning, coping with difficulties, behaviors and personalities develop, and this is why the high performing countries create excellent preschool programs to start educating children through games very early in life, from age 3 to 7. We don't do that.     We do not prepare children as well for and in elementary school and later high school as other countries. We want to graduate them as soon as possible, and we have cases where teachers are instructed to change student grades for the better. Our elementary school performance ends up very weak, with continuing weakness in reading and mathematics, making high school learning more difficult. This process of insufficient foundation produces the poorly prepared high school graduates, and it makes college and job performance more difficult as well. We must eliminate this handicap by providing excellent preparation for subsequent classes, and stop providing an incentive for instructing teachers to alter scores in order to get more children advancing into the next grade faster, for faster graduation.     The state's focus on a 90% graduation rate, instead of focusing on a 5-10% ACT growth is creating this problem. It is not doing the state itself any favors. The graduation rate is not worth more than the ACT Readiness rate which is a function of the average ACT score achieved. Employers do not want children who are not educated well enough. They cannot take years to teach them.   WE ACHIEVE HIGHER GRADUATION RATES, 85-90% OF THOSE WHO ENTERED 9TH GRADE, BUT ONLY 20-30% of them are ready for job training, 80% will be ready only for minimum wage jobs, and virtually all will be replaced by robots in the low end jobs by 2020-2022. Why do this? The 12-13 year education costs us about $120,000-200,000 per child, and for that investment, we get someone unemployable who will need financial support until his life ends? It is interesting that our education did not recognize this problem and acted on correcting it in about 50 years to date. One wonders why it was and why it is ignored: Example1, Example2.   It appears that our leaders have not done anything for more than four decades to raise the most important indicators of education achievement, the ACT and SAT scores. Only 20-30% of our public high school graduates have a chance and only until 2020, to be trained for a better than minimum wage jobs. By 2020 robotics will replace most of the labor force in the fast food and other industries. Instead of only 20-30% of our graduates being prepared, we should be graduating 80-90% of our high school graduates with ACT READINESS, prepared to be trained for a job that provides minimal income for a family of four and the opportunity to obtain more education. Instead, 70-80% of our graduates with a diploma plus dropouts, are not prepared and will be replaced by robots in just a few years. Among African American students, 97-99% of those graduating from high school are not ready according to ACT and will not be employable. However...the Success Academy Schools in New York (41 schools) with poor, inner city, African American children ARE PRODUCING TOP 1% RESULTS BEATING EVEN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS. Obviously, it is possible to educate children far better than we are doing it, regardless of the color of their skin, without fear of law suits and without tolerating bad behavior. So instead of telling the public a lie about how well we are doing, show them the ACT performance charts we have here, and explain that achieving 20-30% ACT Readiness to be trained is nothing to brag about because those not ready will be unemployable. For that reason we cannot have discipline issues, because discipline problems interfere with the entire class.   URGENT ACTIONS NEEDED IN EDUCATION IT IS VITAL TO SHOW THE PUBLIC AND OUR EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS WHERE WE STAND COMPARED TO INTERNATIONAL COMPETITORS INSTEAD OF COMPARISONS ONLY WITHIN THE USA AND WORSE, WITHIN THE SAME STATE. WE DROPPED TO 40TH PLACE IN MATHEMATICS WORLDWIDE IN 2016. OUR WORK FORCE HAS TO BE INTERNATIONALLY COMPETITIVE, AND FOR THAT, WE DEPEND ON OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM TO MAKE IT HAPPEN. THEY ARE OBVIOUSLY NOT DOING IT.   "Things may come to those who wait...but only the things left by those who hustle!" Abraham Lincoln     "There is a plot in this country to enslave every man, women and child. Before I leave this high and noble office, I intend to expose this plot." President John F. Kennedy Seven days before he was assassinated. What did he know? > THESE ARE THE GOALS OF THE TENNESSEE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION IN 2017. "We now launch a new chapter where we will build on the strong foundation in each of our schools and districts to realize our goals for Tennessee students. If we are successful: Districts and schools in Tennessee will exemplify excellence and equity such that all students are equipped with the knowledge and skills to successfully embark upon their chosen path in life." HOW DO YOU MEASURE "EXCELLENCE"? "ALL" STUDENTS?! WHEN 83% ARE FAILURES TODAY?   "This is our unifying vision: success for all students upon graduation from high school. This is how Tennessee Succeeds. To this end, we have set three ambitious goals to guide our work through the next five years: Tennessee will rank in the top half of states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), or the nation's Report Card, by 2019. No one succeeds with low expectation goals like these. We the USA are 40th in mathematics in the world, and Tennessee is 35th-40th in the USA. We have to do better than be satisfied with being in the top HALF of Tennessee. We need people in management positions to set goals and objectives that are a stretch, AND KNOW HOW TO MANAGE TO ACHIEVE IT. The average ACT composite score in Tennessee will be a 21 by 2020. The ACT 21 goal was set about 15 years ago for 2020, and we are almost there in 2016. The way to get to a higher goal is with annual ACT objectives on the school districts and monthly GPA objectives on the schools that represent a little stretch, like 5-10% increase per year. The schools do not have specific objectives, yet they are producing the results. CREATE A COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT. I cannot believe that this is the guidance from the Tennessee Department of Education. The majority of high school graduates from the class of 2020 will earn a postsecondary certificate, diploma or degree. We will accomplish these goals by maintaining the department's current emphasis on rigorous standards, aligned assessment, and strong accountability, and by focusing on five priority areas: early foundations and literacy, high school and bridge to postsecondary, all means all, educator support, and district empowerment. As part of this work, the department will continue to support the governor's goal of becoming the fastest improving state in the nation in raising teacher pay."   ***THE IMPORTANCE OF MANAGEMENT TRAINING*** AND EXPERIENCE If one worked in a small company with only 15-20 people, one may encounter some people problems, some misunderstandings, but one can be successful. If one is in charge of 200 people, and 15-20 times more customers, the situation will be completely different. There is a management exercise where six people stand next to each other 5-6 feet apart. The instructor whispers a message into the ear of the first of those six people, who whispers into the ear of the second person's ear the message he/she heard, until the message is whispered from the fifth person to the sixth. Next you compare what the first person whispered to what the last person thinks he/she received, and they are different. So communications has to become more precise and in writing about everything important in the larger organization. The person heading the group will no longer have time to personally make sure that all things will get done with the quality required by the customer, the organizational and people problems will grow, communications from the top will change and will be reinterpreted as they pass through a couple of layers of management, the president and the management team has to ensure that all things are done legally, anticipating needs and planning projects will need to be done much more formally ensuring excellent execution, because "people do not do what you expect, but do what you inspect". People may or may not be different than their boss and they may interpret things differently then the boss, so written communication becomes much more important, written standards become more important, and the written policies about how we do things within the company become more important. Some people produce excellent quality work, on time, every time. Generally they are the people who are an excellent fit for the job and coworkers, and they are happy in it. Some do not fit well. But if you keep changing them, people turnover is very expensive. It can easily cost 6-18 months (more for mid-to-top level managers) of salary because it took time for the performance to decline and become a terminal case, for the manager or employee to decide that the job and employee are not a good match. A company of 200 people will not be investing $500-$1,000 dollars in testing the employee and his/her background to ensure that they hired the right person. Then you hire the person and some jobs can take a year or more of experience just to adjust to the ways the company works and does business. It is the management training that allows one to eliminate such problems or to provide methods for excellent, trouble free performance - TO GET THE MORE COMPLEX THINGS DONE, INCLUDING THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE RIGHT OBJECTIVES WITH PROFESSIONALLY CREATED OPERATING PLANS. Without these nothing will happen or improve, and morale may sink in the area that produces the company results, e.g., in the classrooms of a school district with the teachers. That was a very simplified description of what happens in a 200 person organization. The complexity of management problems increases with the number of employees in the organization. At 9,000 employees, things get much more complex, and without management training or guidance good results become "impossible" and politics enter the game instead of good performance. People do not recognize the problem, and produce worse results than they could with a little bit of management know-how. Unfortunately, such problems are many in school districts, hence the poor results. OBJECTIVES THAT DO NOT WORK This is where poor performance starts. Based on each objective that follows below, how can you tell what is needed, quantity or quality required, and by what kind of person and when. These objectives sound good, but they are unmeasurable, so anyone, based on their opinion, could decide if they were achieved or not. These objectives are unmeasurable, unrealistic, and unclear. These objectives do not measure anything that the curriculum includes, and that by itself disqualifies them as objectives.   Success Academy Schools is achieving top one percent results with poor, inner city black children in New York City, beating even many private schools. They raise the children's expectations from grade one on, by referring to them as scholars of the year in which they will graduate from college. Every child believes that they WILL go to college and will achieve great things, and every teacher reinforces this. It is a fantastic way to motivate kids. THE FOLLOWING ARE EXAMPLES OF POOR OBJECTIVES Because they are not measurable or specific, or not the key indicator of success through K-12 schooling. Board members many times describe great personal qualities or meaningless qualities or nice personal characteristics, but neither of those can be measured for achievement, and they have nothing to do with school achievement, so they cannot be an objective for a public school district. "Knox County Schools (Tennessee) will provide an educational program designed to help each student to be college and career ready upon graduation from high school. Through implementation of the Tennessee State Standards, students will be able to: Read a variety of complex text, both literary and informational, to build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities and broaden their perspective; Communicate complex information in a clear and articulate manner using effective oral, written and media skills; Develop conceptual understanding, procedural skill and fluency, and application skills in mathematics and science to solve complex real world issues and problems; Participate effectively in civic life with a solid understanding of world geography, economics, history and finance; Develop positive habits that support good physical, mental, social and emotional well-being; Appreciate and participate in the arts; Pursue the acquisition of world languages; Effectively use current and emerging technologies to access, manage and create information;" Think creatively and work collaboratively with others; Demonstrate flexibility, adaptability, initiative and self-direction; Demonstrate a commitment to lifelong learning and personal excellence; and Develop the 21st century skills necessary for a successful transition to college and/or career. Many of the above are good skills/traits, but they are not objectives for a school district. Can one describe how to measure them without bias, what each of them is, how to achieve them, how to tell when each is achieved and how well it is achieved (how does one measure progress toward achievement)? The above examples indicate that management does not understand why objectives and operating plans are necessary for achievement. Objectives must be a 1. key indicator of success, and 2. be measurable. How do you know what you need to do competitively if you know nothing about the high performers and how they are achieving their great results? The world has changed a long time ago, and because we know nothing about where we should be, we are in the gutter ruining most of the children's lives through our public schools. Most of our public schools are "FAILURE FACTORIES" unfortunately. Just look in the graph at the beginning that shows a list of high schools and the high percentage of graduates who are NOT ACT Ready. Those poor children will not be employable long. THIS SHOULD BE DONE ACCURATELY IN EVERY AREA BELOW: Important actions and questions when interviewing superintendent candidates If one is 40th in the world, with others moving forward faster than you, it would be impossible to catch up. The best way to improve one's position is to visit the competitors, study how they are achieving superior results, and implement and use their superior methodologies. Educational methodologies and practices are free from legal problems, if what one is planning to copy and one learns from the other countries' education system. ACTION: One has to be honest about performance history, and pick new candidates who have delivered significantly better ACT results than what we have delivered. This principle must not be violated. Take ownership of the fact that Knox County, TN (as an example, but consider your county), consistently picked poor superintendents with insufficient management training and experience, AND delivered poor results. It is not a good idea to celebrate in public the arrival of a new superintendent for 3-4 years as Knox County, TN did the last time in 2008, especially when no one checked his background. We celebrated the arrival of a new superintendent for 3-4 years, calling him a Miracle Maker without knowing that he will do well or not. He did not do well. Yet it was known from the start that he never even managed a single school, and was not management trained, when our opportunity required the management of more than 80 schools with more than 8,000 employees. The qualification mismatch created many conflicts around him. These are the most important indicators about what you will actually get. Most board members never paid attention to such indicators and picked the wrong candidate EVERY SINGLE TIME, because the board selection committee was inexperienced in several important topics, like interviewing skills for a CEO for a 9,000 employee organization, or recognizing every year that the ACT results were poor. ***ACTION: The management skills (e.g., having a successful principal who delivered excellent ACT results as a superintendent candidate) are very important for small organizations up to about 100 employees, but management training and experience becomes key to success as an organization grows beyond 100 employees. We have close to 9,000 employees at Knox County Schools, and we have never picked a superintendent who had at least 5 successful years with increasing performance, with at least one-third as large organization as the new organization will be. So the people-management skills were totally missing, and so was the knowledge required to improve the key indicator of success, the ACT score, for the school district. They will keep selecting failing superintendents unless they pay attention to picking someone who managed a school district that was greater than 3,000 employees and delivered growing ACT performance that was always above the Knox County Schools performance. Ignoring these important elements will continue the same poor trend: picking an unsatisfactory performer. ***ACTION: If one picked ineffective superintendents with poor ACT results every time, and one keeps selecting a new one the same way, a poor performer will be picked again, and you will get political games in behavior instead of good results for our children. That is exactly what we have been doing. ***ACTION: A good candidate already examined the organization before the first interview. Ask him/her about what she found about our strengths and weaknesses and what we need to do in detail to improve. If they cannot answer, we have the wrong candidate. ***ACTION: A good candidate will be very relaxed and will not get upset about any question you ask. Don't hesitate to test that. ***ACTION: Prepare the candidate's ACT/ACT Readiness record for the last five years. Has he delivered at least 0.5 point higher steadily improving average ACT result for each of five years than we did, in a school organization with at least 3,000 employees? For example, the Hamblen County candidate's school district ACT performance was significantly below ours. How on earth will he be able to do better for us? Also, do not bother with any candidate who changed jobs every four years or less. Superintendents have minimum job durations around three and a half years. Unfortunately, there are not too many out there who are good and looking for a job. I wonder if anyone looked up the ACT performance for the candidate to be interviewed. If good candidates are available, don't waste your time on a candidate who was not a superintendent or director of schools, or had less than 20 schools under him/her. That is the most important question.   