INTRODUCTION

The Big Picture

VERY IMPORTANT: Most of today's jobs will disappear by about 2025-2026 as a result of Artificial Intelligence use in Cognitive Robotics with their cost dropping very low with Nanotechnology. Nanotechnology and Space Science, along with Cognitive Robotics, will enter the market worldwide, with a huge impact on jobs with the replacement of four-year college degrees and below in education. We warned several states frequently about this starting ten years ago with emails to governors. The great majority of our public schools weakened their mathematics instead of going to include Calculus. Same in Science by not requiring Chemistry and Physics for graduation. With being weak in Science and Mathematics we and 75-90% of our children were graduated from high school not even ACT Ready, which is a low standard in four subjects only, who cannot read and cannot do basic mental mathematics. With robotics automating many jobs, the remaining and many new jobs will require graduate-level mathematics through Calculus and three Sciences minimum, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. According to college professors, today's graduates need two years of remedial courses to start the freshman year of a science or engineering program. We will face a big problem in public education with our children being under-educated for two years but FOUR YEARS starting in 2023! The people responsible for the resulting unemployment are the heads of the state education departments, who ignored many important things. For example, teacher and management training. We also do not have high enough performance standards. Playing with the state tests to produce higher grades with less student knowledge, poor planning, and poor execution are big mistakes. How could such a thing be happening in the largest economy in the world, our country? It happens when one does not know one's international competition. Or when one does not improve but falls behind. Or when people on the top have no idea how to plan correctly, set the right objectives, and have the right operating plans. Jobs from about 2026-2028 will be mostly engineering, Science, and economics based on today's graduate level, like String Theory-based Mathematics. Or Physics that will include many new things based on Space Science. Nanotechnology will alter manufacturing to nanometer resolution that is one-millionth of a meter or one-millionth of 3.3 feet. Robotics will be able to do almost all of today's jobs. Robotics are and will be better in producing large quantities of the same product at a high-quality level. Thousands of fascinating new sciences will develop, creating new jobs. Much easier learning will become part of every day in about eight years, to be ready for faster changes. There will be no boring classes that turn off today's children. Today, too many children learn to hate subjects because the first classes in those subjects were boring. I attended 29 of them in math and Science in several states. I know how they feel. But if you fell behind as our public education did during the last 50 years, it will be not impossible, but much more difficult to catch up. I am not sure that we, who allowed public education to decline relative to the technological advancements, could have leadership that is tough enough to make ALL changes in education to catch up both in the schools and in our workforce. We found many public education areas that prevented us from improving our high school graduates' ACT performance. It was astounding that we did not have the management know-how to this day to take action to improve. What is very surprising is that the people's tax money has been paying one of the world's highest rates per student. However, we managed to drop in the most important area in our children's future, mathematics, to the bottom of the industrialized countries, while public education was misstating its performance to the public for years. I believe that such behavior is called a fraud. The HUGE problem for us in the US is that public education regressed rather than improved. Public Education did not keep up with scientific developments. According to some university professors, our high school graduates need two years of additional education to qualify to start freshman classes. With the massive new sciences arriving in 2023, that performance gap will go to 4 years by 2024 because K-12 education has not improved. Political leadership does not dare change them, although our public pays for each public education student, the highest in the world. We need two things urgently. One is independent employer-based management over public education, and not education-based. If the Education Department objects, promises a change, looking at the 20-year ACT record, that is not possible without all the changes in all areas below. Show them the 20-year-old ACT performance chart and ask how an organization that could not plan professionally, could set the right objectives? How could not set it high enough, does not have high enough standards and could not deliver good results in decades AND demonstrated zero management know-how, how could they improve? THEY CANNOT. Education is to satisfy employer needs. Not Education Dep't needs. They can be in conflict as they have to date. Education wants to look good when they do a poor job. Employers know the best what they need in education. Education has not been effective in managing itself. I wrote to a few governors to help them and to listen to them or anyone they designated to reply to me if I was incorrect. I did my homework in my eight-year investigation of our public education in every state and the top three countries in public education. I did not receive a single reply. I feel that I deserved a reply. I love my country. That is why I did this project at my own expense. I hope that what I did will help our governors take serious steps to correct this situation.



WE WILL SOON STEP OFF OF OUR PLANET TO FIND ELEMENTS AND MATERIALS THAT WE NEED. FOR EXAMPLE, TITANIUM IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT FOR US, BUT WE HAVE A VERY LOW SUPPLY OF IT ON EARTH, AND RUSSIA CONTROLS IT. OR ELEMENT 115 IN THE PERIODIC CHART IS VITALLY IMPORTANT TO DEVELOP ANTI-GRAVITY ENGINES. WE DO NOT HAVE ANY ON EARTH. SOME OTHER PLANETS DO HAVE THEM. STEPPING OFF OF EARTH IS A VERY IMPORTANT MOVE FOR MANKIND, AND IT ALREADY STARTED. The future holds enormous, fast-changing opportunities. To succeed, we need to change how we think and recognize how little we know compared to what we will experience during our lifetime. Today, we need to be at peace with the idea that we don't know enough to say that something is not possible, and the other person who saw something unusual may not be lying or crazy. We need to realize that we may not know enough to judge some things based on what we know today. Comments like "Impossible!" are not a good thing because we know very little, compared to what human beings will know in the future. But "Based on what I know today, it does not seem possible" could be a valid statement. BUT IF WE SEE SOMETHING VERY INTERESTING IN THE SKY WITH UNUSUAL CHARACTERISTICS, THE BETTER EDUCATED WE ARE, THE BETTER OUR GUESS WILL BE ABOUT THAT OBJECT. THE SAME THING WILL BE TRUE IF WE EXPERIENCE UNUSUAL THINGS IN OUR JOBS IN THE FUTURE. IT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS THAT WE ARE GETTING VERY CLOSE TO ESTABLISHING COLONIES OUTSIDE OF OUR EARTH, TO FIND RESOURCES ON OTHER PLANETS THAT WE DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH OF ON EARTH. SUCH JOBS WILL PAY MILLIONS PER YEAR, BUT WE WILL NEED MUCH MORE EDUCATION FOR IT THAN WHAT WE CAN GET TODAY IN OUR POORLY PERFORMING PUBLIC SCHOOLS. IT WILL BE A MAJOR OPPORTUNITY FOR OUR CHILDREN, BUT NOT WITH THE EDUCATION WE PROVIDE TODAY.

We are part of the solar system with our sun. Our galaxy, The Milky Way, has about 200 billion star systems with planets in every one of them. Light travels very fast, at 670,616,629 mph. The distances are so great in space that we measure distance in light-years, the distance light travels in one year, or 6,000,000,000,000 miles. The diameter of the Milky Way is 105,700 light-years or 634,200,000,000,000,000 miles. And the Milky Way itself, with us in it, travels at 1.3 million miles per hour in a straight line from the point of formation. Light takes about 105,700 years to cross the Milky Way. The Milky Way is an average-sized galaxy. One light-year is a very long distance for us, and there must be a very large number of planets with all those star systems in it.

We can see and detect only part of the universe with our best instruments in 2020. We call it the observable universe (OU, for short). NASA says that we have two and a half Trillion galaxies in the OU. That's 2,500,000,000,000 times 500,000,000,000 or 3,000,000,000,000 star systems, each with one sun and its planets. Many of the planets are older than we are. With these huge numbers, it would be impossible not only for us to be the only intelligent life, but there must be many that have intelligent life that is thousands and millions of years ahead of us both spiritually and technologically.

Human eyes can see only 10% of the Milky Way with a clear atmosphere on earth. Close to 90% of the Milky Way's mass is dark matter, but we cannot see it, and we don't know what it is yet in 2020. The way we developed on earth, there must be many planets with millions of years more advanced civilizations than we are, and millions with less advanced civilizations. We are just a tiny part of our universe, and there may be an infinite number of universes. Just remember that we know very little compared to what there is to learn in the future. Our future is infinite unless, with our hostile nature, we do not learn to become peaceful and blow ourselves and our planet up. What should worry our leaders is that so far, we could not change our hostility, and so far, we are not taking care of our planet either.

Our solar system is not stationary in space. Nothing is. As I mentioned above, our galaxy is moving at 1.3 million miles per hour. Why don't we have many collisions in space? Everything is moving at high speed. Not as dangerous as it sounds because the high speed is in huge open space compared to our experience on earth. Hubble measured one galaxy that IS moving at a rate of FIVE TIMES THE SPEED OF LIGHT. That is a fact. But under Einstein's law, that is an impossibility. We need to learn how Physics is different in space because some of Physics' laws will be different. What I know is that the distance between planets and solar systems and galaxies is so huge. The gravitational system, which we don't understand fully yet, is not constant but proportional to the mass (size) of the structures in space. The gravitational force diminishes with the square of the distance from each structure or solar system, which may have something to do with it. There must be some forces in space that we do not understand yet. We have a lot to learn yet about space Physics.

What is also interesting is that the structure of an atom is similar. Each atom has a nucleus with different subatomic particles. Electrons in different numbers for each element are rotating around the nucleus at different distances from the nucleus. But the distances between the nucleus and electrons are huge compared to the size of the nucleus and electrons, very similar to what we see in a solar system's sun and the planets. If you look at an iron block, the great majority of its atomic structure is nothing. It is much more than 99.99% nothing. And we think it is solid. But there is some incredibly huge force that keeps the electrons and nucleus of atoms together at the proper speed and distance. How big a force? When we try to pull the parts of an atom apart, we can have a nuclear explosion (fission). When we fuse them (fusion), we can have an even bigger nuclear explosion. You can learn more about these things in Chemistry and Physics, but our education systems do not require it for a high school diploma. Other countries do. And you will need it for almost all future jobs. It is really interesting stuff.
By the way, NASA already found 40 billion planets that have water, and their temperature range is similar to earth. Our kind of biological life could be there. But there could be a life that is different from ours. The point is that it would not be a smart thing to assume that we are alone as intelligent life, and there may be intelligent life out there that is minimum thousands of years more advanced than we are. Could they have been observing us right here? Let me ask you this. Could we observe intelligent life that is 1000 years younger than we are without them noticing it? Absolutely. If we are being observed, why would they not do open? The answer would most likely be that we humans kill each other for different opinions, different religions, different skin colors, and so many other silly reasons. We need to be much better than that first, instead of destroying ourselves with the kind of weapons we already have. I suggest that assuming bad things or bad intent about others to deny the truth or because we do not understand something is not wise. But to learn what they are thinking, well, we might learn something very important. Talking to understand each other is better than hostility. They are thousands of years ahead of us in both spirituality and technology and could destroy us. And to disagree using flimsy "truth" with someone who presents obvious proof about a bad job done is like digging your own grave. Obviously, we are very close to some interesting jobs that are space related. So close that our children will be employable in those very high paying jobs. But please understand that without much better public education, that will not be available to our children. We also cannot accept as a country not to participate in space jobs and fall behind because our political and education leaders are degrading public education. That is why I am enclosing information about the best learning systems and tutorials on any subject below. Our children will need to be better educated about mathematics beyond Calculus and in sciences like Physics and Chemistry. Today they are not required to graduate from high school. But 60 years ago, they were required in the northern states. Interesting.



OUR SITUATION IS IMMENSELY COMPLICATED BY THE BLACK VS. WHITE PROBLEM THAT WE DID NOT RESOLVE IN MORE THAN 100 YEARS. SUCH PROBLEMS FESTER IF LEFT UNRESOLVED. THE SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM IS ALSO EDUCATION. NOT A BETTER EDUCATION FOR BLACK CHILDREN, BUT A MUCH BETTER EDUCATION TO ALL CHILDREN. OTHER COUNTRIES CAN DO IT. WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO IT. BUT WE DON'T. WHY WOULD ANYONE TAKE THE HIGHEST PAYMENT IN THE WORLD AND DELIVER THE WORST JOB AMONG THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES, WHILE LYING ABOUT WHAT THEY ARE DELIVERING AS THE "BEST" RESULTS WHEN THEIR PERFORMANCE IS BAD? IT IS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT THAT SHOULD PROTECT THE PUBLIC BUT THEY DON'T. Who ensures that the education system performs at the right standards, the right objectives, and the right operating plan to meet the objective? The more people know, the more they understand everything, including each other. The fewer people know, the fewer people understand each other, make mistakes, and end up destroying each other. WHAT IF THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT PROVIDE YOU WITH A GOOD ENOUGH EDUCATION? WHY DON'T THEY CREATE A MUCH BETTER EDUCATION SYSTEM FOR ALL CHILDREN? The solution is not just more money handed to the school of black children. Where I live, the school district allocates the same dollars per student in all schools, except for the two high schools with black children. THEY WERE GIVEN DOUBLE THE BUDGET PER STUDENT THAN WHAT THE OTHER SCHOOLS GET FOR TWO DECADES NOW. HOW MUCH DID THAT INCREASE THEIR PERFORMANCE? THE PERFORMANCE DID NOT IMPROVE. IT KEPT GOING DOWN., AND WE KEEP THROWING MONEY AT THE PROBLEM. THAT MEANS THAT MORE MONEY IS NOT THE ISSUE, BUT HOW WELL WE TEACH IS. WE DO NOT CAPTURE THE IMAGINATION OF THE CHILDREN IN MOST PUBLIC SCHOOLS TODAY. The solution is jobs FOR ALL CHILDREN. But that requires a very good education FOR ALL CHILDREN. WHAT CHILDREN LEARN NEEDS TO FOLLOW TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES CLOSELY ENOUGH AND OUR LOW PERFORMANCE IN MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCES ARE NOT HELPFUL. We have been ignoring public education's poor performance. Why can't minority children do much better than 90% of those who graduate with a diploma not being prepared in high school to learn any job? After listening to some people's theories on the subject, I found a charter school in New York called Success Academy Schools. They have about 40 schools, with the great majority of students being black children from poor inner-city families. They have a waiting list of 19,000 families. I visited this school. They are doing an excellent job. Their scores are better than most private schools! These children are scoring above 85%. I could not get anyone from our public schools to visit them. Our public education graduates about 3.6 million children every year. 75-80% of the graduates are not even ACT Ready. That means that those graduates' subject knowledge is way below 60%. I will explain later what ACT Readiness means. Covid-19 closed our schools, and we tried to continue the same old education method remotely. This was and is an opportunity to improve, but we are not using it as an opportunity. SOME PEOPLE DO NOT WANT TO CHANGE AND HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO PREVENT CHANGE. That is undeniable because if such a group does not exist, this could happen only if our IQ was the same as a caveman's IQ. Let me give you a few hints. Universities like MIT have a remote high school program that results in an accredited diploma and is better than most states, if not all states' public schools. Let me tell you that the best teachers' and professors' lectures and tutorials are available on the Internet. If one makes use of them, it is much better than our schools and less expensive. BUT OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS DO NOT WANT TO CHANGE ANYTHING, INCLUDING ANY SUGGESTIONS THAT COME FROM THEIR BOSS, THE GOVERNOR, AND THAT RAISES AN INTERESTING QUESTION THAT I DON'T WANT TO RAISE YET, OTHER THAN WE BETTER CHANGE AND DO IT FAST. WHAT THIS TELLS YOU IS THAT BOTH ON THE POLITICAL SIDE THAT CONTROLS EDUCATION, AND IN THOSE WHO MANAGE STATE EDUCATION, WE DO NOT SEEM TO HAVE ANY CREATIVITY AND ENOUGH KNOW-HOW, OR THEY ARE NOT GIVEN THE AUTHORITY TO DO THEIR BEST.

SOME THINGS TO THINK ABOUT:
Too many of our responsible positions are selected with elections. What and who wins elections? A few decades ago, a person who was a very dependable, well-accomplished member of society could win an election. Then I saw a governor's election. One candidate spent $10 million on advertising to put himself in the best light. The other candidate had only $3 million dollars to promote himself and lost the election. Does the best person win the elections?
Lenin of communism fame told his people many times around WWI, that "If you lie to people 1000 times, they will accept it as truth!" A few decades later, before WWII started, Dr. Joseph Goebels, Hitler's Propaganda Minister, refined Lenin's quotation into a science, and disinformation theory was born. The large advertising companies are experts at it. As a result, the people vote for a candidate based on the IMAGE and CHARACTER that the candidate's advertising agency created. IF THE ADVERTISING COMPANY PRESENTED TO THE PUBLIC OFTEN ENOUGH A POSITIVE IMAGE, THEIR WORK SUCCESSFULLY ELECTED THEIR CANDIDATE. THEREFORE, THE MONEY WINS. BUT THE PUBLIC HAS NO IDEA WHO THE PERSON IS THAT THEY VOTED FOR. HOW MANY TIMES DID YOU HEAR GOVERNORS OR PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES PROMISE TO FIX OUR POOR EDUCATION WHEN THEY WERE RUNNING FOR OFFICE? I HEARD THAT EVERY SINGLE TIME. FIXING EDUCATION WOULD MEAN THAT THEY WOULD MAKE CHANGES THAT WOULD RAISE THE ACT OR SAT SCORES, THAT MEASURE HOW MUCH OUR CHILDREN LEARNED FROM GRADE ONE TO TWELVE. NONE OF THEM IMPROVED EDUCATION'S ACT OR SAT SCORES EVER!! OBVIOUSLY, WE NEED TO TEMPER THE USE OF ELECTIONS WHEN SPECIAL SCIENTIFIC METHODS DEVELOPED FOR CROWD CONTROL CAN MANIPULATE THE PUBLIC'S DECISION. IT APPEARS THAT EDUCATION IS NOT IN GOOD HANDS WHEN IT IS IN HANDS OF POLITICIANS. THE PEOPLE WHO ARE THE CUSTOMERS THAT EDUCATION DEVELOPS ARE EMPLOYERS. IT IS THE EMPLOYERS WHO KNOW BEST WHAT OUR EDUCATION SYSTEMS NEED TO DELIVER, AND THAT INCLUDES GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS THAT EXCEED THEIR NEEDS BECAUSE THEIR NEEDS WILL RISE WITH THE DEPLOYMENT OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES. EDUCATION HAS NOT DELIVERED TO EMPLOYERS' SATISFACTION. GOVERNORS KNOW THAT BECAUSE MANY EMPLOYERS MET WITH GOVERNORS ABOUT THIS PROBLEM. QUITE A FEW WROTE TO US AS WELL ABOUT HOW SUCH MEETINGS WENT. We have a disorganized mess in the departments of education. Their standards and performance evaluations need to be in the hands of a highly qualified group of large industry heads and retired governors, with public education organizations limited to delivering results as this outsider organization decides. And I thought that the public's education would be very important in creating a country with a successful economy. BUT HERE WE ARE, WITH OUR POLITICALLY MANAGED EDUCATION LEADERSHIP RUNNING IT INTO THE GROUND, AND WITHOUT ANY RESPONSE IF WE ASK QUESTIONS.

• How do you justify different K-12 curricula in every state when K-12 is to provide a much better foundation in Math and Science because AI-based cognitive robotics will start replacing many more college-educated jobs in 2023-2024, and nanotechnology and space science will start many new jobs that will require much higher mathematics and science education from high school than what we provide today?



• Why do governors allow the graduation of children from high school who don't even know basic math, cannot read, cannot read and write the script but can perhaps read and write block letters only?



• Why do governors allow in Science and math to skip Chemistry and Physics, as well as Calculus in mathematics as a graduation requirement in high school, when future jobs will require much higher math and science knowledge?



• How did this practice improve our children's ACT scores between 2000 and 2019? How will what we have done produce the bright outlook on jobs "for all children" that our public education promises in writing?



• How can we justify a grading system where state education departments centrally in the state use a method called "cut scores" that selectively drop the pass/fail point in ANY selected subject on the state test? The state test was purchased for many millions of dollars of the people's money meeting the curriculum. Who benefits from making your grades look higher when your knowledge is too low, and have states do this individually at will? How do you compare performance with such actions? How does such action improve our children's poor education? how did this improve act scores between 2000 and 2019?



• The most damaging fact is that we use "90% graduation rate" as an objective to graduate children. The graduation rate is totally under state education department control. The state education departments can modify pass/fail points in the state tests. Graduation depends on the state test. The fact that year-end results and graduation results depend on the state test shows tremendous pressure at year-end to pass as many children as possible. Several teachers told me that they are under pressure to pass children who would be failures normally. Therefore the state tests cannot guarantee that child education is fairly represented by graduating the child. Such practices make it impossible to compare state test results accurately AND FAIRLY to represent an achieved knowledge-level by the students. THERE CAN BE NO JUSTIFICATION FOR ANY OF THESE HARMFUL FACTS THAT DEGRADE OUR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION. THE SOLUTION IS TO USE AVERAGE CONSOLIDATED ACT SCORES AS AN OBJECTIVE, THAT IS AT LEAST 10% ABOVE THE PRIOR YEARS ACT RESULT, IN EVERY SINGLE STATE TO PRODUCE VALID RESULTS AT THE GRADUATION LEVEL FROM HIGH SCHOOL. IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THE STATES WERE GIVEN THE AUTHORITY TO PURPOSEFULLY FALSIFY TESTING RESULTS TO MAKE SUCH RESULTS LOOK MUCH BETTER FOR THE PUBLIC. THE ACT TEST CANNOT BE ALTERED BY THE STATES. WE WOULD SUGGEST THAT THE STATES IMMEDIATELY CHANGE THE GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS, DO NOT USE THE CURRENT STATE TEST-BASED METHODS, AND USE A SPECIFIC ACT SCORE THAT REPRESENTS 80% ACT READINESS AS A GRADUATION REQUIREMENT. WE THINK THAT SUCH A REQUEST IS FAIR AND REASONABLE UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES. WE ALSO REQUEST THAT GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS NOT BE DECIDED BY THE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENTS IN VIEW OF 20 YEARS OF POOR PERFORMANCE, BUT BY AN INDEPENDENT GROUP OF 1 SENIOR OFFICER FROM THE TEN LARGEST CORPORATIONS, PLUS 1 SENIOR PROFESSOR FROM THE FIVE HIGHEST PERFORMING UNIVERSITIES AND 1 STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC EDUCATION FROM THE 4 HIGHEST ACT SCORE PRODUCING STATES.

Please remember something as you read this website. THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. Public education systems are more difficult to manage, than a business. BUT PUBLIC EDUCATION IGNORES MANAGEMENT TRAINING WHEN THEY NEED IT THE MOST. A business must make money, or you will disappear fast—the pressure to be profitable forces a business to pay more attention to doing all things well. You have to make sure that you do not overspend, hire the right people you need, hire managers who had good management training and experience, and deliver good results. You need people who know how to set the right objectives to raise performance without making the job tougher for anyone, and who know that if a group of people delivered a poor performance for years, are not doing their jobs right, and their job focus is wrong. You have income only if you make money. Balancing all of this requires management education and experience. If one does not have such discipline and the right people, one can't even see the problems that do pop up. And you make money only if you are honest and do a good job for your customers. In a business, one has a much better motivation to make sure that the money you spend achieves the results your customers want. You pay much more attention to this because if you do not, everyone loses their job. After all, you go bankrupt. That gets everyone's attention. One needs the same focus in education to do well. But in public education, you have guaranteed funding that makes it even more important to have the same degree of focus and know-how to do well. But you do not have trained management and well-trained people because the standards are low, and decisions are in the hands of locally elected people, who do not understand what we just explained. Today we need a lot more know-how in education than what we had in the late 1800s. The game changed a long time ago. But public education-related decisions went downhill like a huge, destructive snowball. Management know-how is missing in public education.

This is our ACT performance for 20 years, 2000-2019. Just look at it below. Is this satisfactory performance? We show below the ACT, SAT and international PISA scores converted to percentages. Percentages are easier to relate to good or bad performance. We have always referred to good performance as a B Average, that represented more than 80% product knowledge. Today we have to be higher to catch up to what employers need. We have different curricula, or list of subjects and subject content that our high schools need to complete. Even within states we have differences in the curricula. Other countries do not do this because high school is to provide a strong foundation of knowledge for learning specialized know-how for different jobs, and we fell behind those countries. The idea of a mixture of subjects looks like Hungarian Goulash that looks good but it will burn all the way to one's rectum, but we need a solid foundation built in especially mathematics and the sciences for future jobs. So we decided to teach less in mathematics and science. Plus with different curricula and subject content, how do we compare to others to know how good our education program is? We are not doing well, so the purpose seems to be to make it impossible for the public to tell how good our education really is in public schools. Our education system's purpose IS NOT to deliver better education each year in response to the changes in technologies and employers' needs. If the objective was to keep improving our high school curriculum, we would require Pre-Calculus mathematics, plane and solid Geometry, plain and solid Trigonometry, Calculus, Biology with Calculus, Chemistry with Calculus, and Physics with Calculus, reinstating script reading and writing, no calculator use in K-12, because it stunted the neuronal interconnection activity in the brain between ages 6 and 14 to fully develop the math logic part of the brain that is vital in fast automatic millisecond calculations and pattern analysis during critical thinking and decision making, to graduate from high school. Our education management is trying to find a course to teach children critical thinking and decision making without realizing that both functions require subject knowledge in the problem area AND related subjects as well, without which they cannot make good decisions or to think critically. YOU HAVE ALREADY WEAKENED THE CURRICULUM SO THAT IT IS NOT COMPETITIVE, and to make it worse, you allowed the curricula to vary within each state to engineer less educated children. WE HAVE A FEW QUESTIONS RIGHT HERE:

• DON'T YOU THINK THAT WE NEED A CENTRAL, COUNTRY-WIDE DECISION ON ONE CURRICULUM FOR THE USA, DECIDED BY THE MOST SUCCESSFUL LARGE EMPLOYERS CEOs, WHOSE NEEDS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT TO SATISFY BY OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS?



• WOULDN'T EXAMINING AND CONSIDERING THE CURRICULUM IN EACH OF THE TOP THREE COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION IN THE WORLD BE ALSO IMPORTANT? AFTER ALL OUR EDUCATION RESULTS DROPPED TO THE BOTTOM OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES, AND THEY ARE ON TOP BECAUSE THEY ARE DOING A MUCH BETTER JOB IN EDUCATION THAN WE ARE!



• LOOK AT THE 2020 ACT SCORE SCATTER DIAGRAM FOR ALL US STATES TOGETHER, WITH THE SCATTER RANGE FROM ACT 18 TO 26 WITH THE ACT SCORE RANGE OF 1-36. IDEALLY WE SHOULD BE IN ALL STATES AT AVERAGE ACT 28 MINIMUM, BECAUSE IT REPRESENTS AN ACT READINESS LEVEL AT ONLY 80% WITH 20% OF THE CHILDREN NOT BEING ACT READY. WHY ARE WE NOT THERE WHEN THE TOP TEN COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION RANGE IN ACT EQUIVALENT PERFORMANCE FROM ACT 29 TO 34? WHY ARE WE SATISFIED WITH OUR POOR RESULTS THAT GUARANTEE THAT ABOUT 80% OF OUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES WILL BE UNEMPLOYED?



• 3-4 YEARS AGO, AS AN EXAMPLE IN TENNESSEE, THE STATE EDUCATION PLAN CALLED FOR BEING AT AVERAGE ACT 21 IN 2020. WE HAVE SPECIFIED ACT 21 AS THE GOAL TO BE REACHED FOR 18 YEARS NOW!! ACT 21 REPRESENT READINESS AT GRADUATION OF BELOW 25%. THAT IS TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!! YOU KNOW WHY? BECAUSE WE CHANGED NOTHING IN THE WAY WE OPERATE, WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WOULD WORK AS AN OBJECTIVE AND A GOAL, WE HAVE OBJECTIVES LIKE 90% GRADUATION RATE, WHEN WE ARE "DOCTORING" THE PASS/FAIL POINTS TO SHOW HIGHER GRADES WITH NO IMPROVEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE IN ADDITION TO OTHER CLEVER TRICKS TO PASS CHILDREN WHO WERE NOT EDUCATED WELL ENOUGH, AND NO GOVERNOR STOPPED SUCH A TREND. IF I AM WRONG, PLEASE TELL ME WHAT GOVERNORS MADE WHAT CHANGES THAT RAISED THE ACT OR SAT SCORES MORE THAN 5%!! IN TENNESSEE NONE DID FOR 50 YEARS SINCE 1970. DID THAT HAPPEN BECAUSE PUBLIC EDUCATION WAS DOING A GREAT JOB? DO OUR CHILDREN AND OUR STATES AND COUNTRY NEED MUCH BETTER PERFORMANCE? ABSOLUTELY!!

OR IS IT BETTER TO HAVE EACH OF OUR 50 STATES DECIDE THEIR K-12 is to provide solid fundamental education to support what children must learn later. By not having firm national standards at the appropriate level for teachers, with matching personality to teaching, by not teaching management to those who manage schools, school districts and departments of education, and by not planning to be competitive with the top countries in education, and by making decisions within the walls of education about things you know nothing about, you all created a massive problem economically for our country. I think it is time to sober up and to make some important changes to produce much better results.

One cannot plan anything unless one knows all the following very well:

If we are at the start of planning the coming year, and if we know where we want to be by the end of that coming fiscal year, we must know also the resources and skill levels we need to have, before one completes the plan for that coming year. If we cannot plan well, then it is impossible to improve. But worse than that, if one does not plan well, one will fail EVERY SINGLE TIME in multiple areas of the education activity. For public education, one must know where one WANTS TO BE without any prejudice, or without any feelings that it is impossible to achieve where we should be. Unfortunately we do have such feelings of impossibility because we are untrained in management in public education. How do we know where we should be? One guide is knowing where your competition is. For example where the top three countries in education are and how they achieve the results they achieve. I can already see objections to what I just said. The second important input education must satisfy the requirements of employers. We are not doing either one of these two. Employers are not satisfied with public education. They complained to governors for about 15 years, and nothing was done about it to date. High schools and colleges feed the workforce in any nation. They design and make the products and services in an international market. If high school performance is not as good in the US as in country X, country X will win business with higher margins, and that is what determines how healthy the national economy is for country X. Country X's size also matters, but I want to keep the explanations simple. It is very important to have people in one's team who understand that we must have people who know very well how to do an excellent job every day. A manager cannot accept people who will tell you that they tried very hard, but could not do the job well. In education or in any job, the worker may do a poor job and may file a law suit to keep his job. One must fight that law suit, because we simply cannot keep marginal workers in education, because we must do better for both our children AND for our nation's survival. There are people who feel that schools making profit are evil. But what really counts is how good a job a school is doing to educate our children. The problem with negative profitability interpretation is that our taxes are paying the expenses for public schools only, about $10-12K dollars per student. The private schools MUST do a good job to survive. The public schools have guaranteed financial government support, regardless of the quality education they deliver. There are low performance-limits for them by each state, but the low limits are very low, and 90-95% do not do a good enough job as they promised for decades in writing. 75-80% of the children we are graduating, are not educated well enough to be employable for 5 years and will be replaced by AI-based cognitive robotics that will be here in 2023. I can tell you that the following question will get attention fast. If public education does not improve dramatically, why don't we open up tax dollars to good students in high school top get a better education since the public schools were not willing to improve and delivered bad results. Education sets is own standards. That's not a good thing. Employers need to set it, and education must deliver it. If they do not, we need to have a backup for much better education and to expand it. We will have major new technologies influencing what employers need. Most of today's employees will be replaced by robots by 2025, there will be many new jobs, but they will require much better education that our public schools did not and do not have plans to provide.That manager must make certain that all employees working for him/her, have in writing the manager's expectation preferably such that it is measurable in numbers, to see clearly if the job was done well. In today's litigious world this is necessary, unfortunately. If a manager cannot do that, then that manager failed. Unfortunately, in public education, we have people like that in management positions as well, who don't know how to do a good job as the manager needs it. To be a good manager one cannot take negative situations personally. You must understand how your workers/team members see the situation. In any case, one's boss has to know the details to help the school or work place improve its results.



In high-performing countries, teachers graduating from the top 30% of the Master's degree programs in the subject they will teach are very important. The reason is that a teacher needs far better subject knowledge in order to be an enthusiastic and interesting teacher to make his/her classes very interesting to students. I attended 29 classes when I became interested in education, in different states and school districts, in high school math and science classes. All of them were boring. I am sorry to say. This is not a teacher-created problem. It is a problem of old-style teacher education with a low-level subject knowledge, and the certification is the same. The boring classes turn off students at the very start of getting ready the students for higher-level job training. The subject that they learned to hate maybe the ideal profession for them to pursue. This is very important today because we are entering a period when new sciences will develop much faster than before, and AI robots will eliminate the jobs that require less education faster than before. Future jobs will require advanced mathematics, many new sciences and engineering, and economics. Our high school education is very weak in these areas. Our curriculum for a high school diploma is very weak and inconsistent even within the states, and we make decisions about important things in education at the lowest level, the school board level, exactly as that system was created in late 1800s, not recognizing that we really need higher-level national consistency in education that needs the best brains of employers in guidance, since they are the customers for the product of public education, the student. Education did change. But far from enough compared to the changes everywhere else since the 1800s.



A FEW VERY IMPORTANT QUESTIONS ARE:

• The ACT and SAT tests measure what a child learned from grade one to twelve. Why are we graduating students from high school who can not read or do basic math and have poor ACT scores? Why would we graduate even one instead of keeping that child longer in high school until ready?



• Is graduating a child who is not ready but graduated on-time more important than graduating a child 1-2 years later when the child is prepared?



• If the high schools cannot deliver a child ready for getting a job on time, does not the state have an implicit obligation by taking the people's money, that happens to be one of the highest in the world per student, in accordance with the explicit promise made by the National School Board Association's under the benefits of local governance, and claims of excellence under public education elsewhere?



• Should not public education tell the public the truth and nothing but the truth?



• How does graduating more than half the students NOT ACT READY, a very modest measure, help the children's employment prospects and our country's economy?



• It makes no sense to graduate children from high school with reading or basic math problems. That should be accomplished by grade 4 at the latest. Otherwise, the school system makes it very difficult to learn for the child and downgrades the child's ability to learn every single year after grade 4. I would like to see a written comment or a new policy and law from governors about resolving this and other improvements in education to make our high school graduates more effective, otherwise the question will arise about why they have allowed this problem to exist for decades. Other industrialized countries never graduate a single child with such a huge problem.



• Why does the public education system insist on very old practices that do not work today? Please read what I am quoting a few paragraphs below about school boards.



• Why is it that neither Democrats nor Republicans have done a single thing in education that increased the ACT or SAT scores, whichever the state uses?!



• Why does the state lie to the public instead of telling the truth about public education AND fixing it decade after decade?



• If a private school provides excellent education, but your public school does not, should you be able to apply the public school's expense per student toward the expense of the private school for your child, especially when we have problems with the job that the public school is doing? The parents need that choice and so does the country. We need better educated citizens. Any activity that performs poorly needs competition to improve. Who are hurt the most by poor public schools? It is the poor people. Our poverty is growing very fast. Why can't we eliminate poverty like Finland does? By ensuring excellence in education.

• Education is not a line item in a school board's budget - it is the only item. COMMENT: I think they are trying to say that education is very important. We would say that our country's future depends on how good the education of our children is today. We show below in a graph how good the last 20 year's education was.



• The school board represents the community's voice in public education, providing citizen governance and knowledge of the community's resources and needs, and board members are the policy-makers closest to the student. - says the national school boards association. COMMENT: The local school board worked well in late 1800s because we had one dominant industry, agriculture, and their objective was to educate the children of farmers to rejoin the family farm. The education environment, the employers' needs, and international competition make education too complex to be defined by each of 14,000 different school boards today in 50 states. Even if the elected boards were qualified to make decisions about our children's education, how can a nation have the best possible high school graduates by the thousands of the lowest level school boards making independent decisions about their education under late 1800s rules and justifications? The biggest problem is how such a thing could happen for more than a hundred years after all the technological changes we went through? I can tell you how. There was not a single national senator or house member who paid attention to recognize such a huge problem to this day! If they did recognize it, why did they not speak up? Because we have an inappropriate custom of claiming in view of a huge problem that it is not your job, so I will not get involved; I am too busy.



• The school board sets the standard for achievement in the school district, incorporating the LOCAL community's view of what students should know and be able to accomplish at each grade level. COMMENT: Today's world has many industries, fast-changing technologies that require much more education than in late 1800s. How well do we know those who run for school board election? Not well. Do people keep their promises after being elected? You decide. Do they get paid? In my school district, yes, $25,000 per year. That is certainly enough for anyone to want to keep getting it. There are no term limits. I believe that in the LA School District, elected board members get more than $100K/year. In the small school districts, the board members are not paid. In today's much more complex world, are the locally elected people's VOTING MAJORITY the smartest in the country? Do we have the most educated and smartest people in most school districts to decide how our children should be educated? THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE. It worked in late 1800s, but not today. We get great differences in board members among the 14,000 school districts we have country-wide with the locally elected school boards. Should we not change to a national board to make sure with that national board of education, with the best people we can find, to have the best decisions in the nation about ALL STANDARDS IN EDUCATION? CHILDREN WHO GRADUATE NATIONWIDE NEED TO MEET THE SAME HIGH STANDARD IN KNOWLEDGE, HAVING MUCH BETTER RESULTS THAN WHAT OUR CURRENT PUBLIC EDUCATION DELIVERED DURING 2000-2019, over 20 years. Look at the ACT chart below! Are they good results?



• The school board is accessible to everyone in the community and is accountable for the performance of the schools in the district. COMMENT: That is an impossibility. They set the standards for education that create poor results, and THEY are accountable for school performance that they would have to adjudicate against themselves?! And they do not respond to any question you have unless you support them 100%. They have done nothing to improve the poor education because the problems are beyond them, so how could anyone assert that they are accountable?



• It is the community member's right as a voter to select new board members who will work diligently to provide an opportunity for students to receive a high-quality education, which will enable them to succeed in their career, college, and life. COMMENT: The results show conclusively that the locally elected board makes an honest effort, but they lack the know-how as a voting majority especially, to ensure a high-quality education that would ensure success in a career, college, and life. To be specific, these standards by this association are vague. I would suggest that a good specific example for reaching success in college, career, and life would be 80% ACT Readiness achieved in high school. The result of a high school graduating class with an average consolidated ACT score of 28 is the minimum boundary that will allow a student to be reasonably successful for life. ACT Readiness is not a high standard. It is simply one where the child passed with 61% knowledge only in four subjects. The top ten countries in education have an average result between 29 and 34 ACT equivalent scoring.
  
  
• The school board is the community's education watchdog, ensuring that taxpayers get the most for their tax dollars. COMMENT: We are one of the highest spenders per student, delivering the lowest results among industrialized countries. The currently used school board is too expensive and ineffective to do anything about performance. Ask them what good performance is in ACT or SAT scores. They have no idea. What is very disturbing is that the education system is still behind a management structure AFTER MORE THAN 100 YEARS that is based upon an elected school board, with about 14,000 school boards in the nation, coming from the lowest knowledge base that would have enormous knowledge variation, but mostly low, and it does not recognize that we, being the largest national economy, must have the highest level of know-how to ensure the highest decision-making talent nationally to produce the best education for tomorrow's leadership AND workers. BUT THIS IS NOT THE ENTIRE TRUTH.
  We are doing this in every single school district. We have about 14,000 school districts using the same management system in every one of 14,000 school districts with about 15 people in each as we did in late 1800s. The amount of money spent on this could do much better in the classrooms. I could also tell you that the total indirect cost of such a decision under educates about 4,000,000 high school graduates every single year, or 400,000,000 total, and you can multiply that by the missed income of all those children for life, as a result of the poor education, that obviously no one in leadership cared about. But they all promised to fix it when running for office. I want to request respectfully a written answer about why I am incorrect if I am incorrect. AND WE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, NOT ONLY DID NOT NOTICE THAT PUBLIC EDUCATION USES THE WORST DECISION-MAKING CHOICES, BUT HAS BEEN FIBBING TO US SO BLATANTLY THAT IF WE JUST READ IT AND THINK ABOUT IT, WE WOULD SEE THE IMPOSSIBILITY BEHIND THEIR STATEMENTS.
  
  DID YOU READ WHAT THE NATIONAL SCHOOL BOARDS' ASSOCIATION SAID ABOVE?
  
  SINCE 1800s TO THIS DAY, IF THE POPULATION ASKED WHY DO THE LOCALLY ELECTED SCHOOL BOARDS MAKE VERY IMPORTANT DECISIONS ABOUT SCHOOL SPENDING, STANDARDS, GRADUATING REQUIREMENTS THAT ARE DECIDED UPON ON THE HIGHEST NATIONAL LEVEL IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY? THE ANSWER WAS, "THE BEST DECISION CAN ONLY COME FROM THE LOCAL POPULATION'S ELECTED SCHOOL BOARDS TO IMPROVE EDUCATION." LOOK AT THE ACT RESULTS. THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH PERFORMANCE. IT IS DISMAL. It should have been obvious to everyone in decision making that today's work environment is infinitely more complex than during the 1800s, and the decisions to guide our children's education cannot be left to elections from the level of where individual schools exist. Our high school graduates feed the workforce of all industries. Our industries compete internationally with companies whose workforce is much better educated. Not only they learn more than we do in any subject, but the best ten countries in education graduate children in the average ACT equivalent area of 29-34 with 85% minimum ACT Readiness equivalent, when we are graduating children under average 21 ACT score below 25% ACT Readiness, AND AS A BONUS, 75-85% of our high school graduates, are not even ACT Ready and that means that their subject knowledge is anywhere below 61%., with a weaker curriculum than many other nations. We are building a powder keg. Have been doing so for a long time. 94-97% of graduating black students are are also not ACT Ready. Public education is absolute crap, with the results with which we graduate children. The solution for solving the education and the black and white problem is GOOD PUBLIC EDUCATION FOR BOTH. We spend one of the highest rates for it IN THE WORLD!! And this is what we get for it?! I don't know what the public school agenda really is by the political and education leadership. I am absolutely certain that it is not what the education leadership publishes. LOOK BELOW AT THE GOALS OUR EDUCATION DEPARTMENT PROMISED TO ACHIEVE THIS YEAR IN 2020. I WOULD LIKE TO SPELL OUT WHAT I THINK OF IT, BUT CANNOT IN A PUBLIC DOCUMENT LIKE THIS ONE IS.
  
  Click here to see the National Education Goals for 2020
  
  In stressing quality education from early childhood through lifelong learning, the President and the governors adopted the National Education Goals, which were put into law by Congress in the Goals 2000: Educate America Act. The model standards will help define what it means to reach the third and fourth of the goals below.
  The US Dept. of Education Goals state that by the year 2000 we shall meet all objectives described below:
  
  
  • All children in America will start school ready to learn. COMMENT: All children in America? How do you know that they are Ready to learn? Why are they not learning enough then? What does "start school, ready to learn" mean? Every day or start of the year?
  
  
  
  • The high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent. COMMENT: Graduation rate is controllable by lowering the pass/fail point in tests. The ACT measures what students learned, and it cannot be modified to show higher grades.
  
  
  
  • All students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography, and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our nation's modern economy. COMMENT: I am sorry, but this is not happening, and the ACT scores show that.
  
  
  
  • United States students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement. COMMENT: We are in 2020, and we are far from being the best in the world in science and math, e.g., OECD PISA results show us in math that we are 37th, on the bottom of the industrialized nations.
  
  
  
  • Every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise citizenship's rights and responsibilities. COMMENT: How do we measure the results on this statement?
  
  
  
  • Every school in the United States will be free of drugs, violence, and the unauthorized presence of firearms and alcohol and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning. COMMENT: Not true.
  
  
  
  • The nation's teaching force will have access to programs for the continued improvement of their professional skills and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to instruct and prepare all American students for the next century. COMMENT: Not true.
  
  
  
  • Every school will promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children. COMMENT: How do we measure this one? How did we do?
  
  
  
  
  The word "strategic" is used often in aducation documents. The schools develop a product called a high school graduate. Who need those products? The employers. They must meet employers' needs. Employers met with many governors about the poor knowledge of graduates. The graduates become members of the workforce in all industries. Our industries' products and services depend on the education of the workforce. Our workforce is not as well educated as the workforces of 35-40 countries who are our competitors. That makes our products and services less competive, and that results in less income for our industries and for our states and country. This has been a sertious problem since about 2008. National income is normally at 12-14%. It dropped to 3-4%, requiring more borrowed money, called the national debt, that is at $28 Trillion at end of 2020. That is $28 with 12 zeros after it. That means that our K-12 education must be competitive with the top 3 countries in education. We do not believe in education management that we need to be competitive with those top three countries. We just ignore them. A few of our states are doing fairly well, and graduate children above an average ACT 26. The top three countries are scoring the equivalent to ACT 29-34 average. Tennessee and a number of other states are at average ACT 19.6, had an ACT objective of 21 average since about 1998. And ACT 21 is a low score. We will show you on the website why they are not doing better, and what they must do to achieve 80% ACT Readiness of graduating students, that a high school achieves if they have an average ACT score of 29. When your score is as bad as ours in a state like Tennessee, fibbing to the public about their children's "excellent" education is not a smart thing to do. Being smart enough for education departments to manage the results to average ACT 29, and this also requires more attention from governors in some states, would be THE RIGHT THING TO DO, INSTEAD OF DOING WHAT WE FOUND. Just look at goals they express above and below about SCHOOL BOARDS IN THE STATE DOCUMENTS. PLEASE READ THEM, BECAUSE THE DO NOT ACHIEVE ANY LOW TARGET THEY SET, AND THEN LIE TO THE PUBLIC ABOUT WHAT THEY ACHIEVED. THAT IS NOT THE KIND OF COUNTRY OUR FOUNDING FATHERS WANTED! IT NOT THE KIND OF STATE THAT OUR CITIZENS WANT FOR THEIR CHILDREN! IF YOU DISAGREE, PUT INTO WRITING HOW GREAT A JOB OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION IS DOING AND BE AS SPECIFIC AS WE ARE!
  
  
  
  
  Copied from Tennessee government document:
  "STRATEGIC GOALS: TENNESSEE SUCCEEDS"
  
  
  "In Tennessee, we believe that every student should leave high school ready for success in postsecondary education and careers. Given that postsecondary training is increasingly a minimum requirement for most high-demand jobs in fields such as technology, healthcare, engineering, and accounting, it is more important than ever that our actions and goals aim beyond high school graduation and focus on student preparation for postsecondary. To this end, the department has four strategic goals:
  
  Graduation Rate: The majority of high school graduates from the class of 2020 will earn some type of postsecondary certificate, diploma, or degree. CONCLUSION: nothing.
  
  Reading Proficiency: 75 percent of third graders will be proficient in reading by 2025. CONCLUSION: The target date is rediculous. We had the problem since the 1990s!! On reading you have to commit to when all students who graduate from high school will be proficient, and raise the proficiency to 98%!
  
  ACT/SAT Scores: The average ACT (or SAT equivalent) composite score in Tennessee will be 21 by 2020. CONCLUSION: As history shows, low objectives are generally not achieved. Objectives need to be a huge stretch. People rise to high expectations. No one rises to low expectation.
  
  Nation’s Report Card Ranking: Tennessee will rank in the top half of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, by 2019. CONCLUSION: As usual, a low expectation objective does not work.
  
  The above is typical in education in Tennessee and other states: Grandiose "plans" that are not measurable, nothing was planned seriously to achieve these goals, and it will be just forgotten. This is how public education works. We cannot get good results this way.
  
  
  
  We must do many things quite fast to save our country, but a few things are urgent. Some who read this, especially in public education, I don't think would agree with the word "urgent." How could lawmakers and governors, and the people they hire, approve of such a stupid justification for more than a hundred years that is exactly the same as what we had in late 1800s, like the idea of local school boards and base our nation's education on which our future depends, on such an absurd idea. It did work well in the simple agriculture-based economy with minimal exporting. But the world economy became much more complex, requiring the best-educated decisions in any nation, especially about standards in school management and schools' financial operations. We spent many trillions of dollars on it for more than 100 years! Campaigns like "We are the best" distorted reality and made us worse. How could something like this survive for more than a century? I expect no one to want to change it because governors and education decision-makers do not want to look bad for a month or two. IT TAKES A VERY WELL BALANCED INDIVIDUAL TO SAY THAT "I WAS WRONG." THERE ARE NOT TOO MANY LIKE THAT. BUT MANY THINK THAT THEY ARE RIGHT, JUST BECAUSE THEY WERE VOTED INTO A JOB.
  
  1. WE NEED AN INDEPENDENT NATIONAL BODY REPRESENTING MOSTLY LARGE EMPLOYERS TO BE THE DECISION MAKING BODY ON ALL EDUCATION STANDARDS from teacher candidate testing to match the profession. These teachers' college curricula must be Master's level for teaching any mathematics or any science. Grading systems in teacher training and k-12 education, teacher certification, and management training for all people who supervise more than ten-fifteen people or management people under them. Using ACT or SAT annual score objectives. The monthly objectives in grade point average (GPA) ensure the same or higher percentage achievement than the ACT and SAT objectives. We need to adopt in all education organizations on the state and local level zero-based budgeting only with operations level annual planning. In zero-based budgeting, all supervisory positions are identifying what they will need along with their objectives that are to help principals and teachers to achieve high enough annual improvements in the ACT or SAT scores. We said "representing large employers" on the national education board because it is the large companies that management-train all supervisory employees because they understand the best the management dynamics and all the challenges an organization can have. We need that kind of knowledge to understand and prevent the problems that we are having.
  
  2. MANAGEMENT TRAINING IS HIGH PRIORITY FOR HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPALS, AND HAVE THEM MANAGE THE FEEDER SCHOOL PRINCIPALS UNDER THEM. TRANSFER SOME AUTHORITY TO HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPALS SO THAT THEY CAN CONTROL THEIR OWN RESOURCES, AND BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RESULTS. The high school principals will be the best source of new superintendents. I totally understand that people who worked only in an organization with less than 100 employees do not understand why management training is so important. Management happens to be an area where one cannot even recognize problems without training. But one fails without it with more than 100 employees.
  
  3. HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULA MUST INCLUDE CALCULUS AND PRE-CALCULUS MATH, AS WELL AS BIOLOGY, CHEMISTRY, AND PHYSICS ONE YEAR SUBJECTS, IN ORDER TO BE READY FOR MAJOR TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES THAT WILL START IMPACTING EMPLOYERS IN 2023. Let me emphasize again that we do not have time to argue and negotiate. If we do not get moving immediately, which we will not do with political control, layoffs will be massive as a result by 2024, and so will be black and white public disorders because hate festers without any extra help, when we were not smart enough to solve them. Animals kill to eat. SNAKES LIKE TO EAT EACH OTHER AS A DIET CHOICE. Human beings just love to dislike differences between each other and kill each other for minor differences in appearance or in beliefs, and we kill in large numbers. BUT WE MUST LEARN TO SEE BOTH THE GOOD AND BAD THINGS IN EACH OF US AND HELP EACH OTHER ABOUT THE BAD SIDE, AFTER ALL, WE ARE ALL IMPERFECT. WE NEED HELP. WHY DIDN'T WE SOLVE THE BLACK AND WHITE PROBLEM? ARE WE CRAZY ENOUGH TO WANT SELF DESTRUCTION? WE ARE TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED ENOUGH TO DESTROY LIFE ON EARTH. WE ARE NOT PERFECT. WE ALL CAN MAKE MISTAKES. WE CAN VOTE FOR CRAZY PEOPLE TO LEAD THIS NATION, AND WHEN BOTH CANDIDATES ARE A BIG QUESTION MARK, WE ARE ON THIN ICE. BUT THEY CAN PUSH THE RED BUTTON! WE NEED TO HELP EACH OTHER IN VIEW OF WHAT I AM TELLING YOU. WE MUST BE AMERICANS FIRST. NOT BLACK AND WHITE, REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT, OR ANY OTHER DIFFERENCE. I hope that we will be much better educated. NASA says that we have 40 billion planets out there with water and similar temperature as we have on earth. And WE ARE A YOUNG CIVILIZATION. There could be many who are far ahead of us.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  In the 1800s agriculture was the dominant industry. The great majority of communities had mostly farms around them. The schoolhouse had one teacher, and the teacher, based on some 8th grade final tests I saw from those years, did an excellent job educating the children to become excellent farmers when they rejoined the family farm. The local school board was the perfect advisor then, and the two very old 8th grade tests, more than 120 years ago, were very surprising. I DON'T THINK THAT MOST OF TODAY'S HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES COULD PASS THE ENGLISH AND MATHEMATICS PORTION OF THESE OLD TESTS! We decided more than 200 years ago that we will not have central authority in education back in the 1800s. To this day, the states are responsible for everything within their schools. The elected local school boards are making all spending and operational/management decisions for the public schools in each of some 14,000 school districts. The states are setting very low standards and focus on graduation as the objective, instead of an impartial national test like the ACT or SAT. Like it or not, that puts the decision making right down to the lowest possible level in our nation! When asking the education management people from a governor on down why they do that, the answer is uniform: "Because the best guidance about education performance can come only from the local population of each school district." I was very surprised because that was the reason exactly during the 1800s! Let me explain something that may be worth thinking about and then changing now urgently because everything changed significantly since the 1800s. We have several hundred industries, many different jobs that require a college education. Robotics does a better job at the lower skill level until 2023. Still, AI-based cognitive robotics will replace many more jobs on the low end, while new technologies will produce more jobs than expected, as before in factory automation. Still, the new jobs will require more education. But high school education did not change enough. Schools are to graduate children to be trainable for employers and be prepared to go to college, ultimately feeding the workforce of all industries. The most important fact is that employers use all technological changes to improve their productivity, and the employers' products and services in most industries compete for business worldwide, not just locally. It is their workforce that creates their products and services. If our high school education is not as good as the top three nations in education, the product quality coming from us will not be as good as those from the nations with a better education. That is the reason why we are not doing so well. Our national income is struggling at 3-4% instead of 12-14%, where it should be. The remainder is "financed by the national debt," yet we waste a lot of money in government-controlled operations, which will be at $30 trillion by the end of 2020. That is a very big problem. For that reason, it is not a very smart decision to stay with 14,000 local school districts' elected boards making decisions about what the direction of education should be because they don't know enough to carry out that responsibility today. Each state is doing its own thing, but worse, they delegate many things to the school boards who cannot do it well. Decision making on the lowest level, creating different standards and spending decisions on the level of 14,000 mostly independent school boards and 50 states, creates a broadly differing set of results with a bad average because the standards vary all over within our country. It is a puzzle how this could happen in a country like ours. I think that political control can do it. We became more short-term money focused. Lobbyists who are former lawmakers and have old congressional contacts can influence decisions with big money. And that attracts new lawmakers a bit too much. Maybe that is why things did not change. BUT THAT IS WHY WE ARE ON THE BOTTOM OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES TODAY WHEN OUR SPENDING PER STUDENT ROSE TO THE HIGHEST IN THE WORLD. HOW COULD SUCH A THING HAPPEN?!
  
  
  
  
  Dr. Ray Kurzweil is head of all technology development at Google. His technology forecasts are 90% accurate 30 years away.
  
  
  • Why do we need to have more than 50 different curricula, even with only one subject change? We are graduating children from high school who cannot read well, cannot do even basic math. The level of math and science is not high enough at a time when major technology changes are accelerating, INCLUDING AI BASED COGNITIVE ROBOTICS, NANOTECHNOLOGY, AND SPACE SCIENCE starting in 2023. This is a huge technological change, with a much greater impact than anything we had before. That planning in education very irresponsible. As the largest national economy, one cannot afford to under-train its future leaders, and that is what we are doing when we are dumbing down the population. If the game plan is forcing more people into poverty to move toward population control, I understand it.
  • Why is it that we delegate to the states, who delegate to elected school districts' boards important decisions, like improving teacher training that is too low, teacher certification that is also too low, setting one competitive curriculum nationwide against the three top nations in education?
  • ACT Readiness is too low for a standard today, and it will change. It is equal to only 61% subject knowledge in only three high school subjects plus a third-grade subject, reading. BUT 75-80% OF OUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES ARE BELOW ACT READINESS, BELOW EVEN 61% SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE ON THE BENCHMARK SUBJECTS ONLY? DO NOT BLAME TEACHERS. THEY WANTED TO BECOME TEACHERS, ASSUMING THAT THE TEACHING CURRICULUM, THE GRADUATION STANDARD AND CERTIFICATION STANDARD WOULD BE HIGH ENOUGH TO ENSURE THAT THEY CAN DO A GOOD JOB. IT IS MUCH LOWER. THIS IS BEING DONE RIGHT UNDER THE NOSE OF GOVERNORS. People who are elected can be replaced if they propose anything that touches the way public education works. I met with quite a few of them, and that is how they felt. Look at what changes governors and legislators made that would raise the ACT and SAT scores. NOT ONE EVER. That is the only fair evaluation of improved education. I could not find any.
  • Does every state need a different curriculum, graduation standards that differ, and so on? We have duplication of jobs and expenses not just in 50 states but in 14,000 school districts. Did that make our education vs. other countries better? Where and how specifically?
  • Why is it better for us as a country to set different standards with duplicated staff in 50 states and with some functions in 14,000 school districts? It is a very expensive practice that could be replaced by using better quality people centrally in the country. But on that level, one does not find the quality that one would need at each such decision-making point in education. This method prevented us from delivering better education results, and dumbed-down most of the population, it increased poverty, and it will make many people jobless, because three major new technologies will eliminate the largest number of jobs, will bring many new jobs, that will require much more education. AND THAT WE DO NOT HAVE. These three technologies will bring huge changes we have never seen before. It will bring many high paying jobs, but we, unfortunately, made bad decisions about our public education that did not keep pace with the needs of employers. THE SOLUTION TO OUR PROBLEMS IS BETTER EDUCATION IN ELEMENTARY AND HIGH SCHOOLS SO THAT THE CHILDREN, TOMORROW'S LEADERS, LEARN WHAT WE MUST BECOME, AND GET EDUCATED TO BECOME MORE PROSPEROUS BETTER HUMAN BEINGS, BLACK OR WHITE OR ANY COLOR.
  • Most, unfortunately, we were not smart enough to resolve a huge cancer within our society called the black and white problem for more than 100 years. One wonders how we, the largest country economy, could be so stupid, and it does not speak well of our senior political and education management! We get involved in almost all wars. Some of them, like Vietnam, we start, tell the public that communists want to take over the world. I know because I lived in a communist country and it was horrible. We told our public that the Vietnamese people are helpless and are begging us for help, the communist North Vietnamese attacked our boat (the Pueblo Incident), which was not true we later admitted, and president Johnson sold the idea to Congress to send 600,000 of our young soldiers to Vietnam, to help out those poor people. Before sending our soldiers there, we told them that the people would love them, they will welcome them with flowers. The black and white problem became worse in Vietnam. Most of our soldiers had only 8 WEEKS OF TRAINING ONLY, which is not enough. When these young soldiers arrived, they did not get flowers. They got bullets instead, because the story was not true. We were supporting a dictator against communism, and 58,000 of our children died, and many more wounded and went on drugs to cope with incredible pressures. I know, I was there and could tell you more. Some people make a lot of money in wars: billions or even trillions of dollars. WE SAW THE BULLETS HAD NO PREFERENCE FOR SKIN COLOR. BUT OUR LEADERS DID NOT CARE ENOUGH. THEY LET EDUCATION GO TO THE DOGS. THOSE WHO CAME BACK, THOSE WHO WENT THROUGH HELL OVER THERE, AND LANDED AT SAN FRANCISCO, WERE SPIT UPON. I DO NOT EXPECT ANYONE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THAT DID TO THOSE WHO WERE SENT THERE. SO WE DON'T TALK ABOUT IT MUCH. But this is an important part of the education picture. Poor education is harder on minorities. We had something to do with them becoming poor. The wealthy could go to a better school. The poor went to poorly performing public schools, but they did not have the supportive family structure behind them, like the wealthier people did. I am not in favor of special treatment or paying for old sins. BUT IF YOU ARE GETTING THE HIGHEST AMOUNT OF DOLLARS IN THE WORLD PER STUDENT IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, AND DO A BAD JOB, MINORITIES GET HURT MORE, BUT WE ALL GET HURT. OUR COUNTRY GETS HURT. AT LEAST HAVE ENOUGH SPINE AND SENSE OF FAIRNESS TO DELIVER EXCELLENT EDUCATION FOR OUR MONEY, INSTEAD OF WHAT YOU ARE DOING IN EDUCATION, DELIVERING A POOR JOB! BUT NO ONE IN LEADERSHIP HAS THE CHARACTER TO STAND UP AND CHANGE IT AS MANY OTHER COUNTRIES DID. ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE A GOVERNOR. IF YOU ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE AS GOVERNOR, PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHO IS. I WROTE TO YOU AT LEAST THREE TIMES ABOUT THIS PROBLEM VERY POLITELY AND NO ONE REPLIED.
  • Those three major technologies will be here from 2023-2024 onward. They are Artificial Intelligence-driven cognitive robotics with better intelligence than the majority of our high school graduates. That will leave only job opportunities that are dominated by advanced mathematics, advanced sciences, and economics. Nanotechnology is the second big entry at the same time. It will alter manufacturing TOTALLY, with nanometer precision that is one-millionth of a meter or one-millionth of 3.3 feet. It will drop manufacturing costs and bring significant changes to current sciences, and the third major science group will be Space Science, with many new sciences also starting in 2023. WE HAVE DONE A VERY BAD JOB PREPARING OUR CHILDREN FOR THESE BIG CHANGES, AND THE OUTCOME WILL HIT VERY HARD, NOT ONLY HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES BUT TO A LARGER EXTENT OUR CURRENT WORKFORCE NATIONALLY. The same new technology changes will raise the economy of those nations who passed us in high school performance.
  A school creates a "knowledge" product called a student that employers need. The parents pay for the development of this product. THE CUSTOMERS for the "products" are the employers. The products always have to satisfy what the customers need. The high school graduates must satisfy what the employers need. Technological developments materialize if employers find them useful, improving employer competitiveness in a world market today. The student product's education must incorporate the new technology-related information promptly FOR ALL "STUDENT PRODUCTS" in their curriculum. What percentage of the high school curriculum would be acceptable to the employee customers? For many decades the great majority of employers were looking for 80% minimum high school subject knowledge, or a B minus average minimum, that is 80% or higher curriculum subject knowledge, graduated on time. Low-end jobs will be replaced by robotics. Why? To be competitive. Robotics are less expensive than humans. Robotics can make identical products much faster than humans, at a higher quality than humans. Artificial Intelligence-based Cognitive Robotics WILL HAVE A HUGE IMPACT.
  
  
  
  A hundred years ago, a high school curriculum, the list of subjects you needed to complete to graduate, varied state-to-state and within states as well, to satisfy vocational needs that could last a lifetime. That lifetime opportunity has changed during the last twenty years worldwide. Technological changes are growing exponentially, and the frequency of changes will accelerate faster and faster. New technologies emerge faster and faster but will become more and more sophisticated and complicated. Most nations will be changing education to make learning easier. Many other countries already changed, requiring teachers to have a full Master's degree in the subject they teach if they come from the top 10% of the Master's program in some countries. In many other countries, teachers are not hired if they are not from the top 30% in their Master's programs. Japan started two decades ago to teach children from grade two how to learn faster. The top ten countries graduate children from high school in the 29-34 average ACT equivalent score range. WE CHANGED NOTHING OF SIGNIFICANCE.
  
  
  
  Let me tell you how fast things will change. I am writing this in 2020. A $1000 computer has the same computational power as a medium-size animal brain today. By 2025 the $1000 computer will have as much computational power as the average human brain. By 2045 the $1000 computer in 2020 dollars will have as much computational power as all human brains in the world combined. That is ten billion human brains, 10 billion times the power of the 2025 $1000 PC. Learning will be much easier, more enjoyable, and faster. Reference: Ray Kurzweil et al. Dr. Kurzweil's technology forecasts have been 90% accurate 30 years forward. The big problem is that our public education deteriorated, with mathematics on the bottom of the industrialized countries. We would need to recover very fast to avoid some problems. The education decline relative to technology growth OVER THE PAST 50 YEARS can be overcome, but it will require a huge correction in our public education and continuing education for all in the workforce without delay.
  
  
  
  That means that their high school subject-knowledge is below 61%, way too low. For black students, 96-97% of high school graduates are below 61% subject knowledge. A WORD ABOUT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE INTELLIGENCE MEASUREMENT TOOLS ARE MEASURING ONLY TOP LEVEL SUPER INTELLIGENCE SO THAT THE PUBLIC DOES NOT GET UPSET. WE ALREADY PASSED YOUNG CHILD-LEVEL HUMAN INTELLIGENCE IN 2015. THERE WILL BE MANY CHANGES COMING WITH INCREASING FREQUENCY FROM NOW ON. DO NOT WORRY ABOUT THEM BECAUSE MANY NEW DEVELOPMENTS WILL START TO SPEED UP OUR ABILITY TO LEARN FAST AND MORE EASILY IF WE CAN OVERCOME OUR EDUCATION PROBLEM. The fact that we declined in public education makes these future scientific developments much more difficult to learn in the coming 8 years for us, and these new science areas will speed up the development of other new sciences, and it will never end. Whose fault is poor education? Senior political and education management, making very big mistakes during the last 50 years. This is not something that develops normally. Modern warfare developed many tools since WWII to win not by force but by reducing human capabilities that impact our thinking and decision making.
  
  
  
  Having an objective to reach is a very good thing, but only when the objective is a key indicator of success or failure, like the ACT or SAT national tests in education given every year. We use these tests, but we do not use them to drive performance in school. We use "90% graduation rate" as an objective that can be manipulated, "doctored" in many ways. It is based on the state tests controlled by the state departments of education, where the pass/fail percentages can be altered to make graduation more achievable with less knowledge. THEY can do many other things, like changing the curriculum or the content of specific subjects within it to "engineer" passing grades. But an annual objective, when done correctly, is not enough to raise poor performance. To raise performance, one needs an annual, safe NATIONAL test that cannot be "engineered" to achieve an objective. Such are the ACT and SAT, but one also needs a monthly objective to keep a steady focus on what needs to be achieved in performance every month. ONER NEEDS THAT to spot and resolve problems that arise and to reduce end-of-year pressures that create cheating, when graduation depends on the state tests that can be manipulated, in addition to stopping the incentive to pass under-qualified children, as we do today. To have the graduation rate to be the objective IS MISLEADING. We do not call it an objective. The graduation rate can be, and it is manipulated within the states. But we certainly name it as the most important measurement that the average person accepts. The education system wants it because they can doctor many things to "raise performance" to the graduation rate with lower knowledge by the children. The population trusts education. Education should have remained loyal to the public. The public paid education per student the highest rate per student. But public education willfully and purposefully delivered and is delivering poor results for those who pay their salaries. WHAT DO YOU THINK WILL HAPPEN IF WE DO NOT CHANGE THIS UNETHICAL, FRAUDULENT BEHAVIOR ASAP? Hence the bad results that we have. The objective must be an ACT or SAT score depending on what the state uses, which is a percentage higher than the previous year's actually achieved score. A 10% annual increase of both national test results and monthly year-to-date GPA year-to-date results would be far better as an objective. Being a poor performer, a 10% increase is achievable with correctly used management tools that we describe here. We do not use proper objectives even annually, and we have no management training within education for principals. Superintendents are a big problem. We put important decisions into the hands of elected school boards that worked well during the 1800s, but they are not good enough today since principals know more. Having the school board select superintendents is not a management system that works well. The role of school boards needs to be redefined. It is impossible to get good results on the schools' level, WHO PRODUCE THE RESULTS, without solid, up-to-date management training and management structure. For this reason, we have a management area below dealing with this subject. There will be no improvement without setting up a management structure that works in today's world, where people understand clearly how and why things like objectives and operating plans work very well, but they have to be 100% correct.
  
  
  
  Public education makes up its own operating standards. THAT WORKS, IF YEAR AFTER YEAR THEY PRODUCE GOOD RESULTS. BUT IF THEY DO NOT, AN INDEPENDENT GROUP WITH MANAGEMENT EXPERTISE NEEDS TO BE THE ONE THAT SETS THE OPERATING STANDARDS AND MONITORS PERFORMANCE NATIONALLY. THE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENTS' RESPONSIBILITY NEEDS TO FOCUS ON IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS SIGNIFICANTLY. PAST PERFORMANCE RESULTS OF EVERYONE NEED TO BE RECONSIDERED FOR THE FUTURE WITH SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON IMPROVING SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE OF HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES IN ALL MATH AND SCIENCE COURSES, AND DO WHAT TEACHERS AND PRINCIPALS NEED TO ACHIEVE THAT. THEY ARE THE MOST CRITICAL EMPLOYEES TO ACHIEVE BETTER RESULTS AND MUST BE TREATED ACCORDINGLY. REMEMBER THIS VERY WELL: PEOPLE RISE TO HIGH EXPECTATIONS, AND TO OBJECTIVES THAT ARE A STRETCH BUT IMPORTANT. ON THE OTHER HAND, SMALL INCREASES IN OBJECTIVES ARE GENERALLY IGNORED AND MISSED. WE CAN SEE THAT EDUCATION HAS NOT WORKED WELL FOR DECADES, AND THAT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE AT A CRITICAL TIME WE ARE FACING TODAY. WHAT ARE THESE STANDARDS? UNDERSTANDING AND DETAILING OF OBJECTIVES, GOALS (THEY ARE NOT THE SAME AS OBJECTIVES) AND OPERATING PLANS IS VITAL. MANAGEMENT TRAINING FOR PRINCIPALS, TO DEVELOP BETTER SUPERINTENDENTS FROM WITHIN, MEASURING PERFORMANCE PER CLASS, TEACHER, PRINCIPAL AND ASSISTANTS, PER SCHOOL, SCHOOL DISTRICT, STATE, AND NATION IS VITALLY IMPORTANT. AND AUTOMATING IT VIA A DATABASE SYSTEM THAT COVERS ALL THESE AREAS, THAT CAN GIVE AN INSTANT VIEW OF WHERE ANY OPERATING UNIT STANDS VS. MONTHLY OBJECTIVES IS ALSO IMPORTANT. WE ALSO NEED TO INCLUDE IN ANY PLAN, zero-based budgeting, because it is a better method for planning where resources are 100% identified, and it goes very nicely hand-in-hand with planning. All high school principals must become trainees for superintendents, with more responsibilities, and it would be smart to have them be responsible for their feeding schools. I would recommend that school districts do not set and make policies, but states do. I would suggest that the core curriculum be identical in every public school nationally, with mathematics to include Calculus and science to include Chemistry, Physics, and Biology for a high school diploma. High school graduation requirements must be nationally defined, and be not less than 60% knowledge of all high school subjects at graduation, that must go to 80% as soon as possible. We must keep comparing our own national test results compared to the results of Finland, Singapore, and one more top performer, but exclude China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, because culturally, children are subjected to much greater parental pressure about K-12 school performance than we are.
  
  
  
  We need to make BETTER decisions. We need to find the best people, the best solutions to problems, even in the absence of formal qualifications we need to have in decision making the very best people who can make the best decisions FOR THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. I am hoping that our political and education department leadership is totally honest among themselves as they make decisions that are not producing good results. But to be frank, for a country like ours, the largest economy in the world, we must produce much better ACT results than what we did during the last twenty years. We can see on our ACT scores the result of people making decisions who have no idea what competition we are facing in education, and without that information, one cannot even guess where we are and where we should be. There is no way anyone can plan an objective this way, even in a single year, because one is guessing without a sound plan. To top it off, we are short on well-trained teachers, principals, and superintendents. We don't do any meaningful management training, and we do not even acknowledge how poorly we are doing. But like we did in late 1800s, we hand the important decisions to an elected LOCAL school board. Our state education management cannot figure out what was wrong during the last 100 years. The outlook is not promising with that kind of leadership. I am sorry for being so sharp-tongued, but what we do in public education is very wrong. There is a total absence of management know-how in education at all levels. That is exactly why we are NOT doing well with public education. Each state controls its public education, establishing their standards, change curricula even within the same state. Public education and political management are not interested in learning how to do well from the best nations in education. We are not interested in improving. We do not seem to understand how good or bad we are and what we need to do to improve. At the same time, the political and education management complains about any other form of education, taking away public education money. No one is taking their money away. They certainly should not continue paying for an education system that maintains poor performance with 75-80% of graduates not being ACT Ready. They are "educating children to be jobless for life." Such schools cannot be called public schools. They should be called public FAILURE FACTORIES. I am simply suggesting to them to learn to do a good job instead of complaining about others. Public education is already getting the highest amount of dollars in the world per student and doing a very poor job. And those who perform poorly because the performance threshold is set by public education management, the same way as they set graduation requirements too low, have guaranteed at least the same expense level as they had the prior year. Don't we have anyone within both top political and education management to see what multitude of things we are doing in the management of education that is totally wrong and creates failure?? Well, I will take you through them on this website. And to those of you who think that I am too harsh on education, I am not. But I am angry because poor education is destroying our children's and nation's future. The result is a substantial variation among our states in public education. Tennessee is doing a very poor job, Massachusetts is doing a better than an average job, but not as good as the top countries in education. What stands in the way of all our states performing like the best three countries in education? 1. The big egos elected to head each state, and 2. There are very large differences in education results among our states, meaning that the elected people do not select uniformly good people for the jobs. The same high standards need to apply to ensure a successful future. Is election the best way to do that? How much do we know about a person running for office? How much do WE know about what needs to be done by that person? How many people win an election because they can spend more money on advertising to build their image? Is THAT the best way to select the best people for an important decision that the nation depends on? ABSOLUTELY NOT.
  
  
  
  I have to admit that I did not expect to find much that accounts for our public education's poor performance. I was wrong. I noticed the math problems increasingly, especially with high school graduates behind cash registers, and found them very poor readers. They were high school graduates, and I verified every single one of them. I saw this problem more and more frequently and met quite a few people who also noted the problem in interviewing high school grads for jobs. I did not believe them for a number of months, so I joined in on some job interviews that were high school grads. They were as terrible as people told me early on. That is when I started investigating education systematically in the US and in the best three countries in education in detail. As I investigated, what I found in the US did make me angry. Please forgive any angry reactions that may show on this website. I love our country, and I found many things in education that would become very destructive to our country. I even wrote to governors hoping that I made a mistake. I was begging for explanations and did not receive any. NOTHING! ZERO RESPONSE! I believe that as a citizen, especially as a VET who took a bullet for his country, I deserved an explanation. Our nation and our children deserve a much better education than one that puts them below the industrialized nations when our hard-earned tax dollars pay the highest amount for public education in the world. Elementary and high school teachers, principals, and superintendents are not to be blamed. They went into teaching with the best of intentions. It is not their fault that their training and certification is not good enough. It is not their fault that management training does not exist and that the subject training is insufficient. Why is it that governors did not react and solved the problem decades ago? This is not a new problem—all state departments of education report to governors. The governors appoint the head of that department. They are well-credentialed. Why did none of them take the usual management steps to correct the poor performance after going through thousands of governors? I think that those responsible in leadership deserve significant punishment, like having to work for Donald Trump for four years, eating leftover MacDonald cheeseburgers.
  
  
  
  As we are today, our loyalty is split between our nation, our state, and the parties to which we belong. Neither party did a single thing to raise the ACT and SAT scores EVER! I hope that we can concentrate on becoming the best nation in education and do with expertise on the international level what our employers and children need long term. Both our children and our country need the best education we can provide. The curriculum is the list of courses that make up what the children need to learn in elementary and high school to be employable. In the US, it is different not only state-to-state but even within the state. IS THAT A GOOD THING? Should not our country meet the one internationally competitive national standard for a high school diploma at or above 80% ACT Readiness? It will have to migrate within to years to 80% STEM ACT Readiness with Chemistry, Physics and Calculus added as prerequisites for graduation, teacher selection, principal and superintendent training, management training for principals and superintendents, a curriculum that is competitive with the top three nations in education? I am sure that many will say that the state level is better in decision making because it creates competition. But just dividing responsibilities weakens decision making unless there is a big enough material incentive to deliver excellent measured results, and that is expensive. I'll give you an example. A group of countries decided three years ago to give one million US dollars to the teacher with the best measured academic results. That really created enormous effort, excellent teachers immigrated there, the results went up, and a very good teacher from another country who immigrated to these countries in the contest won the million-dollar reward. A million-dollar reward is not costly in any US state that is spending a couple of billion dollars MINIMUM on K-12 education, compared to the motivation that one will get. Some school districts are wasting $10-15 million in their school district's central management alone, and nothing is done about it. We waste much more money than that. AND we waste our children. THE ROAD ON WHICH WE ARE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION DOES NOT END WELL. THE MISSTATEMENT OF FACTS BY SOME POLITICIANS AND EDUCATION MANAGEMENT SHOULD NOT BE HAPPENING. WHY ARE GOVERNORS NOT CORRECTING IT? WHY ARE WE PAYING ONE OF THE HIGHEST RATES IN THE WORLD FROM OUR TAXES PER STUDENT BUT 75-80% WE GRADUATE WITH A DIPLOMA FROM HIGH SCHOOL ARE NOT EDUCATED WELL ENOUGH TO BE TRAINED FOR A JOB? THEY ARE NOT "ACT READY." WE HAVE CANCER WITHIN OUR SOCIETY. IT IS THE BLACK AND WHITE PROBLEM. EDUCATION IS THE ONLY THING THAT SOLVES SUCH PROBLEM. I COULD BE WRONG BUT MANY TIMES PEOPLE GIVE AN OPINION THAT OPPOSES SOMEONE ELSE'S OPINION, AND AFTER A FEW MINUTES THE PERSON KNOWS THAT HE WAS WRONG. BUT HE WILL STAY WITH HIS WRONG OPINION BECAUSE HE THINKS THAT BY ADMITTING THAT HE IS WRONG, HE IS DESTROYING HIS OWN IMAGE OR PEOPLE WILL THINK THAT HE IS STUPID. IF YOU CAN ADMIT THAT YOU ARE WRONG, YOU ARE AN OUTSTANDING INDIVIDUAL. SUCH A PERSON WE CAN DEPEND ON. HE CAN LEARN, AND IT TAKES COURAGE TO ADMIT THAT ONE IS WRONG. THOSE WHO CANNOT DO THAT YOU CANNOT DEPEND ON FOR ANYTHING THAT THEY SAY. 94-97% OF BLACK CHILDREN WE GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOLS ARE NOT PREPARED WELL ENOUGH TO LEARN A JOB. IT APPEARS THAT WE HAVE A PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM THAT IS FAR FROM BEING GOOD ENOUGH. WITH VERY FEW EXCEPTIONS.
  
  
  
  I DON'T KNOW IF WE HAVE ENOUGH TIME to correct this huge, dangerous problem, maybe we are too late, but we have to try as hard as we can and do the right thing for our children and for our nation. Our political and education leaders must have known the very obvious problems I found. I can solve them, and I will describe for you the problems, what creates them, and also what solves them. It appears that some well-credentialed people used their expertise to create this dangerous situation to hurt our country. The scheme that made our education slowly progress toward unnoticeable failure goes back more than 100 years. Some go back to the middle of the 1800s. The people who did it were brilliant and cleverly used basic human fears that we developed in ourselves many thousands of years ago.
  
  
  
  Please read this document by clicking here. It is about why the locally elected school board is the best way to manage our public schools to the best results. This is what we established around late 1800s. It worked well, we had only the agriculture industry back then, and the schoolhouse was training the children of farmers to become good workers on their parents' farms. The local farmers guided the little schools. That is how the elected school boards started, but huge changes have taken place as we went from the horse and buggy TO THE MOON!! For that reason, maybe the idea that worked in late 1800s cannot work in today's world. We will cover this in more detail below to reach a conclusion.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  THERE ARE CLOSE TO TWO HUNDRED COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD. WE ARE AMONG THE TOP FIVE COUNTRIES IN SPENDING THE MOST PER STUDENT. SOMETIMES ON TOP, THE HIGHEST SPENDER, BUT IN THE LAST TEN YEARS, NEVER BELOW THE FIFTH IN SPENDING. HOW ABOUT THE KNOWLEDGE, THE EDUCATION OF OUR CHILDREN? ISN'T THAT THE MOST IMPORTANT TASK OF ANY SCHOOL? WE WERE ONE OF THE TOP COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION BEFORE 1970. Our nation's future depends on how well our children are educated today. Our high school graduates feed the workforce of all industries. That workforce creates our products and services that must be competitive worldwide. That depends on how well our high school graduates are educated. Unfortunately, our high school education declined. WHY? WHOSE JOB WAS IT TO MAKE SURE THAT OUR HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION IMPROVED INSTEAD OF DECLINED? Profitability and national income depend on the workforce's education. We compete in an international market against countries that have a much better K-12 education system. When we become less competitive, our income suffers. Normally our national income should be around 12% or more. Today we are struggling at 3-4%, and our national debt will hit $30 trillion in just a few months, with total interest around $7.5 trillion included in the $30 trillion! WHY?! Because 75-80% of our current high school graduates are not even "ACT ready," a low measure of education at 61% subject knowledge, so such children are graduated with less than 61% subject knowledge!! How many? About 3 million such high school graduates annually, for many years. With such workers injected annually into the general workforce, since the workforce creates and services all industries' products, we became less competitive, lower margins, lower profitability, and lower national income than nations with better high school education. At the same time, technological developments are accelerating exponentially, where education standards should rise as well, but ours did not and does not. By the way, I am painting a picture that is more positive than reality in public education. We deliver the worst mathematics results among the industrialized nations. Mathematics is the most important subject in our technology-driven world. Our public education system does not tell the public the truth about their children's education. They misinform to be kind or because they do not want to be blamed. Or because they want to look good, and no one is challenging that. Those parents in poverty who take school employees' answer as a fact when it was a lie deserve some help instead of blame for their children not doing well. The parent in poverty is generally not a high school graduate. THEY NEED TRUTHFUL ANSWERS THE MOST.
  
  
  
  THERE ARE SOME VERY CLEVER EDUCATION SYSTEMS IN SOME COUNTRIES. WE COULD LEARN A LOT FROM THEM. FINLAND is a good example. The population respects teachers more than any other vocation. WHY? Because they educate the children so well that they graduate from high school with a higher than 29 ACT equivalent average, and the scores are very close. A prospective teacher is hired from the top 10% of the Master's program to teach if they pass some psychological tests to match them to the teaching profession. When hired, they go back to grad school to learn the latest about the best teaching and learning methodologies and learn to diagnose learning disabilities to refer any student directly to the medical community. Then they will work together with a master teacher for 15 years, who qualifies for that position in 15 years. Teachers in Finland solve all the problems that arise in a weekly meeting of teachers. The principal is a general manager, and the teachers do not need help. The curriculum defines what the teachers are to achieve by year-end with their classes. Still, each teacher decides what textbook and teaching aids they will use. They can teach the year's material in any sequence that the teacher feels best or not use any textbook. Textbooks are generally six years behind when published, whereas these teachers in Finland teach totally up to date material. Each country's curriculum is very similar, except for ours, and is upgraded for scientific and technological changes that impact employers and all industrialized countries. We use locally elected school boards to guide our children's education, exactly for the same reason as we did in late 1800s as if nothing has changed since then. We have more than 14,000 school districts, each with elected school districts to decide how our children should be educated. And decade after decade, education does not improve. I am sorry, THIS is not evidence of good performance by people who CARE and are doing a GOOD JOB. WHY ARE WE WASTING THE MONEY DECADE AFTER DECADE WITHOUT MAKING OUR EDUCATION BETTER? IS OUR POLITICAL LEADERSHIP UNDER THREAT? WHY IS IT THAT NEITHER POLITICAL PARTY DOES ANYTHING ABOUT EDUCATION THAT SO MANY THINGS DEPEND ON? DO THEY GET A SECRET LOBOTOMY TO DROP THEIR IQ 50%? HOW ON EARTH CAN SOMETHING SO FOOLISH HAPPEN?? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE THINKING OF GOVERNORS WHO HIRE THE HEAD OF THE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT TO IMPROVE THE STATE EDUCATION THAT NEVER IMPROVES? Our curricula can be different in any state and even within a state. We are very light on science and mathematics when within a decade at most, only those jobs will survive robotics that will be based on advanced mathematics and advanced sciences. So we decided to teach less mathematics and less in science when other countries' high school graduates cover calculus in math and chemistry, physics and biology in science. I saw a very interesting teaching method in Finland. The teacher divides a class of about 30 into small teams of 2-3 students. The teacher hands a written problem weekly to each team in each subject. The small teams are to investigate using the Internet or the school library and solve the problem during that week. The teacher manages the class by walking around to see how each team member is doing at least six times every day. The teacher can answer questions provided it does not help the students to solve the problem, and the teacher is to help a team only if they are stuck in the investigation. This is how they learn every week. Homework is extremely rare, and testing is not necessary until the middle of high school. They spend the same amount of time in school as we do, but if the teacher finds that someone needs some extra training, that individual gets more training after lunch until five pm, so no one falls behind. The deepest and quickest learning is achieved by remembering the facts and doing something to apply what we learned. This method of teaching injects that into the classroom, along with COLLABORATION that is a very important component of the way we produce almost everything. They improve something every year, and as a result, they get multiple groups visiting them from more than 100 countries every year.
  The investigated solution is what they are to learn that week in the teachers' lesson plan. The collaboration within these small teams and their investigation create deeper learning than what most countries do. They produce very high grades once they start testing in the middle of high school, Min-Max spread is around 15%. The teacher walks around to see how the little teams are doing, about six times every day. Her job is not to help unless a little team is stuck. Their schools produce very high grades that are unusually close in range. They see who is fast and who is slow. They assign the slower children to a class in the afternoon to bring them up to date between 2 and 5 pm the same day. Every year they have more than 100 countries visiting them with groups of people to learn what Finland is doing. Finland has no extreme wealth and no poverty. Schooling to several Ph.D.s and medicine is free. Taxes are about 10% higher than ours. Finland is rated the happiest country in the world in a UN survey every year. The curriculum includes ethics but being nice to people, and basic math and reading are included in pre-school, from ages 3-7. First grade starts at seven years of age. Teaching from 3-8 years is delivered through games that gradually get more serious by age 9. The school decides to keep a student on an academic track or vocational track that is very serious, generally ending in a Master's degree in engineering or a science field. After the middle of high school, the student can go back to the academic path for a Ph.D. without penalty. When you visit them, it is like heaven. No discipline problems. Teachers and students communicate on a first-name basis. They all meet at 7:30 am for breakfast, and later for lunch, again together. They take a 15-minute break every hour, and they play outside. They finish the day at 2-2:30, with no homework, and are told to go home and play. This is the system I would recommend for us. It is a fantastic combination of serious high-level knowledge and recognition of the importance of play.
  
  
  
  I met with several inner-city parents, mostly single women. Generally, a single parent in most cases and has a very tough life. I spoke to many. There is a common story. She got pregnant, and he ran away. She had to take care of the baby and did not graduate. Some of you may have critical words for parents in poverty, but if you have not walked in her shoes, this is the time for understanding everything before we decide on solutions. The mother asks a principal how her little Johnny is doing. She is told not the truth, but "Miss Johnson, God, did not make all students for college. But don't worry, Johnny is a smart boy. He could learn a good trade job and make good money." This is not true. This is not true. Robotics will replace the remaining trade jobs. And here is an example of how the deep sadness and misunderstandings develop. In the poverty area, the parent is barely surviving. The only friend the child has, is the gang. Everyone wants to belong—especially children. And so the black and white problem grows, because our education is poor, the parent cannot afford to spend enough time, the child is going to boring classes, and his gang is socially developing him because they are the only ones who care. We don't even care enough to improve education for anyone. For all children, the black and white problem develops. Trade jobs will be replaced by AI-driven cognitive robotics faster than a student writes "mickey mouse" with block letters. The solution is a good education for ALL CHILDREN. Our schools and education require people who have compassion, who understand what we are talking about, well-trained teachers, so raise the teaching colleges standards much higher. Require a full Master's program to teach mathematics or any sciences and use people to teach our children who love their subject, keep up to date with it because they love it, and let that love infect all the children in his or her class. You cannot teach well unless you are THAT KIND OF PERSON. We need much higher standards in our schools than we have. YOU CANNOT COMPROMISE STANDARDS BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH TEACHERS. YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHY POVERTY IS BEATING DOWN THE PARENT. And if you blame anyone, especially those in poverty, and if you can only view the problems of poor people through your relative wealth-blinded eyes, then go to the poor people, ask them your questions and learn what reality is for those less fortunate. A gentleman from Oak Ridge National Labs, who had a different opinion about parents in poverty, wrote to me and blamed the poor parents. When I asked him what solution he would propose to fix the poor parents, he had none. I don't know how an intelligent person can be so insensitive and be critical without any idea of what he would do to solve the problem. I would expect at least that much from any Ph.D. THE COMING DAMAGE: VERY LARGE LAYOFFS BECAUSE OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS NOT BEEN RESPONDING TO EMPLOYERS' NEEDS. We throw money at the education problems that did not solve the problems for decades. Many employers explained this situation to governors during the last 20 years, but the schools did nothing.
  
  
  
  GROWING POVERTY, AND THE MORE THAN 150-YEAR OLD BLACK AND WHITE CONFLICT IS A VERY DANGEROUS PROBLEM FOR OUR COUNTRY.
  PEOPLE ARE BEGGING FOR JOBS, BUT ARE NOT GETTING THEM. WHY CAN'T WE SOLVE SOLVE THIS PROBLEM? JOBS ARE NOT THE SOLUTION! THEY WERE NEVER THE SOLUTION.
  EDUCATION IS THE SOLUTION FOR BOTH POVERTY AND THE BLACK/WHITE PROBLEM. IT IS A GOOD EDUCATION THAT WILL GET ONE A GOOD JOB.
  WITHOUT A GOOD EDUCATION ONE CANNOT GET A JOB, BUT OUR EDUCATION BECAME POOR. WE ARE ON THE BOTTOM OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES IN MATHEMATICS.
  THE CHILDREN WILL END UP IN A FEW YEARS UNEMPLOYED. A POOR, DECLINING EDUCATION, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE PUBLIC IS NOT AWARE, IS NOT A FRIEND'S WORK. IT DUMBS DOWN THE PUBLIC SO THAT THEY CAN BE CONTROLLED MORE EASILY OR BECAUSE THEY GET VIOLENT WITHOUT THINKING AND THEN WE CAN FIRE HOSE THEM OR SOMETHING SIMILAR. THIS IS AN ENEMY'S WORK. I saw recent groups demonstrating, with the leader screaming, "Kill all whites!!". I heard from a group screaming the same about blacks. We need to be reminded to think. SO THINK! What do you think will happen if the blood starts flowing on both sides in the streets because incompetent management and poorly trained staffing in critical positions produced very poor results? BUT THEY WERE WELL CREDENTIALED! The ACT results tell you something more important. Within public education, we hire people to fill job openings. But there is no one with authority it appears who has any idea about how to interview to find the RIGHT PERSON for the job. That happens to be an important part of management. We look at the state's guide to plan the coming year. It is massive but wrong and cannot improve results. We look at how the schools operate and find many problems that make improvements impossible. We hire credentialed people who don't know how to manage the jobs for which they were hired. The biggest problem is not the principals and teachers. The biggest problem is poor teacher training and certification standards, absence of management training, and poorly performing basic things.
  
  
  
  Instead of resolving the black&white problem, we are increasing hate that we should have resolved a long time ago. The increasing hate evolved into special interest groups who demonstrate to amplify it, and the declining public education supports it also. How could we put this awful thing behind us? NOT WITH INCREASING HATE. I believe that a more internationally competitive curriculum education would be the right solution to this problem if we graduate children with an 80% ACT readiness minimum, that would happen with a graduating class scoring an average ACT 29 score. In my work to research our failing education, I found several examples of black high schools graduating kids, 97% of whom are not prepared to learn any job. They are not even ACT Ready, which is a fairly low standard based on ACT 21 average of 3 high school subjects plus reading. That is very bad. AND IT IS NOT ACCIDENTAL. I decided to sit in on 29 science and math courses total in four states' high schools. They were boring. No exception. No one can learn in a boring environment. Not an adult nor a child! Especially poor black and other minority children whose single parents were not educated. And this is the only way for them to get out of poverty, but we make it difficult. I noticed that black children were very quiet. Why? So I found a chain of charter schools in New York with 40+ schools that take only poor black inner-city kids, AND THEY ARE SCORING HIGHER THAN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS in NYC! Do you think that the black kids in New York have far better genes than the black and white kids a bit further south?? Of course not. THEY HAVE BETTER EDUCATED TEACHERS AND MANAGERS, A CONTINUING EDUCATION PROGRAM FOR ALL OF THEM, A BETTER CURRICULUM THAT IS OPEN TO ANYONE, AND A WELL DOCUMENTED TEACHING METHODOLOGY FOR EVERY COURSE THAT THEY ALSO MAKE AVAILABLE. THEIR NAME IS SUCCESS ACADEMY SCHOOLS. I am begging you all, including governors, to do more for those not educated well enough to become better educated. THE FACT IS THAT OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION IS DOING A POOR JOB. THE WEAKER AND LESS EDUCATED ALWAYS GET HIT THE WORST. IT IS THE WEAKEST PART OF OUR POPULATION THAT IS GROWING BECAUSE THE EDUCATION SYSTEM'S OUTPUT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. If we created part of a big problem, let alone all of it, don't governors have an obligation to fix it? Why did this happen? Are the politicians we elect to high office unable to improve things? Are intelligent people on the highest and wealthiest level, who do not want to risk their financial position, threatened? People in growing poverty can become a big financial load on a country. If poor public education contributed to increasing poverty, and it did, with education under government control, don't we have an obligation under the constitution and as a human being to correct it promptly, instead of destroying people's lives? Even wild animals are better than that. They kill to eat. We, humanity, kill people just to destroy them because they are a little different in color, religion, nationality, the way they speak, and on and on. Do you know why that is not a good thing? Because our technology is increasing more rapidly, but our spirituality is in the gutter. We do not search for and see the good in others when we all have good and bad in us. Our weapons are part of it, and they are becoming more destructive. We are not perfect, and we all make mistakes due to decisions based on hate, sometimes for ridiculous reasons. With today's weapons, we could destroy every living thing on this earth due to how we feel about each other. I am writing this website because I care about my country and its people. There will be many who do not appreciate it. Unfortunately, almost everyone can see that most of our children graduating from high school are not educated well enough. When you read what I found, you will become a very surprised believer. I don't know if I or anyone could be different from our political leaders under the circumstances they face and take no action to solve the education problem, especially after seeing how some politicians acted after the 2016 presidential election. I am hopeful that the good in all of us will do the right thing peacefully to make some changes to save our country. Just remember that we all have good and bad in us. None of us are perfect. We CAN do good to others or do bad things to others.
  
  
  
  CREDENTIALED PEOPLE ARE IMPORTANT IF THEY ARE A GOOD FIT FOR THE PROBLEMS TO BE SOLVED. WHEN HIRING IN EDUCATION, WE DO A GREAT JOB, HIRING CREDENTIALED PEOPLE. BUT OBVIOUSLY, THEY CANNOT DO THE JOB WELL ENOUGH. THE RESULTS ARE POOR. We have to be much better to succeed as a nation in the future. I found that the locally elected school board majority interviews and hires SUPERINTENDENTS, a very important position that makes or breaks a school district's results. WE HAVE A BIG PROBLEM WITH SUPERINTENDENTS, because the management know-how is missing, and the results depend on them. WE HAVE A BIG PROBLEM WITH TEACHER TRAINING. We have too many children graduating with poor reading and basic math skills. We cannot be playing nice in this case. If they cannot raise children to excellence by the end of grade four, such teachers need to be replaced, or we have to automate this area with AI-driven cognitive robotics. Our performance is poor. I BELIEVE THAT WE MUST ELIMINATE/REMEDY URGENTLY ANYTHING THAT CONTRIBUTES TO BAD RESULTS. High-performing countries in education have been hiring teachers who have a Master's degree in the subject that they will teach if they are a good personality match to the teaching profession based on tests. People who have a good foundation in math and science on a Master's level and were principals in high school with ACT or SAT results rising for five years would be the right candidates for the superintendent. MAKE IT KNOWN THAT IMPOSSIBILITY THINKING WE DO NOT WANT TO HEAR. WE WANT PEOPLE WHO ARE FOCUSING ON HOW WE CAN INCREASE THE RESULTS AND WHAT THAT MEANS. Unfortunately, in a poorly performing organization, one does not have people like that. That is why the performance is poor. Come to think of it, not only the candidate, but those interviewing the candidate need to be also well qualified in these areas, plus they have to know how to interview and decide on the right candidate and not just depend on the headhunter's background check.
  
  
  
  MANIPULATION OF STATE TESTS TO CREATE GRADES THAT LOOK GOOD, BUT WITH LESS KNOWLEDGE, SEEMS TO BE THE CUSTOM NOW. I read in an education website that Grade Point Average or GPA gives the best indication of the job candidate's exact knowledge and the job he does. It makes good sense, but it is not as secure as the national tests ACT and SAT. The ACT AND SAT are annual tests. The GPA could be a terrific "continuous" test if the testing would be in the hand of a testing company like the ACT or SAT, keeping test results updated daily, scoring tests automatically, showing year-to-date GPA per student, per class, per teacher, per principal, per school district, per state and nationally to the top three countries in education annually. The testing function would need to be under an independent group of senior management people from the biggest employers, who would also be setting the standards for teacher training certification, teacher curriculum, teacher psychological qualification tests to be administered before teacher training. The GPA would be the best indicator if all states required the same number of different subjects with the same information in the same detail as the top three internationals' curriculum. The same standards for every high school in every state cover the same information in every state. And finally, if the states' tests would be identical in every state. BUT NONE OF THIS IS TRUE. ALL STATES WANT THE OPTION OF CHANGING THE PASS/FAIL POINTS IN THEIR STATE TESTS ANNUALLY, "TO MATCH THE COMMON CORE REQUIREMENTS," THEY SAY, BY LOWERING AND NOT RAISING THE PASS/FAIL POINTS IN STATE TESTS. UNFORTUNATELY WHAT THEY CLAIM IS IMPOSSIBLE, BECAUSE PEOPLE IN EDUCATION MANAGEMENT ARE NOT MAKING THE EFFORT TO IMPROVE THEIR BAD RESULTS. With the current method, this practice leads to declining performance. Why? Because we already know that if performance is too low, instead of making the course content higher, they would rather lower the pass/fail points. This area is extremely important. All standards and policies that define what education departments must achieve should not be under the control of education departments. Because if a government-based organization is producing bad results as education does, it is much easier to do things like dropping the pass-fail percentage in tests to get higher grades than improving the way we teach. And then you teach less and less, and by doing so, we are dumbing down the population. One can see that by looking at the chart with 20 years of ACT scores. The ACT chart shows that when we are one of the highest spenders in the world per student in public education, BUT we deliver the worst results among industrialized countries. There has been no effort in the past to raise our declining public school results, and in mathematics, we dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries. WHY? Because high technology developments are coming at a faster pace, employers use new technologies almost immediately. Still, our schools do not teach them, and the graduating high school students become less and less qualified for the jobs that employers need to fill. This presents a huge growing need for better high school education that teachers are NOT prepared to do. THAT INCREASES THE DEMAND FOR AI-DRIVEN COGNITIVE ROBOTICS THAT ARE MUCH MORE SKILLED, FASTER, AND CREATE BETTER QUALITY PRODUCTS THAN HUMANS+CURRENT MACHINERY. IT WILL REPLACE A LOT MORE HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES AND ABOUT 30 MILLION WORKFORCE MEMBERS WITHIN FIVE YEARS BY 2026. DAMAGE: VERY LARGE LAYOFFS BECAUSE OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS NOT BEEN RESPONDING TO EMPLOYERS' NEEDS.
  