Our own past performance tells us that we never picked such a candidate before because the selectors did not have the training and experience on the management side to recognize the importance of this fact, and if recruiting firms were used, the results were less than ideal. The above example about objectives or goals the Knox County Schools and our results indicate that no one on the board and no interim or permanent superintendent was or is schooled AND experienced in managing more than 100 employees with success. If they did, then we would see suitable objectives, operating plans, and far better results. ONE CAN SUCCEED ONLY IF ONE OPENLY RECOGNIZES "IN PUBLIC" ONE'S OWN SHORTCOMINGS AND WHAT HE/SHE DOES NOT KNOW, AND THEN TAKES ACTION TO CORRECT THOSE SHORTCOMINGS. ***ACTION: Do not be in a hurry to hire. If you do not have a good candidate, continue searching. ***ACTION: An external candidate always looks better because we know very little about him/her. On the other hand, we know about all warts that an internal candidate has. That is very good because you get no surprises. The key thing is to listen carefully to the internal candidate's idea about what needs to be done to raise our bad results. ***ACTION: One can do a quick background check about any person's public record at intelius.com ***ACTION: Talk to his/her references, and find out if they know others who are familiar with the candidate? Call these "secondary" references to find out about what the candidate's successes were, and in what areas the candidate needs a little help to become more effective? ***ACTION: What mistakes has the candidate made during each of the last three years, and what did the candidate do about them? ***ACTION: Has he/she managed an organization for at least 5 years that has at least half as many employees as the new organization has, and managed it with good results? Our organization is about 9,000 employees, and having managed successfully for 5 years minimum one third as many employees is a suitable prerequisite. ***ACTION: The management part of a job becomes far more challenging after having managed at minimum a 100 employee organization, and increases in difficulty as the number of employees increase. ***ACTION: Unfortunately if someone did not manage a hundred employees in a growing organization and did not have management training, they would not understand this problem as well as someone with experience managing 100 or more employees. ***ACTION: The management training and experience with at least a 3,000 employee organization for five successful years is also vitally important. Those who did not have such experience may not understand the importance of this question, although it is the most important question in an organization of this size. ***ACTION: Teaching experience, AND having been a principal of a school for at least 5 years WITH EXCELLENT RESULTS EVERY YEAR, are also useful experiences if the candidate did well, and such experience should be present. ***ACTION: But the management experience in an organization that has 9,000 employees is far more important. Those who do not have management experience with successful results in any of these areas, will not do well. If anyone claims two years of successful experience in this area, it is too short to be meaningful. If someone claims five years of experience, with poor results, do not hire that person. ***ACTION: If one does not check a candidate's background, then let such person work for your competitor and not for you. Unfortunately, in education, such people are everywhere, in important positions - doing a poor job. We hope that Leroy in the above picture will not be the selected superintendent. But...you never know. We had some Leroys in the past and so did many other school districts. HOW DOES AN EDUCATION SYSTEM JUSTIFY THEIR POOR JOB-RESULTS WITH STUDENTS BEING SO POORLY PREPARED THAT 75-85% OF OUR GRADUATING CHILDREN ARE NOT PREPARED FOR FURTHER EDUCATION OR JOB TRAINING?! BUT THEY ALL GET A DIPLOMA FROM THEIR SCHOOL! The answer: ***ACTION: THIS MUST BE FIXED. 1. By giving children a much better education than what we provide today. It is not possible that 75-93% of a graduating class is too stupid to learn. 2. By lying to the public as in printing everywhere "Excellence for all children!" and by the superintendent (J.M.) telling the public that "we are doing well, a strong B average" when neither claim is even close to the truth. 3. By having a PR/Communication group within the school district that publishes positive stories about the schools, detracting from the ACT scores that tells us the truth. At one time, the school district under superintendent J.M. had nine full-time professional PR people.   ***ACTION: Employers have been complaining about the poor quality of high school graduates for more than ten years, and our leaders did nothing to improve the ACT scores. What is a fact is that close to 80% of our children, who are unprepared for life, are the product of our public schools, and that our education system is not good enough and must improve rapidly. It appears that our state and school district management does not feel that our teachers and schools need to improve, because they graduate 80% of the children who are not prepared. ****ACTION: Many excellent tutorial programs are available from Internet sources, like YouTube, or the Learning Company or the Khan Academy. They are designed to hold the child's or adult's interest and some are the lectures/presentations from the best professors and teachers nationally. Tutorials in any subject could be very helpful to student or teacher alike. They could be incorporated into the teaching and learning programs in all subjects we teach in primary and secondary schools, except sports. The best company in this area appears to be the Khan Academy. Google them. They cover every subject from preschool to high school graduation. They also have a collection of impressive tutorial programs for teachers to help them accomplish more in less time. For those in education management, read here what the best education systems are doing in the world differently. How many teachers and education system employees read and used in the past the tools presented here? Sadly, very few. Unfortunately most of us unless we are old enough, feel that we know everything, although we have very limited education and experience. Too many people are not interested in learning, a product of dumbing down for close to 50 years. School board members are not an exception. It is not their problem. It is the problem of old laws, and the state education departments whose senior staff is neither schooled nor experienced in management to be able to provide needed guide lines. ****ACTION: Your child is your child. He or she is not an adult. You, the parents are the decision makers at home. The teachers are the decision makers in school. There needs to be zero tolerance of bad behavior in school. The schools are NOT the providers of baby sitting services. The children's future job and income will depend significantly on how much they have learned in high school. Make sure that they work hard.   We have one of the highest rates of poverty in the world (see below). Blaming poverty for the poor school performance is not a good idea when it is the poor education that created a large part of the poverty. We recognized that education is poor for more than 20 years. Why have we not done anything that raised the ACT scores? We also noticed 22 years ago that we have a reading problem after grade 3, and it is still there when students are graduating from high school. We spent about $15 million on consultants. Today the problem is still not solved. We need to sober up. Most problems are not solvable by money. They are solvable by people who know how to solve the problem. We have about 3,000 teachers. And we don't have any who knows how to teach reading?! And we don't have any teachers who would know how to get the children excited about every subject that we teach? THAT IS VERY BAD.   ***ACTION: A drop in our education since 1970 must have effected job readiness for a large number of vocations. The only thing that can increase employment and earning-ability is a much higher education level. We have more than three million open jobs because our employers cannot find suitable educated candidates. The deterioration of our primary and secondary public education is turning into a very poor investment of millions of our tax dollars. But that is not all the damage. There is a lifetime loss of income that could be associated with the dumbing down of the public, that could be extremely damaging financially, all because public education has been mismanaged. ***ACTION: New technologies eliminate many low-end jobs, and open up many new jobs with better pay. The new jobs require more education. In 2016 we had 3.5 million jobs that employers could not fill because our high school performance was/is very poor. Poor education decreases income and leads to poverty. Too many public schools are "failure factories", that do not train our children well enough for jobs. Increasing education is the only way out of poverty. However, poor education is the best way into poverty. Since 1970, our public education declined. That in turn increased poverty and spending to attempt to maintain our living standards. ***ACTION: The right education must be completed first, before we can expect to get a job. Income will depend on the education one gets. Low end jobs with a high school diploma will be replaced by robotics. By 2020, a number of jobs will also go to robotics, e.g., in healthcare, accounting and others. During our life, continuing education with higher degrees will be the only way of life in the future. Continuing education does not mean additional degrees. It means additional knowledge obtained by any means. ***ACTION: Children's success with education depends the most on how well teachers are suited for teaching as a career, how well they are educated and kept up to date about the subject they teach and with improvements in teaching methodologies included. Teachers must be excellent motivators, which means that they cannot be struggling with low morale as they do today. School district management must be much better trained in management of people, to resolve teacher problems that exist today.   ***ACTION: And now please look at the percentage of graduates from each of the Knox County, Tennessee public high schools who are ACT Ready and the percentage who are not ACT Ready. Remember that ACT Readiness means only a 50-75% chance to finish ONLY one course of the first year of a tech/vocational program or a college program. This excludes even the first year of science or engineering programs in colleges because they have a much higher ACT mathematics score requirement than the ACT Readiness benchmark's math requirement. Those who are not ACT Ready, will not be employable longer than a few years with the following. ***ACTION: Looking at the charts on the left and above, the ACT Readiness percentage is very low for those who graduated with a diploma. We are pushing children to graduate instead of being properly educated for the work place or college. Isn't that foolish? It is not what parents want. Parents want 100% graduates with a diploma, all of whom are ACT Ready. Only foolish people would say "90% graduated AND 27% of them are ready for job training or further schooling, but 73% are not ready but maybe they will get a minimum wage job." So four out of five children graduate not ready today. However, the ACT Readiness of African American students is extremely poor, only one or two is prepared out of fifty. THIS IS A DISASTER. Note that a charter school chain in NYC called Success Academy Schools, that started in Harlem in 2006, with 41 schools as of 2016, is achieving a TOP ONE PERCENT result in the NY State Common Core Tests in mathematics, WITH POOR, INNER CITY AFRICAN AMERICAN AND HISPANIC CHILDREN. THEY ARE PASSING EVEN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS! At the same time, we are getting a bottom 2-5% ACT Readiness result only in our public schools for African American and Hispanic children. IT IS POSSIBLE TO PROVIDE FAR BETTER RESULTS THAN WHAT WE ARE ACHIEVING IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. IT CAN BE DONE, IF A FEW PRINCIPALS VISIT THEM TO FIND OUT WHAT THESE HIGH PERFORMERS ARE DOING TO ACHIEVE HIGH RESULTS. Success Academy Schools have a zero discipline-problem policy. Teachers have excellent benefits and compensation, and expected to do a good job. Some parents don't like the "zero discipline-problem policy".     ***ACTION: A minority of teachers do not like the work-related expectations. We would humbly suggest that you cannot have excellent results with children who are a discipline problem, who disturb all children in a class, and you cannot have success without teachers who have been well trained in the subject they teach, who work hard, AND LEARN ABOUT HIGH PERFORMING COMPETITORS, BECAUSE THEY ENJOY AND WANT TO BE EXCELLENT TEACHERS. Our board of education members (mostly teachers in Knox County, Tennessee in 2017) do not even want to visit the Success Academy Schools to find out why they are getting a top one percent result, because those who produce the bottom 2-5% ACT Readiness result (the Knox County, Tennessee school board) feel that they will learn nothing that could improve their dismal 2-5% ACT Readiness with black students! And we just touched on the biggest problem with our public school performance: most teacher training is poor (at the US university level), when our universities tend to be one of the best in the world in most subject areas. Teachers NEED TO BE matched to the teaching profession. Too many go into teaching because they cannot perform in the major they originally selected. Teachers need to be recruited from the ACT 30 and higher results from high school. Teaching needs teachers who have a master's degree in the subject that they would be teaching. That is what brings success to the other countries that passed us. Teachers need a "zero tolerance for discipline-problems" policy, that must be there for good results. More details later. ***ACTION: According to ACT, nationally 74% of graduating high school students, among them 95% of the African American students, were not prepared in 2016 but for close to minimum wage jobs that robots will replace in a few years. IS THAT ACCEPTABLE? In NYC a school chain is getting top one percent results with poor, African American inner city children! We could do much better if the elected boards uniformly acted using the same standards to achieve the kind of results that we should have. In Tennessee the state goal for more than a dozen years was to reach an average ACT score of 21, by 2020!! The ACT Readiness percentage of graduating students at ACT 21 is around 25% only, with 75% not ready. That's no improvement. Just look at the chart. Such a "no improvement", very low goal means that the management has no idea what to do to improve. Our children's education is out of control in public schools, but the education districts through the newspapers tell the public that "we are doing fine, but there is room for improvement." If you live in another state, you are not much better. I fear the time when soon we will have to deal with too many jobless young people, and the public will discover that they were fed lies by the education district, while poorly educating our children for which we, the public paid many billions of dollars. We are forgetting what happened to the public since 1970 and forgetting that we fell all the way to 40th place in the world, weakening our workforce, the general knowledge of our population, our products and services. We are getting dumbed down by the public education system, for which WE, the public, paid and pay. ***ACTION: Our national income dropped as a result to a "break even level" for about ten years we are told. Not quite. The national debt rose at the same time to more than 19 trillion dollars as of 2017. Let me see if I understand this in very simple terms. We keep spending as long as we have some money. Unfortunately we kept spending on the wrong things, not on things to ensure a good future national income, LIKE MAKING PUBLIC SCHOOLING EXCELLENT. Our public schools kept producing poor results while spending many billions of dollars. The education departments and school districts were and still are telling us at the same time how well they are doing. The majority of high school graduates can get only minimum wage jobs for a short time. McDonald's piloting of robot solutions showed customer preference for communicating with the robot more clearly, the robot could "upsell" the customer, AND robots did a better job for less money, increasing net income almost 20%. Not a problem! We did not and do not stop spending on things that do not improve education. We "borrow" money (using Treasury instruments to sell the debt), because our tax income is poor, and increasing taxes when we are the highest in corporate taxes in the world, a very bad move. What we "borrow" becomes "The National Debt". It is about $20 TRILLION now in early 2017. It is so high that we had to pay over $258 billion dollars in interest on it in 2016 (that's $167,000 per tax payer!!) the national debt interest is payable FOREVER at our current interest rate that was 6% in 2016. Just imagine what we could do with $258 billion, instead of paying interest to countries FOREVER every year who purchased our debt (or "loaned us the money"), with China and Japan being the biggest. The interest rate is too low and it is likely to increase. The national debt is also likely to increase more, in order to strengthen national income-producing activities and our weakened military. ***ACTION: The elected board members' great majority doesn't know (and the state's education department does not provide or also doesn't know): where we stand vs. the best international competitors, what the higher performers do differently than us and why , how to hire the right superintendent for a school district with 200-10,000 employees (a medium to huge management job), who knows how to increase our poor results because he/she was educated for it and has done it for minimum five years , how to set objectives that work, how to prepare operating plans that work, how to improve teaching methodologies, how to keep employee morale high and do all of it by facing and telling the truth. Elected board members get paid for it, e.g., $25K/year in Knox County, Tennessee. They do not want to or do not even think of learning what the high performing school systems do differently worldwide to get better results, and are not even willing to visit a much higher performing school in New York City to learn how they achieve their fabulous results. By doing so, they have been throwing most of our children under the bus, with very few exceptions. For the average ACT score of 21 in Tennessee, a state goal for more than a dozen years, if reached, we would get 74% of our high school graduates plus 5% dropouts not being prepared by their school system to be trained for a job, for which us, tax payers, paid $10,000-$12,000 per year for each and every student. HOW CAN A GOVERNOR ACCEPT SUCH A LOW ACT SCORE OBJECTIVE LIKE 21, FROM THE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT THAT GUARANTEES 79% OF THOSE WHO ENTERED HIGH SCHOOL TO BE NOT PREPARED TO BE EMPLOYED?! That is a lot of money, for which we must and should get better results. "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered. The point is to discover them." Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer & physicist (1564 - 1642) ***ACTION: There are too many tests. Some measure correctly (ACT, SAT, NAEP, and OECD-PISA internationally), and some show better grades for public consumption (the state tests that are dumbed down with Cut Scores or because they are easier). ACT checks its scores against what the tested high school student achieved a few years after graduation and adjusts its ACT Readiness benchmarks if needed. Their scores and Readiness percentages are accurate. Because the emphasis is on graduating as many children as possible instead of emphasis on academic achievement, we do have a problem with grades being changed for the better by teachers, principals and support for the same by their Central Management. This problem could be solved if the test is taken on a computer under a program that does not allow changing of grades without identification of the person who authorized the grade change (Examples). ***ACTION: We graduate close to 90% of those students who entered 9th grade in high school. Only 26% of our public high school graduates (and ONLY 5% of black students!) were "ACT ready" nationally in 2015 for training to go beyond a minimum wage job. The necessity to graduate more children is discussed at board meetings. Teachers have been mysteriously instructed from "above" to change grades so that some students who would fail, actually move on to graduate. The educational performance, the ACT results were and are terrible, because state set average ACT goal of only 21 (equals 24-27% ACT Readiness only). It should be an average ACT score of 25 or above (80% ACT readiness). In twelve years we never heard of any board meetings where increasing the ACT scores, and what we need to do to achieve that was discussed, and a plan was agreed upon to do so. Most of these poor students will be replaced by robots within a few years. As an example, in Knox County, Tennessee, the board members are paid $20,000 salary plus $5,000 for expenses and car allowance every year, but they never have time for discussing how to improve the poor ACT scores. Their results are worse than the above results. The public is not informed about this fact. They just pay for the poor education with their hard-earned money in taxes. We were one of the top performers worldwide in 1970. What we see today, the poor performance, the lack of relevant knowledge and interest by elected board members, the state education department or governors to correct the poor academic performance by taking steps to increase what counts, the ACT scores, is revolting. Although we became the fifth highest spender in the world per student by 2015, we, the USA, dropped to 40th place in mathematics that our public schools delivered (2016 OECD PISA tests). Some states like Tennessee, our example, are worse than that. All governors and many locally elected boards and superintendents hired started programs that "will improve education" with additional spending of many millions of dollars, all state tests were made easier to qualify for federal funding (No Child Left Behind Act) and a big effort is made to date to identify learning disabled and children of poverty, because the school district can increase the federal cash they receive for such students. School districts also proposed programs that would permanently increase the school districts' budget annually under the law. No governor of either party stopped the aggressively growing education spending in 46 years or started increasing ACT or SAT scores, that went nowhere! The old education laws gave (and give today) all management decision-making to the elected school district boards in every state along with a guarantee for them to receive at least as much funding as they received in the prior year, regardless of performance. The old education laws that no longer work were not amended. There are approximately 13,500 school districts in the USA, all doing their own thing, but very few who do it well. The requirement to be elected to them is a high school diploma only. Central management is bloated compared to what is defined by two authorities and presented (below). What appears to be motivating school districts is to increase the money they can spend any way possible, then push the students through each grade qualified or not, so that they can graduate 90% - with readiness for job training or further education of only 27% of those who were given a diploma!! The remaining 73%, plus those who attended but did not graduate, plus those who dropped out will be replaced by robots before 2020. Obviously our school districts are interested in money (we became the 5th largest spender per student in the world), and are not interested in the knowledge they teach our children (that is why we just dropped to 40th place in the world). We did not improve the schools; we did an excellent job developing FAILURE FACTORIES. One of the latest programs to improve the education of our children is a free additional two-year college education program. Remember that children learn and pickup all kinds of behaviors and habits as they increase their brain capacity during pre-school and the following 12 years of education. Without correcting the elementary and high school education, many children finished with limited knowledge below what they should have for high school graduation, bad attitude, bad ideas like a feeling of entitlement, and they learned all that in their FORMATIVE years. Two years of additional education cannot correct the formative years' behavior problems and poor study habits, but it may provide almost enough remedial training to improve the odds for a job short-term. Since it would be a miracle to educate those children who did a poor job in high school, it will provide a limited benefit, but at a very high price. To get a full benefit, the money should go to fixing the pre-school, elementary and high school education itself, make it competitive with the best internationals, such that we graduate from high school better educated children, including a good attitude toward work. Then consider a remedial program for those who finished high school previously. Putting only a "band aid" on mistakes after the fact is never a good and efficient solution. THE BIG QUESTION IS: WHY ARE WE NOT FIXING THE MANY FAILURE FACTORIES, CALLED PUBLIC SCHOOLS? CHARTER SCHOOLS AND VOUCHERS. Charter Schools are also public schools. They are less restricted by state and federal laws than traditional public schools. However, many are forced into a working relationship with the low performing traditional public school districts. Any such connection should be avoided. Public schools have an elected board. Charter schools have an appointed board and that can be an advantage. The need for these measures arose because the public school performance was/is dismal and over several decades they were not corrected. Private schools produce an 85-99% ACT Readiness. Public schools produced a 0-50% ACT Readiness of those who graduated. Charter schools had very mixed results but improving during the past 19 years. Of the top three high schools in the nation, two are charter schools. Some but very few charter schools can perform better than most private schools (Success Academy Schools, New York City, 42 schools in 2017 for poor black inner city children with top one percent results!). Their teachers, and superintendents come from poorly performing public education, with teacher training that is less than what the top international school systems are doing (Master's in the subject they will teach, psychological tests to match them to the teaching position, more graduate level training on learning disability diagnoses and the latest about teaching methodologies - before they start teaching in a few high performing countries). The only thing that will remove the need for charter schools and vouchers, is public schools who exceed charter school performance and deliver 80% ACT Ready graduates instead of just 25-27%. What will remove public schools is the good charter schools, vouchers, home schooling that produce much better results on the ACT and SAT tests than the public schools do. "He graduated from our high school ten years ago. He signs his name with block letters. He makes funny noises when he reads. And he smokes these funny looking cigarettes that he rolls up with shaky hands. His name is superintendent Jimmy Minimum. He must be very smart because he got his PhD in Education Policy. He said it cost him $2,500.50, so it must be an excellent university. We can't understand what he says. Don't tell anyone, but he doesn't understand either what he says." LET'S DIGRESS TO EXPLAIN A FEW THINGS THAT ELECTED BOARDS NEED TO UNDERSTAND FOR SUCCESSFUL PERFORMANCE     PAY VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO WHAT FOLLOWS. So far what we see is expenses skyrocketing yet the ACT or SAT education results, the only annual tests that shows what children have learned, did not go anywhere in 46 years, but our international competitors improved significantly as we are about to see below. We dropped in high school mathematics to 40th place in 2016 of 73 nations, from the top in 1970. The state-set performance requirements for schools are too low. That is an average ACT score of 21, that produces upon graduation only 25% of those who earned a diploma minimally ready. The state does not have appropriate objectives and operating plans to reach a 21 ACT score, so they could not reach it now for more than a dozen years. When the objective is too low to motivate or wrong, one cannot stop the poor escalating performance. It is like chasing a big bolder downhill on a mountainside. Most such children would not be accepted by employers if they graduated. Those children who do not want to work or are a discipline problem, should attend different classes or handed back to the parents so that our teachers have a chance to produce better results. We must change being a baby sitting service, and create excellent ACT scores instead. Why do we allow public schools to exist without closing them if more than 50% of their students with a high school diploma are not even prepared to be trained for a job?! WHY DO WE GIVE STUDENTS WHO ARE NOT READY A HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA? Why do we continue operating high schools at public expense for MORE THAN TEN YEARS if more than 90% of their graduates were not prepared for job training, AND WHY ARE WE SPENDING TWO AND A HALF TIMES AS MUCH PER STUDENT ON THEM THAN IN THE BETTER PERFORMING HIGH SCHOOLS? IF THE INCREASED SPENDING MADE NO DIFFERENCE FOR TWELVE YEARS, IT IS A FACT THAT MONEY IS NOT GOING TO THE RIGHT PLACES AND/OR FOR THE RIGHT PEOPLE IN THAT SCHOOL. HIRE A SUPERINTENDENT WHO CAN IMPROVE THEM SIGNIFICANTLY WITHOUT SPENDING MORE THAN DOUBLE PER STUDENT...OR CLOSE THEM. Why do we make excuses for such poorly performing public schools instead of making changes to improve their results? If a superintendent cannot make such changes within a couple of years, one needs a different superintendent, instead of letting hundreds of children become not educated well enough to survive. We hear objections against "corporate ideas" in education, but no one can explain what these are. It would be better if public schools and leadership worried more about their results and improved them. What corporate ideas are detrimental to education achievement? We must try systems that we have not tried to improve education. If one is against something, then offer a better idea! Many different schools and programs offer higher ACT READINESS than most public schools. Why should not the public, who pay for public schools via taxes, be able to choose a different school such that their child will succeed instead of having to attend a poorly performing school? If you don't like such choices, do something to make sure that the public schools perform better. Why should anyone support schools that prepare our children so poorly that the great majority, as much as 95% of the students, are likely to become homeless? We pay more than twice for more than a decade per student in the poorly performing schools without any improvement, than what the good schools spend per student. Is that good management of the people's money? If something does not work for two years, the money is not being spent in the right places, or the goals, objectives and operating plans are absent or wrong. If it does not work after two changes, then you have the wrong superintendent.   For almost 50 years, as the CATO study showed, our primary and secondary education deteriorated. The school districts kept delivering good news to the public, as one by one 39 countries went past us as we dropped to 40 place, the bottom of the international countries. During all that time we just kept spending more money per student and today we are the fifth highest spender per student, delivering poor results. That means that we became accustomed to the poor performance and we do not even see that when the result of such poor performance is loss of competitiveness with barely breaking even as a nation in national income for the past ten years. So we turned to debt and set an enormous record by driving our national debt to $20 trillion dollars. We must become more competitive, and start rising again in the national rankings. Today, our education is so bad that 74% of our high school graduates will not be able to exist financially and cannot compete with robots and more and more countries as a result. For several decades now, our strategy became one where we simply throw more money at a problem - and the problem does not get solved. We have been pouring more and more money into low performing schools, two and a half times as much per student as the better performing students get. And for decades, such extra spending did not create a change for the better. Why? Because we did not change the way we actually run our schools, teacher subject knowledge and teaching methodology and the way we handle student behavior that interferes with teaching and learning. It is good to see that some principals managed to turn around their schools. We should be able to learn a few good lessons from them. But we as a nation must do better and get back among the top ten nations in high school math, where we used to be four decades ago. References: A list of schools that were turned around, and how their principals did it. Mathematics in art: The Fibonacci Curve, is one of the most important curve lines in famous pieces of art, in architecture as well as in nature, and in astronomy. The curve is superimposed on a galaxy that is about 100,000,000,000 light-years in diameter with as many solar systems within it that have planets. Today we can conclude that we have about 100,000,000,000 such galaxies in the universe. There are an infinite number of very interesting things out there that all of humanity could benefit from, requiring many highly educated people in related jobs - instead of fighting, killing each other and living in poverty. HOW DO WE COMPARE TO OTHER COUNTRIES IN THE EDUCATION OF OUR CHILDREN AND THEREFORE WORK FORCE QUALITY?     The knowledge of high school graduates depends significantly on the standards a country sets. Many of the foreign countries teach more under the same subject heading than we do. A parent told us that their two boys went to two different high schools in Knox County, Tennessee. They took the same courses, but in one school they covered much more material in the same course than in the other school. I sat in on 16 math and science courses. The teachers' subject knowledge, teaching skill and ability to motivate students from preschool to high school graduation needs to improve. Teachers told us that a student went to the rest room and when returned, threw feces at the teacher. The punishment was for the parent to take the offender home only for one night, and the offender was back in class the next day. Unbelievable. We, the U.S., dropped to 40th place internationally in mathematics. We need to improve significantly. The quality of our workforce depends on the quality AND amount of K-12 education. The quality and competitiveness of our products and services depend on the quality of our workforce in all of our industries. Our national income depends on the quality and competitiveness of our products and services in a domestic and international market place. Our national income depends to a great extent on the quality, education, and subject knowledge of teachers, and their ability to communicate with and motivate students. Isn't it obvious that we should be comparing our high school output to the best performing countries in the world and the way we teach and manage education to the best international competitors? Instead we always compare against our own poor 40th performance in the world. Our fourteen thousand different elected school boards set objectives that cannot be measured, but no problem! They do their own performance reviews. No wonder that the results are so poor, as we are graduating more and more students each year. Isn't it a necessity to be competitive worldwide today with our high school results, since our industries depend on our high school graduates in order to compete with the best worldwide? Why don't we visit the high performing internationals to find out how they achieve excellent results but we do not? Why don't we learn from them and then make some changes? Read about one of the best, Finland's education system.   "When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity". Dale Carnegie Technology like video conferencing, the Internet, airplanes made almost every country easily reachable in the last few decades. The world has become "smaller". Anyone can sell in any country products or services that can meet local requirements, and we compete against products or services from other countries here in the US. A worldwide competitive product or service must ensure that it has a well-trained workforce that is better than its competitors worldwide. The competence of the workforce depends on how well educated they were coming out of high school and how much they improved after that in additional schooling and years of experience. We were on top in 1970, but in mathematics we dropped to 40th by 2015 internationally of 15-year-olds of 73 countries (OECD PISA). According to the 2014 World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report on 149 nations, the USA is: 41st in Quality of Primary Education, and 66th in Primary Education Enrollment Rate. We do not educate all of our children as some claim, but a list of countries do. 49th in the Quality of Math and Science Education, 49th in Secondary Education Enrollment Rate, 18th with Internet Access in Schools, 12th in Extent of Staff Training (teachers), 9th in the world in grade 4 mathematics (but becoming 40th by the end of high school!), (TIMSS - Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study given every four years), 12th in grade 8 (TIMSS) math of 49 nations and The fifth highest spender per student in 2013 of 65 nations. These are the latest figures as of 2016. The big challenge for the USA is high school performance where we are 40th (OECD PISA) of 73 countries or 49th of 149 countries (World Economic Forum) in the world. WHY IS IT THAT WE DID NOT TAKE ACTION TO CORRECT OUR SHORTCOMINGS IN EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN DURING THE PAST 46 YEARS SUCH THAT THE ACT AND SAT SCORES CONFIRMED SUCH ACTION'S EFFECTIVENESS? Hong Kong, Macao, Shanghai, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan methodologies may not be culturally transferable to the USA, because the high achievement is the result of parental pressure, e.g., homework until midnight, and getting on the train to school by 6 AM. In addition, Shanghai tests and admits only the highest performing students into its public schools. The graph below provides an international view of expenses per student per country. The US is one of the highest spenders, but unfortunately, our performance is poor. THAT MEANS THAT THE MONEY IS NOT SPENT IN THE RIGHT PLACES. Delegation of responsibilities does not mean that we can turn our back on it by trusting the individual to whom we delegated. "Trust but verify." - said President Ronald Reagan. Many elected board of education members, nationwide, don't know what ACT or SAT scores mean, and they believe what the superintendent says without knowing if it is fact or not. They certainly could not "inspect" how a school district is doing on a monthly basis, since there are no monthly measurable academic objectives in our public schools EVERYWHERE, AND THEY ARE PRODUCING THE RESULTS. In some countries like Finland, teachers are more educated, the teaching methodology is different and much better than in the US, and a teacher knows exactly how each of his/her student is doing DAILY as accurately as with a test. If a student is slow, extra help is provided immediately. Therefore no testing is required. Our education board members could inspect the ACT (or SAT) scores annually and insist on them improving, but most do not even do that. ACT tests 64% of our children nationally as of 2016. Their 2016 results show that 74% of high school graduates nationally are not prepared for higher level education and future training for employment - they are not ACT READY. In Tennessee the ACT scores increased slightly, because the state allowed students to retake the ACT a second time. Making it even worse, many of them have bad work attitude, a feeling of entitlement regardless of how well or poorly they do their job, they are depressed, no ambition, in addition to poor English communication and science knowledge and don't even know basic math. It is not enough to demand jobs, if people during their young days are not willing to work hard in our schools and learn what employers need. Just look at the very poor ACT results of Tennessee and its Knox County below. One cannot ignore the impact of robotic automation from 2016 on ACT Readiness. Robots will increase the qualifications needed for the jobs that remain, hence the importance of much more science and mathematics knowledge and higher student achievement that will be needed from those graduating from high school. This will become necessary to remain trainable for frequent job changes to higher level vocations, because the lower level jobs will be replaced by automation. If you are not certain about what ACT readiness means, please click on the following and read it: Explanation of ACT scores and ACT Readiness Take a good look at the above chart results if you were an elected board member at the time in this school district. The NOT ACT Ready percentage of diplomas indicate how many students of those who graduated WILL NOT be prepared for the first year only of a tech/vocational school or college and pursue any science or engineering related course. What we have is a very high failure rate that we call "NOT ACT Ready" based on those students who already earned a diploma and graduated high school. There is another version of NOT ACT Ready, that is based on all those who entered high school in grade nine. Increasing the ACT scores to improve the poor results is the most important task of an education board in our opinion, yet this problem is not discussed and a plan of action is not created at education board meetings to do so. Approving spending bills is a large part of every board meeting. Do you really think that these were good results? The superintendent worked for you, the board. You gave yourselves, the board, and the superintendent good performance reviews for these results every year. About 80% of the graduating children, including 98% of black children, are and will be having a terrible life because you did nothing to ensure better results as board members. A school-chain called Success Academy Schools in NYC is achieving top one percent results with poor, inner city black children, passing even most private schools in New York State. New York State is the 5th best performing state in the US. As a board member in Knox County, Tennessee, you are paid $20,000 annually, plus another $5,000 to cover expenses and a car allowance in Knox County, Tennessee. Yet board members cannot afford to go and visit Success Academy Schools in NYC to find out how they are achieving those high results with poor, inner city black children when black children in Tennessee achieve only a 2% acceptable result? Something is very wrong here with public education. Such inaction about educational performance is building a powder keg that will blow sky high. The low national income cannot support the amount of social services in welfare that our very high percentage of those not ACT ready (74% nationally plus dropouts) put on the street with the help of robotics that replace them. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing!!" Edmund Burke, Irish statesman, 1776 The chart above shows the Knox County, Tennessee school district's annual results and ACT readiness. Look at the high percentage of high school graduates who are "Not ACT Ready". These are terrible results for the county, but the state is even worse! Yet no one does anything about it. The school board gave itself and the superintendent excellent performance reviews every year based on these results. Yes, they all set their own objectives and then performance reviewed themselves every year. See ACT scores and readiness explained. Those not ACT Ready are trainable only for close to minimum wage jobs that will not last long. Unfortunately such jobs are beginning to be replaced by robotics in 2016 and virtually all will be replaced by 2020. Robotics will make success increasingly more difficult for ACT Ready high school graduates to succeed and impossible for those not ACT Ready. The only path to reasonable success between now and 2020 is to have students take two more science and math courses beyond the core curriculum, initiate an excellent preschool program for all, and strengthen primary school performance without rewarding earlier graduates. The chart below shows the poor ACT readiness within each high school in the same school district. The best high school has only average readiness, and the worst has not a single student ACT Ready! IS THIS THE RESULT WE WANT FOR OUR CHILDREN?! This is shocking. It is rather obvious that measurable academic objectives do not exist for this school district and for any of its high schools. It is impossible to deliver good results without such objectives and school level operating plans in the hands of school management when one is dealing with poor performance like school districts within the entire state of Tennessee and in other states.   In the graph on the left, we show a poor five-year average ACT score history and ACT Readiness of each high school in Knox County, Tennessee. We spend more than twice the amount of money for each student in the two poorly performing high schools - for more than a decade now. Why don't we spend only one percent of that money we spend in one high school, go up to New York, visit the Success Academy Schools. They are achieving top one percent results with poor black inner city children, beating even most private schools, in the entire state of New York. Some teachers do not like this school. They have excellent benefits, good salaries, but they have to work long hours, generally 8 AM to 6 PM. WELL, WHO SHOULD DECIDE IF WE SHOULD IMPROVE OR NOT AS THIS SCHOOL DID? NOT PARENTS BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT INFORMED OF THE REAL SITUATION WE FACE. SCHOOL DISTRICT MANAGEMENT MUST DECIDE. WHY DO WE EVEN ASK SUCH A QUESTION WHEN WE ARE DOING SO POORLY? UNFORTUNATELY, SIMILAR HIGH RESULTS FOR WORKING LESS HARD IN POORLY PERFORMING STATES LIKE TENNESSEE AND KENTUCKY, IS NOT POSSIBLE ANYWHERE. The graph below shows a thirteen-year annual average of each high school also in Knox County, Tennessee with performance going nowhere but down. It is rather obvious that neither the state of Tennessee, nor this school district had any effective management controls, the right objectives and operating plans in place to date. It is even more obvious that either we hire state Education Commissioners who are not prepared for the job or the governor does not like their suggestions. Consider that the worst performing high schools spend more than twice as much money per student as the higher performing ones FOR THIRTEEN YEARS OR MORE, WITHOUT ANY IMPROVEMENT. They just keep delivering lower ACT results year after year. What is the major contributors to this failure? The wrong or no academic objective, the 90% graduation rate, and poorly trained teachers in the subjects they teach. If you push children through high school when some may require a year or two more, you miss the most important thing - their education. The result: lack of A HIGH ENOUGH ACT SCORE OBJECTIVE leads to the poorly educated high school graduates and that leads to poor employment for life. We spend more money per student in Knox County, Tennessee than the great majority of the top 19 countries in education, whose cost of living is higher. They cannot even read well enough by the time they graduate. Although our spending per student is the fifth highest in the world, in mathematics we dropped from the top in 1970 to 40th as a country with disastrous results. That means that we spend a lot more money than they do, and we deliver much worse education to our children. The education they get is so bad that three out of four graduates have only 3-5 years of low end employment before robots replace them for the rest of a 40-45 year working life beyond high school. The poor results indicate that WE DO SPEND ENOUGH, BUT IT IS NOT BEING SPENT ON THE RIGHT PEOPLE AND PROGRAMS. Our "ACT Readiness" is only 24-99% of those students who graduated with a diploma. What is the logic behind graduating 73-99% of the students who are NOT ACT Ready and therefore will not have a chance for any job in a few years? IS THIS ACCEPTABLE? We do a poor job in education with one of the highest expenses per student in the world. That means that a large portion of the education money is not spent in the right places and on the right, well-trained people. Who are we helping with such an outrageous long-failing system for many decades? Not our children, not their teachers, not the quality of our workforce and therefore not our economy or country. BUT WE CERTAINLY ARE BUILDING ONE GIGANTIC POWDER KEG! With the years passing, most job requirements and related education increased as robotics and software automation replaced lower level jobs, and as new technologies created new jobs. ACT changes one or more of the four benchmark target scores to define ACT Readiness accordingly. Such a trend will continue in the future, but faster. According to ACT, in Tennessee 83% of the graduating students (98% of black graduates), plus those who did not graduate, plus dropouts are not prepared to be trained for a job as of 2015. Nationally, 94% of black children (74% of all children) who earned a high school diploma, plus about 10% who attended but did not graduate, plus dropouts, were not prepared for anything other than close to minimum wage low skill jobs, and have no chance to finish even the first year of any tech/vocational training or college. ARE THESE ACCEPTABLE RESULTS? ONE WONDERS IF STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENTS AND ELECTED SCHOOL BOARDS UNDERSTAND THE HUGE PROBLEM THEY ARE CREATING BY NOT ACTING ON IT. Some people blame this on parents and poverty. But a 42 school system in New York City called Success Academy Schools takes ONLY poor, inner city black and Hispanic children. They scored TOP ONE PERCENT in the NY State Common Core Tests, PASSING EVEN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS! They have a waiting list of more than 19,000 families! There are no inner city areas that are more difficult than Harlem in New York, where this school system started in 2006. The responsible people for the poor performance are the governors, the education subcommittees in legislature, the state boards of education, the state departments of education and the elected district school boards. A very large percentage of our children will be replaced shortly by robots as a result of our poor public education, and because we did not fix our poor education a long time ago. We are not developing the great majority of children in our public schools (very few exceptions) for the future that they will face. We are creating soft, undisciplined and poorly educated children to face a tough world after high school. We are developing a huge powder keg that is about ready to blow up on us. In 2015 we had more than three million jobs we could not fill because our companies could not find well-educated potential candidates (Click here for report). Our schools need to understand that they are preparing a "product" called a student, who are required by the "customers" called employers and/or universities for further learning, to supply what employers need. The ACT is a test used by 59% of graduating high school students to show how well they are prepared for employment or further education. The poor ACT results indicate that no one in political leadership either cares or understands this fact and are doing nothing about it. It is totally unacceptable to spend $120,000 of the people's money MINIMUM per student for twelve years of education, 74% of whom are not ACT ready nationally to be trained for a job. With robotics coming now to replace fast food and higher level jobs, the 74% unreadiness of high school graduates will rise. (Click here for report). Product and service competitiveness depend on the workforce's education. At the upper end PhDs design and make the products...and they all depend on the quality of high school graduates they produce as a nation. With only 26% of the graduating high school students being ACT READY in the USA, we have been doing a very poor job having our children educated for many years, and Nanotechnology will have an additional major impact by 2020, requiring more education, impacting the great majority of jobs. Our children's education declined, but robotic artificial intelligence (AI) passed average human intelligence in 2015 and their cost dropped below minimum wage. Fast food companies plan to automate every store fully. For example, McDonald's plans to replace 25,000 stores before end of 2017 or about 500,000 jobs. However, we are beginning to see robots that replace people with a graduate degree, e.g. new fighter plane pilots, nurse anesthetists and even anesthesiologists. We cannot expect teachers to do their best if they do not have full authority to deal with student discipline problems decisively on their own, and if they are loaded down with paperwork, too much testing to reduce their preparation and teaching time. Performance evaluations cannot be done 3-4 times a year without such evaluations being student results-based. After all the purpose of the teachers' and the schools' existence is to provide excellent internationally competitive education for our children. THAT IS NOT THE CASE TODAY. JUST LOOK AT OUR ACT OR SAT RESULTS. "A nation can be no swifter than its progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource."   John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) Thirty-fifth President of the USA It would be reasonable to expect that all 3.5 million children who graduated nationally from public high school with a regular diploma, would be (ACT) Ready for job training or further education. Unfortunately, 74% or 2.59 million of our graduating children are not ready each year, and we wasted more than 31 billion dollars per year covering their TWELVE YEARS SPENDING $372,000,000,000 to graduate children who are not prepared (there is no adjustment to constant dollars because the twelve years of education could shift back or forward. These are very low conservative assumptions and the real cost will be higher). They will have minimum wage jobs for a couple of years and then...NOTHING. Robots will replace them. There are very few public high schools nationally who are exceptions. The public should be aware that private high school graduates have 85-99% readiness. But they cost $8,000-15,000 per year. Since the public pays for the poorly performing public schools, the public would deserve a voucher or tax credit in the entire amount of the public school average expense/year/student, if a parent wishes to have his/her child educated in a private school instead. We feel that we, the public deserve a good enough education for our children, that supports minimally a family of four, and improves each each year to make it possible for our children to qualify for the better jobs that new technologies will create. What the public does not deserve is for 2.59 million of its children nationwide to be sentenced to failure factories for schools EVERY SINGLE YEAR for whom we paid $130,000 constant dollars per child or $336.7 BILLION DOLLARS of the people's hard-earned tax dollars, and be ruined for life by the poor quality of public education. A third of a TRILLION dollars is an enormous amount of money that is wasted per year, increasing annually, preparing children poorly, compared to many other nations. Our graduates cannot communicate properly and cannot even do basic math. We are one of the highest spenders per student in the world, and dropped to 40th in the world in performance. Just look at the numbers we are presenting. They are the government's numbers. How many decades do we need to wait and accept such a poor job that we, the public are paying for? We cannot afford to wait. We wasted a lot of money for more than four decades on these failure factories we call schools. We could change for the better. We need changes urgently. There is a new development that most of the public does not know as of 2018. A new class of robots have started to replace many low-end jobs in 2016, some of which require a college degree, not just a high school diploma. How do you think those 2.59 million children will survive, who are not prepared well enough each year? We have been competing worldwide for decades. Our education management, teaching methodology is about 100 years old. Others improved, especially after WWII. We dropped to 40th in high school math in the world in 2016 because we did not improve teacher preparation, the way we teach and manage school districts and schools, as many other countries did and passed us. If we want to learn about how to become better, look at how the best in the world are achieving their fabulous results, like Singapore and Finland. Study how they do everything in education and adopt their methods. Their methods are transferable to US culture. Then you will have an excellent chance for improvement in student results. We are enclosing here a comprehensive document from Finland, one of the best systems in education in the world. Try to read every page of every link in it. This is how the best countries in education plan and conduct the education of its citizens. Click here to read it. AS TIME PASSES, THE WORLD IS GETTING "SMALLER", AND MORE INTEGRATED, MORE FAMILIAR WITH EACH OTHER'S CULTURE We are moving toward faster technological developments that bring with them faster job changes. Jobs replaced by automation at the low end, and many new jobs open - but they require more education. That means that the fundamental education children get in primary and secondary school needs to create a stronger, much better foundation of knowledge than it has created to date. We need to teach at least as much as in the honors courses to all, not just in science and math