  
  
  READING, BASIC MATH AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS: Today the high school graduate can read and write block letters only. You mean their boss writes them a note, and they cannot read it? Yes, we make brilliant decisions in public education. For example, our children graduated from high school, but they cannot read or do basic math and cannot communicate properly. THAT IS REALLY BRILLIANT! We graduate them that way! Who is the national education leader who does not enforce standards that are to be done to a high enough standard in every state?! Doesn't anyone in senior political and education management realize that we create this damage in grades 1-3 and handicap the children's ability to learn and earn? This low skill level presents a significant disability in making a good enough living. It looks like the governors are a taco short on the combination plate, but they are smarter than that. Who and what is creating these problems? This is not the formula for jobs with enough income. This is not the formula for building a prosperous country. The formula for increasing hate between the haves and have nots can get very ugly. This alone is the formula for creating big damage to our country with blood on the streets. This has not been resolved for several decades. I would love to hear from governors in states like Tennessee about why such a problem lasts for many decades instead of a year or two. This is not the only deed by our public education that is destructive. We will present more below. DAMAGE: NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE USED BY EMPLOYERS TO IMPROVE THEIR COMPETITIVENESS AND INCOME. BUT THEY ALSO CHANGE THE WAY THEY WORK A LITTLE OR A LOT DEPENDING ON THE TECHNOLOGY. TO QUALIFY FOR JOBS, OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION NEEDS TO IMPROVE, AND THE ACT SCORES WOULD SHOW THAT IMPROVEMENT BY GOING UP. IF THE ACT SCORES OF OUR GRADUATES ARE NOT IMPROVING, WE ARE WEAKENING OUR COMPANIES' AND INDUSTRIES' WORKFORCE, THEIR INCOME AND OUR NATION'S TAX INCOME, DAMAGING IT SERIOUSLY. PUBLIC EDUCATION DID NOT IMPROVE IN 20 YEARS, AND THAT, IF THIS TREND CONTINUES, IT WILL DAMAGE OUR COUNTRY VERY SERIOUSLY. WE SEEM TO BE IGNORING THAT.
  
  
  
  

  WHY IS IT THAT THE LEADERSHIP IN A SCHOOL DISTRICT DOES NOT KNOW ENOUGH TO RAISE THE ACT SCORES MUCH HIGHER TO PREVENT A DISASTROUS OUTCOME FOR THE NEW GENERATION? SHOULD NOT WE BE AT 80% ACT READINESS MINIMUM? ACT READINESS REPRESENTS ONLY THREE HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS PLUS READING, A THIRD GRADE SUBJECT, PASSED AT 61% SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE LEVEL. NOT TOO LONG AGO, WE HAD TO PASS ALL HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS AT 60% KNOWLEDGE LEVEL. TODAY, WE GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL 75-84% OF GRADUATES WHO ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY. IS THAT GOOD NEWS FOR OUR CHILDREN? ARE WE IMPROVING? I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW WHAT THE GOVERNORS' ANSWER WOULD BE TO THAT QUESTION.
  Why do we have such people working in any school district or at any level above the school districts in management positions who are guessing to solve problems and failing instead of learning proven methods? Their results are poor, but they do not trust anything else. Why can't others above them HELP to correct the problem?
  Why do superintendents allow poor performance in their organization and learn about better ways from the high performing countries in education? Do they know what to do? What do the ACT results tell you?
  If you let half the people go in the central management in all medium and large school districts and transfer the money you gain to the schools, would the results drop or go up? If you did the same in the schools and transferred the money to central management, would the results drop or go up? Why do you waste money and deliver poor results? Does any governor or anyone within education management ask these questions? And now let me ask you if you reduced the number of people by half in the state departments of education and spent that money in school classrooms or on incentives for high-performing teachers, would the results go up? I think you are getting the picture. If you allow central management at any level to grow because someone had a "good" idea in a poorly performing organization, would the results go up? When you do not have management training, and the results are unacceptable, the people on top WILL NOT MAKE GOOD DECISIONS AS OUR RESULTS SHOW.
  The bad results are not the teachers' and principals' fault. They all went into teaching with the best of intentions. They all assumed that the teacher training and certification would match what employers WILL need, plus a little more. YES, THAT IS WHERE IT SHOULD BE. But instead, they were educated based on standards that are too old and too low. It is the fault of people above them, the "standard setters. "Why don't the "standard setters," like governors, act to respond to poor school performance and technological changes?
  State departments of education have a lot to do with all the questions we are raising and more.
  It would be helpful to click here to read about this issue.
  DAMAGE: VERY LARGE CHANGES THAT CAN DESTROY BUSINESSES ON A LARGE SCALE, AND WITH IT THE ENTIRE ECONOMY OF OUR COUNTRY, BECAUSE GOVERNORS DO NOT RESPOND AND SOLVE THE PROBLEM IN PUBLIC EDUCATION. OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS NOT BEEN RESPONDING TO EMPLOYERS' NEEDS. THAT IS A HUGE INCENTIVE TO GO TO ROBOTICS. WE HAVE NO OTHER OPTION.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  ACT SCORES AND "ACT READINESS"
  WHAT ARE THEY? WHAT DO THEY SHOW?

  
  
  The ACT chart covering twenty years seems to shows that almost all of our children do not know enough of the high school subjects. ONE WILL SEE THAT BETTER WHEN ONE READS WHAT "ACT READINESS" MEANS. The K-12 curriculum must cover the subjects that the graduates will need to get a job and perform well in it. Today, the graduation knowledge-level needs to be at 90% of the curriculum because our curriculum is behind the best countries' education. Like the ACT, SAT, PISA (international), the various tests can be converted to a "percentage of knowledge" interpretation of knowledge, like a percentage scale. If we convert the ACT, SAT, or PISA scores to a percentage of each test's maximum score, we can see approximately what percentage of subject knowledge the test score represents in the chart below. For example, an average ACT 21 score is the same as an SAT 1070 score, both representing 58-61% knowledge of high school subjects that vary state-to-state as well as within some states, but the variation is always favoring lower and not higher performance. But most international high school graduates of the leading countries in education also have to pass a so-called matriculation test ON ALL HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS AT THE END OF HIGH SCHOOL. That ensures a significantly higher knowledge. By not having such a test at graduation time, our children graduate high school with less knowledge because a lot of the first three years' material is forgotten by the end of high school.
  
  
  
  On the ACT chart, the black numbers are the ACT scores. The red percentages below the black ACT scores are the ACT Readiness percentages/year in a group of graduates. The third group, red percentages again, represents 80% OF GRADUATES who were NOT EVEN ACT READY (below 61% average knowledge on four K-12 subjects only), BUT WE GRADUATED THEM. Is the ACT Readiness standard too high? Or is that standard a reasonable indicator of knowledge of what employers need? What is the ACT College and Career Readiness? We will cover the answers below.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The state departments of education are the biggest customers of both ACT and SAT tests. ACT dominates the market with a 52-56% market share. They would not be that unless both the education organizations and the testing organizations agree about the test results. So any standards are negotiated between them. That means that the party that is failing its job will use its financial influence on the testing company to present a slightly better picture of school performance than reality is. Considering the public education community's truthfulness with the public about the education they provide our children, who pay them the highest rates in the world per student, any behavioral analysis would show that such behavior is very likely. And it may be too modest. The parties that need education, the well educated high school graduate, are the employers in all industries and the government. But they are not involved directly in the decisions on standards. The standards could be best defined by them, not by education, in a situation where total expenses are guaranteed, like in education. Just a point that we wanted to make upfront. The average consolidated ACT score is the average of four individual subject tests. They are each scored 1-36. Your number of correct answers in four ACT tests converts to a score that ranges from 1 to 36 for each of the four tests in English, Math, Reading, and Science — and your ACT composite score is the average of those.  These four subjects are a close indicator of achievement based on ACT's correlation of scores vs. college performance after high school. We are converting the ACT scores to a high school subject-knowledge percentage to show how much subject-knowledge the score represents. Each ACT score point is equal to 2.78% (100% divided by 36) knowledge of the high school subjects. As an example, an average consolidated ACT 21 score represents 58% subject knowledge level upon high school graduation for a single student or group of students (class, school, city, state). Knowledge levels below 80% upon graduation were not considered good enough for adequate education for income as far back as 1970. We also include in the above conversion table the SAT and the international OECD PISA test scores as a percentage. With robotic automation increasingly replacing more and more sophisticated jobs since about 2000, if someone wants a college education in science or engineering, the education that will survive robotics the longest, a STEM ACT Readiness with an average 29 ACT score WOULD BE NECESSARY. This is only 80% knowledge of the high school subjects, but it also covers Physics, Chemistry, and Calculus THAT ARE PART OF THE HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM IN THE HIGH PERFORMING NATIONS IN EDUCATION. Quite a few also include in the curriculum 2-4 languages, but not just a year or two in each. The students have to be fluent in foreign languages. The minimum ACT score for STEM ACT is 26 (44% knowledge of subjects). We are far behind them, but the top ten nations in education are between the STEM ACT equivalent score of 29-34 TODAY. Our national average was an average ACT score of 20.7 in 2019 TENNESSEE, and THAT IS ONLY A 58% KNOWLEDGE OF HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS. NOT GOOD. IT IS TOO LOW. THE TENNESSEE GOAL WAS AN ACT GOAL OF ONLY 21 SINCE 1995. We never reached it because our education management did not understand how to use the state education departments' management tools. The state education department also did not understand and gave the wrong advice to the school districts about how to use them. We explain all this below. Many of the good US universities already require between 29 and 34 ACT average for admission to study anything. Our public education is behind. If one talks to professors, they will tell you that today's high school graduates need two years of remedial education to start any freshman program today. Please remember that many of today's college degrees will not survive because the artificial intelligence programmed cognitive robots will be able to do a better job less expensively than we people could do. The students who want to be in a field that will survive robotics for ten or more years would need to pass 80% STEM ACT Readiness at 29 average ACT score or more because the surviving jobs will need to have graduate-level knowledge in mathematics, sciences or economics. Hopefully, we will improve in many areas very quickly, and achieving that level of knowledge will most like be easier than what we do today.
  
  
  
  ACT Readiness is different. ACT announced in 2006 that college entry readiness and job readiness became identical. Job readiness was lower before 2006. Unfortunately, ACT Readiness is not communicated clearly to parents, implying readiness to get a college degree. It is important, especially for parents and school children in poverty to understand this. Our poverty rate is increasing. Guess why? Because we are graduating poorly educated children. The high international performers are way ahead of us. Many of them get to their good results independently of what the parent can do to help because, in poverty, most parents are not educated well enough to understand how the child is doing, and their life is terrible. The explanation they are given is that "God did not make all children college material. But your little Johnny is smart, could learn a trade job, and make enough money!" Unfortunately, that is a lie that the poor parent accepts. I spoke to African immigrant parents and other minorities in the high performing countries and saw how well they were doing. MUCH BETTER THAN WE DO. The new governor hires a new state superintendent. Do you know how much our state education superintendents do to find out how well we are doing? They visit a class in three schools in their city, with early announcements to the school about the visit and put on a good show. They don't go to the best countries in education to find out what high performance is about and how they do it, but they spend BILLIONS of dollars annually on our education that is far from the best. As a country, we spend about one trillion dollars annually on public education.
  
  
  
  ACT’s Benchmark at the end of high school for “ACT Readiness” qualification is based on meeting only 4 of these individual subject scores: Math, Algebra score: 22 (61% knowledge), Science: Biology score: 23 (64% knowledge), Reading/Soc. Science: score: 22 (61% knowledge) and English Composition score:18 (50% knowledge). Only those who pass all four subject benchmark tests are "ACT Ready." According to ACT, the ACT Ready students have only a 50% - 75% chance to pass only four first-year college-level courses in the same freshman-level subject-name ONLY, as what the ACT benchmarks' subjects were. That is all that "ACT readiness" is. The four specific high school subjects only qualify the student as ACT ready at or above the four specified ACT scores because he passed the four subjects at an average 21 ACT score (representing only 58% subject knowledge). At the passing score level on all four subjects, the student has a 50% chance to pass four courses in the identical benchmark subjects but on the freshman level only. If the benchmark scores rise to the 80% level, then his chances go to 75% that he will get a passing grade only in the same four freshman courses. But most universities require a 26-34 ACT average to enter. That means that ACT Readiness is not the qualification you want because it is too low in 2020, even for taking basket weaving in college. It is not an indicator by ACT for any other course or program or college entrance to complete entry into any job by 2023, except for domestic help. Also, ACT Readiness will be raised because it is already too low for employers beyond 2020. The STEM ACT definition has already been identifying the graduation knowledge level that will be necessary to be immune to robotics in the near future, hopefully for more than ten years. From 2021 on STEM ACT would be the right predictor of employability.
  
  
  
  Of all children we graduate from high school, more than 80% are not even ACT Ready in Tennessee and a number of other states. A few years ago, our schools graduated ONLY THOSE STUDENTS who passed above 60% good answers ("D" average or higher) on EVERY SINGLE HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECT. Today, MORE THAN 80% of today's high school graduates with a diploma would have been failures because they can be anywhere BELOW 59-61% knowledge ON ONLY FOUR SUBJECTS called "ACT Readiness benchmarks" who would not graduate under the old system we had. WE GRADUATE ABOUT 3.6 MILLION STUDENTS ANNUALLY in the US. 80% OF 3.6 MILLION IS ABOUT THREE MILLION CHILDREN WHO ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY. This was a very foolish creation by the department of state education in every state because more than 80 % of graduates do not have the knowledge to be employable - AND IT IS INCREASING! ACT readiness is at such a low level of product knowledge that by 2023-2024 they will be replaced by robots as well. We will need high school graduates today who are "STEM ACT ready" with an average 29 or higher average consolidated ACT score (80% ACT Ready). STEM ACT is not only for engineering and science jobs. It should be our standard for all high schools now because it will be required for all jobs after 2024. Robots will take over the jobs that require less than STEM ACT Readiness who graduate from high school. Why do we graduate them and give them a high school diploma to imply that they are ready to become self-supporting when they are not?! It is a form of lying to the parents, especially in low-income areas. "Your child has done so well that he is congratulated in a public ceremony and given a diploma!" A piece of paper called a diploma, but the child did not learn enough to get a job. We respectfully requested that our governor ask someone to explain why the education department is allowing our education system to perform this poorly. No one ever replied. Someone higher up should be asking that question, but they don't.
  
  
  
  BAD FINANCIAL AND OPERATIONAL DECISIONS: This is only one example of many but it makes the point. This is a significant sign of bad management to have people in any organization who think that spending money on consultants is the right way to solve a problem with something that millions of schools solved worldwide a long time ago. The much bigger problem is why do we have to hire consultants for tens of thousands of dollars to learn how to do a good job in any subject, like Reading and Basic Math in grades 1-3?
  
  
  • Good consultants are rare. They are good people, but most are unemployed, using consultancy to survive and find the right job. A good choice for them, but you need someone very good at what you need. You are talking to them because you don't know how to teach reading as an example, AND YOU DO NOT WANT TO LEARN, BECAUSE YOU WANT SOMEONE ELSE TO BLAME IF IT DOES NOT WORK. THIS KIND OF PERSON DOES NOT DO A GOOD JOB AND IS UNLIKELY TO HAVE GOOD RESULTS. A GOOD MANAGER WOULD KNOW EXACTLY WHAT KIND OF SKILLS HE NEEDS ON HIS TEAM, AND BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS TEAM'S RESULTS, WOULD LEARN FIRST WHAT HIS/HER TEACHERS ARE LACKING TO PRODUCE GOOD READING RESULTS INSTEAD OF DEPENDING ON A CONSULTANT. The good manager in education does know what skills are needed and reads up on how to teach reading and what method is best in education for it. Then, pick the best school in the country in reading scores, visit them for a few days to find out what they do differently—that kind of manager you can depend on to do anything very well. A New York charter school, Success Academy Schools, has excellent results in everything. They teach children by the end of first grade how to score high under NY state requirements in reading, one of the best in the US. The solution to this problem begs for looking in the mirror and acknowledge openly our shortcomings and why we did not take any action to solve it a long time ago. Self-defense is worthless in a case like this because a teacher should have the talent to know or find out how to teach reading to 1-3 graders. There is another thing that is very important in this example. The objective is to teach children in the shortest amount of time and improve that constantly. With reading, the children need to be fascinated by and enjoy the teacher and what they read. That requires excellent subject knowledge and the talent of loving your subject as a teacher, being excited as a teacher who presents a fantastic thing and transferring that feeling to everyone in the class. That requires teachers with exceptional talent who search for ways to become better at what they do every day. Lastly, you learn best by not just knowing but also doing something and becoming excellent with it. What tells you the truth about this is the GPA score in any class. Acceptance into teaching programs ignores that. Education training in colleges and universities is not good enough in the US. And management training for anyone who wants to be superintendent someday is even more important. Develop them from high school principals because the supply is not good enough. Appointment to a state education superintendent ignores those qualities, although you could test for it since 1970. A word for superintendents: There are conmen, ESPECIALLY in poorly performing organizations. They are excellent planners but only for themselves. They are excellent communicators to achieve what they want for themselves. They are knowledgeable and can beat you. Always focus on a person's performance. It would help if you focused on doing an excellent job in your schools because we are not there yet. It is not smart to become friends with a person who is within your organization. What he or she most likely wants is a big raise that comes with your job. DAMAGE: VERY LARGE LAYOFFS BECAUSE OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS NOT BEEN RESPONDING TO EMPLOYERS' NEEDS.
    
    
    
    JUST A FEW COMMENTS THAT APPEAR TO BE UNRELATED. BUT THEY ARE RELATED. Animals kill for food. We human beings developed to be fighting each other for food initially, and that developed into killing each other for "very important reasons" like skin color, being a different religion, nationality, or anything that makes us different from each other. We have been killing each other for such differences on a huge scale. We learned to trigger wars starting a very long time ago, and many wars did not start the way that we told the public. Some of those people who had a COMPARTMENTED Top Secret clearance in the US military know about such details. We read and hear on the news, but we can feel that more and more information is missing in the news as years go by, and if we knew about it, the truth would look different from what we think without that information. Such programs are very sophisticated today. They existed as very important population control methods since 1910 in a very visible form in communism and in Hitler's Germany. We should remember that when we think of the way we acted on the political side since 2015. It was very destructive. The lying and actions against OURSELVES can destroy any country. We deserve much better. Maybe we need a system change, where loyalty to the country is much higher than loyalty to any party. With a president being a Democrat or Republican, after he is elected, the decision was made, and it is time to support our president, like it or not. The job is difficult enough, and we saw how it could divide a nation and harm the nation if we continue the ugly behavior after an election. WE BETTER LEARN TO BE AMERICANS FIRST. The wealthy and powerful influencers could legitimately see part of the population as highly destructive potentially to all and especially to them. Groups of powerful people perhaps see population growth as a major problem. Some groups see the solution as fast population reduction, with a lot of blood flowing in the streets. Based on what we found, one group with significant power and influence made huge money from wars. When one dumbs down a population, their judgment drops significantly. Everything deteriorates. Voting can be controlled today under disinformation theory based on lying often enough to the people or providing incomplete information to control their views (news and advertising). However, technologically, highly destructive weapons exist in too many countries, where people could make a mistake since none of us are perfect, and that could destroy us all. We found that our education has been in decline for a long time. But I can tell you this! We found a very systematic set of practices in public education that is dumbing down the population. It is a brilliant design created by highly intelligent people. We all judge based on what we think and not necessarily based on what we know as a fact. We learn so much every year, with accelerating discoveries, that we will never know everything. Although most school employees in public education, all the way up to a governor, all think that they do when producing very poor ACT scores. To understand the problem, never think that something cannot be true or cannot be done. We need to think that it could be true and learn to investigate it to find out.
    
    
    
    We need to make enough money as a nation, with national income at 12-14%, instead of struggling at 3-4% as we have been. For that to happen, our industries have to be more innovative than those in other countries. More innovative means designing products and services that help people do things easier and better, with the latest in technology, with larger profit margins. They are using "management by objective" and "zero-based budgeting" to be aware precisely every month how the needed expenses produce the right quality in products, people, and services. A database system software can show automatically to the minute how all key indicators are progressing in our normal operations against an operating plan we made before the start of our fiscal year. With the right management people, we can change the way we operate to find good solutions to problems popping up when "Mr. Murphy of Murphy's Law fame pops up from a street corner along the way". Nothing is perfect, problems can pop up because of it, and it can be enormous fun to solve them fast. Having well-trained management beyond an MBA is of great value, from planning the spending and the needed work objectives everywhere is absolutely vital for any organization from 100 employees and up. People who worked in small organizations or partnerships may be excellent in their jobs, but they may not recognize the need for focusing people on what needs to be achieved, to what standard. We will focus on public education with this website because we are not doing well enough in education, as you will see. OUR CHILDREN'S AND COUNTRY'S FUTURE DEPENDS TOTALLY ON HOW WELL, OR POORLY, OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN, COMPARED TO THE TOP THREE COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION. IF EDUCATION BECOMES THE INTERNAL ENEMY OF A NATION BECAUSE THEY ARE DOING A POOR JOB OVER DECADES, THEY ALSO DO EVERYTHING SLOWLY, SO THAT THE PUBLIC REMAINS UNAWARE. SIMULTANEOUSLY THEY ALSO FLOOD THE PUBLIC WITH "GOOD NEWS" THAT ARE NOT TRUE ABOUT EDUCATION. AND THEN, THAT NATION CAN BE DESTROYED EASILY. Lenin of Communism fame is very famous for something he frequently said: "If you lie to the public a thousand times, they will believe it as truth!" We are too close to that moment. Read below what I found out during an investigation of US education and the best countries in education in the world at my own expense, with my own eyes and observations. We have some big problems to solve. This FORM OF DESTRUCTION CAN BE MORE HARMFUL THAN THE ATTACK OF AN EXTERNAL ENEMY. IT NEEDS TO BE TREATED ACCORDINGLY.
    
    
    
    
    • Our schools' responsibility is to deliver well-trained graduates to satisfy the needs of employers. How well are our schools doing? NOT WELL. Are all the children they graduate employable? CLOSE TO 80% ARE NOT EMPLOYABLE, AND MORE THAN 90% OF BLACK STUDENTS ARE NOT EMPLOYABLE. I FOUND A FEW SCHOOLS WITH POOR INNER CITY BLACK CHILDREN WHO ARE PERFORMING BETTER THAN THE AVERAGE PRIVATE SCHOOL. IT CAN BE DONE! IT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT THAT WE DO AN EXCELLENT JOB FOR CHILDREN OF ALL COLORS, AND TO PUT BEHIND US THE OLD "BLACK& WHITE" PROBLEM ONCE AND FOR ALL.
    
    
    
    • In 2023-2024 Major scientific developments will create hundreds of new sciences, millions of new discoveries that will automate more areas within our industries than computers did alone. Artificial Intelligence in cognitive robotics will eliminate most jobs that are four-year college degree based. Still, many new jobs will be created in many new science and engineering fields requiring life-long learning due to nanotechnology and space sciences emerging. The future of employment will be suddenly in areas of advanced mathematics, economics, many new sciences, and engineering on a master's degree level moving toward Ph.D. degrees. The truth is that learning on the high school level became very difficult because our teacher training and selection became weaker, resulting in too many boring classrooms. Not the teachers' fault. With teaching becoming much easier with cognitive AI robotics, learning itself will become easier to open the gates to the majority of students in graduate schools, with very interesting lifetime learning. But to take advantage of this, our current high schools must improve in teaching our children.
    
    
    
    • It is the employers whose opinion is the most important in defining their potential employees' education level and graduation standards. Employers would be better to determine the standards of public education, not the education departments. It is the same with the K-12 curriculum nationally to ensure our schools' BECOMING THE BEST IN THE WORLD TO SATISFY OUR EMPLOYERS FUTURE NEEDS IN TRAINED EMPLOYEES.
    
    
    
    • The US or state or school district education system should not have a decision-making role in graduation requirements for high school students, in the listed courses or curriculum in this area for conflict of interest reasons. It should implement a national standard only to employers' satisfaction.
    
    
    
    
    Too many of us in this world dislike or do not trust anyone different in some way. Anyone with a different opinion than we have about things like religions, politics, different skin colors, nationality does not mean that we cannot be friends accomplishing great things together. Many of us also believe that we are always right when we all know so little compared to what we will learn in a couple of decades - if we have an interest in our world. We often dislike others just for being "different," even without knowing what that difference is. Such differences can create conflicts, small or large,, and even wars if the conflict is between people on the highest level. In education district school boards, we often see people who believe that simply being on the board means that their opinion must always be true, just because they were elected. We live in a world where nothing is perfect, but beauty, goodness, ugliness, and evil behavior exist everywhere, and none of us are perfect. We do not have enough of us yet to see both the good and not so good in each other, and hopefully, we learn to become more helpful with each other. The important word is to learn to love each other in a general sense and HELP and make each other and our world a better place. The most helpful thing we could do is to achieve this in everything we do, especially in public education. But if this is the problem, put aside what you cannot change AT THE MOMENT, and keep going forward.
    
    
    
    Several countries who were colonial powers used slavery a few hundred years ago. Only WE ended up this long with an ugly black/white problem even today. It is still very much alive. Is it helpful? No. Is it a major problem creator? Absolutely. What is the best problem-solving tool for it? A better life for those of us who are less fortunate. And that can happen only WITH EDUCATION OF THE POPULATION THAT IS AMONG THE BEST THREE OR FOUR IN EDUCATION IN THE WORLD, TO SATISFY THE NEEDS OF EMPLOYERS. The US being the largest economy worldwide, it is necessary for us to be there. The high school education and its prerequisite schooling have the biggest impact. It is "THE huge pipeline" that feeds the workforce everywhere, in government, in all industries, and in higher education. It is becoming more important for the future. By the end of high school, a good education focused on the right subjects gives us the best odds to coexist with robotics are: advanced Mathematics, excellent Communications and Reading, and the new Sciences with changing Physics on top.
    
    
    
    Age 3-6 is the period with the quickest learning (speed of neuronal interconnections in the brain is exactly that), making preschool vitally important. Between ages 3 and 20, there is a specific order of months or years during which the neuronal interconnections get interconnected to learn specific groups of subjects. If we do not learn a subject like mathematics so that we can learn to calculate mentally within the elementary school years, then that area in the brain remains poorly prepared for life, as learning ability slows down more as we get older after age 6-8. A baby is born with 100 billion brain cells or neurons. As we learn to see, hear, speak, muscle coordination during 12-18 years of schooling, the speed of neuronal interconnections begins slowing at an increasing rate. The interconnections slow faster if the child does not learn enough, and learning becomes more difficult. So those children who go to boring classes will have a greater problem in learning as they get older at an increasing rate. That is how some people turn out to hate subjects like math. In the high-performing countries, they accept teacher candidates into the teaching programs with high IQ Master's degree graduates in the subject that they will teach, who love their subject and talk to students with an infectious enthusiasm that the children will enjoy. The teacher whose profile and education is different, whose teaching the children find boring, those students will end up hating that subject, which could be very important for the children in the era of robotics. Our children may end up disabled in the area for mental math because of calculator use at a K-12 age. That will make them poor critical thinkers and decision-makers. By the end of high school, our high school students need to complete Mathematics through Calculus, Physics (space science is bringing major changes there), Nanotechnology/Material Science, Chemistry, Artificial Intelligence with Cognitive Robotics, and Economics, and their prerequisites. Yet what we plan to teach in the curriculum is too little and does not prepare them well. Music and Art are also important for right brain hemisphere development that is also key in decision making.
    
    
    
    We are beginning to be concerned about why the departments of education have made decisions to teach less, skip teaching some subjects, drop the pass/fail points from 60% to as low as 30% in one or more subjects to show higher grades and graduation rates. We focus on and target "90% graduation rates" in high school and do everything in the book to make it look good. One can "doctor" the graduation rate, lie to the public just to look good, and graduate less educated children. But if the schools had a high enough ACT or SAT score that all students take, it would show the real knowledge of high school graduates, that the education industry will not want to do. They do exactly what a crude saying represents: "Please don't @#$% on my shoes and tell me that it is raining." It sounds like an effort of the puppet master in the old puppet theaters. IT IS TIME TO LET SUCH PRACTICES GO. NEVER COMPROMISE WHAT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT FOR YOUR COUNTRY'S FUTURE.
    
    
    
    
    • In most states: Weak teacher selection, teacher training, and certification, mostly boring classes result in students disliking the subject and the jobs that require it. Low teacher morale, high turnover of teachers, 8% are leaving the profession, 8% are leaving the school district. Multiple-choice satisfaction surveys are poor problem identifiers and can guide the teacher away from the problem's real causes to look better to the public. The "puppet masters" on top doing this to teachers, principals, and the public.
    
    
    
    • Curriculum weak in Science and Math compared to the international curricula of nations who are passing us. What other countries do is not important - some say. NOT SO. WE COMPETE WITH THEM. WE WILL EXPLAIN IT SHORTLY.
    
    
    
    • Schools with black students receive twice as much funding per student as the other schools in many places. BUT 94-97% of black school graduates are not even ACT Ready, a very low standard. 80% of other school graduates are also not ACT Ready. Obviously, the money is going to the wrong places and the wrong people in our schools. Obviously, the management is weak at all levels and cannot figure out what to do, and teachers are not trained well. This is not the employee's fault. It is the fault of those who set the standards/requirements. THROWING MONEY AT A PROBLEM IS NOT THE SOLUTION, BUT THAT IS WHAT WE DO. HOW MANY DECADES DO YOU NEED TO SOLVE IT? Better and more education is the solution. Why are we degrading our education? Well, it dumbs down the public. That makes selling the public ANYTHING easier. Only an enemy would do that. This would be only one of many things such an enemy would do. And such an enemy would not want to be visible.
    
    
    
    
    We have to stop thinking in terms of elementary education, high school, and college. Think of them for the future in terms of a continuously increasing learning process for life that is much easier to learn than today. It will increase faster and faster throughout life from now on because jobs will become highly specialized, in narrower, more advanced fields. Learning will become much more comfortable and more fun toward areas where our natural talents lie.
    
    
    
    Public education has not changed and improved much for us in many decades. They are defensive and not progressing with the changing technologies. They are hurting our national industries and their income. Children will do much better in about 8 years because public education, unions, and politicians did not want to embrace change so far, but they will by then. If they wanted to improve, we would not have the poor education performance today in most public schools. When we do not want to learn and change to become better because of self-serving fears, we ALWAYS pay the price for it later. ONE CAN LEARN A LOT, QUITE EASILY, BY USING SEARCH ENGINES OR EXCELLENT TUTORIALS THAT ARE AVAILABLE ON ANY SUBJECT FROM THE INTERNET. Unfortunately, our public schools do not teach our children enough about our subjects for employability. Again, BORING CLASSES TURN OFF STUDENTS. IF YOU HAVE DOUBTS, SIT IN ON SOME MATH AND SCIENCE CLASSES UNANNOUNCED IF POSSIBLE. THEN GO TO A COUNTRY THAT EDUCATES ALL CHILDREN WELL, LIKE FINLAND, AND SIT IN ON THE CLASSES. Such poor preparation could take us back through a very bloody road to the stone age. The cure is to ensure excellent education for children of all colors, competitive with the top countries in education. Why have we not done that?! THAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION. If you have time, ask governors and higher-level politicians, including past presidents.
    
    
    
    Our future success or failure depends on how well our products and services compete with the world's three best nations in any product area. You see, we deal internationally now and for a century now. We have hundreds of industries. Agriculture is one of them. I can demonstrate to you that our K-12 education has never kept up with changing technology, product changes, and market changes where we sell our products. I found two final 8th grade tests. Most of today's high school graduates could not pass the English or Mathematics portion in states like Tennessee and others.
    
    
    
    I contacted several governors more than once about the poor education results we have and did not receive a single reply from anyone. I understand that taking steps in that direction is far riskier for a governor than for me. But our public education must perform much better.
    
    
    
    There are only about 5% of the high schools in the USA that are graduating well-trained students compatible with the international high performing countries. Some of them graduate all students who entered these high schools BEST COUNTRIES. We need 75-80% graduating on such a high level for our economy's benefit to pay off the national debt slowly. Professors we contacted believed that our high school graduates in 2018 required two more years of remedial training to start attending the first year of a college program. The K-12 education-related unions do not want to change anything to raise the ACT scores. Our average nationally is close to ACT 21, with only 22% of the graduates ACT Ready. We should be at MINIMUM AVERAGE ACT 29 in 2020, with 80% of graduates being ACT Ready, instead of 22%. ACT Readiness is a low qualification representing 61% average subject knowledge on four subjects only. It is nowhere near what the high performing countries achieve. We need at this stage to be at an average ACT above 29. The top ten countries in education are graduating high schools, the ACT 29-34 equivalent knowledge area. IF OTHER COUNTRIES CAN OUTPERFORM US THIS MUCH - AS THEY DO, THEN WE CAN SAFELY CONCLUDE THAT THE GREAT MAJORITY OF OUR K-12 SCHOOLS ARE DESTROYING OUR FUTURE. WHY? BECAUSE OUR FUTURE DEPENDS TOTALLY ON HOW WELL WE EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN TODAY, COMPARED TO THE BEST THREE COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION.
    
    
    
    Click here to read ACT's STEM COLLEGE READINESS BENCHMARK. Read it very carefully, public education managers. There is a very important message here for you, but with a great degree of sensitivity, because PUBLIC EDUCATION IS THEIR CUSTOMER. OUR INDUSTRIES COMPETE WITH OTHERS FOR EVERY DOLLAR. THE QUALITY OF HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES CAN HELP THEM OR HINDER THEM IN THE COMPETITION BECAUSE IT IS OUR HIGH SCHOOLS THAT FEED THE WORKFORCE OF ALL OF OUR INDUSTRIES. THAT MAKES K-12 EDUCATION SO IMPORTANT THAT WE MUST NOT ACCEPT ANYONE IN A MANAGEMENT POSITION IF THEY CANNOT PRODUCE EXCELLENT RESULTS. But we don't do that and have never done it. After about five years, all organizations develop their work ethics and how they do their work. That is what produces the results. A new leader is needed who knows what to do, changes the way they work, and if that leader is correct, then the results will improve. That is what a person who is an excellent manager can do if given a free hand.
    
    
    
    American public education has done a terrible job to date, and it appears that public education is trying very hard to create the impression of a much better performance than what we really have, damaging the future of our children and country by doing so. We explained to you on this website what ACT scores mean as a percentage of subject knowledge and what ACT Readiness means. It is a standard that ACT negotiated with the teachers' unions, at also 58% knowledge level on ONLY FOUR HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS. it is a low standard for performance today at 61% knowledge level AND ON ONLY FOUR HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS! Our achievement level nationally is average ACT 21 as well, that equals a shameful 58% subject knowledge ONLY. And now for something even more important! 80% of our graduates in Tennessee are not even ACT Ready qualified. Many states are similar. This is such a low-performance level that it cannot be possible that those directing it do not want to destroy our country. Our international competitors, the top ten, score an ACT equivalent level average between ACT 29 and as high as 34, which represent 80% - 99% subject knowledge in their curriculum subjects. Their curriculum covers more on every subject than we do, plus, PreCalculus, Calculus, Chemistry, Physics plus fluency in two foreign languages, some of them with the same class hours as we have but no homework.
    
    
    
    IT SHOULD BE VERY CLEAR TO EVERYONE THAT WE MUST RATE OUR PERFORMANCE WITH STEM ACT READINESS BUT WITH A 28 ACT AVERAGE (80% product knowledge). PUBLIC EDUCATION WILL BE AGAINST IT AND WANT TO CONTROL ANY NEW STANDARD. ANYONE WHO HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION DURING THE PAST 20 YEARS AND WAS PARTY TO THE BAD RESULTS SHOULD NOT CONTRIBUTE TO OBJECTIVES, TEACHER TRAINING GUIDELINES, GRADUATION STANDARDS. THIS IS NOT A POLITICAL GAME. IT IS A SURVIVAL GAME FOR OUR CHILDREN AND NATION.
    
    
    
    

    IMPORTANT ACTIONS IN MANAGEMENT
    That are missing or used improperly in Public Education

    
    
    

    PUBLIC EDUCATION TODAY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER FOR OUR CHILDREN TO BE EMPLOYABLE, AND FOR OUR COUNTRY TO DO WELL. THERE IS NO QUESTION THAT PUBLIC EDUCATION IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. I would like to know why, and also why our leadership is not doing anything about it. The responsibility rests with governors because the education department of the states reports to governors. I noticed that legislators and governors do not propose any changes to the internal workings of the education system TO INCREASE THE POOR ACT SCORES. This is very strange, when the education system's performance is unacceptable. If you need to increase the teaching results, it is the way the schools work that needs change.
    
    Why is it that our education management did not make any internal changes in education management to raise ACT results?
    
    Why is it that the teachers' unions never took any action to raise the ACT scores?
    
    ONE CANNOT IMPROVE ANY POORLY PERFORMING ORGANIZATION'S RESULTS UNLESS ONE CHANGES THE WAY THE PEOPLE WORK.
    
    

    • DO GOVERNORS HAVE AUTHORITY OVER EDUCATION? If they are intelligent, capable people, and we believe that they are, then POOR PERFORMANCE means that they fear "touching" education, OR THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO. But how can that happen? They all promise to fix education when running for office, but don't do it.
    
    
    
    • US presidents also promise to fix education when running for office but don't do it. What does that tell you? It tells you that they are not in charge of public education, but some other people are. If so, does the population control education in our democracy? WE SAY THEY DO, BUT THEY DO NOT. Should they have control over education? NO. TODAY WE NEED THE BEST EDUCATED, MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCED PEOPLE TO GUIDE EDUCATION.
    
    
    
    • We need uniformity in education standards by a group of very highly educated people CENTRALLY IN THE NATION and we do not need duplication of staff in each of 14,000 school districts or even in 50 states to do a bad job. But unfortunately, we do exactly that.
    
    
    
    • Could someone explain to us why we need different standards, different curricula, different high school graduation requirements within each state and the nation? Are the results better this way? Well, the results are not good. They are poor. Why do we need duplication of people in every state and for some things in every school district of which we have 14,000? My IQ may be too low, so please someone explain to me why we need the enormous duplication of expenses instead of using THAT MONEY IN THE CLASSROOMS to better educate our children?

    
    
    TODAY A NATION NEEDS UNIFORM QUALITY IN EDUCATION OF ITS PUBLIC, SET BY THE BEST QUALIFIED PEOPLE, AND NOT BY THOSE WHO ARE PART OF A GROUP, LIKE PUBLIC EDUCATION, THAT PRODUCED POOR RESULTS FOR MORE THAN THREE YEARS. THE STANDARDS MUST REFLECT WHAT EMPLOYERS NEED AND WHAT THE TOP THREE COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION DO. SUCH A GROUP NEEDS TO BE MADE UP OF SENIOR MANAGEMENT FROM LARGE CORPORATIONS AND UNIVERSITIES ONLY, AS VOTING MEMBERS. AND SUCH A GROUP NEEDS TO SET AND ENFORCE EDUCATION STANDARDS FOR THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. PUBLIC EDUCATION SHOULD BE DELIVERING WHAT THE STANDARDS SETTING GROUP SPECIFIES.
    
    
    
    Why is management training and management experience vital to education success?
    Why does its absence create failure?
    
    

    
    
    
    
    
    
    

    
    
    
    
    MANAGEMENT INTRODUCTION: Management is a high-stress job, unless one's personality suits it well. Not everyone can be a good manager. Often, an excellent worker gets promoted to a management position, but few such good workers and no one who is just average will make a good manager. Also, one will not be good enough even if one's personality is a good match unless that manager had good training first in management and was an excellent performer. In an education system like ours, we accept poor performance presented to the public as "EXCELLENCE FOR ALL CHILDREN". Bad things can happen, like an average or poor teacher getting promoted to principal because he becomes a "friend" of the superintendent, and then he does a bad job and makes a friend of the next superintendent to be promoted to head all schools, and he still has the job ten years later, BUT NOTHING IMPROVED! It was bad before all the promotions, but it became a lot worse. Who gets damaged very badly by such superintendent decisions? Who will be jobless because of it? The children. If you do not measure the performance of WORKERS AND MANAGERS IN EDUCATION, HOW CAN YOU IMPROVE? THE BIG QUESTION BECOMES: WHY DO PEOPLE IN THE EDUCATION ORGANIZATIONS AND THEIR UNIONS DO NOT WANT US TO KNOW HOW GOOD THE RESULTS ARE IN EACH CLASS AND EACH SCHOOL? If you measure teachers' and managers' performance in education, you will know where they are and help them improve. You can make sure that they are prepared for the job well enough to prepare our children. That is the best situation that they can have. BUT THE STATE HAS THE RESPONSIBILITY TO ENSURE THAT THE COLLEGE TRAINING FOR TEACHERS IS COMPETITIVE WITH THE BEST NATIONS IN EDUCATION, ALONG with CERTIFICATION FOR THE SAME LEVEL AND TEST AS WELL FOR A CANDIDATE BEING THE RIGHT PERSONALITY FOR TEACHING. To plan for increased results, you have to know exactly how your people are doing. It would help if you had precise figures for that. You have to know where you are, to IMPROVE, to reach a planned target. You have to know what talent and knowledge you have available for growth. In planning growth, you do need to know what you want to achieve and have a good idea monthly what it will take to get there. If you don't do that, you just guess and wait for a few lucky breaks, which does not produce good results. FOR SCHOOL RESULTS FIND OUT HOW TO PLAN. UNFORTUNATELY, WE HAVE SUPERINTENDENTS WHO ARE NOT TRAINED, GUESS A LOT AND THEIR RESULTS GO NOWHERE. WE HAVE TO CHANGE THAT. Most importantly, you cannot deliver a precise, targeted achievement if you do not know precisely where you are. Management is not a game. You cannot plan growth and get good results WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT RESOURCES YOU HAVE. YOU CANNOT IMPROVE RESULTS WITHOUT KNOWING PRECISELY WHAT KIND OF JOB EVERYONE IS DOING ON YOUR TEAM, WHAT THEIR STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES ARE, AND YOU WILL NOT KNOW THAT WITHOUT MEASURING THEIR PERFORMANCE. THE MEASUREMENT CANNOT BE SOMETHING THAT CAN BE ARGUED. IT MUST BE A RELIABLE NUMBER THAT WILL SHOW SUCCESS OR FAILURE. If the number of people working under you increases, you will need more management training periodically because MANAGEMENT COMPLEXITY WILL INCREASE WITH THE NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES UNDER A MANAGER. When the most important measurable results are not good enough, you have a management problem for sure. You have to find out where. IF YOU DO NOT MEASURE PERFORMANCE, USING A PERFORMANCE INDICATOR THAT IS MEASURABLE BY A NUMBER in education, an ACT score relative to the prior years' actual average ACT score. Or the SAT, depending on which one your state is using, then improvement is impossible. These two tests are the most reliable because the state education organizations cannot change the pass/fail point in them like some states do to show better results. Why do people like that still have their job? That is why we need average ACT objectives that are 10% higher than the prior years' actual performance, UNFORTUNATELY, BECAUSE SUCH ACTION CHEATS THE PUBLIC WHO PAY FOR THE POOR EDUCATION WE PROVIDE, AND PAY THE HIGHEST RATE PER CHILD IN THE WORLD. WHY DO WE TOLERATE SUCH BEHAVIORS?!
    
    
    
    THE IMPACT OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES ON EDUCATION CANNOT BE IGNORED. BUT OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM IGNORED THEM. EMPLOYERS NEED SUCH TECHNOLOGIES TO MAKE THEM MORE COMPETITIVE. THAT MEANS THAT EMPLOYERS NEED AN UPGRADED WORKFORCE, AND TO THAT END, OUR HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION MUST BE UPGRADED AS WELL. NEW TECHNOLOGIES THAT WE WILL SEE FROM 2023 ONWARD WILL HAVE A MASSIVE IMPACT THAT MANY PEOPLE DO NOT KNOW YET. OUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES ALREADY NEED TWO YEARS OF REMEDIAL LEARNING AFTER HIGH SCHOOL BEFORE THEY CAN START A COLLEGE FRESHMAN PROGRAM. WHY IS IT THAT OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM DOES NOT SEE THIS, BUT COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND OTHERS DO?! The three technologies are Nanotechnology, AI-driven Cognitive Robotics, and Space Science. Ray Kurzweil is the most accurate technology forecaster, with 90% accurate forecasting thirty years forward, for several decades now. Let me site a relatively simple forecast of his. By 2025 a $1000 PC will have the computation power of a human brain. But by 2045, the $1000 PC will have the computational power of all human beings combined. That is ten billion times the power of the 2025 PC. The same technological evolution speed applies to the three new technology areas that will be here from 2023 on. Artificial Intelligence (AI) passed average human intelligence in 2015. It is growing faster. If you doubt it, and know someone who works at DARPA, ask them. DARPA is between 50-60 years ahead in technology compared to what public knowledge is. Russia and China have similar technology groups. Nanotechnology takes us to the nanometer scale (one-millionth of a meter that is 3.3 feet) to create and make anything, most likely creating many new sciences with a huge boost in material science. It will substantially lower manufacturing cost in almost everything, with much higher quality and speed than today. Space Sciences will also impact material sciences in a big way, and it will very quickly result in space travel and mining operations with robots on other planets and solar systems that we do not have enough of, like Titanium or materials that we do not have on earth like Element 115 that is a critical component in anti-gravity engines that is not public knowledge yet. These new technologies will replace many jobs and create more, but those jobs will require a higher level of education and constant learning in the future. But we put ourselves into the unfortunate position of becoming a country with declining education. We could have been on top, as we were before 1970. Education must improve A LOT, or we will become, I am sorry to say a dumbed-down broken nation. We are in a very dangerous position with big problems and with possible solutions that require more education.
    
    
    
    We are showing here a conversion table from ACT, SAT and PISA scores to a percentage score for each test. We used percentage scores for a long time, the percentage score in this case represents also the percentage of subject knowledge to make the ACT, SAT and PISA scores more meaningful. The test providers confirmed this. WE HAD SEVERAL VERY DANGEROUS MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS TO DATE: EITHER BAD OBJECTIVES OR BAD OPERATING PLANS, all wrapped into BAD ATTITUDE AGAINST CHANGING WITH THE TIMES that represent the results of technology changes. EACH OF THESE MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS CAN DESTROY AN ORGANIZATION BECAUSE IT PRODUCES BAD RESULTS. What keeps a poorly performing school district to stay alive? Guaranteed expenses by law are at least as much as the prior year's expenses. This removes THE MOST IMPORTANT INCENTIVE FOR GOOD PERFORMANCE, SO THE MANAGEMENT OF THE ORGANIZATION MUST BE BETTER TO COMPENSATE. BUT THEY DO NOT NOT CONSIDER MANAGEMENT KNOWLEDGE TO BE NECESSARY. THAT RESULTS IN NOT EVEN RECOGNIZING MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS, AND THE ORGANIZATION DIES AS A POOR PERFORMER UNLESS THEIR EXPENSES ARE GUARANTEED. This situation would make any good performer organization a poor performer, and sitting in for one hour to observe a teacher four times a year is not a good measure of performance and can create sexual harassment when performance standards and performance measurement is not based on results. As a result, what develops is an environment where performance dies and where most who have been the subject of sexual games need their jobs and keep quiet. That is what happens when performance measurement is absent, and it is amplified by not having any management training at any level in education. What are the schools to achieve? 100% of graduating students are employable graduates, and they are educated in all high school subjects as the graduates are in the best three countries in education. We produce graduates with an average ACT score of 20.7, representing only 58% of subject knowledge when graduating. Those three countries produce high school graduates with subject knowledge in the 80-97% area, which is the same as an average ACT score of 29-34. Possibly more, because in math and science they cover more than we do, plus the graduates must pass a matriculation test covers all high school subjects. The score on that class counts as 50% of the final high school graduation grade. They are significantly ahead of us. That means that those countries are creating products with a better-educated workforce with much better profit margins. We ended up losing entire markets for that reason. If you walk into other than a food store, check out how many foreign-made products they have. The OECD PISA test is the product of a very well managed organization that tests 15-year-old children for the most important subjects in 79 countries. We dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries in mathematics, and that is horrible news. Our Public Education system that has not been professionally managed, our teacher education and certification are unacceptably weak, and both teachers and principals are not supported and treated professionally. It was reasonable for them to assume that both teacher training and certification would be competitive. That is why we have a very high teacher turnover rate. Our employers have complained about this to governors since 1995. Why? Because the high school output joins the workforce of our companies. Their products' quality must be competitive to capture business with suitable margins to have sufficient government income at 12%+. We are struggling at 3-4% because our workforce is not trained well enough, depending on poor public schools. I am sure that the people who work in education here want their country to succeed. But the education results they provide is not friends' work. Who is responsible for the poor, destructive performance? Always the person to whom education reports in every state. We have to find out why this is happening and fix it urgently. Any organization that performs poorly or could perform poorly must not be in charge of setting their own objectives and goals and setting any standards of performance that cover the key employees level of training (teachers, principals, superintendents), certification of the key employees, make the curriculum competitive, the graduation requirement must be competitive. In the management structure, you must make sure that you pick out the most experienced teachers, with each such teacher supervising, HELPING, not more than ten less experienced teachers.. I remember asking a person who managed the principals of all schools the objectives that he has to deliver, and he answered that the new state test would not be available for two years, so "How could I possibly do anything." HE WAS NOT THE BIG PROBLEM. BUT HE NEEDS TO BE WORKING IN A JOB THAT CAN USE HIS TALENTS. A school district cannot have this kind of person managing ANYTHING. BUT WE DO. Lastly, societal problems must be solved because such problems grow at a very high rate, which is the most destructive in any society. Like our old black and white problem. We are at a point where each side is riling up people to kill all whites or all blacks on the other side. This OLD unresolved problem can destroy all of us. Solving this must be at the top of the list. Keeping a big problem like this alive can kill us. Most people in any group cannot be bad, so obviously, all black people or all white people are not bad.
    DAMAGE: POOR RESULTS IN THE EDUCATION OF OUR CHILDREN WILL RESULT IN THEM BECOMING UNEMPLOYED. BECAUSE OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION DOES NOT HAVE WELL-TRAINED AND EXPERIENCED MANAGEMENT. OUR NATION'S FUTURE SUCCESS OR FAILURE DEPENDS ON THE EDUCATION OF TODAY'S CHILDREN. IT DEPENDS ON HOW GOOD OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM IS TODAY. IT IS FAR FROM BEING GOOD ENOUGH. MANY PEOPLE WORKED HARD FOR THE TAX DOLLARS, THAT PAYS THE HIGHEST RATE PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD, AND PROFESSORS TELL US THAT OUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES NEED TWO YEARS OF REMEDIAL WORK TO START A FRESHMAN PROGRAM. 80% OF OUR PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES ARE CHILDREN WHOSE ACHIEVEMENT ON ACT'S FOUR-SUBJECT BENCHMARK IS BELOW 58-61%. THEY ARE POORLY-EDUCATED WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS. DON'T WASTE TIME DEFENDING PUBLIC EDUCATION. THERE IS NO POINT IN DEFENDING IT. 5% OF HIGH SCHOOLS ARE EXCELLENT. 95% ARE NOT.
    
    
    
    

    WE NEED MUCH BETTER FOCUS ON PLANNING
    BECAUSE WHEN YOU DO NOT PLAN CORRECTLY, YOU ARE ACTUALLY PLANNING TO FAIL.

    
    
    

    ONE CANNOT PLAN ANYTHING WELL UNLESS ONE KNOWS EXACTLY WHERE ONE IS AT THE START OF PLANNING THE COMING YEAR, AND WHERE ONE WANTS TO BE BY THE END OF THAT COMING FISCAL YEAR. One must know also as one plans the coming year the resources and skill levels one needs to have, before one completes the plan for that coming year. If we cannot plan well, then it is impossible to improve. But worse than that, if one does not plan well, one will fail EVERY SINGLE TIME. It is very important to have people in one's team who understand that we must have people who know very well how to do an excellent job every day. A manager cannot accept people who will tell you that they tried very hard, but could not do the job well. In education or in any job, the worker may do a poor job and may file a law suit to keep his job. One must fight that law suit, because we simply cannot keep marginal workers in education, because we must do better for both our children AND for our nation's survival. That manager must make certain that all employees working for him/her, have in writing the manager's expectation preferably such that it is measurable in numbers, to see clearly if the job was done well. In today's litigious world this is necessary, unfortunately. If a manager cannot do that, then that manager failed. Unfortunately, in public education, we have people like that in management positions as well, who don't know how to do a good job as the manager needs it. To be a good manager one cannot take negative situations personally. You must understand how your workers/team members see the situation. In any case, one's boss has to know the details to help the school or work place improve its results.

    
    
    
    
    THE WAY PUBLIC EDUCATION PLANS AND MANAGES SCHOOLS TODAY MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO IMPROVE. THE SCHOOLS WILL CONTINUE TO DECLINE COMPARED TO THE NEEDS OF EMPLOYERS, AS THEY HAVE DONE TO DATE UNLESS WE CHANGE THE WAY WE MANAGE EDUCATION AND THE SCHOOL DISTRICTS. THE WAY WE DO IT CURRENTLY DOES NOT WORK. THE 20-YEAR ACT CHART CLEARLY SHOWS THAT. IT SEEMS that the following areas are not understood by both the states' department of education AND THE SCHOOL DISTRICTS. If they understand what I am describing, then they fear something OR HAVE NO AUTHORITY TO CHANGE. One cannot afford management people in education who do not understand this area and do nothing about it. New technologies always satisfy the needs of employers. Otherwise, we would not see the new technology because it would not sell. The high schools must also change the way they operate, teacher and management training, some subject content, and their curriculum so that the high school graduates are up to date to meet employers' needs. The state departments of education do not do that in our high schools. That has to change. In 2018, the high school graduates required two years of remedial training to be prepared for freshman classes in college professors' opinions in 2018. In 2023-2024 we will see the entry of three substantial technology groups that will set our high school graduates four years behind. AI-driven cognitive robotics, nanotechnology, and Space Science will make high school performance-recovery more difficult. It could set us back permanently in high school education because currently, as many as 80% of high school graduates are not even ACT Ready - a low measure, cannot read or do basic math well enough and read and write block letters only. The situation is shocking. Let us explain to you why we cannot improve education as it slowly slides further down. We have to change the way we manage education on the state level.
    
    
    
    There is no possible way to improve results (ACT SCORES), unless we take what we present here VERY SERIOUSLY. ALL suggested changes must be made, working very well, for any large organization, that education is, in any state. Let's look at how a state like Tennessee is planning its school year,2020-2021. Click on it right here . PLANNING IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF MANAGEMENT. THERE IS NO WAY TO HAVE GOOD RESULTS WITHOUT A GOOD PLAN AND MAKING SURE THAT IT IS FOLLOWED. The Tennessee education department's plan cannot be used to increase results. Any planning that starts with a "bottoms up" approach starting at the education district plan level and consolidates them, can maintain at best, but not improve. It involves too many people with too much education department control, and such plans do not address the cultural change required and are compromising everything to an impossible level to improve. A plan that is to turn around our poorly performing education system must start with the US education department defining for all states and their districts a couple of things. As the largest economy in the world, we must do the following with above 90% accuracy. But we cannot do that because our education is based on the state level, the results differ state to state from good to very poor, and it is not centrally controlled in some very important areas that should not vary state to state. Examples are:
    
    
    • Exactly where do we stand internationally with our public education, compared to the top three nations in education? OECD PISA tests are the solution. We don't consider this at all, when in every nation, high school graduates feed the workforce of all industries, with the workforce creating the industries' products and services that compete with other nations' products domestically and worldwide. We ignore in education planning, and we compare state performance to US domestic performance that happens to be too low internationally. As the largest economy, this vital data is not considered, making us less competitive. We lost entire industries. As a result, we were blaming our competitors' wages for being too low. I traveled to these countries often and saw the real reasons. This kind of assumption to date about competition WILL drop you into the gutter.
    
    
    
    • The first thing, without which planning cannot take place, is knowing where we need to be in high school performance compared to your economic competitors worldwide. Being the largest economy, and with our high school education being 20th-30th in the world, our public education is a failure. With high schools being the pipeline to feed all industries, it is suicidal to have your high school output in the gutter, ESPECIALLY IF YOUR EDUCATION SPENDING PER STUDENT IS ALWAYS AMONG THE TOP FIVE IN THE WORLD. The conclusion has to be that you want to be competitive with the top three in the world. They are graduating young people from high school in the average ACT equivalent range of 29-34 that is representing 80% or higher subject knowledge. 80% is not excessive. We used to call it a "B-." We are graduating nationally in the 20.7 average ACT area that represents only 21% ACT Readiness, and our example Tennessee is at average ACT 19.4 that represents only 15% ACT Readiness. ACT Readiness is based on three high school subjects only, plus one third grade subject, Reading. We would average an ACT 21 score on the four benchmark subjects that would equal about 61% subject knowledge only. We graduate 79% in the US and 80.6% in Tennessee, who are not even ACT Ready, meaning that they are below 61% high school subject knowledge. This is NOT ACCEPTABLE, and NOT ENOUGH FOR OUR CHILDREN TO BE EMPLOYED.
    • Management knowhow is missing totally at all levels of management. In this area, the definition of objectives is key for goals and objectives alike. This is the target that we need to achieve and base the rest of the plan on it. Objectives have to be a key indicator of achieved performance that is measurable, and the test on which it is based needs to be annual and cannot be altered by the education system itself on the state level, which is done with state tests. That means that the ACT and SAT, depending on what a state uses, is the correct measurement. We need management training for principals and superintendents urgently.
    
    
    
    • Teacher matching to the profession and adequate training on the subject they teach is not as good as the international competition. Teaching requires a unique person who has a high IQ, educated on the Master's level (7 years) in the subject that he/she is teaching so that he can explain course-details very well to the students. We want teachers who love the subject they teach, so that he/she keeps up with developments within her subject, and delivers it to the students with infectious enthusiasm. These appear to be the most important characteristics of the right personality, which could be a great teacher. We have very few like that and need those qualities in all teachers. The teaching curriculum became one of the easiest at colleges and universities. The subject knowledge is very low and depends on the teacher is learning it or not. In addition, teacher certification is just as light. We also place teachers in teaching subjects for which they had no training. Our high performing countries in education hire teachers above 4th grade who have a full 7-year Master's degree in the subject that they would teach and were in the TOP 10-30% depending on the country, in their MASTER'S PROGRAM. US TEACHERS COME FROM A 2-4 YEAR COLLEGE PROGRAM'S BOTTOM 30%. This area needs major upgrading in the US. Teaching is not a respected position in the US because the results are poor. Teachers are not responsible for this. They signed up to teach assuming that the teaching program is good enough, and some are not happy about this and their treatment on the job, so they are not to be blamed along with the principals. The biggest problem such a system and lack of teacher knowledge creates is not just lower than needed subject knowledge, but the insufficiently trained teacher with a different personality than what is needed can create a lot of hate for the subject that we need.
    
    
    
    • The education system must tell the public the truth and nothing but the truth. The public is paying for it! The children will succeed or fail as a result of education quality. Do not cover school educational performance with other subjects to make the school look better. Do not use untrue claims to fame on stationery, buildings, or anything like "Excellence for all children!". Schools say bad things about other schools, like charter schools. We should stop any such behaviors. What we cover here will actually lower performance by "misrepresentation of facts."
    
    
    
    • Measure and publish teacher performance, a specific school, school district, state, and national performance against the top three nations' results and let the public see it. Without such measurement, one cannot increase performance, and you lose an incentive for better performance. One cannot manage and improve performance without knowing specific information about individual performance within those who create students' knowledge.
    
    
    
    • Pushing for a 90% graduation rate is ineffective because it encourages cheating at year-end that management pushes to raise graduation rates and to lower pass/fail points in one or more subjects to produce higher grades. The method is called "cut-scores," and the states do that. Why? To graduate them fast for the money. Performance? It definitely must not be important. Otherwise, it would be much better. The priority is to graduate children even if their knowledge is nowhere near what our employees need. If children over-perform, that is a very good thing. But when they underperform, it is not the thing that any education organization should support. That is what the 90% graduation objective supports. What is needed is an ACT objective that is 10% higher than the average ACT score achieved the prior year to focus on significant improvement. An objective is something you must achieve during the fiscal year. A goal is what we should achieve in 5 years. And the goal must be the average 29 ACT score. One must change the focus on work everywhere in a poor organization. An annual objective cannot do that in a poorly performing organization. There must be a monthly Grade Point Average that is 10% higher than the prior year's GPA achieved on every teacher and supervisory individual and principal in every school. We want people to try hard to work SMARTER, learn to become better at what they do. The education organizations would say that it is impossible. But they operated without real objectives; they hired with the inexperienced school boards the wrong superintendents who could not improve low ACT scores, they never had real operating plans. The presence of these management tools creates a big improvement in focusing everyone on what needs to be ACCOMPLISHED every month, and THAT can create better than 10% improvement. This is a big change, the people never had performance measuring and objectives to meet, and one has to overcome past habits that require more management attention to stay on the new plan, about 2-3 times per week. We are changing from a very loose system to one that focuses on excellence. We must keep it exactly on plan, not "approximately" on plan. You are solving a very important problem. You are making sure that the nation survives. At the same time, there will be personnel problems. It is all-natural when the employees must wander into a new area that is very different. You must be understanding, and you have to believe in what we are doing and why. The employees must understand what situation we are in and why we are changing. As soon as you see signs of good performance with the new system, give them a big hug. They deserve it. WITH US EDUCATION NOT HAVING ANY PENALTIES FOR POOR PERFORMANCE AND THEY HAVE THE SOLE AUTHORITY TO CHANGE PRIORITIES AND LOWER THE KNOWLEDGE OF GRADUATES, CLEARLY INDICATE THAT WE SHOULD ESTABLISH A SEPARATE AND INDEPENDENT GROUP ON THE NATIONAL LEVEL THAT REPRESENT NOT EDUCATION BUT LARGE EMPLOYERS AND THE BEST UNIVERSITIES TO SET TEACHER TRAINING AND CERTIFICATION STANDARDS, SETTING STUDENT TESTING AND GRADUATION STANDARDS USING ACT AND SAT SCORES, THAT MUST INCREASE TO BECOME COMPETITIVE WITH THE TOP THREE COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION BASED ON THE OECD PISA TESTS. HAVING DIFFERENT STANDARDS THAT ARE NOT INTERNATIONALLY COMPETITIVE WITH THE TOP THREE HIGHEST PERFORMING COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION HAS BEEN DAMAGING TO US, AND THAT MUST STOP. EDUCATION DEPARTMENT'S JOB IS NOT TO SET EDUCATION RELATED STANDARDS, BUT TO ACHIEVE THE STANDARDS THAT THE INDEPENDENT GROUP SETS THAT REPRESENTS EMPLOYERS AND UNIVERSITIES.
    
    
    
    • There are two ways of budgeting. One is called "incremental budgeting," where you simply increase some area's funding AND YOU ADD A GUESSED AMOUNT TO LAST YEAR'S BUDGET. The other is "zero-based budgeting," where you start at the bottom of the school's level, where principals describe the old budget details and the new budget details with the new objectives, explaining how that could be achieved without increasing the budget. Zero-based budgeting goes hand in hand with planning from the ground up. But the incremental budget is preferred in education districts. Why? Because it is much more "fun." You can play really good games with it every month like "Hide and Seek, Money," as long as you do not seek too much. It is fun to load the Piggy Bank for it, by demanding more than ten million dollars from the County Commission, and, THIS IS THE FUN PART, you can attach the new money to the education budget so that the law will add it to the budget every single year until the world ends. Those with a high IQ in education could design at least three more such programs every year.
    
    
    
    • Add to that any people and equipment and other resources necessary for managing by the new objectives' budget and people for various programs, including those that were approved in the past but did not achieve an improvement in ACT scores. Major attention needs to be paid to medium-to-large school districts and their central management, which are excessively inflated (as much as 10% of school district total headcount), and bring them below 2% of school district headcount. Central management that is too large always creates problems. The objective of "zero-based budgets is to pay for what is absolutely needed to achieve the objective every month. But when most higher-performing countries are spending less than we do per student, then obviously a part of past spending went to the wrong places and wrong people. That bunch of money is not producing good results, and it must be identified and invested in the schools and people that produce the results. We are making a huge mistake by not recognizing such spending and applying it to improving school results. That also is an indicator of serious problems in the management structure, and one better identify such problems fast and remove them. For example, for education in general to produce bad results, there must be quite a few people in management that are wasting money on both direct and indirect damages. For example, what if you hire a superintendent, pay him $250,000 yearly, you keep him for 8 years, and he created problems and did not improve the ACT scores? You threw away millions of dollars, produced children who are unemployable, and created massive social expenses for many years. We are talking about billions of dollars of extra expenses created by hiring one unqualified person that the local school board is authorized to hire. We must find ways not to have such massive leaks of money so that we can increase the education of children, especially in poverty areas, but in our entire public school network.
    
    
    
    
    We will explain several other things that are vital for delivering improved performance, but the above are perhaps the most important for planning. In a low performing organization, one cannot afford anything but the truth and limit the waste of money.
    
    
    
    MANAGEMENT AND OBJECTIVES. Without an objective of what you have to achieve, people will do what they will think is important, and you will get results that will not be uniform and coordinated, much less than what you think. A long-time president of IBM had a very true saying, but we don't think about it. PEOPLE DON'T DO WHAT YOU EXPECT. THEY DO WHAT YOU INSPECT!" But you cannot do that with an annual objective only in a poorly performing organization even if you picked the right kind of objective but annual only, without the monthly objectives. A year is too long to reinforce new behaviors. That is what you have to do. To get better results, you have to change the way your people work. To achieve that and change behavior and the way people work, one must have monthly objectives that every supervisor and manager must reinforce a few times weekly by knowing what has been accomplished. People forget, don't remember, people slip back into the old habit. You cannot get the best performance with an annual objective for this reason. Since there is no reliable monthly test, we can use a Grade Point Average (GPA) measured year-to-date to focus people more frequently on what we have to achieve. This is very important when we are trying to get good performance out of a poorly performing group because they are working in a specific way producing results that are not working well. The outcome or result is always related to how we do things and what we do at work. To change that, the managers and supervisors need to change the way the group works, but we change the old habit during a shorter period than a year. People accomplish more if focused on what has to be done. That is what we are doing. And you will find that the work becomes easier when done this way.
    
    Let's say that they want you to increase the results by ten percent. If you ever did 30-50% increases, it is nothing. But if you struggled with staying the same, it feels terrible and impossible to do. In the turn around of a poorly performing organization, one will find many people who cannot drop old habits and, even more importantly, old fears. Talk to people in groups, listen more than you talk. Learn from therm. Promise what you will do short term, and make sure that all promises are kept. You already worked as an animal very hard and could not reach ACT 21 as an objective. The average ACT 21 score is UNACCEPTABLE because that score's ACT Readiness is only 22-23%. Too LOW! You will find that by planning well, having good, well-trained people, and objectives used as I explained, a ten percent objective will take less work than the old objective you missed. It is also enormous fun to be part of a well managed growing organization. Remember that if the ground rules change in management in the right direction by a well-trained manager, you should not associate the objectives with the required effort under different ground rules in the past. Part of one's job also becomes one where you can think up creative ways to produce even better results that do not require more resources. Before you suggest it, make very sure that the idea works. If it does, it is a big plus for you. If it does not work, it is a minus. Always remember that it is everyone's job to improve the education of the students. If you want really big plusses, and if you come up with ideas that work, you can become a very valuable employee. That makes the bad education situation an outstanding opportunity for workers who are excellent AND CREATIVE.
    
    
    
    THE RIGHT OBJECTIVE MUST BE A HEALTHY STRETCH. PEOPLE RISE TO EXPECTATIONS, BUT PEOPLE IGNORE AN OBJECTIVE THAT REPRESENTS ONLY A SMALL INCREASE. BUT TO FOCUS ALL EMPLOYEES ON THE OBJECTIVE, ALL SUPERVISORY PEOPLE NEED TO HAVE AN “OPERATING PLAN.” THIS IS YOUR TOOL THAT ENSURES THE ANNUAL OBJECTIVE BEING REALIZED IN THE ACT SCORE AND IN THE GPA AT YEAR-END. The ACT is annual, but it is the most reliable, and the states cannot change it - very important. Depending on what the ACT objective is, raise the annual GPA to the same percentage increase. There may be a difference between your ACT and GPA actual increases. Adjust the GPA increase percentage to achieve the planned ACT increase as you track performance in the adjusted monthly GPA objective. The same teachers need a monthly lesson plan detailing the monthly objectives and the steps the teacher must take during the month to meet every monthly objective by a specific date. Also, list what resources you need to make the monthly GPA objective happen. This can be an excellent learning experience to find out what teaching method would work for you, and you can learn what these methods are in the best three countries in education. Always dedicate some time to read about how those countries achieve their results. I will tell you that the two countries you should focus on every time are Finland and Singapore. Countries that would not be so valuable would be China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan who have outstanding performance because the parental pressure is enormous on the children, accounting for better results. There is no way American parents could do that. HOWEVER, look at them also for innovative ways they use to solve teaching problems. But to be where they are in PISA results, their education has to be well managed, with excellent techniques. For example, Japan teaches children between grades 1-4, how to learn faster. Others are following them. I heard from high-level people in our education management that "Learning how to learn is a STUPID thing," whose "superior" education system delivers the worst result in the industrialized world. There is no single governor or politician who openly proposed a single change that would increase the ACT scores. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS? They propose things that cost more money but do not improve the children's knowledge and scores.
    
    
    
    
    • GPA objective measured monthly as Year-to-Date (YTD) is vital in every single school. At school-year-end, the GPA YTD must be 10% higher than the previous school year's actual GPA YTD achieved. At our current low-performance level, we need, at minimum, a ten percent increase annually. Objectives and operating plans used in education to date are unmeasurable, very low (low confidence), and are not a key indicator of success or failure. Therefore they cannot accomplish better results.
    
    
    
    • Lean down the central office staff to below 2% of total employees in a medium or large school district, and allocate the savings to schools or funding for a software project for automating all manual data entry required by teachers and generate management reports automatically..
    
    
    
    • You do not need babysitters with teacher salaries. What I mean is that we cannot afford to be tolerant of class-disrupting student behavior to get attention. The response has to be zero tolerance. The school policy must not be lawsuit anticipation from parents, but doing a much better job with excellent results for most children. The acceptable result is an average ACT 29 score or higher. Why? Because in a group, it represents 80% ACT Readiness, that is not a high measure. We are far from it. A few parents want their children away from home and do not care about their learning. Such children need the most help, or they will have hell right here for the rest of their lives. NEVER place the blame on parents UNLESS YOU KNOW how to solve it. Especially those in poverty had a tough life and not much parental guidance. In some states, the school can issue a ticket to the parent for behavior problems. Apply any savings to raising the subject knowledge of high school teachers in any science and mathematics courses and learning the best methods in speeding up learning. Solve the reading problem and basic math problem in all K-12 classes urgently. That should happen within three months. Find out why we have a problem teaching reading for more than 20 years and think very seriously about why such a teacher should be teaching in a school. Or even pre-school, because we are not using well the 3-6-year-old period in children when this is the fastest period in neuronal interconnection activity in the brain, otherwise called "learning."
    
    
    
    • Free up teacher time to increase preparation time, and provide what they need for becoming better teachers. We are not doing that well enough.
    
    
    
    • Allocate the same amount of money per student in each school. The double-spending budget per student we have tried now for more than 20 years. It did not help to improve performance. It takes significant ignorance to keep spending like that for more than 20 years, and then you don't see improvement, but you are afraid of the parental reaction. If some idea did not work for a couple of years, you must stop it. Why don't you take a trip at your expense since you screwed up and visit a high performing country to find out what works? I could not find anyone in education management who did that. WHY DO WE KEEP SPENDING THE PEOPLE'S MONEY IN AREAS WHERE IT DOES NOT INCREASE EDUCATION RESULTS?
    
    
    
    • Allow a fair number of the best elementary school teachers from mostly black schools to organize visits to Success Academy Schools in NYC. They have outstanding results. Visit for three days each, learn how they do it, what tools and practices they use and implement anything that can help us raise black children's performance. This has to be urgently accomplished. NO SHORT CUTS.
    
    
    Complete it NOW! Not next year. Those teachers in the black schools who achieve a 3 ACT point increase in this school year, give a 10% bonus on their annual salary.
    
    
    • For a goal to be practical as a guide to enable a school district's performance to improve, we need to improve several areas. The elected board must know exactly where the individual schools' performance is, where it should be, and why, and exactly what areas need to be improved to get there for us to be competitive with THE BEST THREE COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION. They must know why the individual schools in the school district are not delivering higher results. They must know exactly what and where the individual schools are in the school district's performance relative to the best competitors' performance internationally and their strengths and weaknesses. These are very important questions to be on track to reach competitive performance. This is a task that elected local school boards cannot do based on the last 20-years' ACT Readiness and scores' performance.
    
    
    
    • We need to create or change a few laws that would protect the public from damaging outcomes, as public education has done to this country.
    
    
    
    
    "MANAGING BY WALKING AROUND" (Peters et al) IS A VERY IMPORTANT PART OF ACHIEVING EXCELLENT RESULTS. Management By Objectives or MBO is the best tool to FOCUS an entire organization. It is the most important tool to create good results. Poor results are the result of how all people work. But so are excellent results. If one does not have well-understood, specific measurable monthly and annual objectives, that measure the key indicator of success or failure, such as the ACT score for annual measurement and GPA computed year-to-date for every school. WHY? Because you must know how the operating units of your organization (the individual schools) that create the results (each school) are doing. This way, we spot a problem early and can correct it to achieve the annual objective. That is what good managers do.
    Another method that is called Management By Walking Around is also needed. This method calls for walking around, saying something good and cheerful to employees, asking how they are doing, changing anything, and why. You can feel the morale just by walking around in an organization. But this way, as we suggest, you will know for sure how the employees feel, and you can pick up ideas for implementation that only those know well, who encounter the problem during their work. I would suggest 90 minutes per day be dedicated to this task. You will not be able to get enough information, but in one or two weeks or a month at most, they will add up. Never use this method to attack anyone. Use it to learn and to see opportunities to deliver better results. Showing your face to your team is very important in finding out what you may have to do because, as a manager, you are likely to find out that there will be lots of problems that pop up, but you will be well informed to solve each of them quickly. NEVER HIDE A PROBLEM FROM YOUR BOSS. WORK TOGETHER TO FIND A GOOD SOLUTION AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. DO THE SAME FOR THOSE WHO WORK FOR YOU.
    
    
    
    WHAT WE PRESENT HERE IS THE MINIMUM THAT ONE MUST DO TO IMPROVE EDUCATION. ATTITUDES MUST CHANGE. WE HAVE NO REAL MANAGEMENT TOOLS IN PLACE IN OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION AND NEVER DID. WHAT ONE SEES ON THE ACT CHART OVER 20 YEARS IS THE POOR PERFORMANCE WITHOUT ANY MANAGEMENT GUIDANCE. WHAT ARE GOALS AND OBJECTIVES WITH AN OPERATING PLAN MUST INCLUDE NOTHING LESS THAN WHAT WE HAVE HERE. WHAT YOU HAVE TO ACHIEVE IS A 10% INCREASE IN THE AVERAGE CONSOLIDATED ACT SCORE BY JULY 2021, FROM THE AVERAGE ACT SCORE OF 2019. IF YOU DO WHAT WE RECOMMEND, AND MAKE AN HONEST EFFORT, YOU SHOULD HAVE NO PROBLEM ACHIEVING IT. The management definition of a goal, sometimes called "vision" in education, is what an organization targets several years, typically five years away. WE MUST ACHIEVE AN ACT AVERAGE OF 29 IN FIVE YEARS OR LESS, AND AVERAGE ACT SCORE OF 22.5 BY JULY 2021 IN OUR PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOLS. If you do not do it in less than five years, you will have terrible things happening.
    
    
    
    There is a conflict of interest if you have the same organization setting the standards for themselves without considering the top three competitors internationally. To make it more interesting, the education organizations not only set their own standards in every single of our 50 states but delegate the management and direction of education by an elected school board of which we have about 14,000 nationally. And management has no idea how to improve our high school education results. That is where we need to be to create a competitive workforce for all companies. The high school graduates feed the workforce. That is what our industries and our nation's income depend on. Education's job needs to be to deliver the results under standards that are created by our industries without fail. Why is it that we could not figure this out a long time ago? Why are we still using the management structure that education had in the 1800s? Why is it that highly educated people are trusted only in education when they created bad results decade after decade? Why are the highly intelligent people in our leadership unable to solve such a huge problem that our education created? WHO IS RUNNING OUR COUNTRY? IF THIS IS WHAT VOTING PRODUCES, AND IT APPEARS THAT IT DOES, WE HAVE A GIGANTIC PROBLEM THAT IS KEPT FROM THE PUBLIC WHO ARE PAYING FOR IT!!
    
    
    
    Unfortunately, this is not something that an elected school board committee knows enough about in today's world. The "locally elected board" idea was implemented around late 1800s. It did not change. late 1800s's, PEOPLE!! WHY DON'T WE MANAGE HOSPITALS OR ANY OTHER THING LIKE late 1800s's STYLE? We had only an agricultural industry with a locally elected board BACK THEN, selling close to home. The students in the school were typically the local farmers' students, and this arrangement worked very well. We started up several new industries about 50 years later, and a lot more of them after WWI, now into international trading. These were big changes, with several new sciences and quotations from famous people before 1900 started spreading negative comments about school boards. The increase in new technologies started mushrooming from then on. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon. Everybody abandoned the local school board idea in other nations by WWII because the knowledge was not there. Today I do not think that having a locally elected board in almost 14,000 school districts is doing the job well. The voting majority will rarely have the right people with the right knowledge. An elected committee will be very slow, will not spend time learning and investigating, and wants to be celebrated, but they did not improve the education system. Suppose education departments cannot do this fast, without understanding and compassion. In that case, WE MUST REPLACE THEM BECAUSE THE CURRENT LEVEL OF EDUCATIONAL KNOWHOW AND THEIR LOW LEVEL OF TRAINING AS A VOTING MAJORITY CAN DESTROY US. BOTH A MONTHLY AND ANNUAL OBJECTIVE, AS DESCRIBED HERE, IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO REMEDY LONG-TERM PROBLEMS WITH RESULTS. THERE IS NO POSSIBILITY OF RECOVERING WITHOUT THESE OBJECTIVES BEING ADHERED TO EXACTLY. THE OBJECTIVES MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY AN OPERATING PLAN. A MINIMAL OPERATING PLAN DESCRIBES THE OBJECTIVES OF ALL MANAGEMENT AND SUPERVISORY PERSONNEL AS WELL AS TEACHERS. THE OBJECTIVES AND OPERATING PLANS MUST BE FOR EACH AND EVERY SINGLE SCHOOL BECAUSE THEY ARE PRODUCING THE RESULTS. THE METHOD IS VERY USEFUL FOR ANY GROUP WITH MORE THAN 100 EMPLOYEES WHO HAVE NOT BEEN PERFORMING WELL FOR MANY YEARS, LIKE OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM. I MAY BE MENTIONING SOME NEW CONCEPTS FOR THE READERS WHO WERE NOT MEASURED EVER BY HOW THE PEOPLE PERFORMED AND ACHIEVED UNDER THEM. Set an AVERAGE ACT SCORE as an objective as you plan for the coming fiscal (financial) year what you could or could not anticipate. Meeting the five-year goal is a serious business. It is not just something or "interesting ideas" that people pull out of the air as they do in politics and education to date. An objective MUST BE ACHIEVED, REGARDLESS OF SOME FACTORS THAT ONE MAY NOT BE ABLE TO CONTROL. IT INVOLVES JUDGEMENT ABOUT COMPLEX SITUATIONS AND BECOMING BETTER AT BUILDING A MORE RESILIENT MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATION. A GOOD MANAGER IS NOT BOTHERED BY ADMITTING TO HAVE MADE A MISTAKE. HIS RESULTS ARE GOOD, AND THAT IS WHAT COUNTS. IN EDUCATION AND POLITICS, SUCH A PERSON IS RARE. NOT BECAUSE THE PEOPLE ARE NOT GOOD, BUT BECAUSE IN POLITICS APPEARANCES ARE MORE IMPORTANT, AND SINCE EDUCATION REPORTED TO ONE FOR MANY YEARS, A LOT OF POLITICAL PRACTICES AND METHODS RUBBED OFF ONTO EDUCATION IN THE USA. THEY BOTH WANT TO BE IN THE LIGHTS, BEING PRAISED REGARDLESS OF REAL PERFORMANCE BECAUSE THEY HAVE EXCELLENT SOCIAL SKILLS. Employees don't do work as you expect. They will do WHAT YOU INSPECT. It is a huge conflict of interest to have a poorly performing organization to set its objectives, standards, and goals when its funding is guaranteed by law. IN A VERY BADLY PERFORMING ORGANIZATION, WE NEED CONSEQUENTIAL REWARDS FOR BOTH GOOD AND BAD PERFORMANCE AFTER A YEAR OF MAJOR CHANGES IN OBJECTIVES OR OPERATING STANDARDS. The education organizations MUST HAVE excellent performance: a nationally centralized INDEPENDENT management group needs to create a framework for standards and objectives and monthly operating plans within every single school.    Many other countries figured this out by WWII. WHY COULDN'T WE?!   This fact alone is a 25-30% probability indicator that US education is being influenced by a group that does not want change and good performance.
    
    
    
    We are spending a fortune on duplication of people in every state AND EVERY SCHOOL DISTRICT BOOSTING THE SIZE OF CENTRAL MANAGEMENT IN ALL OF THEM, without knowing what they are to do and how to do it.  WE NEED THE MONEY IN THE SCHOOLS IN ACTIVITIES THAT PRODUCE HIGHER AVERAGE ACT SCORES, LIKE AN AVERAGE ACT 28 THAT IS ABOUT 80% KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS! NOT ACT 21 THAT IS 25% SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE ONLY!! There are standards for the size of central management organizations, and if they grow beyond it bad things happen with performance.  Good ole boys' clubs form, protecting their own highly paid positions, and hire more people around them to protect themselves and not because it is needed for performance increase. This is easy to do with superintendents who do not know what to do. The superintendents do not have a performance increase objective attached to the headcount. It increases with a clear understanding that the positions will be eliminated if the performance commitments do not materialize in either year one or two. Why so strict? In a badly performing organization, several management people want the job of the superintendent. Their past achievement has not been good, and they can "snow" a superintendent who is not management trained well. And such a superintendent will find the suggestions of this person "very interesting" and may implement suggestions from such a person, but the superintendent will fail. Mr. "snow-job" takes his position because no one is trained to see through such a person in a poorly trained operation. When you have such a person who delivered bad results, removing him or her is very important because such a person will pave his own way and place obstacles in the superintendent's path. Badly performing organizations are a happy hunting ground for people like that. You may want to keep in mind that animals kill to eat. A lot of human beings hate others for things like a different color, accent, origin, religion, or any other difference, and we human beings kill each other at the drop of a hat. Just look at all the massive killings in war. And people in a high position start wars and some people become very wealthy as a result of wars. Some day we may grow out of such behavior. Since technological advancement includes weapons that could destroy us all, and since we do not seem to be improving spiritually, how long can we avoid self-destruction?
    
    
    
    MANAGEMENT AND OBJECTIVES. Without an objective of what you have to achieve, people will do what they will think is important, and you will get results that will not be uniform and coordinated, much less than what you think. A long-time president of IBM had a very true saying, but we don't think about it. PEOPLE DON'T DO WHAT YOU EXPECT. THEY DO WHAT YOU INSPECT!" But you cannot do that with an annual objective only in a poorly performing organization even if you picked the right kind of objective but annual only, without the monthly objectives. A year is too long to reinforce new behaviors. That is what you have to do. To get better results, you have to change the way your people work. To achieve that and change behavior and the way people work, one must have monthly objectives, that every supervisor and manager must reinforce a few times weekly by knowing exactly what has been accomplished. People forget, don't remember, people slip back into the old habit. You cannot get the best performance with an annual objective for this reason. Since there is no reliable monthly test, we can use a Grade Point Average (GPA) measured year-to-date to focus people more frequently on what we have to achieve. This is very important when we are trying to get good performance out of a poorly performing group because they are working in a specific way producing results that are not working well. The outcome or result is always related to how we do things and what we do at work. To change that, the managers and supervisors need to change the way the group works, but we change the old habit during a shorter period than a year. People accomplish more if focused on what has to be done. That is what we are doing. And you will find that the work becomes easier when done this way.
    
    Let's say that they want you to increase the results by ten percent. If you ever did 30-50% increases, it is nothing. But if you struggled with staying the same, it feels terrible and impossible to do. In the turn around of a poorly performing organization, one will find many people who cannot drop old habits and, even more importantly, old fears. Talk to people in groups, listen more than you talk. Learn from therm. Promise what you will do short term, and make sure that all promises are kept. You already worked as an animal very hard and could not reach ACT 21 as an objective. Average ACT 21 score is UNACCEPTABLE because that score's ACT Readiness is only 22-23%. Too LOW! You will find that by planning well, having good, well-trained people, and objectives used as I explained, a ten percent objective will take less work than the old objective you missed. It is also enormous fun to be part of a well managed growing organization. Remember that if the ground rules change in management in the right direction by a well-trained manager, you should not associate the objectives with the required effort under different ground rules in the past. Part of one's job also becomes one where you can think up creative ways to produce even better results that do not require more resources. Before you suggest it, make very sure that the idea works. If it does, it is a big plus for you. If it does not work, it is a minus. Always remember that it is everyone's job to improve the education of the students. If you want really big plusses, and if you come up with ideas that work, you can become a very valuable employee. That makes the bad education situation an outstanding opportunity for workers who are excellent AND CREATIVE.
    
    
    
    THE RIGHT OBJECTIVE MUST BE A HEALTHY STRETCH. PEOPLE RISE TO EXPECTATIONS, BUT PEOPLE IGNORE AN OBJECTIVE THAT REPRESENTS ONLY A SMALL INCREASE. BUT TO FOCUS ALL EMPLOYEES ON THE OBJECTIVE, ALL SUPERVISORY PEOPLE NEED TO HAVE AN “OPERATING PLAN.” THIS IS YOUR TOOL THAT ENSURES THE ANNUAL OBJECTIVE BEING REALIZED IN THE ACT SCORE AND IN THE GPA AT YEAR-END. The ACT is annual, but it is the most reliable, and the states cannot change it - very important. Depending on what the ACT objective is, raise the annual GPA to the same percentage increase. There may be a difference between your ACT and GPA actual increases. Adjust the GPA increase percentage to achieve the planned ACT increase as you track performance in the adjusted monthly GPA objective. The same teachers need a monthly lesson plan detailing the monthly objectives and the steps the teacher must take during the month to meet every monthly objective by a specific date. Also, list what resources you need to make the monthly GPA objective happen. This can be an excellent learning experience to find out what teaching method would work for you, and you can learn what these methods are in the best three countries in education. Always dedicate some time to read about how those countries achieve their results. I will tell you that the two countries you should focus on every time are Finland and Singapore. Countries that would not be so valuable would be China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan who have outstanding performance because the parental pressure is enormous on the children, accounting for better results. There is no way American parents could do that. HOWEVER, look at them also for innovative ways they use to solve teaching problems. But to be where they are in PISA results, their education has to be well managed, with excellent techniques. For example, Japan teaches children between grades 1-4, how to learn faster. Others are following them. I heard from high-level people in our education management that "Learning how to learn is a STUPID thing," whose "superior" education system delivers the worst result in the industrialized world. There is no single governor or politician who openly proposed a single change that would increase the ACT scores. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS? They propose things that cost more money but do not improve the children's knowledge and scores.
    
    
    
    
    • GPA objective measured monthly as Year-to-Date (YTD) is vital in every single school. At school-year-end, the GPA YTD must be 10% higher than the previous school year's actual GPA YTD achieved. At our current low-performance level, we need, at minimum, a ten percent increase annually. Objectives and operating plans used in education to date are unmeasurable, very low (low confidence), and are not a key indicator of success or failure. Therefore they cannot accomplish better results.
    
    
    
    • Lean down the central office staff to below 2% of total employees in a medium or large school district, and allocate the savings to schools or funding for a software project for automating all manual data entry required by teachers and generate management reports automatically..
    
    
    
    • You do not need babysitters with teacher salaries. What I mean is that we cannot afford to be tolerant of class-disrupting student behavior to get attention. The response has to be zero tolerance. The school policy must not be lawsuit anticipation from parents, but doing a much better job with excellent results for most children. The acceptable result is an average ACT 29 score or higher. Why? Because in a group it represent 80% ACT Readiness, that is not a high measure. We are far from it. A few parents want their children away from home and do not care about their learning. Such children need the most help, or they will have hell right here for the rest of their lives. NEVER place the blame on parents UNLESS YOU KNOW how to solve it. Especially those in poverty had a tough life and not much parental guidance. In some states, the school can issue a ticket to the parent for behavior problems. Apply any savings to raising the subject knowledge of high school teachers in any science and mathematics courses and learning the best methods in speeding up learning. Solve the reading problem and basic math problem in all K-12 classes urgently. That should happen within three months. Find out why we have a problem teaching reading for more than 20 years and think very seriously why such a teacher should be teaching in a school. Or even pre-school, because we are not using well the 3-6-year-old period in children when this is the fastest period in neuronal interconnection activity in the brain, otherwise called "learning."
    
    
    
    • Free up teacher time to increase preparation time, and provide what they need for becoming better teachers. We are not doing that well enough.
    
    
    
    • Allocate the same amount of money per student in each school. The double spending budget per student we tried now for more than 20 years. It did not help to improve performance. It takes significant ignorance to keep spending like that for more than 20 years, and then you don't see improvement but you are afraid of parental reaction. If some idea did not work for a couple of years, you must stop it. Why don't you take a trip at your expense since you screwed up and visit a high performing country to find out what works? I could not find anyone in education management who did that. WHY DO WE KEEP SPENDING THE PEOPLE'S MONEY IN AREAS WHERE IT DOES NOT INCREASE EDUCATION RESULTS?
    
    
    
    • Allow a fair number of the best elementary school teachers from mostly black schools to organize visits to Success Academy Schools in NYC. They have outstanding results. Visit for three days each, learn how they do it, what tools and practices they use, and implement anything that can help us raise black children's performance. This has to be urgently accomplished. NO SHORT CUTS.
    
    
    Complete it NOW! Not next year. Those teachers in the black schools who achieve a 3 ACT point increase in this school year, give them a 10% bonus on their annual salary.
    
    MANAGING BY WALKING AROUND IS A VERY IMPORTANT PART OF ACHIEVING EXCELLENT RESULTS. Management By Objectives or MBO is the best tool to FOCUS on an entire organization. Poor results are the result of how all people work. But so is excellent performance. If one does not have well-understood, specific measurable monthly, and annual objectives that measure the key indicator of success or failure, such as the ACT score for annual measurement and GPA computed year-to-date for every school. WHY? Because you must know how the operating units that create the results (each school) are doing. This way, we spot a problem early and can correct it to achieve the annual objective. That is what good managers do.
    Another method that is called Management By Walking Around is needed. This method calls for walking around, saying something good and cheerful to employees, asking how they are doing, changing anything, and why. You can feel the morale just by walking around in an organization. But this way, as we suggest, you will know for sure how the employees feel, and you can pick up ideas for implementation that only those know well who encounter the problem. I would suggest 90 minutes per day be dedicated to this task. You will not be able to get enough information, but in one or two weeks or a month at most, they will add up. Never use this method to attack anyone. Use it to learn and to see opportunities to deliver better results. Showing your face to your team is very important in finding out what you may have to do because, as a manager, you are likely to find out that there will be lots of problems that pop up, but you will be well informed to solve each of them quickly. NEVER HIDE A PROBLEM FROM YOUR BOSS. WORK TOGETHER TO FIND A GOOD SOLUTION AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. DO THE SAME FOR THOSE WHO WORK FOR YOU.
    
    
    
    WHAT WE PRESENT HERE IS THE MINIMUM THAT ONE MUST DO TO IMPROVE EDUCATION. ATTITUDES MUST CHANGE. WE HAVE NO REAL MANAGEMENT TOOLS IN PLACE IN OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION AND NEVER DID. WHAT ONE SEES ON THE ACT CHART OVER 20 YEARS IS THE POOR PERFORMANCE WITHOUT ANY MANAGEMENT GUIDANCE. WHAT ARE GOALS AND OBJECTIVES WITH AN OPERATING PLAN MUST INCLUDE NOTHING LESS THAN WHAT WE HAVE HERE. WHAT YOU HAVE TO ACHIEVE IS A 10% INCREASE IN THE AVERAGE CONSOLIDATED ACT SCORE BY JULY 2021, FROM THE AVERAGE ACT SCORE OF 2019. IF YOU DO WHAT WE RECOMMEND, AND MAKE AN HONEST EFFORT, YOU SHOULD HAVE NO PROBLEM ACHIEVING IT. The management definition of a goal, sometimes called "vision" in education, is what an organization targets several years, typically five years away. WE MUST ACHIEVE AN ACT AVERAGE OF 29 IN FIVE YEARS OR LESS, AND AVERAGE ACT SCORE OF 22.5 BY JULY 2021 IN OUR PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOLS. If you do not do it in less than five years, you will have terrible things happening. To enable a school district's performance to improve, we need to improve several areas. The elected board must know exactly where the individual schools' performance is, where it should be, and why, and exactly what areas need to be improved to get there for us to be competitive with THE BEST THREE COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION. They must know why the individual schools in the school district are not delivering higher results. They must know exactly what and where the individual schools are in the school district's performance relative to the best competitors' performance internationally and their strengths and weaknesses. These are very important questions to be on track to reach competitive performance. This is a task that elected local school boards cannot do based on the last 20-years' ACT Readiness and scores' performance. For a goal to be practical as a guide to enable a school district's performance to improve, we need to improve several areas. The elected board must know exactly where the individual schools' performance is, where it should be, and why, and exactly what areas need to be improved to get there for us to be competitive with THE BEST THREE COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION. They must know why the individual schools in the school district are not delivering higher results. They must know exactly what and where the individual schools are in the school district's performance relative to the best competitors' performance internationally and their strengths and weaknesses. These are very important questions to be on track to reach competitive performance. This is a task that elected local school boards cannot do.
    
    
    
    We need to create or change a few laws that would protect the public from damaging outcomes, as public education has done to this country.
    
    
    
    CONFLICT OF INTEREST AND MANAGEMENT KNOWHOW. There is a conflict of interest if you have the same organization setting the standards for themselves without considering the top three competitors internationally. To make it more interesting, the education organizations not only set their own standards in every single of our 50 states, but delegate the management and direction of education by an elected school board of which we have about 14,000 of nationally. And management has no idea how to improve our high school education results That is where we need to be to create a competitive workforce for all companies. The high school graduates feed the workforce. That is what our industries and our nation's income depend on. Education's job needs to be to deliver the results under standards that are created by our industries without fail. Why is it that we could not figure this out a long time ago? Why are we still using the management structure that education had in the 1800s? Why is it that highly educated people are trusted in education when they created bad results decade after decade? Why are the highly intelligent people in our leadership unable to solve such a huge problem that our education created? WHO IS RUNNING OUR COUNTRY? IF THIS IS WHAT VOTING PRODUCES, AND IT APPEARS THAT IT DOES, WE HAVE A GIGANTIC PROBLEM THAT IS KEPT FROM THE PUBLIC WHO ARE PAYING FOR IT!!
    