with an expanded curriculum, but also with music and art to develop both hemispheres of the child's brain. This is important for good decision making and creative thinking. We are talking about it, but we are not doing it. We compete worldwide but we compare ourselves only to US results and US ideas. Our high school graduates dropped to 40th in math in the world. Dropping to 40th in math when you are the fifth highest spender in the world per student, raises serious questions about how we spend our tax dollars to deliver such a poor result. What percentage of public school students who take the ACT in the US are ACT Ready upon graduation? ONLY 26%. What percentage should be ACT Ready? AT LEAST 80%, but preferably all students who graduate with a diploma should be ACT Ready. Since our high schools feed the workforce-needs of all industries, the poor high school output is destroying us from within. "The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." Albert Einstein SOME THINGS HAVE TO MAKE MUCH BETTER SENSE IN OUR SCHOOL DISTRICTS. WHY DON'T WE ELIMINATE THINGS THAT DO NOT MAKE SENSE AND DAMAGE US? DO MORE WHAT HELPS US INSTEAD! When a school district picks low expectation objectives like a 21 ACT score, THAT IS MORE THAN 10 YEARS AWAY, you have a board and superintendent who have no idea how to set the right objectives in each school, how to organize an operating plan to achieve that objective to achieve better results. Why are our education standards so low that we cannot produce 80% minimum ACT Readiness instead of 26% among our high school graduates? Look at Finland whose methods overcome even most learning disabilities. "Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is TO TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO LEARN" Peter Drucker, 1909-2005, Father of 21st Century "Management By Objectives" ACT (or SAT depending on the state) SCORE IS THE BEST INDICATOR OF THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR CHILDREN'S PUBLIC EDUCATION Look at the above graph. In 2006, ACT indicated that their empirical research (comparing ACT scores to jobs or additional education the student was able to obtain some years after taking the ACT) shows that college entrance and workforce training have the same requirement in English and math from 2006 onward. That has changed over the years, because ACT started using a four-subject benchmark test for READINESS, plus university degrees in engineering and science require a higher ACT score in mathematics than the ACT Readiness benchmark in mathematics. ACT defined the additional benchmarks for and definition of "Career (job) and College Readiness", that indicates what CHANCE (not a guarantee) the ACT READY child has to finish the first year only of a college or tech/vocational school. Those who are NOT ACT READY (and DO NOT meet all four subject benchmarks) do not have a chance to finish the first year of any tech/vocational or college program and will have spotty minimum wage employment for a limited time. Robotics will replace them. Passing only one benchmark means that the student does have a chance only to finish the college freshman version of the same subject only as the benchmark that the student passed. However, in addition, the robotic technologies that many US companies have already contracted by 2016 will replace them rapidly. Some of the new robotic applications are replacing jobs FOR THE FIRST TIME that require more than a college degree (anesthesia robots, already installed in some hospitals, however some robots that are involved in healthcare will have slower growth because of public acceptance). We will see more of such applications within a year. Artificial intelligence passed average human levels in 2015 and it is growing faster. Under these circumstances, those who graduate from high school even ACT Ready, will not be employable within a couple of years at most, unless we increase both the high school curriculum and increase the material within each course of the curriculum significantly, and increase the teachers' subject knowledge to Master's level and improve teaching methodologies, to the same level where the top performing international education systems are. With the above poor results - just think about this for a moment: we have poor ACT performance leaving most children behind - not just 51%, but 76-85% and among African American students 96% are left behind. There will be a big price to pay for such negligence! Investigating how the best school systems achieve their results worldwide is NEVER discussed in board meetings to improve what we do. School board members never take ANY TIME at school board meetings to discuss and plan how we could improve our poor ACT scores. Do you think they are interested in doing better? The evidence is not encouraging. "A lie told often enough becomes the truth." Lenin (1870 - 1924) THE PUBLIC PAYS THE HIGH, INCREASING PUBLIC EDUCATION COST. THEY DESERVE THE TRUTH AND BETTER SCHOOLS WITH A MUCH HIGHER ACT READINESS. One cannot solve a problem long by covering it up, or by "packaging" it in good news for those who are paying for it, the public. Unless...those in charge don't want to or don't know how to solve it. "A half-truth is a whole lie" is a popular proverb that has been directed at newspapers and politicians since the 1880s. However, the majority in public education management beat them all. For example in the Knox County School District, Tennessee, 76% of those who graduated with a diploma in 2015 are prepared only for a close to minimum wage job. They will not even have a chance to finish the first year of a tech/vocational school or college per ACT. A new generation of robotics will replace them in a few years. At the same time the superintendent published everywhere, including on his letterhead, that we provide "Excellence for all children" and knowingly and purposefully told the public that "We are doing well, a strong B performance, but we have room to improve". It was a lie about actual school performance. Tennessee did celebrate the highest growth in the USA in 4th and 8th grade NAEP test scores one year...but we were still below the USA average, which we did not mention. Nor did we mention the fact that Knox County did not even take the test, yet some people and foundations partnering with this school district used it as if they did and this was a county achievement. We as a country should also consider that we dropped very significantly from other nations to 40th place in mathematics. In 2013, the same school district set an all time low average ACT score record at 20.2. The ACT is the most important test. It shows what our children learned from grade one to twelve. No one said a word to anyone about the all time low ACT score in 2013. The bad news and the complete truth was and is ignored. Anything that sounds good is published by the school district communications group. What the public gets is a lie, when all this poor education and the lies about their results are created with the public's hard-earned tax dollars within the education budget. SIDE NOTE: Please remember that tests are designed for a specific subject or group of subjects in accordance with the curriculum of the state in which the person studies and/or takes the test. In other words, they are designed such that a 90-100% score would merit an "A" and anything under 60% would be an "F", a failing grade. Test designers are professional people generally with a master's degree in the subject for which the test is created. Unfortunately, some states are changing grades based on what they call a "Cut Score" where a low score like 45% may be changed to a "B" to make the school system look better, and the student loses. Then they celebrate the "B" openly in the newspapers!! TCAP state test results for Tennessee show approximately double the score of the national ACT or NAEP tests, because they are much easier tests. The TCAP's rigor or toughness was 58% lower than the ACT. In other words, the much easier state test shows much higher grades, putting into good light performance that is a disastrous failure. As a result, we hurt a very large percentage of graduating children who are not ready for a meaningful job or for more education without two years of full time remedial courses. Praising and calling a superintendent a Miracle Maker with our TCAP results is not a true representation of the actual results for which the public is paying with their hard-earned tax dollars. Frankly, one would reasonably expect a more truthful representation made to the public in an article like the one below, by any journalist or especially an editor or publisher of any newspaper. The ideals and standards of journalists have changed unfortunately. All the above shows a planned, willful and purposeful misrepresentation of the truth, to create an impression that the school district is doing well, when, in fact, it is doing very poorly according to ACT's impartial college readiness figures. The misrepresentation starts with the Boards and superintendents of school districts who are not telling the entire truth. The public is paying for it. The public is misinformed PURPOSEFULLY with partial truth using the easy tests that provide higher grades. Tennessee is changing those tests in 2016-2017.     THE SHOCKING COST OF ONE CAREER AND COLLEGE READY PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE'S EDUCATION WITH A REGULAR DIPLOMA One will not survive at minimum wage. With robotics taking the low paying jobs, those not ACT Ready cannot survive. If 80% of graduates are not ACT Ready, then eight out of ten high school graduates will not make it under robotic pressure in the job market. But we will be paying for the education of all ten in our example. Therefore the expense of developing one ACT Ready graduate will actually cost five times as much as one graduate. The average per student cost in Tennessee is above $10,000 per year including capital and interest expenses. We will assume $10,000 for easy calculation. For twelve years the cost of educating one student is $120,000. Remember that we pay for all students. Those students who do not test ACT Ready, will be short term minimum wage material. Therefore the cost of 12 years of education for those who leave high school who are not ACT Ready, becomes part of the cost of all those students' education who ARE ACT ready. to be trained for a job or go on to college. We spent $10,000 per student in 2016 in Knox County, Tennessee that included almost all education-related expenses. These expenses are rising every year. This is the public's money - our tax dollars. Under these conditions, the 12-13 year MINIMUM cost of one career (job) or college ready high school graduate, with a regular high school diploma is sky high, because we also pay for those students who dropped out and those who did earn a regular diploma, who are not career or college ready according to ACT. THAT makes the cost of one ACT Ready student in specific demographic areas as high as presented hereunder, because of the ACT Readiness percentage in a specific demographic area is so low. We did not consider inflation adjustment on these dollars because the twelve year education could be spreading to the past (less $) or future (more $) in different degrees, and the future ACT Readiness may vary up or down. One ACT Ready Black Student: $3,960,000 One ACT Ready Hispanic Student: $1,200,000 One ACT Ready Average Student: $600,000 If All Students Were Ready Like In The Top Ten Nations In Education One ACT Ready Student would cost: $120,000 - $140,000 ...because we also have to pay for the many students who are not prepared and not ready in the same demographic group. If 75-98% of those students who earned a regular diploma (plus dropouts, and those who "finished" high school but did not earn a diploma) are not ready to be trained for a job, then our diplomas are worthless - and they are. So why push a 90% graduation rate? That means very low income for the majority of those entering our high schools with increasing unemployment and a huge negative impact upon our economy for lack of a well-trained workforce. RECOMMENDATION: The state focuses school districts on achieving higher graduation rates. THAT IS AN INCREDIBLY POOR STRATEGY IF THE STATE WANTS EMPLOYABLE CHILDREN TO GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL. THE TEACHERS ARE PUSHED SO HARD THAT THEY ARE EVEN INSTRUCTED TO CHANGE GRADES. THE RESULT IS THAT THE ACT SCORES SUFFER, AND 83% OF THE GRADUATING CHILDREN ARE NOT "ACT READY". THEY ARE UNEMPLOYABLE. THIS IS SO STUPID THAT IT BOGGLES THE MIND. IF EACH SCHOOL SET A GPA OBJECTIVE THAT WOULD BE 10% HIGHER THAN THE LAST YEAR'S GPA PERFORMANCE, THE GRADUATION RATE WOULD GO UP AND SO WOUILD THE ACT SCORES. SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT THE WAY WE TEACH THEM IN TENNESSEE. THERE ARE MANY JOBS - WE JUST DO NOT HAVE WELL ENOUGH EDUCATED CANDIDATES FOR THEM. In the USA, 74% of our schools are public schools, 22% are private schools and 4% are charter schools a form of public schools also. The lower skill manufacturing jobs have been disappearing to robotic and software automation for more than two decades. More and more low-end jobs will be replaced by robotics and many new jobs will open with new technologies faster and faster, but they will require more education on the high school level, not just what we know as job training. There were more than three million jobs open in 2015, that could not be filled because employers were not finding candidates with the education that they needed for such jobs. Such new jobs will require a much better education coming out of high school than what public schools deliver today. The stories about good education are true only with very few public schools. What's going to happen to our children? THREE OUT OF FOUR OF OUR CHILDREN ARE BEING LEFT BEHIND TODAY IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN ADDITION TO DROPOUTS. What is going to happen to our state and country? I fear the answer to this question. The poorly educated workforce, mostly untrainable (80% per ACT), is a major concern of corporations who are paying most of the taxes. To do well, they need a well-trained workforce. They are holding onto cash instead of hiring. To survive, they will have to expand elsewhere or move entirely, or depend on the new generation of robots. This trend just started happening. Expect such changes happening here on a much larger scale. We will not survive the poor objectives and lack of a professional annual operating plans on the school district management level. It is common in high performing nations to hire teachers who have a Master's degree in the subject that they would teach, come from the top ten percent of their Master's major, and then they send them back to grad school for learning the latest in teaching methodologies and in some cases diagnosing learning disabilities as well. US teachers come from the bottom third of four-year college programs that are the easiest. The graph above shows a demographic breakdown of the unreadiness percentage of those who graduated from high school nationally. The results are horrible nationally because all states and school districts operate the same way with poor objectives and poor plans. You are looking at a powder keg, that is about to blow up. Our employers must go to robotics, because our graduates not only cannot do the job, they are poorly educated, and they have a bad attitude. If they do not go to robotics, they have to leave and go to where the workforce is better trained - or close the business and no one will be employed. But...in New York City there is a charter school chain with 41 schools in 2016, that started with one school in 2006. They are called Success Academy Schools. This school is scoring top one percent passing even most private schools in the entire State of New York WITH POOR BLACK AND HISPANIC INNER CITY CHILDREN! Anyone with such high performance will have plenty of critics. Misbehaving children who disturb entire classes are gone. So are teachers who do not meet their high standards. Guess what the public wants? They want their child to have an excellent education and future. Obviously our traditional public schools have no idea how to provide excellent education to our children of ANY COLOR, and the states are not doing anything about it! They know however, how to spend more money each year than the majority of the top performing 19 nations in education. What do you think will happen when robotics will dump 50-80% of our children on the streets because they have been poorly trained in our public schools? This is very likely to happen by 2020-2021. The countries that passed us in education, teach significantly more advanced material per subject per year than we do. Unless we bring up both teacher and student knowledge with a tougher curriculum and life-time education for degrees that are in demand, we will not be economically competitive against robotics in problem solving, critical thinking, decision making and job skills by 2025. Poor results shown in the above charts are unacceptable. In Knox County, Tennessee, and in many other school districts and states, we just keep dumbing down the population with the poor results from our public schools, as the elected school boards keep giving themselves and the superintendents an excellent performance review for the poor performance, and increasing education spending every year. As a remedy, some governors announced a free two year college program after high school, that will cost more money and will not solve the problem of declining education, because: We do not take advantage of the fastest brain development that occurs under six years of age with an effective pre-school program, We are not improving and increasing knowledge in K12 education and are not correcting behavior and attitude problems that developed during those formative years. We are not correcting the fundamental K12 problem that limits young people's brain in how much they can achieve for 12-13 years of K12 schooling, We are enabling only some remedial education with the free two-year college, to get closer to the low state standard of today. This does not solve the problems of the K-12 education shortcomings that became set in concrete in our children during the formative years. Yet we will have to pay a higher rate for the additional two years, without fixing what caused the problem in K-12. It would be more effective for the people's money to fix some basic areas within K-12 education to solve the poor performance problem, such as: Raise expectations with a measurable objective, such as an ACT score objective that is 5-10% higher than the actual ACT score achieved the previous year, Create an annual operating plan that simply specifies a monthly year-to-date GPA objective that is minimum 10% above the prior year's monthly year-to-date GPA for all management people and for all teachers. There has to be many years of GPA history available per student. Based on them, an average GPA baseline could be established for at minimum covering the preceding 3 years, using this baseline GPA for every class in any subject before the class starts, and measuring against this baseline GPA what individual teachers achieve at the end of the school year as an average class GPA. There must be a fair assessment of what teachers achieve in average GPA increase beyond the baseline GPA that reflects their class members actual performance for the past three years. Teachers are not treated well compared to the high performing international school systems. They must be