    Unfortunately, this is not something that an elected school board committee knows enough about in today's world. The "locally elected board" idea was implemented around late 1800s. It did not change. late 1800s's PEOPLE!! WHY DON'T WE MANAGE HOSPITALS OR ANY OTHER THING LIKE late 1800s's STYLE? We had only an agricultural industry with a locally elected board BACK THEN, selling close to home. The students in the school were typically the local farmers' students, and this arrangement worked very well. We started up several new industries about 50 years later, and a lot more of them after WWI, now into international trading. These were big changes, with several new sciences and quotations from famous people before 1900 started spreading negative comments about school boards. The increase in new technologies started mushrooming from then on, we went from the horse and buggy to the moon, everybody abandoned the local school board idea in other nations by WWII because the knowledge was not there. Today I do not think that having a locally elected board in almost 14,000 school districts. The voting majority will rarely have the right people with the right knowledge. An elected committee will be very slow, will not spend time learning and investigating, and wants to be celebrated, but they did not improve the education system. Suppose education departments cannot do this fast, without understanding and compassion. In that case, WE MUST REPLACE THEM BECAUSE THE CURRENT LEVEL OF EDUCATIONAL KNOWHOW AND THEIR LOW LEVEL OF TRAINING AS A VOTING MAJORITY CAN DESTROY US. BOTH A MONTHLY AND ANNUAL OBJECTIVE, AS DESCRIBED HERE, IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO REMEDY LONG-TERM PROBLEMS WITH RESULTS. THERE IS NO POSSIBILITY OF RECOVERING WITHOUT THESE OBJECTIVES BEING ADHERED TO EXACTLY. THE OBJECTIVES MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY AN OPERATING PLAN. A MINIMAL OPERATING PLAN DESCRIBES THE OBJECTIVES OF ALL MANAGEMENT AND SUPERVISORY PERSONNEL AS WELL AS TEACHERS. THE OBJECTIVES AND OPERATING PLANS MUST BE FOR EACH AND EVERY SINGLE SCHOOL BECAUSE THEY ARE PRODUCING THE RESULTS. THE METHOD IS VERY USEFUL FOR ANY GROUP WITH MORE THAN 100 EMPLOYEES WHO HAVE NOT BEEN PERFORMING WELL FOR MANY YEARS, LIKE OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM. I MAY BE MENTIONING SOME NEW CONCEPTS FOR THE READERS WHO WERE NOT MEASURED EVER BY HOW THE PEOPLE PERFORMED AND ACHIEVED UNDER THEM. Set an AVERAGE ACT SCORE as an objective as you plan for the coming fiscal (financial) year what you could or could not anticipate. Meeting the five-year goal is a serious business. It is not just something or "interesting ideas" that people pull out of the air as they do in politics and education to date. An objective MUST BE ACHIEVED, REGARDLESS OF SOME FACTORS THAT ONE MAY NOT BE ABLE TO CONTROL. IT INVOLVES JUDGEMENT ABOUT COMPLEX SITUATIONS AND BECOMING BETTER AT BUILDING A MORE RESILIENT MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATION. A GOOD MANAGER IS NOT BOTHERED BY ADMITTING TO HAVE MADE A MISTAKE. HIS RESULTS ARE GOOD, AND THAT IS WHAT COUNTS. IN EDUCATION AND POLITICS, SUCH A PERSON IS RARE. NOT BECAUSE THE PEOPLE ARE NOT GOOD, BUT BECAUSE IN POLITICS APPEARANCES ARE MORE IMPORTANT, AND SINCE EDUCATION REPORTED TO ONE FOR MANY YEARS, A LOT OF POLITICAL PRACTICES AND METHODS RUBBED OFF ONTO EDUCATION IN THE USA. THEY BOTH WANT TO BE IN THE LIGHTS, BEING PRAISED REGARDLESS OF REAL PERFORMANCE BECAUSE THEY HAVE EXCELLENT SOCIAL SKILLS. Employees don't do work as you expect. They will do WHAT YOU INSPECT. It is a huge conflict of interest to have a poorly performing organization to set its objectives, standards, and goals when its funding is guaranteed by law. IN A VERY BADLY PERFORMING ORGANIZATION, WE NEED CONSEQUENTIAL REWARDS FOR BOTH GOOD AND BAD PERFORMANCE AFTER A YEAR OF MAJOR CHANGES IN OBJECTIVES OR OPERATING STANDARDS. The education organizations MUST HAVE excellent performance: a nationally centralized INDEPENDENT management group needs to create a framework for standards and objectives and monthly operating plans within every single school.    Many other countries figured this out by WWII. WHY COULDN'T WE?!   This fact alone is a 25-30% probability indicator that US education is being influenced by a group that does not want change and good performance.
    
    We are spending a fortune on duplication of people in every state AND EVERY SCHOOL DISTRICT BOOSTING THE SIZE OF CENTRAL MANAGEMENT IN ALL OF THEM, without knowing what they are to do and how to do it.  WE NEED THE MONEY IN THE SCHOOLS IN ACTIVITIES THAT PRODUCE HIGHER AVERAGE ACT SCORES, LIKE 29 THAT IS ABOUT 80% KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS! NOT ACT 21 THAT IS 25% SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE ONLY!! There are standards for the size of central management organizations, and if they grow beyond it bad things happen with performance.  Good ole boys' clubs form, protecting their own highly paid positions, and hire more people around them to protect themselves and not because it is needed for performance increase. This is easy to do with superintendents who do not know what to do. The superintendents do not have a performance increase objective attached to the headcount. It increases with a clear understanding that the positions will be eliminated if the performance commitments do not materialize in either year one or two. Why so strict? In a badly performing organization, several management people want the job of the superintendent. Their past achievement has not been good, and they can "snow" a superintendent who is not management trained well. And such a superintendent will find the suggestions of this person "very interesting" and may implement suggestions from such a person, but the superintendent will fail. Mr. "snow-job" takes his position because no one is trained to see through such a person in a poorly trained operation. When you have such a person who delivered bad results, removing him or her is very important because such a person will pave his own way and place obstacles in the superintendent's path. Badly performing organizations are a happy hunting ground for people like that. You may want to keep in mind that animals kill to eat. A lot of human beings hate others for things like a different color, accent, origin, religion, or any other difference, and we human beings kill each other at the drop of a hat. Just look at all the massive killings in war. And people in a high position start wars, and some people become very wealthy as a result of wars. Some day we may grow out of such behavior. Since technological advancement includes weapons that could destroy us all, and since we do not seem to be improving spiritually, how long can we avoid self-destruction?
    
    Operating with silly unmeasurable objectives backed by a very low-performance target like ACT 21, creates a multitude of problems that also drop performance.  We do not seem to have the management experience to know how to create good results in our schools.  Worst of all, most people in the education communities' management think that they know enough just because they were hired or elected. No person in any school district wants to visit school systems that perform well to learn how they do it, and they do not want to learn anything to create better results.  This is "The ostrich with head in sand" method in practice. Teacher morale is bad and justified.  The structured satisfaction surveys that the states use are not a good indicator of morale because the outcome is limited to fixed questions and answers. Such tests can steer the result to a conclusion like "we need more money."  When morale is bad or unknown, one needs an open-ended test where the employee steers the test with guaranteed anonymity.  In a poorly performing environment, no one will put effort into valid morale measurement instead of a technique that encourages only "nice answers." Such highly secure online tests are available.  Who is responsible for the bad results?  The state education organization without exception, their boss, most superintendents, but we are not including principals and teachers, who are trying hard without much help from above.
    
    
    
    
    

    
    

    OUTSTANDING LEARNING TOOLS FOR BOTH TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

    One of the best educational systems in the world is Finland's. What makes it perhaps the best for us is the fact that English is widely spoken, and much of the education-related goals, polices, teaching methodologies, and the best tutorials including learning how to learn faster are available in English as well. It would be helpful if American teachers, principals and governors read the following:
    
    What US Schools Can Learn From Finland's Approach To Education.
    
    A complete set of tools developed in Finland to make remote education effective during Covid-19.
    
    

    FOR BOTH TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

    
    
    

    1. How to learn faster 1:How To Learn Faster
       
       
    2. How to learn faster 2:Six habits and practices do speed up your learning
       
       
    3. Khan Academy: Outstanding. The best in this group. Any subject, any grade, most useful.
    
    
    
    4. The Great Courses presentations from the best professors in the USA in any subject. Many of them include an entire semester or year of the subject, and huge discounts are offered on a group of courses periodically.
    
    
    
    5. Brightstorm has an outstanding collection of the best high school teachers for every single lesson period.
    
    
    
    6. Open Culture, great educational resources.
    
    
    
    7. The best math resources for teachers
    
    
    
    8. EDX Courses for K-12 and personal interest from the best universities.
    
    
    
    9. List of study/learning skills
    
    
    
    10. Teaching without lecturing
    
    
    
    11. MIT OpenCourseWare covering high school
    
    
    
    12. SKILLSHARE is loaded with thousands of job-skill tutorials for jobs or pleasure
    
    
    

    
    
    
    
    

    
    
    
    
    
    
    

    Award winning education tools from Finland.

    
    
    
    
    THE PARENTS WILL FIND OUT SHORTLY THAT THEY WERE MISINFORMED FOR DECADES BY THE PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEM, when little Johnny will try to get a legal job and cannot get one. There will be a lot of anger in the streets. I went to the inner cities and talked with them. They have a terrible job. The teacher's unions influence lawmakers against passing any laws to change anything within the education system to improve the results, as measured by the ACT or SAT scores. We are graduating as many as 80% of graduates who are not even ACT Ready.
    
    
    
    THE SPECIFIC INDICATOR OF EDUCATION PERFORMANCE IS THE ACT SCORE IN MOST STATES. IT SHOWS HOW MUCH OUR CHILDREN LEARNED FROM GRADE ONE TO TWELVE. FLAT RESULTS ARE NOT GOOD. ESPECIALLY WHEN THE FLAT PERFORMANCE IS IN A LOW-PERFORMANCE AREA, LIKE AN AVERAGE ACT SCORE 21 WITH ONLY 20-25% OF GRADUATES ACT READY. ACT Readiness is a low requirement, representing only four high school courses with an average ACT score of 21 (23, 22, 22, and 18). ACT Readiness represents only a chance of 50-75% for the ACT Ready student to pass only four freshman courses that are the same subjects as the ACT benchmarks were. A CHANCE TO PASS ONLY! But that's not all. In Tennessee and a number of other states, 80% or more of the graduating children are not even ACT Ready. Among black students, 94-97% ARE NOT ACT READY. This is is a very low measure in today's world, far from enough to live even in a shack. This kind of performance creates a bunch of desperate high school graduates who will get into trouble on the streets, along with about 30 million workforce members whose education is only a high school diploma.
    
    WHY?
    
    
    • Because education is responsible for delivering what employers need. Employers use new technologies to be competitive. Public education needs to satisfy what employers need in their curriculum. Because of that, the ACT Readiness will be increased. If you do not believe, talk to an ACT vice president.
    • Most of our employers compete with the products of other nations both domestically and internationally. Our high school graduates feed the employers' workforce. The workforce creates employers' products and services. If they are not educated well enough, their work quality will not be competitive enough with countries with a superior public education. We need to be competitive with the top three countries in education who graduate children with an average ACT 29-34 equivalent score as the average of all high schools. This performance level always looks impossible for low performers because they think they are doing their best. But there are techniques/tools to create better results, and we do not use them. One needs to achieve where we should be: We do not measure performance per class or school. How can anyone know where you are in achievement if you do not measure it? How can you tell if one school or a class is behind? But more importantly, to reach a targeted performance level, you have to know very precisely where you are if you want to achieve a specific performance level.
    
    
    
    • We don't know exactly where we are in education every month, but we find out at the end of the year AS A SURPRISE. It is not possible to improve something as a surprise. One has to know how to plan precisely each month, and how much one needs to achieve that to achieve each year's objective. Without knowing how to do that, education cannot improve to a level where our children and country will be successful. One cannot achieve such a thing by just trying. You have to know something called Management By Objectives very well because every single element in that method has to be one that works. In education, there are no precise instructions about how to make it work. Without proper training and experience, the low level of performance we have cannot be raised to a competitive level. IT CAN ONLY BE RAISED WITH MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES (MBO) IF IT IS DONE PERFECTLY. If one learns how to use it, one can achieve a ten percent increase in performance, with less effort than doing nothing well enough to get good results, as we do now. Education departments will argue that it is a business method that does not work in education. Well, good judgment will not come from an organization that produced terrible results for more than 20 years. Second, Management By Objectives works well with any medium-to-large organization that wants to achieve anything, and public education is a large national organization with a management structure that cannot produce good results for several reasons and did not produce good results for many decades.
    
    
    
    
    A DECADE AGO WE GRADUATED CHILDREN FROM HIGH SCHOOL WHO PASSED EVERY SINGLE HIGH SCHOOL COURSE AT A SCORE THAT WAS REPRESENTING MORE THAN 60% SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE. A FEW YEARS PRIOR TO THAT, WE GRADUATED ONLY THOSE CHILDREN ABOVE 70% KNOWLEDGE OF ALL HIGH SCHOOL COURSES. ALL THAT TIME EMPLOYERS WERE LOOKING FOR EMPLOYEES WHO HAD AT LEAST A "B" AVERAGE THAT IS 80-89% KNOWLEDGE LEVEL OF ALL HIGH SCHOOL COURSES. AND THEN, A FEW YEARS AGO ACT READINESS MEANS THAT THE ACT SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE OF THE GRADUATE IN ONLY FOUR HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS IS AT 58-61% OR HIGHER. THIS WAS A HUGE DROP. ACT READINESS INDICATES ONLY THAT THE STUDENT HAS A 50 - 75% CHANCE TO PASS ONLY FOUR FRESHMAN LEVEL COURSES IN THE SAME FOUR SUBJECTS AS THE ACT READY BENCHMARKS. IN TODAY'S WORLD, THIS IS A VERY LOW STANDARD. BUT IN A STATE LIKE TENNESSEE AND OTHERS, 80% OF GRADUATES ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY. ACT READINESS IS AN EDUCATION SYSTEM PROMPTED STANDARD NEGOTIATED BETWEEN ACT AND AND EDUCATION AUTHORITY. They are somewhere between 40% and 60% high school subject-knowledge when graduating from high school. Such low high school performance is a guaranteed failure that would endanger our country's survival, even without new technologies. What gives it a real muscle for self-destruction is the fact that three major new technologies will be here in 2023: AI-driven cognitive robotics, that will replace many jobs with a four-year degree, with huge layoffs in the workforce. Nanotechnology will replace the way we manufacture things with nanometer precision (one-millionth of a meter or yard). It reduces manufacturing costs significantly about almost everything, making sciences like Materials Science gigantic. Our success or failure depends entirely on how well our education system is going to learn how to educate. Some countries, like Japan, teach that in grades 3-4. Yes, it is possible to learn faster and easier, and we will show you below very good sources about how to learn that. Today, in our country, we allowed education to become pitiful by not standing up for each other, not writing to governors to fix this outrageous education system, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, BY NOT STANDING UP FOR OUR COUNTRY! We learned to judge others and do it very well. But in public education, we have been doing a terrible job. We can hire a person in many school districts with a Ph.D. in education, who does a terrible job, when the real task of schools is to satisfy not education's but the employer's needs. THE CHILDREN GRADUATING WOULD NEED TO GET A JOB FROM EMPLOYERS AND DO IT WELL. RIGHT? We see all part of dumbing down because education is the primary target for those who want to dumb us down. For pretty high dollars, we graduated almost all children without them being employable. Over several years of doing this damage, the cost of social support of our unemployable children is already impossible. We do not have enough national income to support it. And all along, those who manage education tend to forget that a boring classroom turns off everyone, and that depends on the teacher's personality, training, his/her ability to be entertaining and his/her love of teaching and the subject he/she is teaching. This kind of thing is not the teacher's fault. Teaching success depends on a very special person, and we do not check the required characteristics for teaching as part of acceptance into teaching programs. Let me give you another example. The elected school board hires a superintendent who never managed a single school. They had 64 schools in the school district, with 6,000 employees. He never supervised an organization with more than 50 employees. The elected board did not check anything in his background, accepted the headhunter's background check of the candidate, and the headhunter received from the elected board a $110,000 commission check. Nothing improved under this superintendent. But he did befriend a school principal whose school was the worst performer for seven years. So the new superintendent promoted this principal to be in charge of all 64 schools! Another eight years went by, and there is no improvement. During all this, about 80% of the children are graduated with results below 60% subject knowledge level that is unacceptable for minimum wage candidate at best.
    
    
    
    IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY WE WENT FROM THE HORSE AND BUGGY TO THE MOON! WITH ENORMOUS GROWTH IN AN INTERNATIONAL SETTING IN MORE THAN HUNDREDS OF INDUSTRIES AND MAJOR NEW TECHNOLOGIES. That increased the employers' needs for better educated high school graduates. Education as a field became more complex, and such changes require more education and change in the management structure nationally to make better decisions to set uniform and competitive standards nationally. We need to be competitive in education in order to help the national workforce and our various industries to become more competitive. Local school boards cannot do that uniformly nationwide. One would need a national board of education made up of high level retired successful management talent representing a few important industries to set education standards for management and teacher training, testing standards, graduation standards nationwide. The job of state education would remain to deliver public education as defined by the national board of education. They would require a board majority of people to be very well informed about management and international standards in education. It is really unbelievable that we do not recognize to this day in the year 2020, 170 years after late 1800s, the magnitude of such change that is needed in education like a national curriculum standard, graduation requirements competitive with the three best nations in education, management structure and training! ALWAYS LISTEN TO PEOPLE, BUT WATCH WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DO. THAT IS WHERE THE TRUTH IS. WITH NEITHER REPUBLICANS' NOR THE DEMOCRATS' PARTY HAS SHOWN ANY INTEREST IN IMPROVING OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM. WE ARE PAYING ONE OF THE HIGHEST RATES IN THE WORLD PER STUDENT. THEY ARE OUR HARD-EARNED TAXES THAT ARE PAYING THE HIGHEST RATES FOR THE WORST EDUCATION OF OUR CHILDREN IN THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES.
    
    
    
    THREE MAJOR TECHNOLOGIES WILL BE HERE IN 2023-2024 WITH A MUCH GREATER IMPACT THAN COMPUTERS DID. One nanometer is one-millionth of a meter. A meter is 3.3 feet long. If you have very good eyes, you cannot see AND recognize anything smaller than 200 nanometers. Atoms of elements are less than one nanometer in size. Robots will be released soon, which could be COVID-19 size (100-140 nanometer diameter), fly anywhere, self-replicating, and Artificial Intelligence programmable. They could enter the bloodstream and go anywhere programmed to do fantastic things in medicine as an example. But we will need highly educated people to create them and defend against them, like with any other technologies. We, the Russians and Chinese, have a super-secret high technology operation whose results are 50 years ahead of anything that we are aware of. Our super-secret organization is known as DARPA. It includes a number of very famous technical departments at universities like MIT, CAL-TECH, and a few others, and part of almost all aerospace companies. That means that we have things out there that we cannot even explain. Technological advancement will become surprisingly faster and faster during the coming 25 years. In 2025, the $1,000 (in constant dollars) PC can perform the same number of math operations as one human brain (Kurzweil). In 20 more years, the $1,000 PC will be able to do ten billion times as many computations than in 2025 (Kurzweil). We will see similar changes in everything. EVERYTHING!! Our public education today requires two years of remedial training to start a college program. We are already that far behind. Unless we get much more advanced high school training compatible with the top three performing nations in education right now, our children will be unemployed by 2025. Do not defend 95% of our public schools because most of those who run the state education department, who report to a governor, are hurting us and our country with poor performance, and the politician and education leadership in charge have not done anything about it over many decades. This is the kind of thing that could destroy us unless we change public education in many areas without any negotiation whatsoever. When an "industry" like education has been producing poor results for many decades, but they are lying about it to the people who pay the highest amount per student in the world with our hard-earned taxes, people don't know that and accept it as normal. It is disgusting that our political leaders do NOTHING about it. In the case of public education, why would anyone insist on favoring an education background for superintendents? It is an industry that has been poorly managed, poorly performed for many decades. There are many outstanding well-trained retired senior managers out there who not only know more about what they as employers need, they have been totally ignored, and are well trained in management, who could do a far better job. You would be getting far better-experienced talent this way than with the old method. When you are a superintendent, lacking real management training and experience as our superintendents do, and the elected board can't even ask you the important questions, and you don't do your homework on the superintendent candidate before hiring him, you will never do well. Please do not be offended because that is what the evidence shows. Learn and become better than the rest! Give such a man a free hand. Do not have the local school board controlling him. Have his monthly objectives and operating plan control him. The locally elected school board system was established during the 1800s, in the agriculture industry, in a local market setting, where the students were born into farmer families. The management structure worked well then. But when we went from the horse and buggy to the moon during a hundred year period, with enormous technological changes that changed our employers' needs and all governors did the same thing, NOTHING! Such uniformity indicates directed action from above. Who did that, and why? But our public educations did not do a thing to upgrade. The governors were responsible for that
    
    
    
    Robots can do higher quality, highly repetitive jobs, 24/7, much better than a human being. The second big change, Nanotechnology, will manufacture things at a much lower cost, WITH NANOMETER PRECISION. A nanometer is one-millionth of a meter. A meter is about the same as 3.3 feet. Picture the nanotechnology manufacturing method as "pouring" one-nanometer layers at a time. Nanotechnology will also cause the development of great changes in other technologies, especially in materials science. Unfortunately, if our education quality remains poor like now and coming to education late, it will hold back the employers' deadlines that is a deadly development. And the employer loses the competitive edge if they are not first to market with a reliable design. FINALLY, Space Science will be the third new technology at the same time in 2023, which will certainly alter what we teach in Physics, Chemistry, and Materials Science along with others. This trio of major technologies coming in 2023 will have an enormous effect on practically all technologies, sciences, engineering, AND JOBS that today's population knows. But we should not forget that all such outcomes have a positive and negative side also, and all human beings have a very important right granted to them from above, called the freedom to decide and choose. So, there is not much to fear unless we keep destroying our future with our declining public education. Our future existence depends on the education of our children today. Unfortunately, the schools oppose any change, and their performance grew into a major handicap to succeed as a nation. The teachers' unions just want more money and did nothing to improve school performance. They have substantial lobbying power in Congress to ensure no changes for improving education. We have MANY partnerships that advertise that they can make a difference to improve education and solicit donations to achieve that. Much of the donated money goes to ensuring their wealth. But how come that education did not improve? Because they are not what they say they are. Sometimes if you eat lunch with a friend in a large Mexican city, a poor, teary-eyed child interrupts, asking for money to eat. So I offer them lunch. But they insist that they need money. Some people who collect money from other wealthy people for education are worse. They just found an opportunity to con people for their own financial gain. Such organizations simply take advantage of the situation instead of raising education along with the improving technologies. Are the past twenty years' education results accidental? It appears that our governors, lawmakers, and departments of education could not do anything about it. The keywords are, "It appears."
    
    
    
    IS THERE A SPECIAL TALENT WITHIN EACH OF US?
    
    Buddhism is a respected and the most peaceful philosophy. It also has a substantial medical research base that was developed by a group of Buddhist monks over a two thousand year period, and especially in brain-related neurology, that releases natural restorative powers in the human body, through combination of deep meditation and guided imagery. The medical science in Buddhism is called Ayurvedic Medicine. This is a specialized area within the Buddhist monks who developed outstanding methods and even medical solutions during the last two thousand years, to use the human body's internal, God-given capabilities to solve health problems using the natural capabilities programmed into us human beings. Today we use only about 4-6% of our brains, and we know the least about the brain, about how it works and what capabilities exist within it, in the 94-96% of the brain, that we, humanity, cannot use yet. Einstein was estimated to be using 8% of his brain, so there must be enormous powers in the remaining 92% that we are not using yet.
    Buddhists say that "What you think, you become." Think about that. Our thinking is limited by what we THINK we know - some facts and what we assume. That makes both formal and informal education extremely important. Deep Meditation is a very important tool to open up one's thinking.
    Another important Buddhist belief is that all human beings have a built-in talent, they will be the happiest when using it, and they will be most successful in a job that is based on it. Let me offer you a few examples, and please look at them but, most importantly, think about them. Each of the following are young raw talent who will make it big I am sure. They exist in any field, any profession. Everybody has something like this, and some day we will be able to find it in everyone. I am showing you four examples in music by amazing young people performing, but this capability seems to exit in all professions.
    
    
    
    To see them, copy each of the following into your browser's address field and hit the "return" key:
    
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oybU09RQUTs
    
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjDNRAhxAgo.html
    
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IChJ6eO3k48.html
    
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rcd75zbbuLw.html
    
    
    
    Listen to and observe the young person's skill. I want you to notice something. Watch their body movements. They feel the music! It all comes from within the person! For example, when you are dealing with one's natural talent, we see a loving emotion emerging with what they do. This is perfection. It can be in any job. We all have it. We just don't know yet how to find it. In case of music, this feeling creates body movements in rhythm that takes over their body. You can see that they love what they do. There is a definite special connection between them and what they do. Steve Jobs, during the late 1970s, before he became very famous, told me about this a long time ago. He quit school and went to India for a year to be with Buddhist monks. The monks discovered what his special talent was, and without Steve even recognizing it, he changed. He started Apple and made it a fantastic company. He was tough on employees because he could see solutions to problems much faster than others. He told me that we provide the same education to all children, which is OK and necessary IF IT IS DONE WELL. But to discover your unique talent, you have to follow your special interests that pop up from an early age. SPEND 30 MINUTES A DAY TO MEDITATE ABOUT WHAT IT COULD BE. WHEN IT COMES UP, YOU WILL TRY IT AND SEE IF YOU LOVE IT. IF IT FEELS ENJOYABLE, DON'T JUST TRY IT, BUT BECOME EXCELLENT AT IT AS LONG AS YOU ENJOY IT. YOU MAY DROP IT, SO BE IT. BUT THIS IS HOW YOUR SPECIAL TALENT WILL POP UP. When you feel that real special talent, you will not give it up and quit it. Do not ignore your regular education. He got excellent grades always but quit to go to India. The special talent will just pop up someday, and you will enjoy it like nothing before. You will become the best at it because you enjoy it. You will not want to quit your special talent. DO NOT ACCEPT ANY PRESSURE BY ANYONE to do additional things that you do not feel strongly about. The money will become less important to you. But doing what you love will make you very happy, and all of a sudden, the money will come automatically. Don't forget. "What you think...you become." But what you learn as a fact is what can enhance what you think. By learning, I mean, not just in school. Everything you experience is learning. Read about what interests you. See videos that interests you. Tools like Google are fantastic places to learn. Learning to read very well and being very well trained in basic math or watching programs with real experts about the subjects you love will be very helpful and make further learning much easier. However, I want you to know also, that we graduate from high school too many students who cannot read or use basic math well by 5th grade. It must be learned very well by fifth grade. Learning starts at the fastest rate from birth by brain nerve cells (neurons) starting to interconnect at a very high rate. A healthy brain has about 100 billion neurons at birth. Learning itself is the interconnections of neurons forming in the specific order of "wiring" up specific functions in the brain with a limit on the time within each function to finish the "wiring" job for each function. For example vision starts first, hearing is next, basic math and reading between age 3 and 10, etc., etc., and vocational fit, in the ideal vocations for the individual is finishing around age 21. So vocational testing should take place after 21 years of age. We can test for it today with the Strong Interest Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Intelligence Inventory, but they must be correlated. Both can be downloaded from the Internet for $100 and would recommend that one session with a vocational psychologist, Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology would be highly recommended to explain any questions one has Our schools push students toward a vocation from late elementary school on, and that could have a negative effect on the natural development for an individual's natural vocational talent. Our public schools do a poor job by teaching the basics poorly as measured by the SAT and ACT tests by high school graduation, in the right developmental order, especially with mathematics and the sciences, the only areas that can protect against early replacement of jobs by robotics. Decisions without understanding the problems they create and by approving decisions not realizing the damage that their lack of knowledge creates should is not appropriate on a lower than central, national-level.l the fact that calculator use in the schools and during tests halts the full development of basic mathematics and we have experienced shocking inability of high school graduates to do a simple subtraction. But the biggest problem that is and was caused by calculator use was the fact that the when you do not develop deliver the the brains basic math capability is that internal math operations in the brain as part of important functions like in decision making at a much faster rate are also paralyzed and THAT limits employability severely. The latest solution by the education leadership is to teach critical thinking. Critical thinking and decision making uses the brain for speed if the brain's mathematics are well developed. Forgetting that for decision making and critical thinking, one must also have to be competent in the knowledge area within which the problems are AND and other peripheral areas that are related to the problem as well. It is very harmful to us as a country to have unqualified people making many decisions.
    
    
    
    Our teacher education declined, and management training for principals and superintendents is not a requirement before consideration for selection to these positions. It should be. Our public education decreases the chances of employment for our children and the workforce, with a lack of good enough education, creating a problem for employers. If a company's workforce is better educated than the competitor of that company, the company with a better educated workforce will have higher quality products with better margins and they will win more business, higher profits and taxes. As a result of our declining education vs. the technological improvements, the national income dropped like a stone from a normal 12-14% to 3-4%. We borrow money to make up for it. It is called the national debt. By the end of 2020, it will be close to $30 TRILLION. How much is the interest in this debt? Close to $8 TRILLION dollars, $8,000,000,000,000! The $8 Trillion interest is dead money. We have to pay it back. We had to borrow it because our industries' products did not sell well enough internationally or domestically. Why? Because several other countries have a better-educated workforce by their high schools than we do. Are most of our public schools "failure factories" instead of schools? It seems that way. The more important question is: "Will my child be unemployed for life?" AND "How can our country survive this way?" WE HAVE A SERIOUS PROBLEM.
    
    
    
    We searched, but could not find any action and change in public education by top Republicans or Democrats or Education leadership, that would increase our ACT scores. But they promise things about improving our public education when they run for office! To date, do nothing to improve education to raise the ACT scores after they get elected. That is the measure of what children learned from grade one to twelve, and along with a psychological match to the teaching profession and being a top 30% graduate in a Master's program for the single subject that they would teach after 4th grade is the critical requirement for high performing countries in teaching beyond 4th grade. I spent a lot of time in more than 50 countries in my work and an extended amount of time in the top three countries in education. They don't promise, they don't have slogans like "Excellence for all children," BUT THEY DELIVER EXCELLENT RESULTS. They promise things about improving our public education when their politicians run for office. THEY DELIVER. We found many things within our public education system during the last ten years in management structures and operations that block the possibility of good performance. We do not believe that teachers and principals are to be blamed for poor performance. But the state departments of education and those in charge are responsible. A teacher or principal wanted to become a teacher. They were accepted into a teacher training program, with all parties' assumption that both teacher training and certification would ensure their success. The program acceptance, training, and certification are not high enough, and such a condition cannot produce good results. Add to it lack of management training for principals and higher positions that oversee more than 100 employees. It is not viewed as necessary, but nothing succeeds without excellent planning and execution, requiring substantial management training. Education did not advance enough. Although we went from the horse and buggy to the moon in a hundred years, with more than a thousand new Science and engineering jobs becoming important after WWII, education did not keep up with them to this date. It appears that the biggest problem to date is the teacher training program becoming the greatest contributor to boring classrooms (I sat in on 29 of them), and neither Republican nor Democrat leadership did anything about the most critical problem that our future depends on as a nation. But I care, and hopefully many others care as well.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    OUR CHILDREN ARE GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL BEING POOR READERS AND NOT BEING ABLE TO MAKE CHANGE FROM A HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL, AND THEY DO NOT SEEM TO KNOW VERY SIMPLE THINGS DURING JOB INTERVIEWS. Most cannot even fill out a job application. WHY IS THAT ACCEPTABLE? They should be good readers by fourth grade because being poor in reading and basic math from the fifth-grade handicaps any future learning. Reading and basic math are necessary for learning through both elementary school, high school, and after that on the job. Our future as a country depends totally on the education our children get today.
    
    I just saw a TV program in which the superintendent of a large school district said that we should eliminate testing. The moderator asked him, "How can you tell without testing that the children learned something or not?" The superintendent of a school district with black children said, "I LOOK INTO THEIR EYES AND I CAN TELL!" It is scary even if only one superintendent would say something this outrageously stupid, because their education should be good enough, if they graduated, to prevent opinions of this kind even in one superintendent. The qualification standard must be strong enough to ensure that no such person, not a single one can become a teacher or manager in an education organization.
    
    If employers who hire our high school graduates complain to governors about their education, and they do, then nothing happens to improve the schools to raise the ACT and SAT results. We have a big problem that needs to be solved urgently.
    
    
    
    AS ONE CAN SEE ON THE ABOVE CHART, OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION HAS NOT BEEN DOING WELL ENOUGH IN ALMOST ALL OF OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. THERE IS ENOUGH PUBLIC EXPERIENCE TO INDICATE THE SAME AS WELL FOR AT LEAST FIFTEEN YEARS. WHY WAS IT NOT CORRECTED TO DATE? WE DROPPED AS A RESULT TO THE BOTTOM OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES. WE DESERVE BETTER FOR THE HIGHEST PRICES WE PAY PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD. We need better education for our children and country to survive. An increase in employees' education is always needed to follow closely technological advancements because employers always use them to become more competitive. Education standards always need to follow technological developments quickly to increase our students' education to meet employers' needs after they graduate. Unfortunately, our public schools do not do that and fell behind. What is the gap between where our high schools are and where they should be? We heard from university professors often the answer. In 2019 we heard that for a high school graduate to start attending the freshman year of a university program, the high school graduate needs two years of remedial education first. So the gap is a minimum of two years. In 2023 we will see the entry of three technologies: Artificial Intelligence-driven cognitive robotics, nanotechnology, and space science will open hundreds if not thousands of new science and engineering fields. The gap will double to four years. If we do not change our high schools to the level of the top countries in education, many of today's high school graduates and tens of thousands from our current workforce will become jobless within a few years.
    
    
    
    I ATTENDED MANY BOARD MEETINGS. THERE WAS NEVER ANY TIME SPENT ON HOW TO IMPROVE EDUCATION. ZERO TIME OVER MANY YEARS!! BUT THEY SPENT A LOT OF TIME ON APPROVING MORE MONEY. THERE WAS ZERO TIME SPENT DISCUSSING WHY THE SCHOOL DISTRICT SPENDS EIGHT-TO-TEN TIMES MORE MONEY ON CENTRAL MANAGEMENT THAN WHAT NORMAL SIZE IS. THERE IS ZERO TIME SPENT ON EXAMINING WHY EVERY SINGLE POSITION IS IMPORTANT OR NOT IN CENTRAL MANAGEMENT. This is a huge problem because if you are too high in the central management area, you are paid the highest salaries, and the results are so poor that it is a question whether or not anyone in that large group knows what they are doing. The normal percentage in large school district central management is less than 2% of the total number of full-time employees. Central management is most often 8-12% of the entire school district's employees. One gets much better-unbiased work from normal-sized central management. Why? Because they are smart people and realize that one could do a better job by delegating some of it to where the action is, where the results come from, the schools! That is where the money should be spent on expert knowhow. The best reason for not overspending in central management is the fact that the act results are poor. That, in turn, means that the money is not going to the right places. It should go to where the results are created, the schools. But where in the schools? Now you do have to know who is performing and how well. But there is opposition to measuring teacher and school performance. You have to change that because if you do not have a measurable annual ACT objective in every high school and a monthly GPA objective in every school. A manager must know what every person under the manager needs to do very well to raise results instead of listening to "interesting ideas" from inexperienced people who never had good results but can amaze you with BS. In education, it is very common to find managers who have no idea what they and people under them must know to do an excellent job. we do not have such talent, and there will not be such talent without management training.
    
    IF YOU LET POORLY PERFORMING PEOPLE GO, YOUR RESULTS WILL NOT GO DOWN. IF YOU LEARN HOW TO HIRE GOOD PEOPLE, IT WILL GO UP. BUT LOCALLY ELECTED SCHOOL BOARDS ARE NOT TRAINED AND EXPERIENCED TO DO THAT, AND SUPERINTENDENTS NEED TO REPORT TO PEOPLE WHO DO FOR BEST RESULTS. WHY CAN'T WE FIND SUPERINTENDENTS WHO CAN DO A GOOD JOB? THE GOOD ONES LEARNED WHAT MANAGEMENT IS ALL ABOUT, AND THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE A COMMITTEE THAT DOES NOT HAVE THE NEEDED KNOWLEDGE AS THE BOSS, WITH THE SUPERINTENDENT'S FUTURE DEPENDING ON IT. THEY WILL DO BETTER WITH A SINGLE BOSS WHO KNOWS EXACTLY HOW TO ACHIEVE BETTER RESULTS. THE CURRENT SCHOOL BOARD SYSTEM WAS USEFUL ONLY DURING THE AGRICULTURAL YEARS OF THE 1800s. But elected boards from the local supply of talent do not have the right knowhow to raise school performance. We think that 20 years of experience shows that quite clearly. Such people can be manipulated much more easily by other groups who also do not have the knowhow or have ill intent. And with such people having the authority to direct the more experienced guy is not a formula for good school performance. With our public education heading south for such a long time, the local school boards are not improving but the opposite. This kind of management philosophy and structure that resides in the school boards of more than 13,500 school districts in our nation can only create bad results. There are only 5% of all public schools that produce good results. The fact that such a dysfunctional management structure still exists is a clear indication that the public is being dumbed down with a less than needed public school competence that will keep going down unless it is revised. The problems with this situation are:
    
    
    • Elections can be "arranged" for a specific person to win. This is a serious subject under Psychological Warfare, Disinformation Theory, a highly advanced science, based on Lenin's quote of "If you lie a thousand times to the public about the same subject, they will accept it as truth." Repeat slogans often like "WE ARE THE BEST IN 'XYZ'," and make sure that they never receive news about who really is the best in 'XYZ'." Both communism and the nazi party used this method.
    
    
    
    • If you dumb down the public, by dumbing down their schools, you can convince them faster of anything, and the disinformation campaign will last longer. But it is aided by normal human behavior of covering your shortcomings instead of accepting them and learning to become better.
    
    
    
    • Drive important decisions to the lowest level of the population. Repeat often that it should be the people who make the best decisions.
    
    
    
    • Paralyze the management structure of their country and selectively any specific national function under government control by appointing a board of the local population to make all important decisions. Again, it is basic human nature to be elected to what one believes is an important position, and most believe that if they got elected, they are qualified to make important decisions.
    
    
    Whoever set up this system during the 1800s was brilliant, and an expert on human behavior to make use of it so brilliantly. I am citing only two such examples now. Still, it is very surprising that many other countries followed a much better education system, while we hypnotized ourselves repeating that "WE ARE THE BEST" slogan after WWII, initiated by the same group that started in the 1800s! It was sold to the public as a way to save the self-esteem of poorly performing children as "Johnny, you can do it! You are the best!!" We took the bait.
    
    It is also a basic human trait to defend yourself to survive if the results are not good. We see this in education, but if the qualification requirements were low, we should not blame such people but organize to raise such people's knowledge. HELP THEM.
    
    It is impossible to get out of a dilemma like education is today by being defensive, and covering up if one is in top management, or becoming hostile if someone brings up the topic. When things do not work in a group, it is vital to put anger and self-defense aside and compare yourself openly against the world's best to know exactly where you are. Remove poor performers, and get the right people to help you to close the performance gap. Acknowledging frankly that you did not know how to do this is important. Create a monthly plan to correct the problems, and tell the public truthfully on a monthly basis the successes and failures in working your plan. A PERSON WHOSE EGO ALLOWS HIM OR HER TO SHARE SUCH ACTION OPENLY WILL CORRECT THE PROBLEM. OTHERS WHO CANNOT DO THIS, CANNOT AND WILL NOT.
    
    
    
    

    HOW CAN INTELLIGENT PEOPLE MAKE SUCH POOR DECISIONS? This is the most damaging to our future success with not only our children's education.  Our country's future depends on how well our children are educated today. We are the largest economy in the world. We need a lot more high schools that graduate children with a minimum 29 average ACT score. Unfortunately, we are so bad that our schools think that an ACT 29 average is impossible to do. Bad attitude is the result of bad management. They call it "realistic outlook." If so, then meet the average performance of Singapore and Finland. And I really do not want to hear stupid arguments like "We are much bigger and that makes it impossible", or "We have minorities and that makes it impossible", when we are creating minorities with poverty as a result of poor education. Back in the 1800's we had only the agriculture economy, driven by local clusters of farms around each town. The local families owned these farms, doing an excellent job, one generation after another. The local people were well qualified to advise the local school teacher. That is the time when all the needed knowledge to guide education using the local people made sense, and the schools did a good job. That is how local school boards developed and did a good job for many years. But the world changed faster and faster, and a lot of new industries were created, and we started selling our products locally, AND in other countries. The schools had to teach more subjects. Going from the horse and buggy to the moon created new sciences, and more knowledge became necessary. The population was increasing, and so did wars that demanded more advanced weapons. Animals kill other animals to eat. But we, the people, evolved struggling with each other and killing each other at the drop of a hat. We are still that way. Today, we can kill not just next door, but anywhere on this planet. The increase in sciences and technologies required improvement in teacher and student training, but both became worse instead, AT A TIME WHEN WE WILL EXPERIENCE ACCELERATING TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES LIKE NEVER BEFORE. Schools became more complex as well, and some nations' schools have changed for the better and adapted, but others, like us, did not. The population could not make many decisions about the education of the local villages, but we decided to keep the locally elected school boards for decision making, when such decision making in today's much more complex world required better-educated people on a national level. Bad results are not accidental. They are the result of politicians appointing unqualified people with bad ideas to very important positions.
    
    
    
    Education in a changing world that cannot stay the same. And we have a big problem as a result, in great part because we do not have well-qualified local people making important education-related decisions in more than 13,500 school districts nationwide, with different standards and rules flying around. The result is a decline in the performance to a very low current level. It is also more expensive, with huge duplication in more than 13,500 school districts. We certainly need much better standards for teacher education, certification and our children's curriculum, and such decisions should be made with better, more knowledgeable people centrally for the entire country. Why would such decisions have to be different for different states or school districts? They should not be different. That is what the high performing countries do. They know everything about us. But we know nothing about them. It appears that our leaders do not care and do not want to know about some very important things on which our future depends. Well, kick them out of education! The education community always fights being measured on performance. In other industries we measure to find out EXACTLY where we are weak. In education we sit in on a teacher only four times a year for one hour!!! Is that a good way to measure performance? Absolutely not. Look at the results. When results are bad, teachers are not doing a good job, because their training was poor, and it is, because their management does not know how to manage because they are not trained well, or because their personality is not a good math for teaching, and that happens to be very important in most jobs.
    
    
    
    THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH THE PUBLIC VOTING WHEN THE PUBLIC'S EDUCATION DECLINED AS OURS DID. THE WORLD AROUND US BECAME MORE COMPLEX AND SOPHISTICATED. HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW THE PEOPLE YOU VOTE FOR? HOW MANY TIMES DID YOU HEAR FROM THOSE RUNNING TO FIX EDUCATION? MANY TIMES. DID THEY IMPROVE PUBLIC EDUCATION? THEY MADE IT WORSE. I AM SORRY, BUT HOW CAN ANYONE COME UP WITH SOMETHING THIS FOOLISH? IS THIS HOW IMPORTANT EDUCATION IS TO THE POLITICAL AND EDUCATION LEADERSHIP? Never judge the words. Always watch for what education management and politicians do. Why?  Because it applies to all planning, if any, all management of execution to non-existing measurable objectives, and totally lacking any management knowhow to change the way the organization works, without which the bad results to date cannot change.  Also, because you simply cannot get a well enough educated school board MAJORITY by electing them, who are experienced enough to make equally good decisions today, that is competitive with the best nations in education. Our children's highest success or dismal failure in school depends on how well our schools educate them.  BUT more importantly, OUR COUNTRY's ECONOMY depends totally on our children's education today.  During the last 100 years, having elected school boards is one reason why our public education is dropping like a stone.  But we found ten other measures that ensure failure, performed by the state education departments with the governor's blessing - everywhere. In addition, the elected local school boards duplicate functions where decision making SHOULD BE uniform for the nation, and it is duplicating staff in 13,500 school districts, with good people who are well-intentioned, who do not have the right education and experience for the decisions that they have to make to improve education.  This is like 13,500 blindfolded people getting into their cars but have absolutely no idea about where to go. But they step on the accelerator anyway because they were paid to do so.  You do not need any more proof than the poor ACT records for decades, which are among the worst in the industrialized countries.  The state education departments, the governors, and lawmakers are not standing up to the education lobby and unions.  No laws were proposed that would require changes within the educational organizations.  Why not?  The poor results are created within those organizations with the "help" of education lobbying organizations, who could vote out any politician whose proposal they do not like.  This is a classic,  bad management structure that can only go down, where the education organization is poorly performing, obviously because of poor, insufficiently educated self-serving decisions.  Such decisions must be made centrally as in every country, except with the best people we can find, with the central decision-making group's responsibility to set standards and a framework for objectives' achievement IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST who are totally independent of the education organizations. 

    
    
    
    
    It is a fact of life, especially since WWII, that new technologies are emerging faster and faster, like an exponential curve. It is not increasing fast because some scientists like to get excited. It is increasing to make our industries and military more competitive because only then can our country get enough tax income. It is a technological improvement that can ensure all industries' competitiveness to sell more products and services. It must be at a price that leaves enough taxes for the government to exist normally with its services. That includes technological development in research centers, the military, administrative services, political management services like Congress and education. Our education is a poor performer, when we spend the most on education in the world, and fell to the bottom of the industrialized countries.
    
    
    
    We do not have high enough reserves, and when we have things like COVID-19 or war or high crimes, we as a country have to borrow money. We are struggling at the 3-4% income on the government level that is not enough. Normal would be 13-14%. That is why the national debt is increasing to unreal levels, and the interest on it will be around $8 trillion by the end of 2020, on a total debt plus interest of $30 trillion. Education spending in the USA is the highest in the world with a bad performance that weakens our industries resulting in less tax income.
    
    
    
    The poorly educated children will not be able to get legal jobs, but they will be hungry and will make a lot of children. Crime will rise. We cannot make up for the failure of our public education. We do not have enough money to help them with education to make up for the weak K-12 education because the brain slows down enough by 20 years of age significantly by high school graduates who did not learn enough. That will result in riots. Big riots. and that will cost a lot more than education expenses every year.
    
    
    
    Wealthy people will not be free of these problems. They are the only source of money by then, and I am sure they believe they can escape losing it. We are so large that if we do not correct this situation, it will have a major economic impact on practically every country. So all in education management, plus lawmakers and political leadership, since they have not done enough to correct the education problem they created, will probably get a medal for doing a fabulous job. Read the Harvard Business Review article from 1991, 30 years ago, by clicking here. It identified the problem well, and in 30 years, nothing was done to increase the ACT and SAT scores. I do not think that our country and population deserved it. I don't think that such people, who destroyed such an important thing, can perform well enough to be part of a future solution. It is time for us to call such action exactly what it is if we want to improve to the level of the top competitors.
    
    
    
    We have done a very poor job in most of our schools, and there were many meetings between governors and employers during the last ten years to correct this problem. Read this excellent article from 1991 (https://hbr.org/1991/03/does-business-have-any-business-in-education). Our public education never responded other than becoming worse. Why is it that most of our governors are not fixing it? THE POSSIBILITIES ARE:
    
    • I could be wrong. If I am, I would like to know where.
    
    
    • The people involved fear some danger to themselves. That can be solved, but their leaders chose not to do it.
    
    
    • No action to solve this problem is NOT a friendly act in our country. Think about how important education is for ANY COUNTRY AND ANY CHILD. Is this the act of enemies within? Or is it just a lack of knowhow?
    
    We must answer this question with firm decisions and actions to correct the education problem URGENTLY. It is not rocket science, as you will see.
    
    
    
    With close to 80% of our high school graduates not even qualified as ACT Ready. ACT Readiness is a low achievement level today, and 80-90% of our current high school graduates will not be employable with AI/Cognitive Robotics, Nanotechnology, and Space Science created changes in employer-needs after 2023. Our standards and results are poor. The leadership must know that the last twenty years' poor results in the above chart and prior come from public education being done poorly, especially in states like Tennessee. The standards are low. Monthly measurable academic objectives do not exist. Good performance CANNOT BE DONE WITHOUT SUCH FOCUS, especially in individual schools, like in monthly "Grade Point Average" (GPA) AND annual ACT objective for high schools and their feeder schools and the school district (monthly and annual objectives). We need to delegate some central management authorities to high school principals if we want them to deliver aggressive growth in student results. An operating plan also does not exist that shows what measurable results and GPA each manager, supervisor, teacher, and principal is to accomplish monthly in each school. The schools produce education results, and we don't measure performance to know how we are doing?! With their monthly results not being focused for decades, there is no way to improve schools so that our children will be employable. In any work, including teaching and school management, you must know what specific, measurable result you want to accomplish, like a particular GPA score, and what you have to do to achieve it. In a competitive world, you must be producing one of the best results.
    
    
    
    Successful teachers have very interesting qualifications that I found to be identical in the top ten countries in education. We must focus on that. The principals must focus on and control this area.
    Beyond 4th grade, in the higher performing countries, a successful teacher requires:
    
    
    • A high I.Q. and high energy,
    
    
    • Teachers come from the top 10-30% of university graduates, who have a Master's degree in the subject they will teach after the 4th - grade. Teachers are never transferred to teaching a different subject. US teachers come from the bottom 30% in performance and are often assigned to teach a subject on which they had no training.
    
    
    • A personality matching to the teaching profession is very important: the candidate needs to be very open, friendly, but firm, exciting presenter of his/her subject. In the US two tests CORRELATED can match a candidate to a vocation with 100% accuracy, where they will be happiest and will do well. The two tests are the Strong Interest Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Psychological Inventory. One can download and take both from the Internet, for $100 total for both. After taking it, take it to a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology who specializes in vocational psychology for interpretation. One such session would be useful.
    
    
    • The teacher loves the subject he/she teaches so that he is aware of technical developments and the job possibilities within it.
    
    
    • He/she teaches with infectious enthusiasm because the teacher loves the subject he/she teaches.
    
    
    • Keeps learning on his/her own about new teaching methods, AND IMPROVES HIS/HER RESULTS EVERY SINGLE YEAR.
    
    
    • He/she wants to be the best at whatever he/she does,
    
    
    • Very interested in knowing first-hand how his job is done in countries that are very successful in education. Such a teacher will visit at least one such country at his/her expense. All because of his/her drive to become the best.
    
    
    • Uses on his/her own the new, better teaching tools available on the Internet to improve his/her results.
    
    
    
    
    br>
    
    
    

    Some may say "Good luck in finding such teachers". There are many out there who could be like that. The problem is that the supply of teachers is declining. You know why? Because they and principals are not treated well. They do not have enough backing on dealing with discipline problems. They should be THE AUTHORITY in the classroom. They are overloaded with things like paperwork and are not given enough preparation time for classes, which is an important thing in all countries where the quality of education is high. They are being set up as the fall guy when the poor education is found out by parents, and they had nothing to do with it. The teacher education in teacher colleges are declining, and the certification is weak. One would logically assume as they choose their college, that the education would be good and a bit higher than even in the high performing nations. Factory workers are treated better and they are not as important as teachers are. And then to complete this picture, the elected boards pick terrible superintendents with results that were far from good, and many take the headhunters' background check of the candidate. All superintendent candidates will appear as nice people but don't know how to create good results, and had no management training. An MBA is too light for management training. The best courses in management are called Post MBA Management Training, typically 2-4 weeks long, 16 hours a day six days/week, 90% role playing specific problems, typically supervised by a clinical psychologist, and two professors from the graduate school of management of large universities. And everybody believes that we have an education system that is managed well, because the teacher satisfaction surveys say so. I looked at those tests. They are structured, multiple choice question-based. Such surveys do not work because the answers can steer the teacher to a conclusion that favors the school system and its unions. High turnover, that is above 2.5% per school district means that it is not a good place to work. And the system is hiding its problems instead of correcting it. The ACT scores and Readiness shows clearly that the knowledge they deliver to our children is far from enough, and as new technologies arise, the education system makes it worse by falling behind without any training to become good enough, whenever new technologies arise. And who gets hurt the most, the poor people whose poverty is rising as the failing education system pulls the rug from under them. In a situation like this, the low ACT performance is more than enough for those in leadership to take immediate action to raise the ACT scores to 80% readiness satisfying the needs of employers. BUT INSTED PUBLIC EDUCATION CONTROLS EVERYTHING NOT TO BE INTERNATIONALLY COMPETITIVE, THAT OUR EMPLOYERS ACTUALLY NEED, AND THEY FOCUS ON MAKING THINGS LOOK GOOD, WHEN IT IS A DISASTER THAT CAN DESTROY OUR COUNTRY. THIS IS NOT RIGHT, AND OUR LEADERS DO NOTHING ABOUT IT, IT SEEMS. I AM VERY SORRY, BUT THIS IS WHAT WE, THE PEOPLE HAVE.

    
    
    
    
    Our country's future depends on the education of our children today. BUT FOR THE FUTURE TO BE GOOD, LEARNING CANNOT BE BORING. IF IT IS BORING, NEITHER A CHILD, NOR AN ADULT WILL LEARN A THING. IT HAS TO BE INTERESTING AND FUN FOR BOTH THE TEACHERS AND THE STUDENTS! I investigated our education in the USA and the countries that are the best in education. I am describing what I found, and the actions that WE NEED to take and why, because not doing so will create huge problems for our country. It is THE ANNUAL NATIONAL TESTS that cannot be changed by state education departments.
    
    
    
    TEACHERS' UNIONS are major influencers in education. They are very well funded and they are the ones who work with our Congress to get what they want. When 95% of our public schools do a very poor job like in the last twenty years, it appears as if the teachers' unions do not care or create the problem with too much enthusiasm. They should be for our schools to significantly increase our ACT and SAT scores because those two tests show what our children learned between grade one and twelve. So far education has been a "one size fits all" program where too many different curricula exists, and extremely few of the curricula are robust enough to be up-to-date with employers' needs. We wish to make sure that our high school graduates' average ACT score is graduating with at least 80% knowledge of the courses they have taken in high school. That means an average ACT 28 score. Some countries perform better than that. We are around 60% high school subject knowledge or less. That puts pressure on high technology companies to create an education robot. AI-assisted cognitive robotics will be able to do an excellent teacher robot, that can diagnose psychological problems as a background, diagnose natural vocational strengths in any person as a background task, and deliver the necessary educational materials optimized for the individual child. Education will become individually optimized, highly motivating as a life time program, that will be much easier to achieve for a Ph.D. than a high school diploma today. I saw the prototype robots. They will be able to do a much better job than today's public schools. We have to understand that what most public schools produce today is unacceptable. When the graduating students cannot read and write using script, but write only with block letters that are not suitable for taking notes, and they cannot do simple basic math, but WE GRADUATE THEM WITH A DIPLOMA THAT WAY.
    
    
    
    The states purchase the state tests. The companies that supply the tests have to provide the tests to meet the official curriculum by law. The curriculum is the list of subjects and what each subject must cover for 12 grades. The states run the new tests first to see the results first, without distributing the results to the public or the schools. If the results are "not satisfactory," and so far they were not satisfactory to the state, the state department of education modifies the pass/fail point of one or more subject tests to produce a higher final grade, with a "Cut Scores" method. Not too long ago, a graduating student from high school had to pass all high school subjects to graduate. That meant passing all subjects with a D score or higher, above 60% correct answers in each and every high school course at the end of each course. In the high performing countries in education, they also take an end of high school course covering all high school subjects, and it counts as 50% of the final graduation result.
    
    
    
    I am proud to be a US citizen, I am a disabled VET, and I will do whatever I need to do to call attention to this enormous problem that APPEARS TO BE PURPOSEFULLY created. The problem created so far can destroy any country and destroy our country unless we improve the school system to an average consolidated ACT score of 28, representing 80% high school subject knowledge. I did not benefit financially for doing this work from anyone or any organization. What I found, endangers our children's future and our country the most. IF SOMEONE STEALS A BICYCLE, IT IS A CRIME. BUT WHAT POLITICAL AND EDUCATION MANAGEMENT IS DOING TO US IS NOT A CRIME?! NO LAW WAS EVEN PROPOSED EVER ABOUT POLITICAL AND EDUCATION MANAGEMENT PEOPLE WHO DID THIS TO PUBLIC EDUCATION. SHOULD NOT THEY BE IN JAIL? DO TODAY'S GOVERNORS FEEL THAT SUCH ACTION IS ALL RIGHT? OBVIOUSLY, THEY FEEL THAT WAY OR HAVE ZERO COURAGE TO DO WHAT IS ETHICAL AND RIGHT FOR THE COUNTRY'S POPULATION. I could not believe it when I saw it. To make it worse, decades go by, and no one is acting to correct it within political leadership or education management. Education changes the way we think, and we become better - or worse if our education is not successful or directed to be an instrument of destruction. IT IS DESTRUCTIVE NOW. Why did some people do this, and why did they get away with it? AND WHY DO THEY KEEP DOING IT! THEY DID IT WITH THE PUBLIC'S HARD-EARNED TAX DOLLARS. IT IS DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE THAT NO ONE IN POLITICAL MANAGEMENT, LIKE GOVERNORS, AND NO ONE IN STATE EDUCATION MANAGEMENT, LIKE STATE BOARDS OF EDUCATION OR STATE SUPERINTENDENTS OF EDUCATION, KNEW THAT PUBLIC EDUCATION WAS SET UP TO FAIL. SEE SOME REFERENCES UNDER "ACTIONS" BELOW. IT WAS DONE BY SOME VERY INTELLIGENT PEOPLE DURING THE 1800s.
    
    
    
    When the results are not good enough, you need to work smarter, AND CHANGE TO BECOME BETTER! ONE CAN LEARN HOW TO DO BETTER WHAT ONE IS DOING EVERY TIME. Why don't we know how to do that? Some people do not like change. Some people do not want to learn. A hint: People are not born that way. The more they enjoy something, the more they want it. BUT if something is boring, an adult or child will easily lose motivation and not want to keep doing it. THAT IS HOW CHILDREN LEARN TO HATE SUBJECTS LIKE MATHEMATICS OR SCIENCE. Treat them poorly; they get turned off immediately. I'll cover this in more detail further down, and that will help. It appears that those who should have improved the management of education during the last twenty years had and have no idea how to improve it. Or did not want to improve it. They hate teaching. That is why it is very important to use teachers trained on the Master's level in the subjects they teach, love the subject and talk about it with infectious enthusiasm. Someone has to make sure above every school that the right type of person is teaching all subjects. MAKING SURE THAT THIS IS DONE IS WHAT A MANAGER'S JOB IS. YOU CAN LEARN IT LIKE ANYTHING ELSE. But I discovered that management training is not important to those who manage in education - and that is a BIG PROBLEM. How to graduate our children with the best possible ACT scores and knowledge is a big problem. One can do that very well only if ONE understands and loves the job they have. This should be managed centrally in the US, and should be a federal requirement to be applied everywhere. The argument against it is that with such a requirement, you will not have enough candidates. No one in politics or education realizes the fact that without knowing enough about management, your objectives and planning is not going to be good, and then it is certain that you will produce bad results. In fact, people do not view management as a necessary skill and promote people into management who did a good job in non-management jobs before. Big mistake. And most of them fail because higher political and education management does not know because they never found out why management is needed. The same people believe that to be in education management. You have to be a teacher first. Once you have 200-250 employees, the management part of the job becomes dominant enough, so that a retired person with large organization management who was formally trained in management will do an infinitely more successful job even if he was never a teacher. Why? Because an employer knows a lot better than anyone specialized in education, about what the employer's needs are in education because that is what public education is to satisfy, BUT DOES NOT.
    
    
    
    When classes for children or adults are boring, they are a turnoff, and one not only does not learn enough but learns to hate the subject. I attended 29 high school science and math classes total in various states. They were boring, and the teachers did not know the subject well enough. NOT THEIR FAULT. They wanted to become a teacher. Logically one assumes that if you spend money on getting a teaching degree, your education will teach you enough, and the certification will reflect the same. We don't do that. We dropped teacher education during the past 35-40 years, and to make it worse. Education organizations do not educate superintendents in management, have no idea how to interview, and hire people like one who was teaching for one year, then managed food service, security, and accounting for many years. Then the school district's elected board hired him or her as superintendent with a $100,000 raise. That is an incredibly bad decision that has a very high direct cost and an enormous cost in uneducated children and its damage to the economy and the quality of children such people have. And they will procreate a lot.
    
    
    
    Why is it that neither Democrats, nor Republicans have improved our poor education in more than 20 years? THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT CLUE TO FIX THE EDUCATION PROBLEM. The two parties compete for control. That is a good thing. The problem is that they are self-serving and not country-serving. The fact that they are powerful in controlling the country does not remove the fact that if they are in danger, they are willing to damage the country to get an upper hand. They have been doing that increasingly since 2000. Why such two groups have not taken action to fix public education, is strong evidence that for them, public education and the public is not important. If you dumb down people, they can be controlled much more easily. Lenin said, "if you lie to people 1000 times, they will accept it as truth!" This has been an extremely important technique to control people. Think about elections. How many candidates promise things, but do nothing? How much do we really know about them? Practically nothing. They use "advertising", a well developed science within "disinformation theory" to control people to succeed. We pay them, and they control us. They could be useful or useless to those who elected them. Are they becoming more useful, or more useless? Their achilles heal is telling truth and nothing but all of the truth. Most politicians make promises at election time about education being a huge problem and promise to fix it. They get elected and do nothing much about it. We, the people, pay the highest price per student in the world for it. Our children's and country's future depend on it.
    
    
    
    Why is it that for the highest dollars per student, using the people's hard-earned tax dollars, our public schools produce the worst educated high school graduates in the industrialized countries. Where is the job to professionally oversee where and how the people's money is spent? A simple audit is not effective enough. A "forensic audit" is an excellent investigative tool. It is probably five times as expensive. IT NEEDS TO BE DONE by a major national accounting firm that cannot afford to blemish its reputation. BUT IT IS A LOT LESS EXPENSIVE THAN THE MONEY BEING WASTED IN EDUCATION, AND IT IS THE ONLY TOOL THAT CAN REDUCE THE MONEY WASTING AND THE POOR RESULTS. CONSIDER THE HUGE COST OF THE INDIRECT DAMAGE LIKE POOR EDUCATION WILL COST AS WE ARE BECOMING WORSE.
    
    
    
    Look at the chart again. Remember that new technologies always require K-12 education to improve, because employers will use them, the new jobs require more knowledge. Therefore more education and the old jobs go to robotics. Of the jobs that robots can do, they are better than we are in producing high-quality products faster at a much lower cost than we human beings can do. They are improving in intelligence faster than human beings can, and could learn today as much as what a child learns in eight years in less than a minute, with a simple download. In just a few years, they can do that with the knowledge of a Ph.D. in most subjects. It is Artificial Intelligence that can "learn" to use and apply the massive subject knowledge, and all of it is doubling every two years at most.
    
    
    
    I spent a lot of time in Japan. I saw that forty years ago, the Japanese schools started teaching children under fourth grade how to learn faster, and all the large Japanese companies like Toshiba paid for a Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo for managers to make the manager more useful for their company and country. Of course, increased income went with it. Japanese are more traditional, honor more their country, develop better quality in more areas than we do, and quickly apply new technologies. If you are a visiting foreigner in Japan, you are an outsider. You will not be able to learn about many things. I was lucky to be an insider in Japan. Being invited to Japanese homes is one sign of real friendship, and it is not done for any other reason then real respect and friendship. And it is experiencing their homes that open the door to the real Japan. The University of Tokyo is like Harvard University in the US. We do not teach learning faster in our elementary schools. Another interesting country is Singapore. Very small, but everybody loves the place. It is very hard to keep a tropical country clean. Yet in Singapore, you arrive, and the streets and subways are clean, no littering, everything is beautiful. The population is a Malay, Indian, and Chinese mixture; the religion is Islam. They have zero natural resources, they became excellent in high tech manufacturing, banking, transportation, their military is trained by Germany and Israel, the schools are one of the top three in the world, and they are very successful as a country. To run any government brach, they hire a certain number of years the best experienced large business talent with a history of success every time. Education is part of central government planning on the highest level. They compare everything against the best in the world. That all tells you why their education is on top. Our education management tells me that when you are small, it is easier to be the best, and they do not have the minorities that pulls our education down. The size of the country does not make it harder to have good results. Success in education or any other group activity depends on things like management-trained managers, everyone knowing what they have to do well each day, each week, each month, and for the entire year. Classes that all children find interesting instead of boring, teachers whose personality is well matched to the job, teachers who were in the top ten percent of their classes in a Master's program in the subject that they are teaching. Precise objectives and graduation requirements that are competitive with the top three countries in education. More about this below.
    
    
    
    OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION IS ONE OF THE BIGGEST CREATORS OF POVERTY IN THE WORLD WITH OUR POOR EDUCATION. 80% GOING ON TO 90% OF HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES WILL NOT BE EARNING ENOUGH MONEY THE WAY WE EDUCATE CHILDREN IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. THEY WILL BE HOMELESS UNLESS THEY MAKE MONEY ILLEGALLY. THEY ARE DEFENSIVE INSTEAD OF FIXING EDUCATION. THEY LIE TO THE PUBLIC ABOUT EDUCATION. AND THEY GRADUATE MOSTLY UNEMPLOYABLE CHILDREN. OUR LEADERSHIP IN EDUCATION DOES NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO AND HOW TO FIX IT. OR THEY DO NOT WANT TO FIX IT BECAUSE THEY FEAR SOMETHING IF THEY DO TRY TO FIX IT. MANAGEMENT KNOW-HOW IS MISSING BOTH IN OUR EDUCATION AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP. IS THAT A FORMULA FOR SURVIVAL OR FAILURE? Please read here what I found before you disagree. Then decide. We will show you what the problems are and where.
    
    
    
    Normally the highest person is the most important in an organization, if he/she is well trained and experienced in management and if he/she has 100 or more people under him/her. But in education, we do not have management trained people in positions that require it, and that is a big contributor to our poor results. THEREFORE, FOR US, GOOD TEACHERS AND PRINCIPALS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT PEOPLE TODAY IN ANY SCHOOL DISTRICT. We have too many people who would agree with our education being poor - they would say, but you can count on one hand the people who are willing to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. That includes their unions. If I am 75% correct, and I believe that I am 100% accurate with our proposed actions, then we, as a nation, have a huge problem with public education destroying our country. Most schools do not deserve the "school" name because they are FAILURE FACTORIES and do THAT very well. Our education management speaks about how we Americans do not respect teachers like other countries' population does. But they know nothing about other nations. I do. In many nations, they do respect teachers more. But that always happened as a result of the good job they have done. Unfortunately, we don't know what a good job is, and that is why our results are poor. It is not because of the good people who decided to be teachers. Our teacher training programs and teacher certification, along with the curricula, are much weaker than those of many other countries. The teachers are trying with what they have; they are frustrated; their morale is low. Their superintendents never had management training; their subject knowledge is too low. We need to ensure that potential teachers meet the following:
    
    
    
    

    TEACHER TRAINING REQUIREMENTS IN THE BEST COUNTRIES IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

    • Teaching in other countries that are great in education requires both a BS and MS, 7 years total, in the same subject that they will teach. Teacher candidates always come from the top 30% of the Master's program. Exception: Finland recruits from the top 10%. Many teacher colleges offer a one year Master's program after the teacher training. This is not enough for teaching a subject.
    
    
    
    • They love their subject and keep up with every new development in it.
    
    
    
    • They are the right personality for teaching. Two tests that can be downloaded from the Internet for $100 or less, can give an accurate indication of the top 3-5 vocations where the test taker fits. The brain area that completes vocational area development is ready for such a test after 22 years of age, and the vocational fit does not change during the life of the individual. This would be of great help to the teacher candidate even if he or she is not a good fit for teaching. It would be helpful to take the test results to a vocational psychologist, with a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, for one session if any questions. The two tests are the Strong Interest Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Intelligence Inventory. The two tests need to correlated.
    
    
    
    • Come from the top 10% of their Master's programs, and
    
    
    
    • They create fabulous results with children in the ACT 29-34 average equivalent range.
    
    
    
    
    Our teachers are nowhere near that. And that is the people's fault who approved the teacher training curriculum and the rigor of certification. The teaching profession is not one that anyone could do well. It requires a very specific psychological profile to do well as a teacher. Two tests correlated that do this well for any profession are the Strong Interest Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Intelligence Inventory.
    
    
    
    The teachers are treated worse than a factory worker. Management training is absent in education organizations and that is the big problem creating it.
    
    
    
    TEACHERS' UNIONS: THEY COMPLAIN AND DEFEND THEMSELVES INSTEAD OF CORRECTING THE PROBLEMS FOR THE TEACHERS AND THE POPULATION THAT THEIR POORLY PERFORMING SCHOOLS CREATE. AS IF THE TEACHERS' TRAINING AND CERTIFICATION WERE EXCELLENT IN EVERY WAY. THAT MEANS THAT THE TEACHERS' UNION DOES NOT WANT BETTER TEACHER TRAINING AND BETTER CERTIFICATION.
    
    
    
    The great majority of our public schools are doing a very poor job. We are the lowest performer within the industrialized countries. We are paying per student one of the highest rates per student with our hard-earned tax dollars. Salaries depend on "supply and demand," and the quality of the job done. Our employers have been meeting with governors about the poor quality of our K-12 high school graduates for the past 15 years, without any action to raise ACT scores that measure what our children learned from grade one to twelve. NOTHING CHANGED! Public education is delivering poor results for what they are paid per student, and they do not treat the teachers well as they should. AND THEIR EXPENSES AND SALARIES ARE GUARANTEED BY LAW, REGARDLESS OF THE RESULTS! WHY IS IT THAT OUR POLITICAL LEADERS OF BOTH PARTIES HAVE DONE NOTHING TO IMPROVE THE ACT SCORES?! What is scaring them?
    
    
    
    These are hardly the conditions for bringing up the desire for increasing salaries. But not unexpected from people in high positions in politics and education who did not give any thought to fixing education.
    
    
    
    Many nations went through a poor teaching period between WWI and WWII. Many corrected it. A few of our schools did as well. A few, because our philosophy is that "locally elected school boards know the best what schools should teach and how." Do you know how old this idea is?! It was this way since late 1800s, in a purely agricultural economy, where the local farmers knew very well what the children had to learn to do an excellent job on the farms. It was perfect for the period up to the early 1900s. THE EDUCATION COMMUNITY FIGHTS FOR THE SAME LOCALLY ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD IDEA WHEN IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THE LOCALLY ELECTED BOARD DOES NOT HAVE THE EXPERTISE TO HELP MAKE OUR SCHOOLS COMPETITIVE IN TODAY'S WORLD. THIS FACT BY ITSELF SHOWS THAT TODAY'S POLITICAL AND EDUCATION LEADERSHIP DOES NOT CARE ABOUT THE COUNTRY AND WHAT PEOPLE WANT. ACTIONS AND LACK THEREOF IN SOME AREAS MAKE THIS VERY CLEAR. They don't even realize that we went from the horse and buggy to the moon, went from local agriculture to international sales in more than a thousand different industries, with huge technological changes during the last 120 years. Today's school board requires much more knowledge, especially as a majority, to make changes to solve the problems we have in public education. Many things delegated to locally elected school boards need to be made nationally on the highest level. Examples are the school curriculum, teacher training curriculum, teacher certification, high school graduation requirements, hiring superintendents, managing superintendents. Also, continuing education for teachers since we are advancing faster in many technologies, better teaching tools, and how to make every class an exciting experience for the children instead of boring. Sit in on school board meetings and see how much time board members spend on improving our children's poor education. Do they make any good changes that increase the ACT scores? The locally elected school board members do not know some vital solutions they are trying to make and do not have time to learn.
    
    
    
    Our success depends on how good our workforces are in every industry compared to the top three countries. AND THAT DEPENDS ON HOW WELL EDUCATED OUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES ARE. I am afraid that we are doing very poorly. The ACT scores in the chart we have here show how much our children are learning from grade one to twelve in our public schools, and how poor the results were since the year 2000 and most likely longer. Look at the ACT chart below, showing no improvement for 20 years. In a world where technologies are advancing, we have been falling behind other countries. Such is the price one pays for bad leadership.
    
    
    
    Good results always depend on how decision-makers think, and how good a job their employees are doing. With the public education results we have, we must change the way we think and do things.
    Good results always depend on how well we do our jobs each day as workers, to meet a specific, measurable objective to be achieved each month IN EACH INDIVIDUAL SCHOOL. Unfortunately we seriously regressed in public education for too long.
    
    
    
    It is vital to have the right monthly GPA objectives (measured year to date) in every single school. The GPA year to date monthly objective is 10% higher each month than it was in the corresponding month prior year, with a monthly operating plan for any teacher or manager in every single school. YOUR RESULTS IN THE SCHOOLS ARE BAD BECAUSE THEY REQUIRE AN OBJECTIVE BUT NOT A CORRECT ONE THAT FOCUSES THE PEOPLE ON WHAT MUST BE DONE. YOU WILL NOT IMPROVE ENOUGH WITHOUT IT GUARANTEED! IF IT IS DONE CORRECTLY. Not having the right measurable objectives is a key indicator of academic success or failure; IMPROVEMENT IS NOT POSSIBLE EVEN WITH MAJOR CHANGES. Please look at the ACT performance chart FOR THE PAST TWENTY YEARS. IT IS A VERY POOR RECORD. WITH THE TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES COMING IN 2023-2024 in AI-ASSISTED COGNITIVE ROBOTICS, NANOTECHNOLOGY, AND SPACE SCIENCE, MOST OF OUR CHILDREN WILL BECOME UNEMPLOYABLE. THE FUTURE SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF OUR NATION DEPENDS ON HOW WELL WE EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN TODAY IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. THEY ARE DOING VERY POORLY.
    
    
    
    There exists a terrible idea about what management is within education organizations. Generally, they promote the best worker into management. And he does not work out. Bad workers will not make a good manager. But without management training, a good worker also MAY NOT become a good manager of people. An MBA provides a very general introduction to management that is not very useful. Some universities offer a very busy two-week post-MBA Advanced Management Program. That is the best program to learn to solve management problems. It is a role-playing of management problems that one has to solve under pressure. Two professors from the graduate school of management and a clinical psychologist supervise 14 hours per day, six days per week. Management problems start developing in organizations if a manager has about 50 employees working for him. Management problems become more sophisticated as the number of employees increase. One major problem public schools have is a lack of such management training for principals and superintendents, contributing to poor results and teachers' high turnover. Proper Mathematics, Science, and Management training rarely exist in our education, which accounts for most of our problems today. I hope that we will make the governors and public education management people think so that they become much better problem solvers. Any organization with poor results can only improve if the organization recognizes its real problems openly to the public and plans well with proper objectives and operating plans. We have done none of that in public education while paying the most in the world per student. No one in the political leadership decided to solve the problem. The poor performance continued for decades. This inaction damaged us. We have been harming the majority of the public. It must be corrected. How can those who caused the damage claim innocence and claim today that they had nothing to do with it? How can they claim that as politicians, they acted in the interest of the people when they were party to damaging the country very seriously from within?
    
    
    
    Focus everyone on what they have to accomplish every month. All people who supervise and lead others, especially teachers, must see their results together with their managers to see exactly how they could improve what they are doing. It needs to be an open team discussion about what could work better. That is how one can find the best idea when multiple solutions exist. Not wild, unproven ideas. So look for proven ideas that work. Hostile feelings and hurt egos have no place here. No one is perfect. But the senior person is more experienced. An objective is the measurable MONTHLY key indicator of success or failure under every manager, supervisor, principal, and, most importantly, every single teacher in every single school. For low performing schools like ours, the objective has to be 10% higher than the previous year's actual achievement during the same month. People do not respond to low objectives well. Especially if the objective is annual and not challenging, they just keep working the same way as before with the same results. However, people respond to the challenge of an objective that is a stretch and not easy. In a poorly performing area like education, one must have monthly measurable objectives, but the group's manager must check how his/her team members are doing at least weekly, and the performance reporting must be automated to limit any manual work and focus people and their time on preparation and work to achieve the objectives.
    
    
    
    A comment on management terminology that needs to be clear. The word "objective" applies only to the current OR coming fiscal year, with a specific, measurable key indicator of success or failure, like a GPA or YEAR-TO-DATE GPA (Grade Point Average). You must have such a target to achieve monthly to focus all employees. A "goal" on the other hand, is a target that one would like to achieve during a longer period, like five years. Things can happen during those five years that could change the goal.
    
    
    
    A grade point average or GPA is the best measure for an objective at all school levels. Some universities prefer that to an ACT or SAT score because it is very specific when they look at its details. It is also essential to have a national test (ACT or SAT) objective each year that is 10% higher than the immediately preceding year's score because cheating has happened with state tests to make the results look better for the public. Having a "90% graduation" objective with a low average ACT 21 minimum score has been creating pressures at the end of the school year to pass children who would otherwise fail. It is harmful instead of beneficial. Just look at the bad ACT results we have. THE CHILDREN ARE IN SCHOOL TO BE EMPLOYABLE WHEN THEY GRADUATE, AND ABOUT 80% TODAY ARE NOT EMPLOYABLE. For higher academic achievement, a graduation-only goal does not work. It only makes the schools look better, creating an enormous problem for the children and the nation later. Unfortunately, building up the graduation's and diploma's image in the public eye, instead of getting higher grades without dumbing down pass/fail points, is useless and harmful if the child cannot get a job. Why did the education system create it? Most are misleading the public, while the public schools do not teach most children enough so that our children become JOBLESS! Add to this a few 150-year-old management problems that worked well during the 1800s, but not after WWI. And we make the public's hard-earned tax dollars pay for it at the highest amount per student in the world. I think that for some reason, our political leaders have done nothing. They ARE smart people. If so, then they have a morbid fear of something, and we must find out what and remove it.
    
    
    
    In addition to the objectives as described, for every individual identified for objectives, there must be an "operating plan" that lists the objectives, and the tools/material/training they need to achieve their objectives, so that both the resources and the results can be verified.
    
    
    
    We need to buy an open-ended multiuser database system that can be very useful nationally to keep everyone informed about the public schools' progress for which they are responsible. With high enough security, automatic tests that are secured can add other management functions to it later. This would cost much less than 10% of the amount of money we waste with overstaffing 13,500 school districts' central management and loading teachers with paperwork.
    
    
    
    In correcting problems of this magnitude, one has to act firmly and quickly. We are a bit late to this party. There will be big job losses and civil disorder problems, but not as big as we will have if we keep ignoring it further. Our governors and state departments of education ignore three important things. The technological developments fuel our industries if they have well-trained workforces. That means that our K-12 curricula must advance closely behind the technologies, with management training for all principals and superintendents, and state education leadership. Teachers need much better subject knowledge and continuing education about new developments in their subjects above the 4th grade. Use the objectives and operating plans in every school as described above.
    
    
    
    It is vitally important to keep educating teachers to educate our children better to improve our workforces. Excellent K-12 education is essential for any industry's workforce to create products and services that are internationally competitive. We don't do that, and it is a big mistake. An organization that produced bad results at the highest cost IN THE WORLD to the American public for 20 years should not make any decisions in a new education system's management structure and standards. They are the worst source to set high school graduation standards and high school graduation standards to produce internationally competitive results. They are to satisfy employers' needs. Many employers met with governors about the poorly trained workers by our public high schools. The education organizations must deliver the employers' needs with the public schools, with much better prepared high school graduates than what they produced. Employers need new technologies to become more competitive internationally. And they need high school graduates like those educated in the top three nations in public education. Unfortunately, our public education claims to be the best globally, and they are far from it. The employees within school districts cannot and should not be blamed. The blame is squarely on the shoulders of governors and departments of education in every state, because THEY SET THE STANDARDS FOR THE STATE, and they created the bad morale within every school district that resulted in a very high teacher turnover in the USA.
    
    
    
    Our objectives to improve public education need to be based on the following trends.
    
    
    • Within one year of any new technology or science introduction, high schools' curriculum needs to include increasing information about the new technology or Science. The Kurzweil chart shows the increase in calculations that a $1000 computer will do, and this man's forecasts are accurate. Please look at this chart and remember what it tells us. We are getting very close to the $1000 PC that can do as many calculations as the human brain does per second. In 20-25 more years, the $1000 computer or PC will do as many computations per second as what all human brains could do or about 8,500,000,000 human brains combined, and the computer will be much smaller than the nail on your small finger. Think about what that means when robots use that much computer power, with artificial intelligence that will be about a million times faster than human intelligence. Read and learn about it first, then think about what good or bad things could such technology do. It does not mean that humanity will be destroyed because we already know how to use that high computational speed to multiply the brain's power during the 2030s. But it will require a well developed and educated and healthy brain. It would not work with an undereducated, recreational drug infected brain. That could take a child who studied hard and did not get involved with drugs out of poverty very easily and could bring us into a world of happiness. The problem is the coming ten years, during which the existing public education could eliminate the possibility because they are reducing our knowledge they are dumbing the population down. It is quite easy to show that with what we found.
      
      
      
      
      
      Dr. Ray Kurzweil is the best technology futurist, with a record of 87% of his predictions being correct and on time. Education leadership should read his books. It would be exciting and beneficial to explain such technology trends in high school classes. More importantly, when we do not incorporate new technology changes in the curriculum or don't know how to make our education a positive experience for most of our children, our education failed us. Example: requiring only Algebra 2 and Biology for high school graduation when we need Calculus and Chemistry plus Physics about 50 years ago, is the same kind of damaging move as lowering pass/fail points in the state test to produce higher grades. We are making a science out of "how to teach less and look better to the public as we dumb down our children so that they cannot get a job."
    
    
    There is a very urgent need to accomplish these steps as soon as possible.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    • The US education department needs to be aware of any changes in the curricula, teaching methodology, teacher training programs, K-12 graduation standards of the three best nations in education, especially in Science and Mathematics, and adopt such new information or standards in our education system TO KEEP OUR COUNTRY COMPETITIVE TO SURVIVE.
    
    
    
    
    The other traditional side of education has to do with the knowledge of subjects specified in the state curriculum to make better decisions in a changing world and to be employable. But that cannot help if the curriculum and quality of education is not competitive with the best three countries in education. The majority of public high school graduates in most of our states cannot read well enough, cannot do basic math, read and write only block letters, and cannot fill out job applications. The poorly performing public education is costing us the most per student in the world. Instead of improving year by year, we teach our children less and less. We do things that stunt brain development in critical areas and use methods that worked in late 1800s but not after the industrial developments that started accelerating after WWI. Our political leadership, lawmakers, and our weak education management do nothing to improve, and the top leadership is certainly smart enough to do it correctly but has not done that for many decades. WHO IS HOLDING A GUN TO THEIR HEAD TO DO NOTHING TO IMPROVE PUBLIC EDUCATION? MEANING INCREASING THE AVERAGE ACT SCORES FROM BELOW 21 TO 29 THAT CORRESPOND TO INCREASING ACT READINESS FROM A VERY POOR 58% TO 80% SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE, BASED UPON ONLY FOUR SUBJECTS TO BE "ACT READY" OF A GRADUATING CLASS TO 80% ACT READINESS? We will show how low "ACT Readiness" is. It requires only four specific subjects' knowledge out of four years of subjects. We used to require 60% minimum knowledge of ALL high school subjects ten years ago to graduate. Consider also that in a state like Tennessee, more than 80% of those who graduate from high school with a diploma are not even ACT Ready. Our political leadership is not thinking that we should improve our children's knowledge to be employable to average ACT score 29 to achieve 80% ACT Readiness because the education management feels that such a goal is impossible. When we have low expectation objectives that are unmeasurable, yearly instead of monthly, and are not a key indicator of success or failure, it will not improve. That is what we had in place for decades, and it is a major contributor to operating education without any guidance to achieve good results.
    
    
    
    Why do our high school graduates' results need to be competitive and be at the same level as the top 3 countries in education? "WELL, THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!" - SAY SOME PEOPLE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION. THEY ARE WRONG. WE USED TO BE THERE ABOUT 50 YEARS AGO. WE MUST BE THERE NOW MORE THAN EVER. THERE ARE GOOD REASONS WHY WE ARE DOING SO POORLY. ALL ORGANIZATIONS WE STILL USE AND DO SOME IMPORTANT THINGS EXACTLY THE WAY WE DID IN THE LATE 1800s. Teacher training declined.
    
    
    
    Every time a new governor is elected, he/she hires a new state superintendent, We had huge technological changes since then. But not a corresponding change in our schools. We allowed education to be controlled by politicians and to be controlled by locally elected school boards WHO DID NOT UNDERSTAND THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES. We have 14,000 elected school boards in the nation, all doing their own thing. These are huge mistakes that can only produce failure. We will deal with this in more detail below. The national and state management structure does not work, and the current structure will not work.
    
    
    
    Our high school graduates will be employed by a company's workforce. Almost all companies' products and services are sold not only domestically but internationally. When we go shopping at home, we will see that many products are made in other countries. Both the quality and profit margin of products depends mostly on the workforce's high school education level for job training or additional college training. If our high school education is worse than those high schools whose products we see in our stores, most likely, their high schools did a better job of educating their high school graduates. Such a situation results in fewer sales, lower profit margins, fewer taxes paid, which results in less national income. Normally that income would be 13-14% to pay for all federal programs. We have been struggling at 3-4%. When that happens, governments have to borrow money, which becomes the national debt, which will be about $30 Trillion for us by the end of 2020. The interest portion of the national debt will be close to $9 Trillion by end of 2020. THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR PUBLIC EDUCATION DOES A POOR JOB.
    
    
    
    So, where is the problem? The ACT scores show very poor results and very poor readiness for college or employment. The ACT shows what our children learned from grade one to twelve. This is the teachers' fault. Right? That is not true. A high school graduate decided that he wants to be a teacher. He makes a fair assumption that the standards for the degree in teaching are at the right level for at least the first five years of teaching and that the same is true, along with the knowledge of the subject that he will teach. It is a fair assumption by the high school graduate that all of these things are true. But they are not true. Both elementary and high school has done a poor job. As a high school graduate, the student has reading and basic math problems, only one subject in Science, Biology, Physics, and Chemistry being more important. The classes were boring, so the student ended up hating the subjects. None of us could learn in a boring class. But we could certainly learn to hate the subject. The trouble is that cognitive AI robotics will start replacing jobs in 2024 that are not based on sciences that are changing under the influence of Space Science, Advanced Mathematics, English, all at the Master's level - if the new high school graduates want to survive. The good news is that the new robotics will be much better than teachers anywhere by about 2029, and the children from then on will be much better educated. But the time before then will become a big problem because we are graduating about three million children per year who are so poorly trained by high schools that they will be jobless. Thirty million of the existing workforce will also become unemployable because they were not educated well enough to be trainable for the new jobs. For a solution, the management structure needs change, management training is necessary for principals and above, the standards for teacher training needs change, so does certification, and performance needs to be measured by a national test plus GPA, and education laws need updating along with continuing education for teachers in the subject they teach.
    
    
    
    There are a few important facts that also apply and are necessary for providing good-to-excellent education. No adult or child will listen, enjoy, and learn from a boring presentation where the presenter does not know the subject well enough and has to go to the textbook for an answer. I attended 29 classes in high school science and math 8-10 years ago. Then I went to the three best countries in public education to investigate their systems in detail; for about 40 years, I spent time several times annually in 10 countries initially that grew to 80 countries worldwide later. I am very familiar with cultural differences that could make or not make excellent ideas transferable to the US culture. I saw some smart children in every class in the US who could ask good questions. The people we need as teachers in the class are one whose personality is upbeat, has a master's degree in the subject, loves the subject enough to keep up with new developments, and teaches with infectious enthusiasm to turn on all children their subject. We could test people for such qualities for a long time. That is what the high performing nations do in education. To achieve that, you could take two tests to find out the best fitting profession for you where you will be happy if you are 20 years old or older when taking these tests. It takes that long for the relevant areas to develop in the brain, but they do not change as you get older. We will always do the best job when we are happy in that job. The test names are the Strong Interest Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Intelligence Inventory. You can download both from the Internet for $100 total for both tests.
    
    
    
    We operate in an "international economy." We trade internationally to satisfy customer needs internationally, NOT LIKE IN late 1800s. We advertise and develop products and services for all countries to be sold everywhere, including other countries. Around 1995 many of us noticed that our high school graduates could not figure out the amount of change for a customer if the electric power went off in the store. This is a grave matter because it involves some brain functions not operating well enough. At my own expense, I spent ten years investigating US education in every state from every angle and did the same in detail in the best three education countries. We were far behind in many areas as if we were using 150-year-old methodologies. In many important areas, from management structure to standards and subject knowledge, our public education is doing exactly that or less. I know, because I found TWO, more than 120-year-old 8th-grade final tests that most high school graduates today could not pass. To ensure that they were real, I found elementary school textbooks for English and Math from the same period, when we had only one dominant industry called agriculture. The world changed a lot since then, and we went from the horse and buggy TO THE MOON. That brought enormous technological changes everywhere, but not in education. The great majority of today's high school graduates could not pass those old tests. We will show them to you further down. IT APPEARS THAT IN BOTH ENGLISH AND MATHEMATICS; WE TAUGHT MORE TO 8TH GRADERS AT THE END OF THE 1800s THAN WHAT WE TAUGHT TO HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES TODAY, MORE THAN 120 YEARS LATER. MANY OF US NOTICED AFTER 1995 THAT YOUNG CASH REGISTER OPERATORS COULD NOT MAKE CHANGE IF THE ELECTRICITY WENT OUT AT A STORE. LATE LAST YEAR, I HAD TO PAY A $23.00 BILL IN A STORE. THE ELECTRICITY WENT OUT, AND I PAID WITH A $50 BILL. THERE WASN'T A SINGLE CASH REGISTER OPERATOR OR SUPERVISOR, WHO COULD FIGURE OUT HOW MUCH CASH I SHOULD BE GETTING BACK. THEY WERE ALL HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES, I VERIFIED. THERE SHOULD NOT BE A SINGLE SUCH POORLY EDUCATED HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE ANYWHERE. < br>
    
    
    
    Why would anyone or a nation do that? What does such a move do to the nation? It dumbs down the people who graduated from public school. That's about 80% of the population. But it is progressive. Every few years, you dumb down the public a little more, the public does not notice, but we are creative people! In about 50 years, the public's knowledge can be downgraded by 50%. This is a very important science related to military operations in psychological warfare, called disinformation theory. It goes back to V. I. Lenin's favorite saying: "If you lie to the public a thousand times, they accept it as truth!" We, of course, would not use it. Not even in the running for an office to be a member of congress at any level. Especially not in elections, not in political decisions, after all, we represent what the public, "The American people want...". This is a phrase that we all hear from politicians often. It rests easy because we would never do to "the American people" what public education is doing. Wait a minute...if our public education is doing that, they are doing it to American children on whom the country's future depends. Who is running public education I wonder. It is not managed the same way as other US government departments, with an annual budget approved, an annual operating plan approved with national quality control to compete with the world's best. Public education is an orphan; standards are not the same nationwide for anything. And each state fully delegated operational and spending decisions to the elected board of each school district. Anyone should understand that you cannot get good results that way. But you certainly get varying low performance when an elected body of the local population is in charge of things that they know nothing about.
    
    
    
    The OECD PISA tests show how we are doing as a country compared to other countries. One country, China, shows only the top four school districts' results. Do not use China, Macao, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan as an education system from which to learn. The parental pressure in these countries is enormous on the child seven days per week to study to be the best. Children normally do homework until midnight, and by 6 AM, they take the train/subway to school. The most effective teaching methodology and teacher selection methodology is in Finland. In our opinion, that method is transferable to the US. Their graduation rate is high, and the grades are also high, with a small difference between the highest and lowest grades. Their teaching methods are very friendly, without pressure, and with playing emphasized. In teacher selection, they emphasize the candidate being in the top ten percent of the Master's class in the subject that they would teach, psychological testing for the right personality for teaching. They will be an assistant teacher for 15 years, but all teachers are totally independent in planning the course's sequence, what books, teaching materials they want to use. There are no discipline problems. Their minorities are black African, gypsy, and Lapp tribes, but with good results by all. Education to a Ph.D. in any field, and medical services are free, worker benefits are better than ours, but they are not a socialist economy. Poverty and extreme wealth (beyond $10 million) do not exist, and UN tests always show the population to be the happiest in the world. National level economic and business planning includes education and medicine on the same level as the major industries. That is the highest level of education in any country. But with the US, SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG, and NO ONE HAS THE COURAGE TO STAND UP AND FIX IT. So let me suggest a few questions to think about.
    
    
    • What do you want to achieve? It has to be a measurable key indicator of graduating student knowledge, both monthly and annually per school, as a goal five years away, and as an objective during the coming fiscal year. What level/percentage of ACT Readiness is to be achieved in graduating classes is a very important part of planning, because ACT Readiness is such a minimal requirement that such graduates will not be employable with the new technological developments coming in 2023-2024.
    • What do you need in: people, their schooling and employment history, DECISION-MAKING AUTHORITY, equipment, money, and automation of testing and actual achievement vs. the objectives of every teacher, principal and other supervisors/management people AND WHY WE NEED SUCH RESOURCES to meet the OBJECTIVES AT ANY AND ALL LEVELS. These things must be known at all levels each month, so that you know what is not working as planned, to decide what must be done to meet the year's objective.
    • Adjust the system nationwide, but you must achieve ACT Readiness at 100% of those who graduate short term. The constant dropping of standards and requirements we saw during the last 20 years MUST BE ENDED NOW. THE PUBLIC MUST BE TOLD THE TRUTH and ALL OF THE TRUTH. The public's hard-earned money pays for our poor public education, and that HAS TO CHANGE NOW.
    
    
    
    
    Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already passed average human levels in the USA with high school education and will rapidly pass us in most fields within five years by 2025. AI-driven cognitive robotics (they can learn faster than a human being and can obtain answers from search engines like Google about anything in milliseconds for the right decision) will replace an additional 30 million from the existing workforce in just a few years as a result of the marginal high school education they were provided by our public schools. A major contributor was and still is our poor public education system, with less than 5% exception. We will show below that our public education did not keep pace with technological developments for about 100 years, which is degrading our workforce and national income. The effect will be twofold. We graduate 3.6 million students annually who would be destined to the workforce of our various industries. The great majority of them, 74-84% are unemployable. Second, the existing workforce, 30 million will also lose their job for the same reason. All these losses could have been greatly reduced if our public education maintained compatibility with the top three primary and secondary education countries. Is that all? Not yet. We have something that is far more dangerous. It is called the "black/white problem" that went unresolved for more than 100 years now. In fact, it became worse during the last 12 years. We have been building a huge powder keg in this area by us doing a very bad job in public education. AND, WE HAVE DONE A SUPERB JOB TO CREATE A FUSE BY IGNORING OUR POOR PERFORMANCE IN EDUCATION, THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE THAT THIS INCOMPETENCE IS LIKELY TO PUT ON THE STREET AT A TIME WHEN OUR NATIONAL INCOME IS VERY LOW. STILL, OUR NATIONAL DEBT WILL BE EXTREMELY HIGH, AT $30 TRILLION BY THE END OF 2020. A RESOLUTION OF THIS PROBLEM WOULD REQUIRE URGENT ACTION UNDER CENTRAL AND NOT STATE CONTROL TO ENSURE RAPID IMPROVEMENT OF EDUCATION RESULTS AT MINIMUM 10% PER ANNUM. I AM DESCRIBING THE STEPS REQUIRED TO DO SO UNDER "ACTIONS" BELOW.
    
    
    
    Having said all that, we are making enormous advances in biological computing as well, and in 5-8 years, it will be possible to use brain implants to increase IQ, thinking, and learning. We should also remember that we can do far better even today if we enjoy the teacher who is very interesting and his explanations are fascinating, and his/her behavior shows that he really cares about helping the children to enjoy his subject. The future from 2030 on will solve the education problem. I have already seen teacher robots and others in Japan, being tested in the real work environment. Buddhist monks had significant achievements in neurology, focusing on making human beings happier, healthier mentally, and correcting physical brain abnormalities that were created by early childhood trauma. According to them, we all have within us some unique capabilities that show up during the teen years, and they are likely to lead to work that we will enjoy the most. That is the vocational area where we will be the best. Steve Jobs went to India, spent one year with such monks, and it had an enormous impact on him professionally. I met him a few times, and as a friend, he was very nice and brilliant and could see things in life that the average person could not. The Indian experience speeded up his mental performance enormously, and that made him difficult to have as a boss because in meetings, he could see immediate solutions to problems, and he wanted to see the problems solved immediately. So the mechanism is within us to be doing something that we are going to become very good at. But the education we get is a "one formula fits all", and it cannot be optimized to the unique individual talents. The basic math, science level does need to be developed in school, and we are not doing it well. But developing them much faster along with the unique emerging talent will be possible within 8 years with AI driven cognitive robotics that will be here by 2023-2024. With their teaching robot by 2028 we will educate much better faster than any human being could do, matched psychologically to the individual student. It will be affordable by any family and will be the right tool to reverse poverty growth. If people in education today do not want to improve much faster than they have been doing to allow our children's deterioration, they will not have a chance for improvement for future jobs, of which there will be many. Big changes are coming between now and 30 years of now, much bigger than what we can imagine for the better unless we destroy ourselves.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
    IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING!"
    Edmund Burke, Irish/American statesman, 1776
    
    
    Those good men, our political leaders and law makers of BOTH parties, did NOTHING that raised the ACT scores!
    
    
    
    
    URGENT ACTIONS NEEDED TO TURN EDUCATION AROUND
    
    
    
    Education (the high school curriculum and graduation requirements) needs to track the technological improvements because our industries will adopt them quickly because technological improvements are released for them to reduce expenses. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon! That carried many technological improvements that mandated the incorporation of pre-calculus mathematics and a year of Calculus, plus Chemistry and Physics. To this day, we have not added them to the curriculum. In a number of states like Tennessee, we are graduating children who cannot read or do basic mathematics well. Our goal of 80% ACT READINESS IS TOO WEAK WILL SUFFICE ONLY UNTIL 2021 AT MOST. THE TECHNOLOGICAL ACCELERATION THAT WE WILL SEE FROM 2020 WILL BE MUCH HIGHER THAN ANYTHING WE HAVE EXPERIENCED BEFORE. A GROUP OF NATIONS ARE ALREADY FOR IT, BUT WE ARE NOT BECAUSE OUR EDUCATION AND STANDARDS WERE ALLOWED TO DETERIORATE. Any improvement by us will require us to achieve a much higher standard because the only jobs that may survive robotics in only ten years will be those that will require a Ph.D. in science, engineering, or economics. To achieve that will not be more difficult for students, but teacher development will require frequent upgrading in education methodology and subject knowledge to a much higher level by 2024. IF WE CANNOT ACHIEVE THAT, THE COMING TECHNOLOGIES WILL BE ABLE TO PRODUCE SUPERIOR EDUCATION ROBOTS BY 2025-2028 TO REPLACE OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
    
    
    
    WE SHOULD not be spending money on other than an excellent education, the needed technology for networking, and the presentation of best teachers and professors in the nation to be used in all classrooms, for maintenance of improving ACT scores 10% per year MINIMUM. But it must be part of a written fiscal plan per school
    
    
    
    There must be a measurable monthly GPA objective in every school and in the school district, which is 10% higher than the prior year's annual GPA everywhere. When performance is not planned and not visible, you get no improvement. When performance is 25% below normal expectation, you can bring it up only with Management by Objectives. What should be our readiness for our graduates to be employable? At or above 90%. The education community cannot be acceptable when they did not produce but only 17% readiness in Tennessee and 26% nationally. Such children will not be employable within a couple of years. We have to be internationally competitive in order to raise our national income high enough to pay off the national debt and improve sufficiently the workforce of all our industries to make our products and services competitive. THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, AND PEOPLE WHO PRODUCED POOR RESULTS IN THE PAST NEED TO BE REPLACED. Reduce school district central management staffing to 2% of total school district full-time employees who do a good job.
    