treated fairly, and to that end some state laws will need to be changed to allow them to do their best with high morale. Our governors, state departments of education and the elected school district boards managed to develop FAILURE FACTORIES nationwide with their inaction instead of good results, through incompetence in management, with weaker teacher training, limiting teachers' authority and preparation time with unproductive tasks. Teacher morale is low. The higher performing countries require teacher candidates to have a master's degree in the subject that they will teach, they are tested for suitability for the teaching profession, and must continue to update their education every year in teaching methodologies and subject knowledge. We do not seem to be interested in learning from the top performing countries. When one dropped from the top to 40th in the world (and our example state, Tennessee, is much lower than that), one does not have the experience to come up with a winning methodology to become one of the best based only on USA experience in education. No wonder we have poverty problems. We don't even recognize that our dropping education results dumbed us down for 45+ years, weakening our workforce, creating more poverty plus a huge problem for employers, who have only two options to survive: move to areas with a better-trained workforce, or replace low-end jobs with robotics. McDonalds decided in 2015 to replace 25,000 stores totally with robotics by end of 2019, so did Wendy's and many others. Robots were announced in 2016 to replace anesthesia nurses whose education goes well beyond high school. We better improve education very quickly by focusing on ACT score objectives and learning as much as possible from the highest performing countries in education about how they are achieving their fabulous results. The result for us will be increasing social problems with the unemployed. There will be no money to solve them, because our national income has been struggling for ten years at break even only. All of this happened because the poor high school education output weakened the workforce in all industries, from the low end jobs, up to and including PhD's. For several decades now foreign students made up 50% of the PhD's we needed for research and development, but for the past few years many are returning to their home countries because they find better opportunities there. WHY ARE WE ONE OF THE HIGHEST SPENDERS PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD DELIVERING THE WORST EDUCATION RESULTS AMONG INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES? School districts do not identify all education spending for the public to see. We try to do that and relate the approved budget to it although the approved budget itself does not include all education-related expenses. We would advocate the board of education being fully responsible for a budget that includes ALL education-related expenses. The "Current" budget is approved at the beginning of the school year. It excludes certain education-related expenses, like capital and interest expenses, legal and other expenses that are commingled hidden in different county cost centers. That means that we do not know exactly how much we spend on public education. A special investigative audit, called a forensic audit would be the efficient way to identify ALL education related spending. The "Current" budget is overspent 15-18% every single year (2008-2014), and we get the above poor results for it. The state publishes the Grand Total Education Expense Spent in the same school district, that is overspent 28-38% every year beyond the approved budget, including the capital and interest expenses covering school renovations and new schools that the education department decides to renovate or build respectively, but excluding them from the budget they present. Even the Grand Total doesn't include all education-related expenses. All this points to another very important thing that is not being done: ZERO BASED BUDGET PLANNING, AND PRESENTING TO THE PUBLIC ALL PUBLIC SCHOOL-RELATED EXPENSES. It is the school system that initiates or causes all such expenses, but they do not have responsibility for the outcome. This is not a good way to manage to success. ZERO BASED BUDGET PLANNING means that the budget being prepared for all departments identifies first all actions that they will have to take during the coming year to improve results and reach a specific performance objective. Then each department and school puts the budget together for themselves on that basis. That is how one can make sure that any surprises are minimized for the coming year, and it is an important part of planning and creating an operating plan for the coming year only. Poor planners do a quick and easy way, called INCREMENTAL BUDGET PLANNING in which one looks at what one spent last year, and modifies it by adding or subtracting amounts that one just guesses without planning. For small organizations that total less than 100 employees one can do that. For larger organizations, the end result is overspending beyond the approved budget every year, and that is what is happening in Knox County, Tennessee and in many other school districts. When one starts putting together multi-year plans, like the five year plan, it just does not make sense because too many unanticipated things will be changing each year that no one can predict that far ahead. Therefore in well-managed operations one sees zero-based budget planning for a ONE-YEAR OPERATING PLAN, based on which the spending can be managed accurately. That is what well management schooled and experienced superintendents do. When one sees a five year plan, that looks beautiful with color charts and pictures, with simply a fixed percentage increase on some activities every year, and then adds a tenth year result that looks just OK, no serious planning went into that plan. The superintendent in such a case prepared a "selling document only", it is always a beautiful colorful document, but without any serious planning. Five years are too long. Too many things can change even within a year. What many school districts do not have is a one year operating plan where there is a measurable performance goal like an ACT score that is 5-10% higher than the last one achieved, and measurable objectives are defined for every management and supervisory position in every single school and in central management. One cannot achieve good results with only titles. The Five Year Strategic Plans of the Knox County, TN superintendent, were good examples of this. The Knox County, Tennessee school district has an unusually large PR group as of 2015 whose planning and execution on any action they target is excellent. They do not report all of the news. They report only what looks good, creating a positive image in the eyes of the public. As a result, the public is unaware how poorly their children are prepared in our public schools. One sees significant additional money requests annually from the board of education, with two big problems. They are never tied to a plan to show how much they will raise the ACT results that count. The promises are endless. Most such programs do not produce any improvement in the ACT scores. However, the amount approved one year just keeps included every year thereafter and no one questions it. It is sad how the people's hard-earned tax dollars are wasted in education without any improvement in results. HIDING BAD RESULTS FROM THE PUBLIC "A half-truth is a whole lie" is a popular proverb that's been directed at newspapers and politicians since the 1880s. "A lie told often enough becomes the truth." - Lenin "Present good news to the public and repeat often, no matter how insignificant it is. Do not present the bad news to the public, no matter how important it is" - Goebels and Hitler All these methods are used in most PR organizations in school districts. We overspend the people's money every year in education in Knox County, Tennessee and produce one of the worst results at the same time within the USA. Internationally, we dropped to 40th place in math, a new all time low record - that's the bottom of the industrialized countries. Our education spending per student is the fifth highest in the world. Our school districts are always pushing for more money as the solution to fix the poor results. We also do not identify for the public all of the money we spend on education. Some such moneys are commingled with non-education related expenses and hidden in different cost centers. I think that the public who is paying for the poor results and high expense levels deserves to get a detailed accounting of how much money we really spend on education-related expenses. We need a forensic audit to identify exactly where the money went and why it was not getting to the right place in the school district, destroying most of our children's employability, our workforce and our economy as a result. Proposed programs costing additional tens of millions of dollars in each state by school district management, did not and do not deliver higher act or sat scores. They are the only tests that show the real end of high school results. Could these kinds of ineffective actions be accidental after more than 40 years? No, they cannot and they require uniform statewide control via laws. More than 30 states cut back education spending since 2008. See http://www.cbpp.org/cams/?fa=view&id=4011. Even with such reductions in spending, the US is the fifth largest spender per student among the industrialized countries, with the lowest academic performance among those nations. All things are possible - if one is smart. The chart below shows very poor expense management without any reasonable monthly control per school that disregards the approved budget with overspending without any recourse and with poor academic results. No report covers all expenses going into education, although the state report covers significantly more in its Tennessee Education Statistical Report for each year than the Knox County education district itself. The problem is that when board members look at a chart like this they do not recognize poor results or excessive spending. Most of them do not understand what not being ACT Ready means, and most importantly do not understand how robotics will impact all children who are not ACT Ready, and within just a few years will be impacting some jobs that require training beyond high school. Most board members do not want to learn and do not question the superintendent about academic results and spending vs. objective or budget every month at board meetings. In our opinion two questions are vital in managing poorly performing education districts. THESE TWO QUESTIONS need to be answered monthly: How are we doing with the most important academic results (e.g., annual ACT and monthly year-to-date GPA) year-to-date vs. plan in every school and the school district, and How much money are we spending per school and project, year-to-date vs. the approved budget. Neither of these is presented or discussed. THE PUBLIC IS NOT GETTING THE TRUTH ABOUT HOW POORLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN This is vital in order to get parental help and because the public is paying one of the highest dollars per student in the world. Why are we not doing it?   "Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence." Vince Lombardi     To get more public support, tell the truth. Generally both parents have to work today, and single parents have a tougher time. We need more support from them. Giving the public good news only is not helpful under the circumstances. Another important consideration is the fact that the public is paying everyone's salaries in public education. They deserve to know the truth. IF THE PUBLIC FINDS OUT WITHOUT FOREWARNING THAT THEIR CHILDREN CANNOT GET A JOB AFTER GRADUATING FROM OUR HIGH SCHOOLS, WE WILL SEE A VERY BAD, VIOLENT REACTION. IT WOULD BE SMARTER TO ADMIT THE PROBLEM WE FACE WITH OUR POOR EDUCATION AND TAKE OWNERSHIP FOR WHY IT HAPPENED. THERE WOULD BE SOME INITIAL REACTION, BUT THE PUBLIC IS FORGIVING IF THEY SEE AN HONEST ATTEMPT MADE TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Only 26% nationally, 16% in Tennessee and 24% in Knox County, Tennessee of our graduating students with a diploma are ready for job training or have a chance to finish the first year only of a college, tech school/vocational program - in 2015. However the school system tells the public that all is well, and complains about parents not pushing the children enough to study. This level of readiness of public school graduates for job or higher level training is very poor and it is not improving. Many including the schools blame the parents when there are examples of some of the best school systems in the world achieve very high results parent-independently. Our education management has no interest in how they achieve that. The graph below shows the percentage of high school graduates nationally by demographics, who are not prepared for any job other than minimum wage jobs that will be replaced by robots shortly. The Tennessee figures are worse. We produce only 26% readiness of high school graduates nationally for job training or to have just a chance to finish the first year of a tech/vocational school or college according to ACT. But much worse, we produce only 5-6% ACT ready black high school students nationally (Tennessee 2%). The 41-school charter school, Success Academy Schools of New York City, produce top 1% results with poor, inner city black children. At the same time, a new generation of robots started replacing low and medium level jobs. See examples further down. As a result, those students' chances who are not ACT Ready, will evaporate for any job. If our governors and legislators cared, this would not be happening. When Performance Is As Poor As Ours, It Is Vital To Have Two Objectives Only To Focus The Entire Organization On The Key Measurable Indicator Of Academic Success, Like An ACT Score That Is 5-10% Higher Than The Last ACT Score Achieved. The Second Objective Must Be A Limit On Spending To Stay Under The Budget That Was Approved Before The School Year Started. Anyone requesting additional school funding must commit to an ACT score increase in return with a plan in writing that explains how the ACT score increase is going to be achieved. State leadership, education committees, state school boards, and the state department of education, all must be focused on achieving an ACT score objective that is 5-10% higher than the last ACT score achieved along with the school districts. There is much more effort going into spending more money on programs that do not improve the ACT or SAT scores that represent our graduates' knowledge, or making excuses on the state or local level. There Is No Effort To Learn From The Best International Performers To Improve Our Poor Results. Our Public Education System Has The 5th Highest Cost Per Student In The World, While Dropping To 40th From The Top At Great Cost To The USA Public. All ACT objectives require that an operating plan exist detailing what committee members, board members and all management and supervisory personnel need to achieve by each month's end. Look at the high percentage of graduating children who are not ACT Ready in the chart. Not being ACT Ready means no chance to finish even the first year of a tech/vocational school or a college. They are qualified only for minimum wage jobs, which will be replaced by robots in a couple of years. "Denial. Ask any psychologist what the major obstacle to recovery is, and the likely answer will be denial. It's fundamental. Until you admit there is a problem, you can't begin to solve it." John McCormack "Self-Made in America"   The elected boards have to oversee the management and success of a school district with typically 100 – 10,000 employees, and a $10 million - $1 BILLION annual budget through a superintendent that they interview and hire. That is a huge management job, for which the voting majority or even a single board member would not be experienced and qualified. One requires substantial training even to interview and decide to hire a superintendent for an organization of that size. The state cannot provide management guidelines because the old education laws block it and they are likely to not have the experience to give it. School districts have meaningless objectives. They don't know how to change the way they manage and operate to create better results.   The elected board has to set objectives for the coming school year. Their objectives are always very vague, never about achieving an ACT score and never about not exceeding the budget approved at the start of the school year. The result is poor ACT scores, poor readiness after graduation and the budget exceeded every year. Then they perform their own performance review. The superintendent does the same and gives himself excellent marks, although the academic results are terrible. All objectives turn out vague and immeasurable. The superintendent is to prepare a five-year "strategic" plan according to the state, again with vague goals, many $100 words that no board-member dares to question for fear of looking uneducated. The plans do not include academic and financial objectives for schools, and school performance is the most important area. With such an arrangement, life becomes very political, and a poorly performing mayhem where sexual harassment can happen without the individual being fired. You hire and promote friends and relatives. You do nothing about helping teachers and principals to make their life more productive with higher morale so that they become more effective with students. All within current education law.   When the state itself is performing as poorly as Tennessee, it is not happening because they have the right management experience in the Department of Education, in the state Board of Education or even in the governor's office. If you disagree, just look at the ACT results. What does that tell us? It does not tell us that we have brilliant people with the right management experience, they just decided for a very important reason not to solve the problem that is destroying our children's future.   