    
    
    Teach all principals how to do a zero-based monthly budget and GPA-based monthly performance planning to achieve a 10% annual increase in the annual average ACT scores.
    
    
    
    All principals and superintendents must have management training. All people who do a non-management job but are excellent do not make good managers. We have too many of those. And those who managed 50 people with outstanding results may not do well with 500 people under them. The management job gets more sophisticated as the number of employees under the manager grow. This applies to experience with Military management as well.
    
    
    
    American teacher training at universities declined as well during the past 20 years. Our teacher colleges must select mathematics and science teachers from the top 10% of the Master's graduates from both BA/BS and Master's level programs in the single subject they will teach, with close attention to the ideal qualification/personality match for teaching all children above 4th grade. We cannot improve teacher results without doing this. And we cannot improve teacher pay without far better results.
    
    
    
    We must keep only employees who deliver FAR BETTER RESULTS THAN IN THE PAST. Use of zero based budget planning is very important for performance planning FOR ALL MANAGEMENT AND SUPERVISORY PEOPLE. Start with all high schools first against an ACT score objective that is 10% above the prior year's average ACT achieved.
    
    
    
    Justify all jobs based on how they contribute to a high school's operation to increase the ACT score at least 10% over the prior year's average ACT score. If that cannot happen, why keep them or hire them?
    
    
    
    Any school district must communicate TO THE PUBLIC, ESPECIALLY TO PARENTS, only the truth and nothing but the truth about education achievement. Currently, this is totally ignored.
    
    
    
    
    Provide a $100,000 financial incentive for each of the top ten high school principals in the state who exceeded 10% ACT growth, and recognition plaques to teachers and all principals who exceed a 10% higher GPA than the prior year's GPA, or more than 3.5 GPA, whichever is lower. Do not dismiss the power of incentives. In Dubai plus two other countries, a single $1,000,000 annual incentive to the best teacher brought fantastic results for 2018 and 2019.
    
    
    
    
    Graduate only those who are ACT Ready, keep those IN HIGH SCHOOL who are not, for up to two more years.
    
    
    
    
    Keep a voting-public record of all elected school district board members on all votes that would reduce spending or (or except for those that) increase education results. Locally elected school district boards of education do not and cannot contribute to improving our education system. Their voting majority does not have enough know-how. Appointed boards can be very helpful (e.g., in the form of US Public schools is one called a "charter school").
    
    
    
    
    K-12 Education MUST BE INTERNATIONALLY COMPETITIVE because high school graduates feed the workforce of all American companies from design to manufacturing. The quality and price of our products depend on the training of the workforce. We have to compete internationally with our products, and as our high school education declined compared to other countries, our profit margins decline, and so does our national income. We are one of the top spenders in the world per student, but we dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries. We decide K-12 curriculum and depth of subjects within it, teacher qualification criteria, teacher training curriculum competitiveness require very well qualified people on the national level. We delegated everything under education to the states, who delegated almost all decision-making to the more than 14,000 school districts' elected school boards. There are several big problems here. One is enormous duplication of staff, and all of them not the best in the country. Most of them would not understand what we are talking about here. A very flat large organization that depends on locally elected boards cannot have the right management know-how to be successful with the existing prerequisites and experience. And the explanation in its favor that the best advice for how education needs to be improving comes only from the local population probably worked 150 years ago, but today it can only fail. Just look at the record we have documented here. What is most dangerous for the nation is the fact that no correction has taken place in the last 100 years in everything relating to education: management structure and methodology, standards in every job, performance and spending management, employee competence and level of performance internationally in a competitive world.
    
    
    
    Public schools dominate about 80% of the K-12 education in every country. That makes them a "monopoly". A monopoly can control the country to ensure that no other type of school system can enter the country. A monopoly does not have to do an excellent job of staying in control. They can be doing a poor job in most schools as education is in the USA. They promote themselves to the public as a school that is much better than they really are. Understand ACT or SAT scores so that you can understand how well they are doing. Do not trust the state test scores because most have been dumbed down. They say bad things about any other different school, even if they are much better at educating your child. We will tell you more here. Be single-minded about the school for your child. Care only about how well educated their students are by comparing ACT, SAT or NAEP (primary school test) scores. Or find out which is the best high school is with ACT scores, and ask the principal about which primary school is best.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    It is not possible to turn around bad performance without ALL OF THE ABOVE STEPS. In 2016, we were the highest spenders per student in the world. We dropped to 40th in mathematics internationally that year, among 15-year-old high school children, and that is very bad news. We spent and kept spending the people's money for public education, our hard-earned tax dollars. But the poor job we did and do in public education will result in massive joblessness for our children and grandchildren for life. Whose job was it, and is it to deliver one of the highest results for the high spending in education? The money was enough, but where did it go? Certainly not for the right people in the right places in education districts. The remedy would be a forensic audit of medium to large school districts and changing people and projects that have not been productive.
    
    
    
    Reference: Click here for ACT College and Career Readiness/benchmarks.
    
    
    
    ,
    76-84% OF CHILDREN WE GRADUATE TODAY (94-97% OF BLACK CHILDREN!!) ARE SO POORLY PREPARED THAT THEY WILL BE UNEMPLOYABLE! Anyone can keep denying this fact, but our education results are unacceptable for any demographic group. We have been paying the highest rate in the world per student for this unacceptable poor performance. I love my country and will do my best to prevent its destruction, or would be the happiest if some responsible people could show me that I am wrong. Our education is a major civil disorder creator. Are we creating it purposefully to "reduce the population?" In two years time, the public will discover that they paid for education the highest amounts in taxes in the world for decades and their children cannot get a job after 2024. Our "black/white" history has been going on for more than hundred and fifty years, unresolved, and education having the smell of being fraudulent (expense per child from our taxes is the highest in the world, but the results dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries, purposefully dumbing down the population), what we are doing has to be the all-time dumbest strategy that would be the worst problem-solving solution, but here it is! Please, someone, explain this to me in detail and in writing if I am incorrect. some will have to pay, but if we do not admit first, it will be discovered soon, and the reaction will be violent. I hope that I am.
    
    
    
    As a result of our public education, we fell from the top to the bottom of the industrialized countries in important subjects, especially in mathematics. We were told how well our public schools are doing by our education management everywhere -- and now we find that what they told us was not true. THERE HAS NOT BEEN A SINGLE PERSON IN PUBLIC EDUCATION LEADERSHIP WHO STOOD UP TO FIX IT IN MORE THAN 20 YEARS OR LONGER. NOT ONE! Our parents are told by the schools that we are doing fine as students when we are not. If that is untrue, many children may be unemployed for life because we are already two years behind, according to discussions with college professors. Did any governor care enough to do some things that raised the poor ACT scores? NOT ONE. WE HAD THOUSANDS OF GOVERNORS SINCE 1970, BUT THEY ALL PROMISED WHILE RUNNING FOR OFFICE TO FIX EDUCATION AND TO RAISE THE ACT SCORES AND TO MAKE OUR CHILDREN EMPLOYABLE. NOT ONE OF THEM STOOD UP SEEING THE QUICK INCREASE IN EDUCATION EXPENSES. STAFF GROWTH AS THE RESULTS WERE DROPPING AND SAID THAT WE ARE NOT GOING TO KEEP INCREASING THE SPENDING UNTIL WE FIND OUT WHY WE ARE NOT IMPROVING. AFTER WE SEE THE APPROPRIATE IMPROVEMENT, WE WILL DISCUSS WHAT EXPENSES WE CAN CUT AND WHAT EXPENSES COULD GO TO IMPROVE THE EDUCATION RESULTS. NONE OF THEM TOOK STEPS TO CORRECT THIS SITUATION.
    
    
    
    In 1997 I noticed that we are graduating children from high school who cannot read well and cannot do even basic math. This negligence IN EDUCATION MANAGEMENT handicaps students through high school and for life to this day 23-24 years later. Instead of visiting a few schools anywhere in the world at some minimum expense compared to what the indirect cost of this problem will be without quick resolution, education districts hired consultants without looking at a good school that did the job very well, which is the best and also the least expensive solution to solve such problems. Few consultants are good. They are generally people who lost their jobs, and they do consulting until they find a good job again. The spending went into millions, but the problem went unsolved for more than twenty years now. But we are starting again with the money-wasting consultant approach. After rediscovering the problem again, we did the same thing. The problem went unsolved. Teaching reading is not a complex problem. The most effective and least expensive solution is to visit a couple of schools that have the best results both in reading and in all subjects, in the USA or anywhere in the world. It is important to visit and see the best in any field. Find out exactly how they do it. In parallel, find and read a few good articles about how they teach reading and math in countries with an excellent education system, like Singapore, and Finland. They are much better in education than we are. Then you know what you have to do and how. I found an excellent school network called Success Academy Schools in New York. They take poor inner-city black children, for less money than what traditional public schools get, AND THEY GET HIGHER GRADES THAN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN NEW YORK. I walked into a lunch room there, picked out a lively table of 8th graders, and just said hi, telling them how hard their job is that they have to read 50 books every year. This tiny girl jumped up, told me that I was wrong and described what the teacher did to engage everyone's imagination and the fact that 3 days later they could "see" what was happening in their mind in the story, and it was better than TV. That was a fantastic and very specific introduction to teaching reading. When I left, the little girl yelled after me that she is on the 87th book this year!! And I learned the trick to teaching reading from an excellent witness. They all loved reading and talked about what university they will go to and graduate what year. They referred to each other by name and what year they will graduate from their university. By that time, we had a bunch of very enthusiastic children around us. It was a fantastic experience! One always learns best by observing the best people in the best performing group in the best nation, and then doing it yourself. Much better than any other method, and it may cost the school only $3-4K. Hiring a consultant will cost the school $100K-1,000K. It will not work, because to successfully hire anyone, you have to know how to do the job well and what has to be done. How do you determine otherwise how good the consultant is? We become the best in something by brain-learning, but to become really excellent we actually have to jump in and do the job to train the brain, the motor nerves or any other part of the brain to become really excellent about the task. Unfortunately, in most schools, they know a lot less than what is required for excellent performance. When the 20-year ACT record is as bad as it is on our chart, you generally do not have the right people on top for high performance. High performing people do not stay in a poorly performing organization. We will further explain a much more serious problem: the use of calculators created in children in mental mathematics is very important for autonomous mental mathematics that is vitally important in decision-making and analytical thinking in adulthood. We managed to paralyze it by using calculators. It is not too much for a voice response, but in tasks that require fast, automatic calculations like decision-making, which all human beings need.
    
    
    
    
    The following information is to explain some things for the ACT chart and graph below. The ACT measures what our children learned from grade one to twelve. As an annual national test, the ACT is the test of choice for about half of our states, covering about 55% of all graduating students. It appears that most state tests are not good indicators of performance because the state departments of education alter them to show higher grades for less subject knowledge, by dropping the passing points to get a result that graduates more than 80% of graduating children. They call the method Cut Scores in state education departments. We wrote to some governors as much as three times, and we did not get a reply from anyone.
    
    
    
    
    Why is it important to know how the best countries in public education achieve their excellent results?
    
    
    The OECD PISA test is the most respected international test whose results cover the 79 countries' educational performance plus the best four Chinese cities/provinces but not the average best result of China. The best countries in education are among them. I would suggest a few things for consideration for adaptation to our culture. Japanese, Chinese, Hong Kong, and another 3-4 large Chinese communities with excellent results, Taiwan, and Korea all produce outstanding results. A major influence that drivers those results is a parental pressure like no one else has, that results in a slightly higher suicide rate than what is common. I preferred to focus on the others for this reason. About 50 years ago, I traveled on business to about 90 countries annually for about 40 years. 50 years ago, I saw American products valued the most in every country because they were indeed the best. We were operating our industries in an international market then, both in the USA and in other countries, and even more so today. Our public education declined more since then, but we poured more and more money into it per student, and we became the highest spender in the world per student. Other nations improved their public education better than we did and passed us. Today, when you go to most stores, you see that most products are made in other countries. We lost entire markets to them (e.g., all heavy machinery, all electronics, and others). Look at any product. We became the highest spender nation per student, which dropped our children's education and, therefore, our country's future to the bottom of the industrialized nations. Why? Because our education system and schools do not think that our schools compete with other nations' schools. THIS IS A HUGE MISTAKE. The high school graduates become employed by the workforce directly or through university education of various employers. IT IS THE EMPLOYERS' COMPANIES WHO KNOW BEST WHAT LEVEL OF EDUCATION THEY NEED TODAY AND IN THE FUTURE FOR THEIR WORKFORCES. US Education Management never seems to pay attention to this important fact or to things like how the brain's neuronal network operates, where unique capabilities develop at a specific age "window" and in a specific sequence, between birth and about 20 years of age. Learning is possible later, but it is much more difficult unless you kept up learning. Such is the impact of using calculators in school instead of learning math very well. The brain is used for fairly complex mathematics and pattern recognition when critical thinking and decision making. And this is only one example of what kind of decisions have been made in our public schools. It is the workforce of companies and entire industries that create the products and services. If our workforce was educated well, if we kept our schools one of the best than other nations, we would be doing much better. If they knew what the best international education systems are planning and achieving so that our education system would be among the top three in the world, we would be doing much better financially as a nation. That also means a good tax income for our state and federal government. Today our national income is struggling around 3-4%, when it should be at 13-15%. To pay off our huge national debt, which will be $30 TRILLION by the end of 2020, we would need an additional 4% raising the needed national income to 17-19%. Many would say that this is impossible. People who are used to poor performance for decades always believe that they are doing their best. They don't know that the results always mirror how everyone does their job, and they all work very hard. What they don't know without extensive management training, which does not appear to exist in education for some reason, that they are working hard with 19th Century shovels instead of 21st Century machines that can accomplish a hundred times more with one worker with an easier job. Doing a job in an excellent, smart manner and creating excellent results is easier than doing a job that turns out bad.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    Our country's future depends on how well our children are educated today. 15-25% somewhat prepared, like today, is far from enough. Why is it that those good men and women who are our political leaders, our public school management, and our lawmakers of both parties did nothing to increase the ACT and SAT scores to be among the best five countries in education when our spending per student is the highest of all nations?
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    Human behavior, pride, making students feel good about themselves when they are not doing well and such are not always helpful. Being truthful and understanding is better. Even after three years of bad performance, if the boss does not say anything, everyone in that badly performing organization believes that the poor school results may not be bad but average-to-good. It is a normal human characteristic to show your performance in a good light only. But it can happen with lies, or truth or both. Low performing organizations will stretch the truth to LOOK BETTER to their customers, UNLESS THE LAW REQUIRES THE SPECIFIC TRUTH IN SPECIFIC AREAS THAT DEFINE THE TRUTH ABOUT HOW GOOD THEY ARE COMPARED TO THE BEST % IN THE WORLD IN THE SAME PRODUCT OR SERVICE AREA. WE NEED SUCH LAWS, AND PUBLIC REPORTS THAT ARE NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH IN EDUCATION. Imagine the attitudes after 20 years of poor performance. "ACT Readiness" indicates only:
    
    An average of 50-70% minimum subject knowledge (ACT scores 18-23) of only four subjects (like 50-70% good answers in a test) called "ACT readiness," is not a sufficient minimum standard ANY MORE. That means that the ACT Ready child has a 50% or 75% CHANCE ONLY TO PASS THE SAME FOUR SUBJECTS ONLY ON THE FIRST YEAR, FRESHMAN LEVEL IN COLLEGE. That is nothing compared to the level of knowledge we need for employment that can survive robotics for ten years. The level of readiness coming out of high school is not good enough. ACT Readiness cannot be ACT's doing because the state education departments are doing many things to create higher grades for less knowledge. The education system does not want to raise ACT Readiness because 75-80% of those children they graduate are not even ACT Ready. Consider also that ACT's income depends on our school system, and our public schools fight against any change to improve ACT scores. The education system in every state acts against any change or improvement. All the new technology areas are accelerating faster. The graduating requirement from high school needs to be ABOVE WHAT WE HAD A FEW YEARS AGO, WHICH WAS 60% achievement minimum in all high school subjects. We need central control of all standards in every state to increase our chances of recovery. WE NEED TO BE ABOVE 70-80% KNOWLEDGE LEVEL IN ALL HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS. OTHERWISE, IT WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR OUR INDUSTRIES TO SURVIVE. The nations we compete with have ACT 29-34 equivalent average results when graduating. Our high schools give a diploma to more than 80% of graduates in Tennessee, who are not even "ACT Ready" and that is below 60% knowledge level of four high school subjects only.
    
    About 80% of the children we graduate from high school are not even "ACT Ready." Not too long ago, we graduated students ONLY if they had a higher than 60% subject knowledge IN ALL HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS. That was called a D or better grade-performance in all subjects. Many employers and colleges did not accept graduates with such low performance like a D. The current level of performance for being "ACT Ready" is much worse than that. We wrote to governors about this huge problem in states like Tennessee 3-6 times, and no one replied. THAT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR BECAUSE OF THE BAD RESULTS. Too many people from the education organization tell the public "tall stories." No response from a governor three times is not good news. A person who is doing well responds proudly with facts. A strong leader who knows what is happening in his/her organization is honest, truthful, have a good plan to solve the problems, and welcomes suggestions because they may learn something significant and useful. After all, an election is a contest of self-promotion. And that depends on how much one spends on self-advertising. The ACT results are solid evidence of how much a child learned between grades one and twelve. So what? Your child's ability to make a living depends on it. And the future of the entire country depends on it. And they all believe that they are doing a good job. Welcome to our public schools. Honesty with the students and parents so that their expectations for employment are realistic would be most helpful. But they are telling parents that "God did not make all children for college work. But your little Johnny is smart, he can learn a trade, and do well!" is an unadulterated lie because all such jobs will go to robotics within five years, by 2024. I attended 29 classes in 15 different school districts in Science and math. The new state superintendents always attend three classes, preannounced in the newspapers. The most common complaint we heard from high school students during the past 15 years was that the classes are boring. After finding a few interesting things about our education programs, I visited the best three public education countries to learn how they are getting better results. They were averaging an ACT equivalent score between 29-34. Half of the final graduation grade is a test that they take on all four years of ALL high school courses.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
    IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING!"
    Edmund Burke, Irish/American statesman, 1776
    
    
    Those good men, our political leaders and law makers of BOTH parties, did NOTHING that raised the ACT score.
    
    It is useful to look at the 20-year average annual ACT results of Knox County, TN, the state of Tennessee and the USA high school graduates above without any explanations first. You will notice that 20-years of ACT results are flat and not improving. Others' opinions can influence all organizations. I would suggest finding out about the published results first. Just look at the results above. Focus on finding out how well our high schools are doing, looking at their ACT results for 20 years. If they are doing a bad job, like a less than 22 average ACT score, they are graduating with only a 25% knowledge of the high school subjects. THE MEASURABLE RESULT (e.g., AVERAGE ACT SCORE HOPEFULLY above 26) OF ANY MANAGEMENT CHANGE, DEPENDS TOTALLY ON THE ACTUAL MEASURABLE PRIOR FIVE-YEARS' RESULTS OF THE NEW EMPLOYEE(S) PUT IN CHARGE. For the past twenty years, the ACT results were poor. Who can really think that a headhunter will find a good superintendent candidate when we have poorly performing schools almost everywhere. 74-86% of public high school graduates are that low, and we graduate them with a diploma. If the schools are doing an excellent job, like a 29-34 average ACT score, the same as what the top nations are achieving who passed us, their opinion would be valuable. Your child's and the country's future is at stake. That makes primary and secondary public education a very important thing to ensure a normal future for the entire country.
    
    
    
    The high schools have the most important job in any country. After graduation, our children become a national workforce in every industry, in every company, and government jobs. It is the workforce that creates and makes the products and services in all industries. Some high school graduates go on to get university training and be at the high end of the workforce. The quality and price of the products and services depend on how well educated the workforce is AND HOW WELL THEY KNOW WHAT THEIR COMPETITORS ARE DOING. IT IS TRUE IN EVERYTHING THAT IF ONE DOES NOT KNOW ONE'S COMPETITION 100%, THE COMPETITION WILL BEAT YOU WITH ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY. THIS IS NOT A GAME. KNOWING A FEW THINGS ABOUT THEM, SECOND HAND IS NOT ENOUGH. AMERICAN EDUCATION AND POLITICAL MANAGEMENT KNOW NOTHING, ZERO, ABOUT THE HIGH PERFORMING COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION. The best products will be the most popular in features and also in price. And that depends on the high school education of the workforce in the country that creates the products. Government jobs do not make or create money. THEY USE THE PUBLIC'S TAXES. Public education is one of them. Public education depends on the taxes that private companies and individuals pay. That's called national and state income. The national income is normally 12-14%. But we have been struggling with only 3-4% as national income. It is not enough, and it depends mostly on the education of our national workforce. And then the government has to borrow money called the national debt, on which we have to pay a very high national interest to the landers. If you read this, you will hopefully understand that the quality of high school education can raise or lower national income, which depends mostly on our high schools. Our high schools are not doing well enough, and that creates a huge problem. That can destroy a country from the inside.
    
    
    
    The high schools' job is to create a "product," called the high school graduate, who is employable in a job that pays enough to maintain a family of four. Think of the employer as the "customer" for the "student" It is essential to understand that what the high schools teach must be what the employers need, and our schools must teach it very well. NOTHING LESS, preferably more. The reality is dismal in public schools. Read about "ACT Readiness" below. 80% ACT Readiness or an average ACT score of 27 is the minimum for "well enough trained high school graduates today" for tomorrow's jobs until 2024 only. We have a huge technological impact coming in 2023. The employers' needs from high school graduates are increasing with changes in technology. The schools may argue with you about this, but obviously, for your child to be employed, his/her employer must be happy with your child's education/knowledge. By 2023 we will have three major new science groups, A.I.-driven cognitive robotics, space science, and nanotechnology, a change much bigger than what computers created. Every time new technologies arise, they will influence the way employers work and change their jobs. There will be a big change in jobs, emphasizing Mathematics beyond Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics is becoming the most important Science. Reading and good mental Math, English Composition, and Economics are also subjects that today's high school graduates need to master very well. Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will replace many jobs. That means that most of our schools are not doing a good job. The parents must supplement the children's education using a great supply of outstanding and inexpensive learning aids and tutorials on the Internet. We are providing a list of the best below. In the ACT performance chart, the Internet's teaching material is vital because teacher training became weak. The important thing is that the "customer" for the "products" that high schools graduate are the EMPLOYERS. OUR SCHOOLS MUST SATISFY THE NEEDS OF THESE EMPLOYERS, WHO HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING ABOUT OUR POOR HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION TO GOVERNORS FOR THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, WITHOUT ANY HELP BY THOSE GOVERNORS TO RAISE THE ACT SCORES. ANY MONEY SPENDING THAT DOES NOT RAISE THE ACT SCORES IS WORTHLESS IN IMPROVING OUR POOR RESULTS. EVERYTHING IS GETTING MORE COMPLEX AROUND the US PRACTICALLY EVERY MONTH. THE WORKERS NEED MORE KNOWLEDGE, BUT OUR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION, THE ACT SCORES SHOW, IS NOT GOING UP. THAT IS NOT GOOD NEWS.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    This is our biggest problem. The signs are all around us. The old American courage is gone. The ACT results have been too low for 20 years or more. Neither party did anything to fix it. The ACT scores remained low. Our founding fathers' great ideas are trampled. Money is king. Too many of us worldwide hate and even kill each other for ridiculous reasons like different opinions, appearances, languages, or religious beliefs. We have been struggling with a historical problem for more than 100 years. A good education would be critical to fix it. Why is our children's education not important enough for the governors from either party to raise the ACT scores for 20 years or more?! UNBELIEVABLE! Have we all become slaves to something evil? People with extreme wealth and the best education in small numbers can control anything. Not necessarily bad. The key to our survival is "our public schools must be among the best three worldwide in education." Read here how poor we are. And we human beings could have fixed all of this on a large scale, with the right leadership in every state. Poverty in the US is growing at a high rate instead of decreasing. The education system blames poverty for the bad education results. Not true. Bad education creates graduates for low paying jobs only. Bad education creates poverty. US public schools became the most expensive per student in the world. Most of our public schools' education became the worst in the industrialized world. We should not have slogans like "Excellent education for any child!" How about "POVERTY FOR EVERY CHILD!" It is a lot closer to the truth. The American public education system has been declining for a very long time, dumbing down the high school graduates, and "misinforming" parents and the public. The international PISA test shows us too far behind. An article in one of the major American education publications claims that we are number 1 in the OECD PISA tests worldwide. A huge lie, and without any government agency taking any action whatsoever to apologize for delivering poorly educated children who will be jobless. They could be fixing it instead. But they don't. WHY? Politicians propose something because "the American people want it, deserve it or need it." NO THEY DON'T! Their "representatives" convinced the public with promises that are not kept to give them money for advertising to fight and deliver the promises made. This kind of behavior is not so common. EXCEPT FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION. From governors on down, they delivered NOTHING that raised the ACT scores. Our public education is in bad shape, perhaps with only 5% exception. How come we do not hear any support from politicians for actions that increase the ACT scores? Is it the parents who want their children unemployed in the future?? "SPEAKING FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE" must be it! Or is it the governors? Why is it that governors do not make changes in our public education that raise the ACT scores?. Why do you allow education publications to publish not just small lies but major ones, like America is number one in the OECD PISA international tests in mathematics, when we were 25th at best in the past, closer to 40th most of the time? ACT Readiness benchmarks pass you at a 23 ACT score at best, which represents only 22-24% good answers on a test, in 4 high school subjects only, which is very low performance. Why do you allow 74-84% of children who do not even meet ACT Readiness to graduate from high school? And for black students, you graduate 94-97% who do not meet the low ACT Readiness!! Our education system should make sure that 90% or higher ACT Readiness graduates. Not just 16-26%. They cannot even hang on to jobs for a month that way. A decade or so ago, we used to graduate only those students from high school who passed all four years of high school courses above 60% good answers in every single high school subject. In the last few years, 74-84% of high school graduates do not even meet the four subject benchmark test that passes only 25% of subject knowledge called ACT Readiness. Do our political leaders and governors want our children unemployed? And you allow people with such low performance to be employed or to be decision-makers on our education. We are doing what Edmund Burke warned us about in 1776. Such low performance has been dumbing down our children in public schools
    
    
    
    “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
    IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING!"
    Edmund Burke, Irish/American statesman, 1776
    
    
    Those good men, our political leaders and law makers of BOTH parties, did NOTHING that raised the ACT and SAT scores! OUR HARD_EARNED TAXES PAID THE HIGHEST RATES PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD, BUT DROPPED OUR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION TO THE BOTTOM OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES. It would be reasonable if governors could explain why they did this, and what their plan is to restore our MINIMUM high school ACT readiness to 80% of the graduating classes.Those scores show reliably every year what our children learnt by grade twelve.
    
    
    
    
    
    • In business, there is a natural control to help keep the organization healthy. If you do a bad job, like the great majority of our public schools, your customers disappear within a few months, and you are history. No one will use you, and public education would be gone, and someone better would take the bad schools' place. Why do we treat poorly performing public schools preferentially? Their money is guaranteed by law, regardless of the results. AND! The law says that your child must go to one of them, EVEN IF THE SCHOOL IS DOING A POOR JOB ACCORDING TO THE STATE. THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE STATE'S DEFINITION OF IT APPEARS THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS DO NOT HAVE ANY CHECKS AND BALANCES BETWEEN THEMSELVES AND THEIR CUSTOMERS, THE EMPLOYERS. ALSO, THERE IS NOT ENOUGH OVERSIGHT OF SPENDING, AND THEY WASTE A LOT OF MONEY. THAT IS WHY WE PAY THEM THE HIGHEST AMOUNTS PER STUDENT, BUT THEY ARE DELIVERING THE WORST EDUCATION. PUBLIC EDUCATION SHOULD NEVER EVALUATE THEMSELVES. IT IS THE EMPLOYERS WHO SHOULD JUDGE HOW WELL THE HIGH SCHOOLS ARE PERFORMING BASED ON A NATIONAL STANDARD THAT IS COMPETITIVE WITH THE TOP 3 COUNTRIES IN HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION.
    
    
    
    
    
    • Unfortunately, the laws require attendance of PUBLIC EDUCATION by students, without the parent being able to use the actual amount of money spent on a child's education, which is $11,000 from taxes. The education laws also guarantee the schools at least the same amount of money for the new school year from the people's taxes that the school district received the previous year, REGARDLESS OF PERFORMANCE. THESE ARE THE CONDITIONS THAT PRODUCE BAD SCHOOLS AND THE WORST OF MONOPOLIES TO EDUCATE THE PUBLIC. THERE IS NO RISK TO THEM IF THEY DO A BAD JOB. AND THAT IS HOW MORE AND MORE OF OUR SCHOOLS BECAME "FAILURE FACTORIES." But by being so bad in providing education, they are graduating the great majority of our children (75-80%) so poorly educated that they will be jobless, in poverty.
    
    
    
    
    
    • The future (2030) education curriculum comparable to high school today, will need to rise to Master's level UNIVERSITY work (2018) equivalent knowledge by age 18, in 2030. We need a much stronger foundation in basics in both elementary and high schools. E.g., mathematics beyond Calculus, 5-8 different groups of sciences, communications, and economics with psychological analysis included so that the future workers can be re-educated for much narrower, much more advanced knowledge that can be optimized for the natural talent of individual children. The future will bring many highly specialized jobs that will have a short duration with fast technology changes. That will require constant learning for life. This will include inorganic supplemental brain implants by 2030 to raise the human brain capacity and power much higher. Such "high school" education can be accomplished only with AI-driven cognitive robotics that will educate people with a fantastic "Education-in-the-Pocket" product, with knowledge updates literally in seconds. I see the possibility of yet unknown sciences and knowledge popping up as a need from one day to the next, with a short job duration because new developments will overtake the old job that fast. Falling behind in education today is becoming a very dangerous thing in the USA for the 2020-2030 period, although I believe it will greatly benefit humanity. We understand in a very limited way only by formally and informally what we get educated on in the broadest sense. But the knowledge that humanity is to learn as yet is infinitely huge. Yet we act and pass opinions as if we knew everything today, when we know virtually nothing yet.
    
    
    
    
    
    • I have some very good news for tomorrow's students. Today's education is like a "one size fits all suit". Very few teachers are the type of personality and educated well enough in the subject they teach because the university curriculum was not strong enough, who have the knowledge and personality to create very enjoyable classes to motivate all students. They are not the problem, teacher candidate matching to the teaching profession we don't do, although very good tests have been available for many decades. If students feel that the classes are boring, they lose interest in the subject. In the highest performing school systems internationally, for teaching above 4th grade, they test the top 10% of the Master's program psychologically in the needed subject for which a teacher is needed. That gives the school a high IQ candidate who knows the subject better than the American teachers and psychologically a better match for teaching than the American teacher who was not screened and happens to come from the lowest one-third of university performance. Teaching will undergo a huge technological change. Buddhism is more like a guide for a peaceful life than a religion. They may have multiple "gods" for various earthly values (that we call saints), but they would qualify more as spiritual leaders for specific human needs. Many of their monk's two-thousand-year-old teachings apply to the successful correction of neurological and other problems, for which Western medicine does not have good solutions. They and a few other cultures also believe that all human beings have specific and very high talents that would make them in such a job very happy and successful. Steve Jobs of Apple Computer was a good example. One may also see such unusually high natural talent in sports, in talent shows for young children, in music and in Art, but they could be such talents in any vocation. Such talent shows as a naturally high degree of interest in a specific activity that parents should support to have the child become as good as he/she wants in addition to normal school. Unfortunately, the current form of educating groups of children could only support a national curriculum and teacher training and certification standards. BUT Teaching will go automatic with AI and cognitive robotics by 2025-2027. It will be able to recognize such unique talents and psychological interests in the background of an AI component and find out how and what educational option could be more effective for any individual student to maximize his.her interest. And it will be able to do it anywhere without today's education methods, by 18 years of age with a complete university education. AND THE CHILD WILL LOVE IT. Until that new system delivers graduates, the current education system is so dangerously low. The education management system is so poor that the idea of destroying our country from within is a real possibility.
    
    
    
    
    
    • PLEASE LOOK AT THE ACT PERFORMANCE CHART COVERING 20 YEARS. HOW WELL DID WE DO? WHAT GRADE WOULD YOU GIVE OUR ACT SCORE PERFORMANCE? DID IT GO UP IN 20 YEARS as technological changes materialized? Twenty years of bad ACT performance in our public schools will not provide the school employees, the state department of education, or the governors with any credibility for promising a better performance change. They all promised a fix, and changed nothing that would raise the ACT scores. Standards get established from the top of the organization on down. If the education results are bad, who is in charge of education? It is the state's governor. Therefore, the governors, the legislators are also without any credibility because they wasted AT LEAST 20 years and created; as a result, great damage BY NOT INITIATING ANY ACTION TO RAISE THE ACT SCORES in our children's education, on whom the future of our country depends. We will be paying a very high price in lives for this huge mistake, not having remedied for 20 years or longer. The public was hurt badly, and they were not even told the truth. INSTEAD OF EVERYTHING DECIDED BY AN ELECTED BOARD IN EACH OF 50 STATES, EVEN IF THEY ARE VERY SMART AND EXPERIENCED PEOPLE, THEY CANNOT PROVIDE A GOOD, UNIFORM NATIONAL DECISION. THE FUTURE DEPENDS ON HOW WELL WE EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN TODAY. THE 20-YEAR ACT CHART CLEARLY SHOWS WHAT THE ORGANIZATION CREATED FOR EDUCATION AROUND late 1800s, IS STILL THE SAME IN ALL KEY MANAGEMENT AREAS. WE DID NOT CHANGE IN VERY IMPORTANT AREAS TO THIS DAY. IT IS CLEAR THAT AT LEAST DURING THE LAST 20 YEARS, LIKELY LONGER, WE DID VERY POORLY. WE HAVE HUNG ON TO TOO MANY OLD AND INEFFECTIVE WAYS OF MAKING DECISIONS, WITH DIFFERENT LEVELS OF TALENT. THAT WORKED WELL ENOUGH DURING THE 1800s. But the world became much more complicated during the 1900s, requiring much more experienced talent than what we could find in all states. Look at the ACT chart. For 20 years, we are in a bad performance area and not going up. With such results, no one can claim that we have done a good job. We must centralize education-related standards as other countries did about 70 years ago. That is why they passed us. You cannot expect other than poor results if you continue with locally elected board guidance. If one elects such guidance, do you think that the best people will jump up and run for such an election? If you elect such people to guide education to one of the world's best in all 50 states? We delegated virtually all decisions to individual school districts' elected local boards. THERE ARE 14,000 OF THEM IN THE USA. That is insane. The education system is almost the same as what we had in late 1800s for the village school for the surrounding farms. They worked well then. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon since then. That is a huge technological change. But our state education departments still insist that it is the locally elected board that knows the best what our children's school should achieve. The jobs are very different today. And we think that things like teacher training and certification standards, objectives and operating plans of individual schools are good enough for our children to be employed? They are far from good enough. Such standards need to be the same nationally since WWII, and the standards need to be competitive with the best countries in education.
    
    
    
    
    
    • The biggest mistake the education community can make is to be defensive. Unfortunately, they keep doing it. Our children were poorly educated for decades by our public school system. Only total public honesty without any fibbing, and a total restructuring and a lot of school employee training of our system can save our children. The objective must be to raise average ACT performance from 21 to 27 minimum. Our competitor nations are already producing graduates in the ACT 29-34 equivalent range. We all must work together to solve this problem. We certainly cannot do that with the currently used authority WITH THE RESULTS OF THE PAST 20 YEARS, from the governors on down, to set objectives for teacher training, goals and objectives, curriculum, and operating standards. They must be controlled by an independent, highly-educated retired CEO of major corporations who are to employ future HIGH SCHOOL graduates. As part of solving this problem, we cannot afford hateful behavior between black and white folks. WE MUST CHANGE THAT NOW. Everyone must forget and forgive. No conflict is one-sided. Both sides are contributing to the conflict. If you all do not listen, our country will break apart with no winners. The only thing that can save us is the willingness on all sides to get educated as much as possible so that we all become smarter to understand this self-destructive problem. Everyone has a good side and a bad side. See the good in others. We don't do enough of that. You see, none of us are peaches and cream. Education is the only thing that can save us. And we have a huge job to do to recover. Those who created the last two decades of poor performance cannot change the way they work, and how could we trust TO IMPROVE those who made bad decisions, created bad results for 20 years, to create all of a sudden good results. WE HAVE A NATIONAL EMERGENCY BECAUSE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION'S AND POLITICIAN'S POOR PAST PERFORMANCE. How can we trust such people to get us into the top ten countries in K-12 education in the world?
    
    
    
    
    
    • The governor hires the state superintendent of education on whom the education results depend in the state. One wonders if they know how to do their job. The results have been bad for decades. Nothing changes. Do they think that such a person has to come from the education industry, which happens to be a total failure in public education? Yes. You will not find excellent management people in any organization that performs badly, like public education in the USA, except for a few states like Massachusetts and Connecticut. Good performers do not join bad organizations. If they do, they will leave it quickly. When public education hires new management employees at any level, they need a person who has been a successful management talent with large organizations and has turned around such large organizations already. There is no such person in education. We have been producing bad education results for decades, and in the last few years, our public education has declined in results even faster than before. How could that happen? Those who do a bad job always describe their job as much better than reality. Too many people assume in education that if they are hired, they know their jobs very well. They don't want to learn, but their boss and bosses boss does not know either what to do. They could visit an outstanding school to find out what they should do, but "if anyone finds out" doing that is a sign of weakness. As a result, enormous mistakes are made in this paralyzed management environment. Anyone who does not like what they do is prejudiced. Combined with "Lenin's law" of "If you lie to people a thousand times, they believe it as true," this is especially bad for the inner-cities' poor people, because the public school system is not honest with them in simple language, and they give them false hope.
    
    
    
    
    
    • When the people in poverty discover that their child cannot get a job, we will have major problems in our streets. We are very close to that now. This is what we should be very concerned about. AND THIS IS WHY WE MUST USE AN ACT SCORE FOR ANNUAL HIGH SCHOOL AND SCHOOL DISTRICT ACT PERFORMANCE AS THE OBJECTIVE BECAUSE THE ACT GIVES AN ACCURATE INDICATION OF WHAT OUR CHILDREN LEARNED FROM GRADE ONE TO TWELVE. A 90% GRADUATION RATE MEANS NOTHING UNLESS GRADUATION AND THE DIPLOMA REQUIRES 26 ACT AVERAGE OF EVERYONE WHO IS TO GRADUATE. ONE CANNOT IMPROVE WITHOUT KNOWING EXACTLY WITH A MEASURABLE KEY INDICATOR OF PERFORMANCE IS, WHERE ONE STANDS AT THE START AND WHERE ONE WANTS TO BE MONTHLY AND ANNUALLY. IF YOU DON'T WANT THAT, THEN YOU WILL NOT ACHIEVE ANYTHING.
    
    
    
    
    
    • Please remember the following. We found many low-performing high schools and a few great ones also. See them here. The high schools that are on a level where they should be (80% ACT Readiness/subjects knowledge = average ACT 27), produce less than 5% of our graduates. 5% of graduates is much less than what our economy needs to be competitive. We need more like 80%. We met three high school graduates who could not figure out the answer to "50 minus 23". There should not be even a single such 4th-grade student, let alone a high school graduate. Many brain functions use the area of the brain that does basic math. We allowed students the use of calculators during classes and tests starting about 20 years ago. We no longer required memorizing multiplication tables, mental calculations, and even doing mathematics on paper during primary and secondary schooling. Unfortunately, the mathematics area of the brain did not develop fully as a result of such decisions. The brain automatically uses this area very fast for other brain functions such as critical thinking, decision-making or pattern recognition. The states did this by not consulting brain-specialized neurologists in education-related decisions about changing policies or practices. Not teaching Art and music, especially classics, impacts brain hemisphere neuronal interconnection development, impacting the same brain functions.
    
    
    
    
    
    • We have a major problem because our future as a nation depends on today's high school graduates. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon. Our public education has been regressing relative the technological increases in all industries, and it did not keep up with all the new technological developments that employers needed. To make it worse, we are graduating from high school children who could not read and write well enough, read and write block letters only, could not fill out job applications, and could not learn simple things. 76-84% of those children who are graduated with a diploma do not even meet ACT Readiness, which is a very weak qualification level because ACT Readiness is based on meeting only four benchmark subjects at less than 60% knowledge level of those four benchmark courses. THAT IS A VERY LOW STANDARD. We have two 8th grade final tests below as examples, that are more than 120 years old. Many high school graduates could not pass them today. Having attended many high school science and math classes, they were boring. NO PERSON, YOUNG OR OLDER, WILL LEARN ANYTHING IN A CLASS THAT IS BORING. Difficult to believe unless we sit-in at a few school board meetings and look at the past 20 years of ACT performance. Go to a school board meeting, please. Ask how they are doing and what needs improvement. Write down the answers. It will be "we are doing OK, but we need money." Then, write down how much time they spent on "how to improve our children's education." Ask at the meeting what actions they are planning, who is to do what by what date, to improve the ACT scores. Make notes on what they say. You will be asking very good questions after you read this website.
    
    
    
    
    
    • TEACHERS' UNIONS AND OTHER EDUCATION-RELATED UNIONS: YOU ARE PARTY TO THE POOR PUBLIC EDUCATION PERFORMANCE OF OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. OUR COUNTRY'S SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON THE EDUCATION OF TODAY'S CHILDREN. ARE YOU DOING THINGS TO DUMB DOWN OUR CHILDREN? I HOPE NOT. LIKE IT OR NOT, YOU ARE A VERY INFLUENTIAL PART OF PUBLIC EDUCATION, AND PUBLIC EDUCATION IS DOING VERY POORLY. I WOULD THINK THAT IT WOULD BE VERY IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO ENSURE THAT OUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES ARE COMPETITIVELY EDUCATED IF COMPARED TO THE TOP THREE COUNTRIES IN EDUCATION, BUT WE ARE FAR BELOW THEM. WHY ARE YOU NOT HELPING US TO BECOME ONE OF THE BEST THREE COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD IN EDUCATION? WHY ARE WE GIVING DIPLOMAS TO 80% OF THE GRADUATING CHILDREN WHO ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY?
    
    
    
    
    
    • According to college professors in 2018, our high school performance was too low. It requires high school graduates to complete two years of remedial courses before they can start the first freshman courses of a college program. By 2024, our high schools will be not 2, but 4 years behind what our employers need. THAT is going to damage our economy very badly.
    
    
    
    
    
    • What makes school courses difficult for a child? This is extremely important. Bad experiences with something, repeated 3-4 times, conditions children or adults to expect additional similar experiences to be bad. The Buddhist philosophy of "What you think,...you become" becomes "What you believe,...you become" with conditioning. Boring classes create children who learn to dislike ANY SUBJECT, and without any solution to solve the problem, they learn to dislike that subject or subjects. I heard many times from children that school is boring. It is the teachers' job to make the classes VERY interesting and entertaining for the children. It requires a unique personality to be an excellent teacher. Some tests can determine that. The Strong Interest Inventory correlated with the Myers-Briggs Intelligence Inventory can do that. A child who finds school a boring, bad experience cannot do well. Selecting the right kind of profile for teacher training acceptance will make or break any school's performance. We will discuss this in more detail below.
    
    
    
    
    
    • We have another very serious problem. Only better education could solve it. I did not find this problem in other countries. Too many white and black people believe that others are inferior. Our public education level is responsible for that. In Tennessee and many other states, 94-97% of the graduating black students are NOT EVEN ACT READY! IN TENNESSEE, 84% OF THOSE WHO GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL IS NOT EVEN ACT READY, WHICH IS A VERY LOW-PERFORMANCE INDICATOR. Moreover, we spend twice as much in schools PER STUDENT than in those with white students. SO I FOUND A SCHOOL CHAIN CALLED SUCCESS ACADEMY SCHOOLS, WHO TAKE ONLY POOR INNER CITY STUDENTS. GUESS WHAT KIND OF GRADE THOSE CHILDREN ACHIEVE? THEY SCORE ABOVE 90% AND ARE BETTER THAN MOST PRIVATE SCHOOLS. IF THEY CAN DO IT, SO COULD WE IF WE HAD LEADERSHIP WHO ACTED IN COUNTRY'S BEST INTEREST. The locally elected school boards believe in those states that money is the solution, and in most problem solving, including this one, money is not the solution. That just means that elected school board members have no idea how to solve performance problems, don't want to learn how to solve such problems, but they do want the extra $25,000 dollars every year to spend on themselves. Better education requires better teachers trained on the Master's level in the subject they teach. Teachers who come from the top 30% of their university training. Teachers who are a good psychological match for the profession, working under management trained in management, had excellent results. That is the most important solution to this problem in most of our states. A good education is the only remedy to fix both our education and our old black and white conflict problem. We found a charter school with 46 schools in New York City, that takes only poor minority children, the majority are poor black children. They are scoring higher than most private schools! A public education system that operates as poorly as ours can destroy the entire country.
    
    
    
    
    
    • The poor education for black folks and other minorities will be the fuse that WILL BLOW US APART. We warned about this problem as very urgent in 2010. Education would be the only remedy to solve it, but very interestingly, both our politicians and education management would prefer to do nothing about these two huge problems. We need to fix our non-existent teacher selection program, our poor teacher training programs, the lack of management training in education, and why no governor has done anything to raise the ACT scores. PUBLIC SCHOOLS MUST DELIVER MUCH BETTER EDUCATION IF WE WANT OUR COUNTRY TO SURVIVE. Look at the ACT results. The great majority of public schools are destroying our country.
    
    
    
    
    
    • Please look at the graph below. One can verify the numbers on the Internet or by contacting ACT. For the time being, look how high the percentage of high school graduates are who are NOT READY TO BE EMPLOYED OR TO BE TRAINED FOR A JOB each year (those who are not "ACT Ready"). The great majority of today's graduates will be jobless very soon. We will cover this decision also in detail.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
    IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING!"
    Edmund Burke, Irish/American statesman, 1776
    
    
    Those good men, our political leaders and law makers of BOTH parties, did NOTHING that raised the ACT scores!
    
    OUR HARD-EARNED TAXES PAID THE HIGHEST RATES PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD, BUT PUBLIC EDUCATION DROPPED OUR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION TO THE BOTTOM OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES. It would be reasonable if governors could explain why they did this, and what their plan is to raise our MINIMUM high school ACT readiness to 80% of the graduating classes. ACT Readiness means that the graduating high school student passed only four subjects with an ACT score between 18 and 23, which is at or below 25% product knowledge in a test. To make it worse, 76-84% of our graduating children ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY, meaning they don't even know 25% in four subjects only! The ACT scores show reliably every year what our children learned by grade twelve. The state test results are dumbed down regularly by the state education department under the governor. They dropped the pass/fail points from 60% good answers to as low as below 30% good answers each year, for one or more courses that produce higher grades with less knowledge. Let us mention here that a few years ago our children had to pass every single high school course in 4-5 years of the high school above 60% good answers (D score), and in most schools at 70% good answers. We dropped with this, and with many more actions/methods/practices, public high school graduates' knowledge very significantly. We will cover them all.
    
    
    
    
    We would like to remind the readers that not too long ago, a passing grade in any high school subject had to contain 60% correct answers in the tests to earn a passing grade, and a passing grade WAS NOT considered to be a good grade unless it had 80% or more correct answers. But this is not the most important point. What is even more important is that back then, one could graduate from high school ONLY with a diploma if one passed all four years of all high school subjects at 60% correct answers or higher. Today, 80% or more of the high school graduates are not even ACT READY, which means that they are below 25% subject knowledge.
    
    

    We found that no other country graduated high school children so poorly prepared as we did. We lie to the public by targeting 90% graduation AS AN ACHIEVEMENT instead of an ACT average score with STEM ACT READINESS AT 90%. WHO DID THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENTS OF ALL STATES HELPED?? NOT THE PARENTS WHO PAY FOR THEM. NOT THE STUDENTS. THE EDUCATION SYSTEM IS ALWAYS ASKING FOR MONEY, ALTHOUGH WE PAY THEM ONE OF THE HIGHEST AMOUNTS IN THE WORLD PER STUDENT AND THEY DO A POOR JOB, AS ACT MEASURES. THEN WE HAVE THEIR UNIONS, PLUS MANY PARTNERSHIPS NATIONWIDE, WHO COLLECT DONATIONS FROM THE POPULATION FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT MOSTLY, BUT THEY ALSO HAVE NO IMPACT ON OUR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION IMPROVING AS THE ACT SCORES SHOW FOR 20 YEARS. THE GOVERNORS DO NOT TAKE ANY ACTION ALONG WITH LAW MAKERS, THAT WOULD RAISE THE ACT SCORES. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT ALL THOSE WHO COULD IMPROVE EDUCATION DO NOT TAKE ANY ACTION TO IMPROVE OUR POOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS? WHO CONTROLS BOTH POLITICIANS AND EDUCATION TO CREATE UNIFORM DAMAGING ACTIONS OR LACK THEREOF, YEAR AFTER YEAR? SINCE ANY COUNTRY'S FUTURE DEPENDS ON THE EDUCATION OF ITS CHILDREN TODAY, THIS PROBLEM SHOULD BE REMEDIED URGENTLY.