The American public is paying a huge increasing bill for education with a school system failure rate at 74% nationally. For black students, it is an outrageous 95% ACT Unreadiness or failure rate, when a NYC chain of 42 charter schools, Success Academy Schools scored top one percent passing even most private schools with poor, inner city black students! IT CAN BE DONE. VISIT THIS SCHOOL, FIND OUT WHAT CREATES THE SUCCESS, LEARN AND IMPLEMENT ANYTHING THAT WOULD HELP. "It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy." Albert Chancre, President of the American Federation of Teachers SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM This website lists the ten best tools that could make learning easier for students and make teaching easier for teachers, in any school environment: http://www.teacherswithapps.com/top-10-most-effective-online-tools-for-academic-classes/. AVOID OBJECTIVES THAT DO NOT WORK SEE THESE EXAMPLES. Many objectives dilute each other. A second primary objective is also needed, monthly, to not exceed the expense budget that the board approved at the start of the school year, with each and every school principal being responsible for meeting a corresponding expense objective and academic objective, spending and personnel decisions without interference. All other objectives are secondary objectives applying to specific management positions under the board or superintendent. The objectives set in the past that one sees below, cannot achieve good results, because those who produce the results, the schools and support staff are not focused on the right two elements, a measurable academic and expense objective monthly. Schools are not research institutions. They are production institutions of the highest importance, whose national result has a vital impact on our children, every industry and our economy. In the school district's website the superintendent mentions that: "In fact, you may remember that a key goal of our strategic plan is 100/90/90/90, that is:" "100% of students completing high school" (What is the value of "completing" high school with 80% of those who entered 9th grade not being ready per ACT but for minimum wage jobs at best?) "At least 90% graduating with a regular diploma" (What is the value of a diploma when 77% of those with a regular diploma are not even ready to be trained for a job or to enter a college or tech school per ACT?) "At least 90% of our graduates taking the ACT," (All students take the ACT by law. What is the value here? Just taking a test has zero value in any case.) "At least 90% of ACT takers scoring a 21 or better" (An average ACT 21 score means that 73-75% of those who entered in 9th grade are NOT ACT READY and are prepared for minimum wage jobs only. This is a shamefully low objective. A neighboring school district's objective is ACT 24. The top 19 countries in education are delivering high school students in an ACT equivalent range of 26 to 31)." In the superintendent's Five Year Strategic Plan we have these different objectives that are also not appropriate, unclear, not measurable, neither academic nor spending related. Ask yourself on each one of these "How on earth can I tell if they met this objective or not? How do I measure how well they have done?". "Guarantee Excellence in Teaching and Learning." "Personalize Learning" "Facilitate High Quality Student Supports" "Build & Support Our Community of Learners" "Build & Support Our Community of Leaders" "Value Our Hardworking People" "Build & Strengthen Our "One Big Team"" "Invite & Earn Stakeholder Feedback" "Improve Customer Service & Communication" Are these easy to understand, clear, measurable academic objectives and a spending objective vs. the approved budget? Of course not. Can you tell what measurable result to reach in each one? Of course not. Can all workers be focused on these objectives so that the GPA and ACT scores go up in every school? Absolutely not. That is the reason for poor performance. No one is going to pay attention to such objectives, and when they are not measurable, there can be no possible consequence. Ignoring it works. What becomes important is to please your boss and shield any complaints from him. Anyone can come up with excuses for the ACT score not improving. And the boss needs good excuses so he/she will appreciate you for it. That is the effect of too many objectives that are not measurable to see with certainty if they were met or not. Such a situation ends up with politics becoming important and achieving good results become less important. Poor, unmeasurable objectives increase the importance of politics in organizational behavior for survival. You may want to read "Objectives are vitally important if you wish to accomplish anything" with a group of people - or even alone - especially in a poorly performing organization. That is why we are producing the 40th result internationally in math. Tennessee is worse. We were on top in 1970. Teachers do not take the initiative to find out how the best nations in education are achieving their excellent results. They are focused on resolving their own personal issues with management, they have been demoralized over the years and not even given the basic right of being in charge of the classroom with full backing by management over discipline issues in the classroom. That is demeaning to teachers and reduces their credibility and authority in front of their students. Although the states should do this centrally, we do not see teachers making an individual effort to learn about why the top competitors are producing much better results, learn about them and implement such new methods. Unfortunately such attitudes are understandable with low morale but not helpful. Most parents are not pushing their children to study harder. A few decades ago only one parent worked and the other parent could focus on what needed to be done at home, including focusing the children on studying. Today, both parents are working, and most parents take the child's side if a complaint comes from school about the child's behavior. When the school district PR machine lies to the public about things going well, it is not helpful in getting single parents to help the school because they are working long hours every day. Many parents are not supportive enough to get their children to work harder today. It would be very helpful if the public was well informed about the poor performance of schools, to motivate them to help. However, there are school systems that produce uniformly excellent scores from all students, minority or not, without parental involvement, e.g., Finland's teaching method, or the 42-school Success Academy Schools in New York City that achieved in 2015 top one percent results with poor inner city black children, an amazing achievement. Finland's teacher selection and teaching methodology is better than ours. We are covering them in more detail later. Unfortunately our children pay a heavy price for all this. Four out of five graduates are unprepared for better jobs and robotic automation will replace them. All because our schools are not doing a better job. Parents we cannot control. Schools are to be controlled by their elected board and elected board members do not have the experience to do so. Some people show better OECD PISA results for the USA by showing only OECD member country results (35 countries), a smaller number. OECD as of 2015 publishes both member and non-member countries' results, 73 total, on the same page in its results. We dropped to 40th in the world in math in 2015. The potential working years of a high school graduate is 40-45 years. More than 75% of graduates in Knox County, Tennessee (more than 80% for Tennessee) are not prepared for any employment other than close to minimum wage jobs with increasing unemployment during their short working life, as robotics replace the low-to-medium level jobs. Excellent high school results are critical for our nation and individual graduates to be employable or what is called ACT Ready. Not just by one student in five being ready for employment as we have it now, but at least by four students out of five. Those who are ready, become part of our workforce. We need an outstanding well-educated workforce to create competitively priced outstanding products and services that our various industries can sell worldwide. Our workforce declined in skills. Our national income, GNP, and tax income depend on the success of US industries worldwide. Our GNP has been under 3% in growth for the past ten years. That's not good enough. It is the result of the poor readiness we deliver from our high schools. It is vital for us as a nation to fix our schools' performance. The world is everyone's market. That means that we must become competitive in the world market and that means that our high school output must be one of the best. It dropped to 40th in math. CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW WE COMPARE TO OTHER COUNTRIES IN PERFORMANCE. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing!!" Edmund Burke, Irish statesman, 1776 WHAT COULD BOARD MEMBERS DO DIFFERENTLY AND BETTER TO IMPROVE EDUCATION? Between 1995 and 2014 Knox County, Tennessee students increased only 14% but administrators increased 130%. The spending would have been more appropriate in the classroom. BUT THAT IS NOT ALL. Administrators hire people to work for them. The real increase ends up 650-900% if they hire 4-6 people per administrator for only a 14% increase in students. However, with this huge increase in management, the ACT results dropped like a stone setting an all time low record in 2013 with a score of 20.2! ACT Readiness reports indicate that as a result, more than 80% (statewide 89%, nationally 76%!) of those students who enter 9th grade are ready only for minimum wage employment, the types of jobs that will disappear. It is common knowledge in management that if you increase management numbers beyond standard operating ratios, managers (administrators) will start justifying their management positions, and such efforts actually hurt results and morale. This huge percentage of management increase was not reversed to this day, and it did absolutely nothing but cost us a lot of money! So...money is being shifted away from the classroom producing poorly prepared children in large numbers. Management overhead was increased purposefully, but the results dropped like a stone. I am sorry, but the wisdom with which the public's money and these decisions appear to be handled by school boards and superintendents is mind boggling. No one in leadership appears to have the wisdom to stand up and reverse such foolish spending. Why is the state allowing the wasting of so much of the people's money and dumb down virtually the entire workforce year after year? That is what the ACT results indicate under the governor. Any school district could reduce total Central Management employees to 1% of the total school district's employees. Any school district set as their most important two objectives: a 5-10% higher ACT score than the ACT score last achieved, and an objective for all managers in any school that is a monthly, month-to-date GPA objective. The second objective needs to focus on not exceeding the spending budget. The ACT and SAT tests show that our public school results are extremely poor. It is not surprising. If you attend any school board meeting, they never discuss the poor results and how those results could be improved. In addition, it is the schools that produce the results, yet we do not have monthly year-to-date GPA objectives in our schools that is 5-10% higher than the last one achieved. THAT EXPLAINS THE OUTRAGEOUSLY POOR PERFORMANCE.   In our state's plans to improve math and English requirements, we are focusing on public opinion about what the school district should be doing. Education spending per student rose aggressively since 1970, and student performance went down. None of our leaders suggested any changes to our education system that would have increased the ACT and SAT scores, the key indicators of what children learned before graduating from high school.   The public became less educated as a result, was dumbed down since 1970, and public opinion would not know anything about what our international competition accomplished and is planning, and what our employers need. As you see many foreign products around us, it should be very clear that we are competing with foreign countries whose education systems passed ours. We must catch up with the best. It will not be the local public's advice that will improve us.   After all, it did not do any good so far for many decades, especially since they are misinformed by the school district PR groups about how well our schools are doing. It will be the detailed knowledge of what makes the top performers in the world much better than we are in the OECD PISA tests, that will tell us what areas we need to correct in primary and secondary education. We need to forget the old American slogan that "WE ARE THE BEST". We are 40th in high school math. That is not the best. Be honest with the public, and have objectives and operating plans achieved to become the best. One should be friendly and fair, but never become personally attached to anyone who works for you. It will bias your judgment about them. You may have to make hard decisions about them. If they are your close friend, you will not be able to do that. You have to judge your employee's performance through measurable key indicators of success in their job, their specific objective. THIS IS NOT BEING DONE. Board members must understand VERY WELL what ACT's definition of Readiness means (go to ACT scores explained), as it is changed by developments in robotics to replace low-to-medium level jobs. Most do not understand this area. They must appreciate the impact of new technologies on existing jobs, and also the new job opportunities they create and the education required for them (go to in robotics). They must understand that we are competing internationally, and that we therefore must compare our progress to the countries that passed us. It would be important for board members to be familiar with two high performing countries' education system, Singapore and Finland. THEY KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THEM. It would be important to know exactly what Singapore and Finland cover in each subject in their curricula and try to do better than that. The state education department should be doing such work. But if they do not, we need the school boards to be creative. One can request such information from the Ministry of Education in the country. ACT does provide in their annual readiness report statistics about how to increase the ACT scores. At minimum, Board members must understand these areas well. THEY DO NOT. If the board member was a teacher, they need to realize that we have to become much better. Our teachers did not improve in subject knowledge, teaching methodologies and education management like other nations who passed us. THEY ARE NOT AWARE OF THIS AND WE ARE INCLUDING REFERENCES HERE. We have some serious work to do. A potential superintendent is very experienced in operating in a political environment whether he/she accomplished excellent results or not. Superintendents last in a job only 3-4 years for a couple of reasons: they take direction from a board who may or may not agree, and he/she is more experienced in the job than the board members. Or he or she cannot produce better results. In interviewing them, ask meaningful questions, such as:   How would you measure monthly what a school district or a school achieved academically? How can you tell which high school graduates are prepared to get a job after high school that can minimally support a family of four? What does ACT Readiness mean? What ACT or SAT average did you achieve during each of the last three years? What mistakes did you make in each of the last three years? How do you know that morale is high or low in your organization? The superintendent is the board's employee and not the board's boss. Board members must understand what ACT Readiness and ACT scores the superintendent is to deliver. That is the superintendent's responsibility. If the superintendent is delivering poor results for seven years and the board gives the superintendent good performance reviews, the Board is responsible for the poor results. The board has destroyed the future of up to 76% (those not ACT Ready) or more of our high school graduates. If the board cared about them, this would not happen - or perhaps the board had no idea what to do and made no attempt at learning what to do. When the results have been bad for decades, one must focus the entire organization on one performance and one spending objective like the ACT score and spending vs. budget in education. Without such focus, there is no chance for recovery. Look at the chart below about ACT results. If only 24% of the high school diplomas are "ACT Ready" qualified, we are doing and extremely poor job, and both the Board and superintendent do not deserve a good performance evaluation. Yet that is what we gave year after year. It is not acceptable to do a job under which 76% of the graduating children's jobs will be subject to replacement by robots within a few years, and they have not been educated well enough to learn a more sophisticated new job. 76% not being ACT Ready means that they have no chance to complete even the first year of a tech/vocational school or a college. Science and engineering programs require a 26 ACT achievement in math, in addition to the ACT Readiness benchmark in math, and that is way above 24% ACT Readiness. Also in addition, look at the examples listed here for immediate robotic applications. Some of these are replacing employees with four-year college degrees. It is fair to conclude that those who are not ACT Ready have only a few years of employment, because robotic capabilities will increase rapidly from now on. See examples of robotics. The ACT achievement and budget compliance objectives need an operating plan. The operating plan requires a monthly year-to-date objective per school in two areas: one is an academic objective to be determined, most likely a GPA average, and the second a spending objective not to exceed a monthly year-to-date expense budget. It is necessary to have a monthly year-to-date progress measurement in both objectives for schools to identify any shortcomings early toward meeting the annual average ACT and budget goals for the school district. Performance-related objectives are needed for all supervisory positions in schools, in central management and for teachers also. All objectives at all levels need to be measurable, a key indicator of success for the job of the individual AND FOR HIS/HER SUPERIORS AND ORGANIZATION, that contribute to ACT school district objective achievement. They have to be brief and simple enough to be remembered precisely at all times by the individual. No current objectives at any level meet that criteria today in 2016. Click here to see ACT scores explained for the graph below http://www.education.org/1actscoresexplained.html . A useful document to read would be this guideline from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that covered 65 countries' primary and secondary education, with the best in the world among them. We can see in the OECD chart above spending per pupil for each of 65 countries. We in Knox County, Tennessee are one of the top spenders per student compared to these 65 nations. But in results, we, the USA, are 40th in math - very poor. Tennessee is at the low end of USA performance. Knox County, Tennessee results would be much worse than 40th worldwide. That means that we spend enough money, but the money is not being spent in the right places. For example not enough money is getting to the classrooms that results come from, and there are requirements on teachers that cut down their preparation and teaching time, so that they cannot do their best. See chart below. If we want 80% of those with a diploma to be ready to get better than minimum wage jobs, we need to be at an average ACT score above 25. That simply cannot be done with the poor management performance shown in the above charts. A diploma generally means that the person is fully prepared for a job or further education. With a 20.7 (Knox County, TN 2015) ACT score we produce only 24% of the graduates with a diploma who are ACT ready. That makes our Tennessee public school diplomas - worthless. What is the point in issuing worthless diplomas?   We are raising both at home and in school very soft and poorly trained children for a much tougher and more competitive world after high school. Schools and families must get tougher so that our children can survive in this tougher market. Otherwise they will not survive. The public is purposefully misinformed about how poorly our children are prepared in high school. It is done both by the state and the school districts. They employ professional PR people at public expense for which the public pays with their hard-earned tax dollars in order to produce good news. State Education Departments do it with "Cut Scores", no specifications for objectives and operating plans that elected board members do not understand, interviewing standards and practices especially to hire superintendents, limit on the size of central management organizations that are bloated, and requirements as well in addition to the above, to assist elected school district board members. It is the ACT or SAT scores that indicate every year how well our children have been educated from grade one to twelve. They can claim that they have done many things, and they blame teachers and parents - but they have not initiated any program that raised the ACT or SAT scores since 1970. Those are the only tests that count and are given every year. But they organize big celebrations if we show even tiny gains in tests that do not count, because they are easier to show higher scores. This is how they misguide and lie to the public, who pay more and more every year for the poor results. "Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either". Albert Einstein Are school boards and superintendents telling the public all the truth and nothing but the truth about their results? Raising the minimum wage instead of increasing public high school performance and improving behavior to internationally competitive levels, accelerates the demand for the less expensive and more productive robotic automation. Among black high school graduates, 95% were not ready nationally in 2015. 95%! At the same time a charter school chain in NYC (Success Academy Schools 1, Success Academy Schools 2) with poor, inner city black students with 32 schools scored top one percent in math in the New York State Common Core Tests in 2013 beating even most private schools. They demand excellence in teaching and in student behavior. New York State is the fifth highest performer in the USA. Tennessee, a state we use for some examples, is in the bottom half of US performance. Or better yet, look at a world top performer, Finland with methodologies developed that are pure genius to produce excellent results in less teaching hours and lower cost than ours, although their cost of living is higher (Finland 1, Finland 2). Excellent results are possible, but not the way we have been running public schools in any state for the past hundred years. We do not visit those who excel to learn from them. "With the long-term decline of primary and secondary education, we are developing a nation of sheep. A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves." Edward R. Morrow, Journalist, 1908-1965     TCAP state test results for Tennessee showed a much higher score than the national ACT or NAEP tests, because the state tests are easier. In addition, if the percentage score of right answers is low, e.g., 45%, normally it would be a failing grade. To make it look better, the state translates the low 45% score to a "B". They call this failing grade translation "Cut Scores". The result about how well the students know what they were taught, becomes a lie to the public. The TCAP's rigor or toughness was 58% lower than the ACT. Tests are never designed to show less than the intended results for a grade. In other words, the much easier state test shows much higher grades, putting into good light performance that is a disastrous failure using these "Cut Scores". As a result, we hurt a very large percentage of graduating children who are not ready for a meaningful job or for more education without two years of full time remedial courses. TAKING A LOOK INTO HOW AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES COMPARE TO OTHER NATIONS' GRADUATES   Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is TO TEACH PEOPLE HOW TO LEARN Peter Drucker, 1909-2005, Father of 21st Century "Management By Objectives" For black students the percentage of those not ready for a job is 98% in Tennessee (95% nationally). The public is unaware of these facts. The black student figures are very disturbing. A chain of charter schools with poor black inner city children (Success Academy Schools of New York City 1: http://educationnext.org/what-explains-success-academy-charter-network/, Success Academy Schools of New York City 2: http://successacademies.org/about/, A virtual tour: http://virtualtour.successacademies.org/tour/#welcome) worked hard and had outstanding results with 32 schools in 2014. They have 41 schools as of 2018. These black inner city children from poor families scored in the top 1% in Math and the top 3% in English on the difficult Common Core tests in the entire State of New York, the fifth best performing state in US education. THE PROBLEM CAN BE SOLVED, BUT NOT THE WAY OUR PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICTS ARE MANAGED. We have created a powder keg that will surely blow up. All of this, because state law delegates ALL decisions to the school districts' elected board everywhere, whose majority has no management experience on the scale of the school district. Important: The states do not provide MANAGEMENT GUIDELINES. What brings success in other countries? (Statement from the national institute for excellence in teaching on the 2013 NAEP results and Nation's report card). Most national income tends to be generated internationally, because the international market is huge. That happens only if American companies who sell internationally are selling competitive products in quality and pricing. Such competitiveness depends on the quality of their workforce, which in turn is dependent on the competitiveness of the high schools. That in turn depends on the nation's position on the OECD PISA tests, how wisely that nation spends money on education per student, and how teachers are prepared and managed to educate the coming workforce. Education results depend to a large degree on the TEACHERS' education, quality and management of teachers, AND most importantly how the teachers' personality matches the teaching environment. That quality needs to be high internationally to have competitive children in the workforce after high school graduation or to go to higher level learning. The graph below shows the excessive hours that US teachers have to work in the classroom compared to the high performing internationals in education. Our teachers also have a large load in paperwork and in tests relative the competition. COMPETITIVELY THESE ARE EXCESSIVE AND DO NOT IMPROVE THE POOR PERFORMANCE. The results of the teachers are not good, since we dropped internationally to 40th place as a nation when 15 year-old students are tested worldwide.   "Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource." John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) Thirty-fifth President of the USA   The very low black student performance is likely to become the fuse in this "powder keg", that our state departments of education and elected school boards in our school districts allowed to happen. A charter school is a public school also. Before anyone says that improvement is not possible, a charter school system called Success Academy Schools in New York City with 32 schools and poor inner city black children, scored in the top one percent in mathematics in the New York State Common Core tests in 2014. They beat the majority of all state public AND private schools (Success Academy Schools of New York City 1: http://educationnext.org/what-explains-success-academy-charter-network/, Success Academy Schools of New York City 2: http://successacademies.org/about/, A virtual tour: http://virtualtour.successacademies.org/tour/#welcome). The big difference between a charter school and a public school is the board of education who are in charge. In a charter school, the board members are appointed by the school system management. In a public school district, the board is elected. The results mirror the quality of the voting majority on these boards. New York State is the fifth highest performer in the USA.   In our opinion, we are facing a national emergency. No one took sufficient action in any state's leadership to raise the ACT (or SAT) scores, yet the Success Academy Schools clearly show what can be accomplished! At what average ACT score level should we be to be ACT Ready for a job or to enter a college? Assuming 80% ACT readiness ( note that we are 80%+ NOT ACT READY) of high school graduates. More than an average ACT score of 25 would be needed, instead of 21 nationally and close to it in other states for 80% of our high school graduates to be ACT Ready. THE 21 ACT GOAL BY THE STATE BY 2020 IS TOO LOW.   We are not doing as well as the school districts' PR groups tell us through the local newspapers. The education laws allow the school districts to conduct their business in any manner whatsoever. They get fully funded under the law. They don't have to be competitive. The public has to be reasonably satisfied, and the school district PR Groups achieve that. Lenin, the father of "disinformation" theory said that "A lie mentioned often enough "becomes the truth." The public who pays for it all does not get the entire truth. Under Hitler, master propagandist of the Nazi regime, Joseph Goebels, his information minister, added the following practice: use half-truths to build a case that the public will buy. "A half-truth is a whole lie" - says a proverb. A group can get away with it only until the majority discovers that their children cannot get a job. That moment is coming close AND THERE WILL BE A LOT OF ANGER.   Programs with very small growth in objectives reflect low expectations and the gains produced will hardly justify the expense. When people face high objectives, they rise to the occasion and meet objectives. When people face low objectives, they have difficulty meeting them.   For example if Tennessee is producing only a 14% ACT Readiness, and starts a program that will raise it only to 21% ACT Readiness, with the rate at which job requirements are growing, they accomplished nothing. That is exactly the kind of low expectation objective that is being implemented and celebrated. You do improve somewhat with it if delivered, it will look good to the public, but it means nothing. And then cognitive robots come into the market and the majority of your children will have no chance for a job.   " Educational failure puts the United States' future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk", warns the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, chaired by Joel I. Klein, former head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, Director, Stanford University, former U.S. secretary of state. The country "will not be able to keep pace - much less lead - globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long," argues the Task Force. US Education is a major national security problem that IS VERY IMPORTANT http://workforce/united-states/us-education-reform-national-security/p27618.   Our failure level, and market size we are demonstrating make us an ideal target market for robots. That has a positive side, because many companies are dissatisfied with workforce quality and are holding funds so that they can move to states or countries with a better trained workforce.   Look at the chart for teacher turnover below. Turnover typically costs 6-18 months of the salaries of the people replaced. We are not showing total turnover expense, but only the portion that could be saved with better people management. Many nations spent less per student than we did, and delivered superior results. This is the result of better education management. Poor management: poor results with MORE THAN ENOUGH FUNDING. THE MONEY IS NOT BEING SPENT IN THE RIGHT PLACES. And the poor inexperienced management keeps making the same mistake every year. This is NOT a right or left wing, Republican or Democrat problem. It happened under both parties since 1970. IT IS AN AMERICAN PROBLEM, and we keep doing nothing about it. It is time for some big changes.   We have a problem to solve. IN EVERY SCHOOL DISTRICT OF EVERY US STATE, IT IS THE ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD THAT DETERMINES WHAT OBJECTIVES AND PLANS THE SCHOOL DISTRICT WILL FOLLOW. With more than 13,500 school districts nationally, performance standardization and achievement becomes an impossibility. Imagine a ball game with 13,500 playing. They just follow their own rules, and don't even know where the goal posts are. And, they cost A LOT of money.   The elected boards have more authority than the state or federal government in areas relating to education results, spending and operating ratios. Board membership requires only a high school diploma. The end of high school results (ACT and SAT) are very poor. Imagine that in the case of Knox County, Tennessee, our example, such an elected board oversees an organization with more than 8,500 employees with a budget of more than half billion dollars. That is a huge management task requiring management training and experience on the highest level. Such background and experience is not available in school boards even on the individual level let alone for the voting majority. The results can only be terrible under such circumstances. Who was responsible for these poor results and bad teacher morale in Knox County, Tennessee? The board of education is totally in charge of all decisions about objectives, operating plans and financial decisions under the state law. However, we have a sample of the public running for the school board, and the state education departments do not help them at all with explanations and guide lines in areas where the average person is not familiar with the process - because they don't even know. The people who were responsible for the poor results in Knox County, TN, are the superintendent, and board of education chairs INDYA KINCANNON, KAREN CARSON, LYNNE FUGATE AND MIKE MACMILLAN. Superintendent taught for one year, then managed food service, security and accounting with less than 150 direct employees, never managed a single school before the board hired him with a 5:4 decision to manage 89 schools, more than 8,500 direct employees and a half billion dollar budget.   Read this website. Verify the sources. Decide where the truth is, and what they don't tell you. "WILL MY CHILDREN AND GRAND CHILDREN BE EMPLOYED?" Your child's future depends on them. "Things may come to those who wait...but only the things left by those who hustle!" Abraham Lincoln THE NATIONAL PLAN IN 2008 - THAT WAS IGNORED TO DATE: Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-Class Education Click on the title to read the plan. A report by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, Inc. Action 1: Upgrade state standards by adopting a common core of internationally bench marked standards in math and language arts for grades K-12 to ensure that students are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to be globally competitive. Action 2: Leverage states' collective influence to ensure that textbooks, digital media, curricula, and assessments are aligned to internationally bench marked standards and draw on lessons from high performing nations and states. Action 3: Revise state policies for recruiting, preparing, developing, and supporting teachers and school leaders to reflect the human capital practices of top-performing nations and states around the world. Action 4: Hold schools and systems accountable through monitoring, interventions, and support to ensure consistently high performance, drawing upon international best practices. Action 5: Measure state-level education performance globally by examining student achievement and attainment in an international context to ensure that, over time, students are receiving the education they need to compete in the 21st century economy. THE ABOVE PLAN WAS APPROVED BY MORE THAN 40 STATES AND THE US GOVERNMENT. This plan was not created by the US Government. The intent was clear: study the top international performers, determine what made them more productive in education than the US, and implement the new practices and standards in the states to produce significant improvement. Nothing of significance was implemented as of August, 2015. If implemented, the ACT (and SAT) scores would have risen significantly. They did not increase and went down in many states like Tennessee, where we set an all time low ACT score. Look at the results below.   The Success Academy Schools of NYC, having achieved top one percent status in the entire State of New York with 32 schools of poor black inner city children in 2013, is an example of what is possible, when everywhere else the same children are on the bottom. Look at the example for turnover analysis below. It is very costly. We are not showing total turnover expense, but only the portion that could be saved with better hiring practices. Sadly, we are killing the country and don't want to change in order to save the jobs of those who are creating the problem.   The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has an Education Department that tracks the performance of 15 year olds in 73 countries and presents excellent reports on where and what improvements are needed. Key indicators of success per country: http://www.oecd.org/edu/educationataglance2013-indicatorsandannexes.htm#Annex3. Test results (PISA) and detailed reports per country (USA Status Report, http://www.oecd.org/edu/EAG2014-Indicator%20D4%20(eng).pdf). Per country education analysis and polices: http://gpseducation.oecd.org/Home. What countries' teachers spend the most hours teaching (compare to top performing countries Finland and Korea): http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/48631419.pdf. Class size makes a difference in outcomes if less than 20 students: http://www.classsizematters.org/research-and-links/.   A presidential project, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5 (2010)", concluded that "disparities in U.S. K-12 education compared to those of many other nations, impose the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession - one substantially larger than the deep recession the country is currently experiencing." You can read it here.   Good education is the only certain way out of poverty. Unfortunately, our education system has become so poor that it can drive even children who are not from poverty, into poverty.   For years now, our education system in Knox County, Tennessee has been creating more than 80% of the students from 9th grade who are not prepared for jobs beyond minimum wage after leaving high school, according to ACT. The State is worse at 86%. They will be replaced by robots by 2025. WHY WE MUST IMPROVE URGENTLY: It Is A Good Idea To Peek Into The Future With The Videos Below To Understand Why Better Education Than What We Currently Have Is Absolutely Vital For The Future Existence Of Our Children. Dr. Michio Kaku, world famous scientist, in "America has a secret weapon": ...and if you would like to understand more about the future in depth, here is Dr. Ray Kurzweil,a brilliant man, head of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at Google (http://www.kurzweilai.net/) a world famous scientist, whose accuracy of forecasting future events and developments has been more than 85% accurate. Copyright © 2018 V. Spencer This is a work in progress. Remedying early K-12 education problems in India: http://economics.mit.edu/files/9907 After the bad news, you may want to read my jokes. And then, we must fight for the right thing.