    
    
    This problem is not the teachers' fault, but they are not matched to the profession, the American teacher training is not good enough on the subject training. Much more knowledge is needed, and this makes the classes boring. American teachers typically come from the bottom third of their university classes. Many could not complete their original major, and transfer to teaching because it is easier. Trade jobs are disappearing to robots. Robots can deliver the finished product faster, lower cost, and higher quality than a human can. The exception is unique products that are specially tailored to one person. This is a small and shrinking market, require the best in the trade to work it, no training available because it would require decades of experience.
    
    
    
    Looking at the ACT scores and ACT readiness percentages above and the low ACT Readiness benchmark scores in the table above indicate that the student is only 58% prepared in the top four Benchmark subjects to be passing with one exception: English. For that subject, the benchmark score is 18, representing only 25% readiness only, meaning 25% good answers in a test. But the US education system chose this benchmark for English.
    
    
    
    "ACT READINESS" is a meager target for public education, and it will not get any student into a position of remaining employable longer than a few years unless the student graduates with an average ACT score at 27 minimum today in 2020. The reason for this is that the countries with which we compete to achieve a satisfactory national income have a better-trained workforce than we have due to our long-declining high school education. Those countries graduate children from high school with average performance that is in the ACT 29-34 range, depending on the country. The reason for this is the fact that the success of all industries in any country depends on the training level of workforces in those industries, and that is dependent on the education level of high school graduates.
    
    
    
    What has been very disturbing during the last ten years is the discovery that our own department of education in each state is not doing anything about the deterioration of our public education. I wrote to the governor seven times in eight years about what we observed. Not one response to my questions from anyone. Then I wrote to the next governor four times, and again not one response from anyone. The things that should be done very well were and are not done well. And the bad things that should not be done were done - very well. It appeared and appeared to this day that most is done purposefully to ensure poor results.
    
    
    
    In the last few years, 74% of public schools graduates nationally, and 85% of those graduated in the state of Tennessee and other states are not even ACT Ready. This is accomplished with a method called "cut scores," done by the state education departments, who describe this method as a beneficial alignment of student performance in order to raise the ACT scores. Then they present a fairly complex looking mathematical manipulation and changing of the pass/fail percentages in one or more subjects to achieve the desired outcome in graduates.
    
    
    
    The pass/fail percentage went from 60% to 25% or less below, but we kept graduating 80-85%. Did the students’ knowledge go up or down during this period? IT DROPPED LIKE A STONE.
    
    
    
    The departments of education require elected boards to set objectives. But they don't know what kind of objectives work or not, and they also don't know that a written operating plan is a necessity without which no improvement is possible. And that makes the great majority of our high school graduates unemployable even for minimum wage jobs.
    
    
    
    WE ARE ALWAYS ONE OF THE FIVE HIGHEST SPENDERS IN THE WORLD PER STUDENT. EVEN IN TENNESSEE WHERE WE DO NOT SHOW WITHIN THE SCHOOL DISTRICT'S EXPENSES, THE EDUCATION-RELATED MORTGAGE EXPENSES THAT ARE HIGH, LEGAL EXPENSES AND GOD ONLY KNOWS WHAT ELSE.
    Countries like Finland are delivering their fabulous education results at a level that is above average act-30-equivalent, and they do it 18% lower cost than ours per student when their cost of living is higher than ours. The teachers come from the top 10% of Master's programs in the subject that they will teach from grade 5 onward. The teaching methodology is so good that it eliminates the necessity for testing until the middle of high school. The teachers have total freedom of what books they want to use, or teaching aids or nothing. The teachers meet weekly to decide what problem they want to solve, but the students' testing is tougher once they start testing, because they not only grade tests on the basis of correct answers like we do, but they also score the method that the student uses to decide what the right answer is. They have the best reputation of any vocation because they had outstanding results for more than twenty years. Finally, at the end of high school, every student must take a matriculation exam in Finland, and in other countries as well. That is a test that covers all high school subjects. Their pay is average, but there is never any complaint about the pay. Our teachers would love to be treated the same way, but the qualification requirement to enter teaching is much higher In Finland, and they are treated well because they produce excellent results. Our teachers are not respected as well because they produce bad results, although that happens because the states have very low teacher education and certification requirements. US teachers generally come from the low 30% college performance area, and many quit their original major and transferred to teacher training because it is easier. Both the teacher qualification for entering teacher training and graduating from it needs to be much better than what it is today. What we do in most school systems is to switch teachers to teach subjects for which they were not trained, we allow teachers poor treatment by students as well as their superiors who are not management trained, and that results in a very high turnover among teachers. There are parents who use the schools as a baby sitting service at taxpayer expense, and the education community is complying because they are afraid of law suits by parents. The education system fails to recognize that they are to teach our children well enough to be employable long term, the schools' job is to educate our children well, which they fail to do, and to keep informing the public about the truth concerning their performance, but they are certainly very vocal about standardized testing, and anyone measuring teacher and student performance. It is embarrassing to witness such poor behavior and poor performance. What is even more disturbing is that our governors of either party, to whom education reports, do nothing about improving our public school performance. Since 1970 we had thousands of governors in 48-50 states, the education expense per student sky rocketed, but the student performance declined and other nations passed us. The big question is why didn't a single governor reduce the wastful expenses of which we have a significant amount, and caused such moneys to be transferred to principals' control to improve teacher performance, and why not a single governor took a firm stand and said thar we are not going to increase spending per student, until we find out why our public education is performing poorly, fix the problem and we see at least 2-3 years of good increases in ACT or SAT performance! Why did we not do that in any state for the past 50 years? ARE the great majority of our public school districts' management, especially their elected school boards, afraid of something if they do not remain poor performers? Or is the entire management of public education, including governors, have no idea how to do a good job and produce much higher results with our children? Why is it that the great majority of 48-50 states performed so poorly for the past 50 years? Don't you believe that we should know the TRUTH about these questions to solve the problems we have?!
    
    
    • We do not have a "subject-knowledge maintenance" program covering every school year, and our students retain only 25-30% of the previous year's subject knowledge, let alone all high school years' subjects.
    
    
    
    • We are approximately 100 years behind the high performing nations in teaching methodologies, management, student-teacher relationships. We do not match teacher candidates to the teaching profession before selection for admission to teacher training. Teacher education declined to a poor level, yet we pushed out the older teachers who were better trained, and the new young teachers' turnover rate became very high. I have never seen so many things done wrong in any other organization during my life. It is quite disturbing how such things can happen in large numbers. It may not have happened accidentally.
    
    
    
    • Curriculum, knowledge level in mathematics, sciences, reading and language studies, teacher training, management training are poor. They all have a management structure that makes it impossible to improve, and lacking proper objectives and operating plans for improvement. I'll give you an example. Decisions are always better if one involves the smartest people in important decisions. The opposite of that would be picking the people who know the least to make the important decisions. We not only make our own decisions about things like what subjects should we teach teachers in teachers colleges, or graduation requirements from high school, or how much we should teach in trigonometry, or slid geometry, or calculus, or should we make sure that children are very good readers by grade five, after all, if they are not good readers HOW ON EARTH ARE THEY GOING TO STUDY AND LEARN TO FINISH THEI LEARNING TO BE EMPLOYABLE? NOT JUST FOR TODAY! NOT JUST FOR % YEARS AGO BEFORE GRADUATION! BUT CERTAINLY MORE THAN ENOUGH AFTER THE GRADUATION DATE! AND SHOULD THAT EDUCATION BE UNIFORM AND HIGH QUALITY FOR ALL CHILDREN IN ALL STATES IN THE UNITED STATES. OUR EDUCATION IS NOT UNIFORM IN MANY DIFFERENT AREAS BY STATE OF WHICH WE HAVE 50, OR BY SCHOOL DISTRICT OF WHICH WE HAVE ABOUT 14,000. If the decision making on all these things would be made by one highly experienced and educated people, represented by employers, whose needs the high school graduates would need to satisfy, would that be the least expensive way to the best decisions? If not, could you explain why, considering that we have faster and faster technological changes both behind us and even faster changes ahead of us. If I ask education management people about why do we put so many decisions on the shoulders of elected local school board members. That decision was made around late 1800s by the way when we had only an agricultural economy everywhere. Whenever I ask someone in a management position in public education about why we are delegating so many important decisions to the local school board, the answer is "Because it is the local people who know best what our children should learn to be successful in the future." This explanation happens to be the same as what we told the public in late 1800s. It was shocking, because in a society that was dominated by farms, the local farmers guided what the education should be for the child who would go back to the family farm to do an excellent job. AND BACK THEN, THIS WAS TRUE AND THE SMALL SCHOOL AND TEACHER DID INDEED ASN EXCELLENT JOB. But then we went from the horse and buggy TO THE MOON!!!! That changed everything in more than 500 industries, not just agriculture any more, the children we educated in one city but many ended up in other towns and countries for work, we developed close to a thousand industries, and it should be very obvious that the new technologies changed many jobs that employers had and public education was not hustling to keep the education up with the technological changes, at least initially. But other countries changed and started passing us around 1950-1955. American education had no idea how the other nations passed us, and we started hearing slogans a lot, like "We are the best", as other countries passed us. We still do not have any idea how our international competitors are doing. They do not believe that other countries' performance is necessary to know in detail. I found out that they knew exactly how we were doing, but we refused to learn and we fell further and further behind the technological changes, down to the bottom of all industrialized nations. DOES OUR POLITICAL AND PUBLIC EDUCATION REALIZE WHAT THIS MEANS?! This is the worst thing that happens in business, and such companies go out of business. Education does not go out of business. But the schools told too many parents, single mothers in poverty, who had limited understanding, that "Miss Johnson, please do not worry about little Johnny. God did not make all children college material.. Johnny is a smart boy, he can learn a trade job real well and make good money with it.. But education management does not understand the trends that control education unfortunately.
    
    
    
    • School boards have no idea how to background check, interview, and hire the right talent for any job, and for this reason, they hire superintendents who were unsuccessful and never bothered to learn how to manage a school district's specific average ACT score's growth. The ACT and SAT are national tests that consistently and accurately measure graduating students' knowledge. ON THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION LEVEL, THE STATE TEST PASS/FAIL POINTS ARE REDUCED SELECTIVELY BY SUBJECT IN ORDER TO SHOW HIGHER GRADES FOR THE DECLINING EDUCATION THEY PROVIDE. The failing points can be reduced as much as from 60% good answers on a test to below 30% good answers, GRADUATING MANY CHILDREN WHO WOULD OTHERWISE FAIL. There are no central country-wide standards in the USA for objectives, graduation, performance measurements such that it actually damages public schools' graduates.
    
    
    Other nations improved their education systems with more expertise, improved teaching methodologies. The reason given for this was that delegating total education responsibilities to the states happened "because it was not in the US Constitution at the USA's formation and approved in 1789. Why was this a bad reason? Because the results are BAD. LOOK AT THE ACT SCORES! The US Constitution was amended as needed since then, 27 times! The first ten amendments are known as the Bill of Rights. Then all states delegated all management and other decisions to the elected boards of local school districts. We have more than 13,500 of them in the USA. They are all doing their own thing without centralized standards, and we hear even today from them that we control education on the school district level because "THE BEST GUIDANCE FOR OUR SCHOOLS AND CHILDREN COME NOT FROM THE NATION CENTRALLY, BUT FROM THE ELECTED LOCAL SCHOOL BOARDS REPRESENTING THE LOCAL POPULATION." THAT REASONING IS FROM THE MID-1800s. It was appropriate then. But after we went from the horse and buggy TO THE MOON, other nations kept education up to date with the huge technological advances. It is difficult to understand why such a very limited decision still dominates US education, with politicians in control who do not seem to understand that their actions are damaging our economy on a large scale. This idea worked well until about 1900, for more than a century. PLEASE CHANGE SUCH DECISIONS TO ONE INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONAL GROUP OF RETIRED LARGE COMPANY CEOS WHOSE COMPANY IS INTERNATIONALLY SUCCESSFUL, BECAUSE THEY REPRESENT THEIR FUTURE EMPLOYEE NEEDS THE BEST. THOSE ARE THE KIND OF PEOPLE WHO COULD APPROVE NATIONAL STANDARDS: TO CONTROL GRADING AND TESTING STANDARDS, TEACHER TRAINING STANDARDS, TEACHER SELECTION, AND QUALIFICATION STANDARDS, K-12 CURRICULUM, TEACHING METHODOLOGIES, TEACHER COMPENSATION POLICIES, TEACHER PERFORMANCE EVALUATION STANDARDS NATIONALLY. The education results have been poor for 19 years or more under state political control. The entire nation's standards need to be raised to improve results. The standards need to be made by an independent, highly educated standard, and the states are to improve the education results under those standards.
    
    
    
    The small single-classroom school houses did a good job in mathematics and English focused on mostly agricultural production, and very simple manufacturing. Please look at two 8th grade final exams more than 120 years ago: one is from 1895, and the other is from 1912. We are showing here how much tougher the 8th-grade education and tests were more than 120 years ago. Many of today's high school graduates could not pass these eighth-grade final tests. But then, something happened after WWI. We started advancing in more and more areas of sciences and mathematics, AND WE WENT FROM THE HORSE AND BUGGY TO THE MOON, AND THESE EFFORTS RESULTED IN MILLIONS OF NEW DISCOVERIES IN THOUSANDS OF NEW SCIENCES, ENGINEERING, MEDICINE AND WE COULD GO ON FOREVER. MANY OLD JOBS DISAPPEARED, BUT THE BIG CHANGES CREATED MORE NEW JOBS. EDUCATION HAD TO INCREASE FOR THE NEW JOBS AT ALL LEVELS, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL AND HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL, UNIVERSITY LEVEL, AND GRADUATE LEVEL LIKE DOCTORATE PERFORMANCE IN MOST FIELDS. AFTER WWII, EDUCATION ON THE ELEMENTARY AND HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL INCREASED ACCORDINGLY IN MANY COUNTRIES. BUT NOT IN THE USA. When hiring people within school districts or on the state level, those hiring have no idea how to check the background and how to interview. In many cases, they think they know what the problem is, but have no idea within school districts what they need to change to get better results, and don't know what kind of talent they need to hire. BS is the rule of the day. Political control and political management influenced all education-related decisions more and more after WWI. Even after the millions of technological advances, we stayed with the old slogan of "The best decision can only come from the local population's elected school boards to improve education." This idea worked well in the agriculture-based economy of the 1800s, but not after WWI when we went from the horse and buggy to the moon, with incredible technological discoveries that are accelerating faster and faster as you are reading this report. But American public education broke with the old belief of the 1800s coupled with the power of law-making politicians whose fuel became the worshiping of money FROM LOBBYISTS. Lobbyists are generally retired Congress members, who changed from being paid off by lobbyists to being the lobbyist for more money. Not all of them, but enough in numbers to control Congress's decision-making for specific interest groups or industries. We are not a Democracy that we try to sell to other countries. Even the Greeks decided about two thousand years ago that democracy creates huge disorganization and conflicts followed by failure. BUT WE HAVE BEEN SELLING IT TO OTHER COUNTRIES, combined with creating incredible losses of our young people and leaving the country in an economic mess. In Japan and Germany, we stayed and helped to rebuild the countries. We benefitted economically by doing so. But most importantly, we created close friends and allies from two powerful enemies. But in many other cases, we left quickly after destroying the countries. Without help to recover. This reminds me of Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and others. They have to rebuild. Something to think about.
    
    
    
    By WWII, we were the only one of the industrialized nations who stayed with the late 1800s's belief of "The best decision can only come from the local population's elected school boards to improve education," that held us back as others passed us. And important to note that politicians always propose something in the name of the people. "The American people want "XYZ" that I am proposing." It's possible that 0.0001% of the public heard something about it. There is a limit at which point we can drop down to the "level of cavemen, " losing everything with these old beliefs as we are getting dumbed down. We are only halfway there in 2020 - exactly. The closer we get to that point, the more difficult recovery will be. We are too close to that point beyond which recovery is impossible with a law making body of former lawyers mostly, who can argue for and be part of either side that pays more. This is not negative thinking. It is called trend extension in decision making. In this case, you look at a reliable measure of annual performance (ACT) trend for ten years minimum compared to the trend of your top ten competitor countries' annual performance in the same period - it doesn't look good.
    
    
    
    The philosophy born 200 years ago, about managing education is the same today: "The best decision can only come from the local population's elected school boards to improve education," is the most damaging to our future success. Why? Because it applies to all planning, if any, all management of execution to non-existing measurable objective, and lacking any management know how to change the way the organization works, without which the results cannot change. We will not get smarter ELECTED school board members in ANY OF THE 13,500 - 14,000 school districts, with their incredible duplication of people and expenses, and the education results that will make almost all of our children jobless! You simply cannot get well enough educated school board MAJORITY by electing them, who are experienced enough to make equally good decisions today, that is competitive with the best nations in education. Our children's highest success or dismal failure in school depends on how well our schools educate them. BUT more importantly, OUR COUNTRY's ECONOMY depends totally on our children's education today. Having elected school boards during the last 100 years is one reason why our public education is dropping like a stone. But we found ten other actions that ensure failure, performed by the state education departments with the governor's blessing - everywhere. Besides, the elected local school boards duplicate functions where decision making SHOULD BE uniform for the nation, and it is duplicating staff in more than 13,500 school districts, with good people who do not have the right education and experience for decisions that vary among them. This is almost like 13,500 blindfolded people getting into their cars, but have no idea about where to go - but even if they did, there is no way they can succeed. You do not need any more proof than the poor ACT records for decades, which are among the worst in the industrialized countries. The state education departments, the governors and lawmakers who do not seem to be brave enough to stand up to the education lobby. No laws were proposed that would require changes within the educational organizations. Why not? The poor results are created within those organizations with the "help" of education lobbyists, who could vote out any politician whose proposal they do not like. This is a classic, bad management structure that can only go down, where the education organization is poorly performing, obviously because of poor, insufficiently educated self-serving decisions. Such decisions must be made centrally as in every country, except in ours, with the best people we can find, with this central decision-making group's responsibility to set standards IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST! The education organizations MUST be implemented with excellent performance: the nationally centralized INDEPENDENT management group directs in objectives and monthly operating plans within each school. If many other countries figured this out by WWII, WHY COULDN'T WE?! We are spending a fortune on duplication of people in every state AND EVERY SCHOOL DISTRICT BOOSTING THE SIZE OF CENTRAL MANAGEMENT IN ALL OF THEM, without knowing exactly what they are to do and how to do it. This just makes every school district worse. There are standards for the size of central management organizations, and if they grow beyond it bad things happen with performance. Operating with silly unmeasurable objectives backed by a very low-performance target like ACT 21 creates many problems that also drop performance. We do not seem to have the management experience to know anything to create good results from the top down. Worst of all, most people in the education communities' management think they know enough because they were hired. No person in any school district wants to visit school systems that perform better, and they do not want to learn anything to create better results, BECAUSE THEY THINK THAT SUCH VISITS WOULD INDICATE THAT THEY DON'T KNOW ENOUGH TO DO THEIR JOBS WELL. Morale is bad and justified. The results could not be worse. The structured satisfaction surveys that the states use are not a good choice because the outcome is limited to fixed questions and answers. Such tests can steer the result to a conclusion like "we need more money." When morale is bad or unknown, one needs an open-ended test where the employee steers the test. Such highly secure online tests are available. The responsibility for bad results rests with governors, the state education organization without exception, most superintendents, but we are not including principals and teachers, who are trying hard without much help from above.
    
    
    
    
    School boards started gathering a bad reputation by the late 1800's. Relying on the important decision's of standards, curriculum, and elected school board members having the highest authority for decisions, when they know far less about education than an assistant teacher. With majority of voting decisions within aboard, they were not trained and experienced in management. Same in subject knowledge, in determining if we need to improve and by how much per subject. Or in teacher training, or interviewing people to be the new superintendent, who has a history that demonstrated increasing the national test or any measurable results, such an elected board as a group decision, simply cannot do well. But to give such authority by law to such a group shows not enough skill from a governor on down to change with the times. So, American education became the most expensive per student and dropped like a stone to the industrialized countries' bottom. Not being able to improve teaching but making teachers' jobs more difficult, not being able to hire good superintendents whose future depended on the elected board, who have no idea what bad performance is, have no idea how to fix a problem by throwing money at it. You see, having a boss who is unqualified will not be able to attract good experienced management talent who can improve things. The board members are good people who want to do good. Still, most of the elected board is not trained and experienced well enough to direct even a 50 person organization, let alone one with 100-10,000 employees. With political influence without "measurable academic achievement objectives" in every school with a national test and not a state test, it is not the path to success. Having untrained, inexperienced people for the jobs to prepare our children for building a better tomorrow is not the path to success. The qualifications, standards and objectives within education must be centralized with the best highly educated and experienced people who are independent of public education. The education of our children cannot be based on those organizations who could not deliver better results for decades and presented to the public a much better picture than reality was. They lied to the public, "purposefully misleading the public, who pay for it all." It is a fraudulent action that needs to be investigated. And to prove our point, look at the evidence presented below, and after you do, YOU DECIDE what you want for your children, grandchildren, and your country. But you have to focus on ACT score results. The ACT score shows what the child learned from grade one to twelve.
    
    
    
    

    THAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT TASK THAT OUR HIGH SCHOOLS ARE TO ACCOMPLISH. THAT WILL HAPPEN ONLY IF THE ELEMENTARY AND MIDDLE SCHOOLS' PERFORMANCE IS OUTSTANDING. DO NOT LET ANYONE MISGUIDE YOU BY SAYING THAT "THERE ARE OTHER THINGS THAT ARE JUST AS IMPORTANT." BETTER EDUCATION IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING FOR BOTH: OUR CHILDREN AND OUR COUNTRY. THE CURRENT LEVEL OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IS EXTREMELY POOR. WE WILL SHOW BELOW ALL ACTIONS APPEAR TO BE PAST AND CURRENT ACTIONS, DONE PURPOSEFULLY, TO DUMB DOWN 95-99% OF OUR NATION. We will explain to you what you need to know to pick a good ACT score target. Never let anyone tell you, referring to your child, that God did not make all children for college. What is true is that God did not make MOST children jobless. BUT OUR STATE PUBLIC EDUCATION DEPARTMENTS UNDER THE GOVERNOR CERTAINLY DID BY NOT TAKING CORRECTIVE ACTION! OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS HAVE BEEN DECLINING FOR A LONG TIME AND GETTING WORSE. THEY ARE DOING IT AT THE HIGHEST COST IN THE WORLD PER CHILD. YOU SHOULD ASK YOUR GOVERNOR VERY POLITELY IN WRITING ABOUT WHY CERTAIN THINGS IS DONE, BECAUSE IT APPEARS TO BE DAMAGING, and YOU WOULD LIKE TO UNDERSTAND IT. WE DID NOT GET AN ANSWER. MAYBE YOU WILL.
    
    
    
    A VERY IMPORTANT POINT: We, and probably every country, can have emergencies that take more money to survive, at a time when we are disabled to make more money. It could be an infectious disease for which no defense exists when it breaks out. It could be a natural disaster that comes as a surprise, like a major earthquake or a volcanic eruption, that is not predictable. Or it could be believable, but we dismiss its possibility. It was like a bloody revolt when tens of millions of people could no longer get a job because their educators did not teach the information they needed. We must realize that to have a safety net, we are dependent on the quality of our public education, creating a boring school that does not create good results. We set the wrong standards, with 13,500 school districts' elected boards. For that to happen, we would need to enforce having a much better trained and managed public school system that operates with the right objectives and follows an annual operating plan with monthly GPA objectives that are 10% higher than the prior years' actual performance. We must understand that people who worked in a poorly performing organization view their performance as normal, do not want objectives, or be measured, and view anything above 2-3% improvement in performance as an impossibility. Look at the chart covering nineteen years. We never managed to increase the performance more. Schools never operated under a performance objective with monthly operating plans focusing them on what they must accomplish. School employees just came to work, doing things the same way as they did a hundred years ago. When you do not change the way you work, you will keep getting the same results. That is why the ACT performance does not improve; it just stays in a poor performance area.
    
    
    
    Charter schools are a different version of public schools. They are also USA public schools. Traditional public schools like to publicize "facts" like charter schools are not better; they take money away from your children's public schools. All of which is "true" (wink, wink). Please understand that when the truth is bad, the offending people have to make up "facts," they lie, and they DO NOT WANT TO CHANGE. VERY UNPROFESSIONAL. As a result, they are destroying the employability of most of today's children. So what do you have to do to look better? You follow uncle VLADIMIR LENIN'S ADVICE, WHO SAID MANY TIMES THAT "IF YOU LIE TO THE PUBLIC A THOUSAND TIMES, THEY WILL ACCEPT IT AS THE TRUTH." And disinformation theory was born. Charter schools have an appointed board of business leaders and members of the local public school management and teachers - UNFORTUNATELY. The traditional public schools have an elected board of local people AND PAY THEM in most cases. To win a school board election, it will cost about $15,000 in advertising. To win a governorship, you need to spend $10-15 million in self-advertising. In one case, a governor candidate spent $3 million to get elected. His opponent spent $15 million and won. AND INTO POLITICAL OBLIGATIONS WE GO IF YOU DONATED ENOUGH TO THE CANDIDATE. HOW GOOD THE CANDIDATES ARE, DOES NOT MATTER. All of them promise to fix education when running for office. AND NONE OF THEM DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. Please do not object. Just look at 20 years of ACT scores and the fact that about 80% of we graduate are not even ACT READY - and that is a very low measure of knowledge compared to what employers needed. The traditional public school board member gets $25,000 per year, as an example, in Knoxville, TN, for at least four years, and there are no term limits. Naturally, the school board member does not care about the money (wink, wink), and will understand what they have to do to improve the already "excellent" performance of the school system (wink, wink, wink!) by screaming, "We need more money!!!". The prerequisite is a high school diploma, and the candidate does not know anything about education and how to improve it. Look at the comparison of charter vs. traditional public school performance right here. The charter schools get less money than the traditional low-performing public schools do. Black student performance is generally very low, with a MINIMUM of 94%, not even ACT Ready. I heard all kinds of ideas about why. I decided to find one that accepts only poor, black, inner-city children. A charter school started in 2006 in Harlem, called Success Academy Schools. Today they have 46 schools and a waiting list of 19,000 families. Their results are excellent, and they passed almost all private schools. I visited them, but I could not convince any school districts to visit and learn. NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON VISITED THEM FROM TRADITIONAL PUBLIC SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. They even put their curriculum and teaching methodology on the Internet free for any school. There are too many people in most traditional public schools who are taco short on the combination plate. IT IS RECOGNIZED THAT THEY ARE DOING A POOR JOB THAT DAMAGES THE CHILDREN "THEY EDUCATE POORLY." THE HUMAN IGNORANCE AND BIG EGOS MOSTLY BY PEOPLE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION WHO REFUSE TO LEARN AND DID NOT KNOW ENOUGH WHEN THEY STARTED, TRYING TO HIDE BAD PERFORMANCE THAT IS NOTICED BY MORE AND MORE PEOPLE IN PUBLIC. WHY IS IT THAT BOTH PARTIES AND ALL GOVERNORS AVOIDED MAKING CHANGES IN PUBLIC EDUCATION THAT WOULD INCREASE ACT AND SAT PERFORMANCE TO INTERNATIONALLY COMPETITIVE LEVELS?
    
    
    
    We would like to explain something very basic about debt and excessive spending in general. If you must pay for something right now, but you do not have the money, you can borrow that money. But the amount you must pay back will be higher. The difference is called "interest." You will end up with less money in the future because you will have to keep paying interest on the money you borrowed ages ago. That's not a good thing. How big or small is the total interest due? Is it insignificant? When I found out, I was shocked. Our national debt is 23.6 TRILLION dollars on March 24, 2020. The total interest IS ONE THIRD OF THE NATIONAL DEBT AT 8 TRILLION DOLLARS! The COVID-19 virus problem will increase it more rapidly because we had insufficient money in reserve. AND THAT IS A BIG PROBLEM. THAT BIG PROBLEM IS OUR POOR HIGH SCHOOL PERFORMANCE THAT HAS BEEN WEAKENING THE WORKFORCE IN ALL INDUSTRIES AND THAT REDUCED NATIONAL INCOME, RESULTING IN THIS SITUATION. WHAT WILL WE DO IF A HURRICANE HITS THE EAST COAST OR A VOLCANIC ERUPTION OR A BIG EARTHQUAKE HITS US? ALL OF THEM ARE HIGH PROBABILITY EVENTS FOR THE USA. HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION MUST BE INCREASED ASAP TO A NATIONAL AVERAGE 27 ACT, BECAUSE THE CURRENT LOW PERFORMANCE IN BOTH PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION, WITH 3 OUT OF 4 GRADUATES NOT EVEN MEETING THE LOW "ACT READINESS" STANDARD HAS BEEN WEAKENING OUR NATIONAL WORKFORCE FOR SEVERAL DECADES.

    
    
    
    
    Please look at the graph below. For now, concentrate on the three horizontal lines in the middle of the graph, and what they are. They are 19 years of ACT scores for the USA, Tennessee, and the Knox County school district in Tennessee. These scores are a fact, the real scores for 19 years. Just think about what they tell you. This single school district alone is costing us MORE THAN 500 MILLION dollars per year. So Tennessee must be costing what? Many Millions. And how about the entire USA? BILLIONS!! It appears that 80% of the children will not get a job for more than minimum wage until 2023. Cognitive robots with Artificial Intelligence that passed average human intelligence will replace 95-98% of low-end jobs. Just think about this situation, as we investigate below to find out why and what we must do. By the way, the national debt is now above $210,000 per person IN 2019 including our children. Only a very healthy economy could pay it back. BUT THAT REQUIRES A HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION WITH CHILDREN WHO ARE ALL "STEM ACT READY," WITH AN AVERAGE 26 ACT SCORE TODAY AND RISING WITH THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES. "STEM ACT READINESS" (75%, MINIMUM 26 ACT AVERAGE) IS WHAT OUR SCHOOLS SHOULD ACHIEVE. NOT JUST ORDINARY ACT READINESS (MINIMUM 18-23% ACT READINESS, representing only 0%-24% subject knowledge in four subjects only, a very poor performance level). BUT 80% OF THE CHILDREN WE GRADUATE CANNOT EVEN ACHIEVE THAT. LET ME SAY IT AGAIN: THEY GRADUATE THE MAJORITY OF OUR CHILDREN, NOT EVEN "ACT READY." THAT MEANS NO POSSIBILITY OF EMPLOYMENT. WE WILL PROVE THAT BELOW. EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW THIS.
    
    Who is responsible for such low public school performance?
    
    
    
    
    
    The inner city folks, many times single parents, limited education, working hard manual jobs, not enough money. I spoke to them. We have no idea how difficult their life is. The most common answer they told me was that "My boyfriend got me pregnant. When he found out, he ran away. I could not finish high school. I work my fingers to the bone every day. I am dead tired by the end of my work every day. I don't understand what the schools tell me about my child." Very sad. The well-to-do parents can help their own children easily. How does anyone propose we increase poor children's performance?
    
    Education results are the responsibility of state governors. Look at the chart. The education results are bad. Is that why school districts' expenses and salaries are guaranteed the money by law, regardless of the job they do! We have one of the highest expenses per student in the world, but our education results are the lowest among industrialized countries. During the 1990's we found that the children we graduate could not read properly. We spent a few million dollars on consultants instead of getting a few teachers educated to teach reading. Today in 2020, we have the same problem that never changed. We hired a consultant again. Today's poorly performing school districts do not go to high-performing schools to determine how they teach subjects where performance is too low. They do not search the Internet for some fantastic education tools that we have there. The result is that they have no clue what they are doing wrong, and with such laziness, they hire a consultant, and they don't know if that consultant can do the job. Many are just unemployed. By hiring a consultant, the elected board doesn't know any better. The new expense will increase the school spending, and the "maintenance of effort law" in education guarantees that level of spending for the following year. The elected board members majority and education management at almost all school districts just sit there without updating the education laws because the lawmakers are afraid of being replaced at reelection time by the education lobby.
    
    
    
    

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

    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    It appears from many years of poor performance that the management people from the local school boards and superintendents to the state superintendents of education and governors have no idea what to do or are afraid to change anything when performance is bad. The US Department of Education website even has a comment about no business practices are applicable to education. The fact is that the best modern business methods relating to achieving objectives, hiring and managing people and financial operations are used not only in business but in ANY SUCCESSFUL GROUP ACTIVITY where the money is spent to achieve anything, Not using and preventing such methods in public education where the academic results are below the results of the top ten nations in education is extremely negligent and must be changed.
    
    
    
    The biggest mistake perhaps that one makes in organizations is this: hiring someone, without the hiring manager knowing exactly how to do the job, or hiring a consultant to find out both what the problem is and how to do the job. That means that the great majority of management people not only don't know the job, for which they are trying to hire a person, but they don't know what they have to achieve in measurable terms in their own job and they interview the potential employee without being able to ask the right questions to find out if the potential employee can do the job or not. Such employees do not even make an effort to learn what they don't know, and they are not doing the job well. Public education organizations are full of people like that. The results are bad, and they have no idea how to fix it. The same goes for hiring consultants. If you don't know precisely what a potential employee needs to do, what he/she needs to achieve, and to what standard, you will not hire the right person.
    
    
    
    To make the national debt-related interest payments disappear. We have to be able to make enough money to pay off that debt. To make that a reality, our high schools must graduate far better-educated students than we graduate today. What does that mean? Today, our high school graduates have an average ACT readiness (explained below) of only 24-26% nationally. That is not good enough, and will explain below why. The schools may tell you that we are doing fine. They may tell you that I am pessimistic. You be the judge. One thing is a fact. To go anywhere, including achieving anything, you must know honestly and precisely first WHERE YOU ARE, where you stand, exactly. Without that, you cannot decide what to do and plan the monthly or weekly steps you want to achieve to get to where you want to be. We must TRY to graduate 95%, but...with all graduates "ACT Ready", and that would take an average ACT score at or above 27 in 2021. Several nations perform better than what ACT 27 represents. But they have excellent controls over education, and we have none. For example, their teacher candidates are from the top 10% of Master's programs in the subject that they would teach. They do not appoint a teacher who was not trained actually to teach that subject. Unfortunately, we do. The teacher's personality and IQ are matched to the teaching position to ensure that teaching is what they love the most as a profession. Then they are under the guidance of a senior teacher in that subject who demonstrated success for 12-15 years. WE WILL DESCRIBE BELOW WHY AND HOW THAT CAN BE ACHIEVED. WE ALL must UNDERSTAND THAT FIRST. Only then can we start improving our workforce everywhere. So that our industries can win more business with higher profits. So that they can pay higher wages and more taxes wisely. So that we pay down that huge national debt. So that we have the money to IMPROVE LIFE AT HOME, and also to do more good in the world where too much suffering exists.
    
    
    
    I remember that around 1970 and before, I saw great demand in about 90 countries for American-made products, IN ANY PRODUCT AREA. Everyone thought that American products are the best. Obviously they were at that time.
    
    
    
    If something changes slowly in our lives, like a 1-5% annual change, we human beings do not notice such a small change.
    
    
    
    After 1970 we slowly started seeing foreign products that the public liked better. A few years after losing several products to companies in other countries, we started losing entire industries to other countries. We became very vocal and blamed the lower wages in those other countries. I saw during my international trips that we were wrong. Most big winners automated manufacturing much faster than we did. And then I saw that we started losing entire industries, like electronics, heavy machinery, textiles, etc. We all saw more and more foreign products in American stores. Decades later, I found out that the countries whose products passed ours started to improve their public education system immediately after WWII. But we did not recognize that we were competing internationally with our products and services and losing business to other nations. Yet we kept telling our children and to each other that we are the best in the world in everything. AND WE WERE. SOME TIME AGO FOR ABOUT TWO DECADES.
    
    
    
    IF YOU DO NOT KEEP YOUR EYE ON YOUR COMPETITORS, BUT THEY KEEP AN EYE ON YOU SO THAT THEY KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, YOU DO NOT STAND A CHANCE. THEY WILL WIN. Someone in our country got us into the habit of telling our children that "Johnny, you will win! Because YOU ARE the best!" That's like telling the one-legged man that "Johnny, you can win the 100-yard dash at the Olympics, if you believe that you can!" The truth is that you will win if you study hard and practice a lot to become the best-educated, and you always keep learning during your life to be the best. AND ENJOY BEING THE BEST AT WHAT YOU DO.YOU CAN BECOME EXCELLENT AT WHAT YOU ARE DOING IF YOU LOVE WHAT YOU ARE DOING. WE FOCUS ON MONEY A LITTLE TOO MUCH IN TODAY'S WORLD. FOCUS ONLY ON WHAT YOU ENJOY DOING (THAT'S LEGAL). THE MONEY WILL COME.
    
    
    
    Not knowing precisely what competitors or opponents are doing, and thinking that you are the best, is a prescription for certain failure. We did, and we do exactly that even today. We did not do our homework on foreign competitors in public education, and we are not doing it today. . Many other countries passed us. That explains why our industries' competitiveness dropped; we lost entire industries to competition (e.g., television, electronics, heavy machinery, and others), because the workforces of many other nations became better educated. They started improving in 1946. We have not started improving our education system yet. But we started destroying public education without any delay when others improved. We will explain examples in the upcoming sections of this website. New technologies always require more education in the workforce AND IN OUR SCHOOLS. The computer industry hit our jobs hard. We are going to experience even bigger technological changes from 2023 on, with cognitive robotics, nanotechnology, and space science as a start, with a huge impact on education. We are two years behind as of 2018, according to college professors who are dealing with yesterday's and today's high school graduates. If the high school ACT average does not rise by 10% minimum annually, we will be four years behind the international competition by 2023-2025, and then the national income drop and
    
    
    
    Please click on this video and listen to it all the way to the end. Are you impressed? What do you think? Difficult questions, huh?
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    

    Looking at the ACT scores and ACT readiness percentages above and the low ACT benchmark scores in the table above indicate that the student is only 25% prepared in the top four Benchmark subjects to be passing with one exception: English. For that subject the benchmark score is 18, representing only 10% readiness only, meaning 10% good answers in a test. But the US education system chose this benchmark for English.
    
    
    
    “ACT READINESS" is a very low target for public education. It will not get any student into a position of remaining employable longer than a few years unless the student graduates with an average ACT score at 27, minimum today in 2020. The reason for this is that the countries with which we compete to achieve a satisfactory national income have a better-trained workforce than we have due to our declining high school education. Those countries graduate from high school with average performance in the ACT 28-32 range, depending on the country. This is because the success of all industries in any country depends on the training level of workforces in those industries, and that depends on the education level of high school graduates.
    
    
    
    What has been very disturbing during the last ten years is the discovery that our own department of education in each state is not doing anything about the deterioration of our public education. I wrote to the governor seven times in eight years about what we observed. Not one response to my questions from anyone. Then I wrote to the next governor four times, and again not one response from anyone. The things that should be done very well were not done well. And the bad things that should not be done were done - very well. It appeared and appeared to this day that most are done purposefully to ensure poor results. Examples:
    
    
    
    

    • In the last few years, 74% of public schools graduates nationally, and 85% of those graduated in the state of Tennessee and other states are not even ACT Ready. This is accomplished with a method called "cut scores," done by the state education departments, who describe this method as a beneficial alignment of student performance in order to raise the ACT scores. Then they present a fairly complex looking mathematical manipulation and changing of the pass/fail percentages in one or more subjects to achieve the desired outcome in graduates.
    
    
    
    
    
    • The pass/fail percentage went from 60% to 25% or less below, but we kept graduating 80-85%. Did the students’ knowledge go up or down during this period? IT DROPPED LIKE A STONE.
    
    
    
    
    
    • The departments of education require elected boards to set objectives. But they don't know what kind of objectives work or not, and they also don't know that a written operating plan is a necessity without which no improvement is possible. And that makes the great majority of our high school graduates unemployable even for minimum wage jobs.
    
    
    
    
    
    • We are one of the five highest spenders in the world per student, even in Tennessee, where we do not show within the school district's expenses the education-related mortgage expenses, legal expenses, and God only knows what else, and countries like Finland are delivering their fabulous education results at a level that is above ACT-30-equivalent average, and they do it 18% lower cost than ours per student, when their cost of living is higher than ours. Their teaching methodology is so good that it eliminates the the necessity of testing until the middle of high school. But their testing is tougher once they start doing it, because they, not only grade tests based on correct answers like we do, but they also score the method that the student uses to decide what the right answer is. and finally, at the end of high school, every student must take a matriculation exam in Finland and other countries as well, that is a test that covers all subjects of the high school years.
    
    
    
    
    
    • Unfortunately it is too low, especially considering that we have been doing very poorly in some states like Tennessee in both reading and English composition for more than 20 years. It does not seem to matter to decision-makers like governors that 75-80% of the students we graduate from high school are not even ACT Ready. To be specific, we graduate from high school with a diploma three times the number of ACT Ready students WHO ARE NOT ACT READY.
    
    
    
    
    
    • About 35-40 years ago, the failing score meant that one had 70% or less correct answers on a test. To graduate from high school, one had to pass all courses in four years at 70% good answers. Ten years later, the failure point was lowered to 60% or less per subject. Today we measure the end of high school readiness level of graduates with four benchmark tests in the above table. A 1-36 scoring range measures every test that ACT does. For example, a 15 ACT score is about the same as only 0-2% good answers on our typical tests. ACT readiness benchmarks correspond to only 10-25% good answers on tests, and 76-84% of the children we graduate from high school with a diploma are not even ACT ready. That means that 4 out of 5 children who graduate from high school in a state like Tennessee, with a diploma, that child who had only 5% good answers or less on his tests, graduates from high school. Under these conditions almost all the children who graduate from high school are so poorly educated that the outcome will be joblessness for almost all of them and disastrous for our country, children and grandchildren.
    
    
    
    
    
    • Passing "ACT readiness" benchmark tests represent only a 25% minimum subject knowledge in three subjects and 10% minimum subject knowledge in a fourth subject (English). But "many will score much higher than that," the schools will tell you.

    
    
    The challenge is that 74% nationally and 84% in Tennessee of those who graduates high school with a diploma are not even ACT Ready. Nationwide...the children learn some subjects in any school year and forget too much of it each year. One has to learn how to learn first, and THEN learn in different and fun ways in all subjects and keep playing with it so that it becomes fun. In the high performing countries, they know very well what qualifications have to be for a successful teacher. Any teacher, including assistants, has to be high IQ, who completed a 6-year Master's program in the subject he/she would teach. The teacher has to be in the top ten percent of his university classes, loves his own subject, can give many examples of fun work with his subject today and in the future. Such a teacher has enormous fun making his/her classes the most interesting and better each year because they love performing for the children and learn more about his/her subject every year. Impossible, you think? I saw this in many countries that are high performing in education. Such teachers and children would not want to miss a single class. We have many among teachers who oppose any proven successful practice from any country with untrue excuses and knowing nothing about the country or the methodology. But our competitor nations are doing exactly that and know exactly how poorly we are doing. We do not care, and our results show exactly that. We have to remove schools from politics totally. And great performers do not mind if their performance is measured against objectives. They WANT to find ways to learn how to become better.
    
    
    
    Before 2010, a student could graduate from high school only if all high school courses were passed above 60% good answers! Big difference in the knowledge of American high school graduates then and now. A bigger problem is the even bigger difference between the top 30 internationals and us today.
    
    
    
    

    Passing "ACT Readiness" benchmark tests represent only about 58 % minimum subject knowledge in four subjects. But "many will score much higher than that" the schools will tell you. Not too long ago one had to pass all high school subjects with 60% knowledge level, and many employers would not accept a "D" average. With all due respect, we seem to be creating a more complex system that confuses the student and his family. Especially those in poverty! To make it worse, we renamed the 5 grades (A, B, C, D, and F) to 4 grades with new and confusing grade names, that were unnecessary, UNLESS WE WANTED TO MAKE THE GRADE SUCH THAT MOST PEOPLE WOULD NOT UNDERSTAND. WHY? I have an idea about what is going on, I would not criticize "the objective" unless I was sure what it was, but the plan execution is unnecessarily crude.
    
    
    
    The challenge is that 74% nationally and 84% in Tennessee of those who graduate high school with a diploma, are not even ACT Ready. Nationwide...the children learn some subjects in any school year, and forget too much of it each year. One has to learn how to learn first, and THEN learn in different and fun ways in all subjects and keep playing with it so that it becomes fun. In the high performing countries they know very well what qualifications have to be for a successful teacher. Any teacher, including assistants, has to be high IQ, who completed a 6-year Master's program in the subject he/she would teach. The teacher has to be in the top ten percent of his university classes, loves his own subject, can give many examples of fun work with his subject today and in the future. Such a teacher has enormous fun making his/her classes the most interesting and better each year, because he or she loves performing for the children and learn more about his/her subject every year. Impossible, you think? I actually saw this in many countries that are high performing in education. Such teachers and children would not want to miss a single class. We have many among teachers who bring up opposing any proven successful practice from any country with untrue excuses and knowing nothing about the country, or the methodology. But our competitor nations are doing exactly that and know exactly how poorly we are doing. We do not care, and our results show exactly that. We have to remove schools from politics totally. And great performers do not mind if their performance is measured against objectives. They WANT to find ways to learn how to become better.
    
    
    
    Before 2010, a student could graduate from high school only if all high school courses were passed above 60% good answers! Big difference in the knowledge of American high school graduates then and now. A bigger problem is the even bigger difference between the top 30 internationals and us today.
    
    
    
    Teaching without lecturing

    
    
    

    MIT OpenCourseWare covering high school

    
    
    

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

    
    

    Google Classroom

    
    
    

    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    

    URGENT ACTIONS NEEDED IN OUR SCHOOLS

    
    
    
    “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
    IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING!"
    
    Edmund Burke, Irish/American statesman, 1776
    
    
    Eliminate the push for a 90% graduation rate because it is worthless. The graduation rate depends on the state test results, that can be and is manipulated by the states every year to pass children in one or more subjects toward graduation, who otherwise would fail. It also creates enormous pressure on teachers to pass children who would otherwise fail to meet the 90% graduation rate. Indirect measurement schemes do not work. Graduation rate would be indirect. But a GPA and ACT score are direct measurements of year end performance. But they miss the idea of keeping an eye on monthly progress and that makes the year end result a surprise.
    
    
    The objective a high school and school district sets must be an ACT or SAT score (depending on the state) that shows what our children learned from grade one to twelve. The ACT an d SAT tests are highly accurate, but an annual ACT measurement is not enough to change the way people work. THE RESULTS ARE ALWAYS THE RESULT OF HOW WELL TRAINED PEOPLE ARE AND HOW THEY WORK. THE OBJECTIVE of a poorly performing organization could make the achievement of a ten percent increase possible, if the ACT Readiness is below 50%. The objective in such a case must be 10% higher than the previous year's actual average ACT score achieved. Two more things must be also in place to achieve a ten percent ACT score increase. One must have a GPA Year-to-Date monthly objective in every classroom, on every teacher, everyone in a supervisory position and in every school thAt leads to the 10% increase in every class and school to spot any performance problems, so that it can be corrected quickly to meet the annual objective in every school and school district. All those good men, our political leaders and law makers of BOTH parties, and the majority of our governors to whom education reports, as well as the national secretary of education, did NOTHING to date that raised the ACT scores for 20 years or more. OUR HARD-EARNED TAXES PAID THE HIGHEST RATES PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD (when we include all education-related expenses like they do, e.g. mortgage and legal expenses), BUT DROPPED OUR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION TO THE BOTTOM OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES. It would be reasonable if governors could explain why they did this, and what their specific measurable plan is to restore our MINIMUM high school ACT Readiness, a low qualification we will explain later, to 80% of the graduating classes from the current 16-26% of graduates who meet that today, but we graduate them anyway. The ACT scores show reliably every year what our children learnt by grade twelve. Good results depend on well-educated workers WHO ENJOY THEIR JOBS doing excellent work. However, THAT IS NOT ENOUGH. Reaching a 90% graduation rate and average ACT score of 21, has been a ridiculously low goal of this Tennessee school system since about 1995 but NEVER REACHED! That really means graduates whose average subject knowledge is about 22% ONLY! A low goal like that is set by people who have no idea how to improve anything in education. THAT SHOULD REALLY WORRY THE GOVERNORS, BUT THEY DO NOTHING TO IMPROVE IT. As a member of the public they do not tell you the truth. The education system was created by IRRESPONSIBLE people who do not want anything measured about performance. "But we have an ACT 21 goal also" they will tell you. Yes, they had that 21 ACT goal since 1995 and never reached it. ACT 21 is equal to knowing only 23% of what a graduating high school student is supposed to know. That is a huge failing performance. Not too long ago a student had to score MORE THAN 60% correct answers in all high school subjects to get at least a "D" score TO GRADUATE. Passing students at 23% good answers in any test means that we are now passing a huge number of students who were failures before. THAT IS A HORRIBLE RESULT. Why does a state do that? Because the education districts have poor teachers, poor management and the governor has no idea how to fix all to do a much better job. But there are many ways the public education system informs the population with overly optimistic information. One cannot change results in any job if employees keep working the same way as for years before. One needs a single objective to focus people on the most important thing: the key indicator of success or failure, like an ACT score, or a GPA monthly, that is 10% higher than the prior year's actual average ACT score. THAT IS AN ACT ANNUAL OBJECTIVE with monthly GPA objectives for backup. The annual ACT objective must be backed up by monthly academic objectives, like a year-to-date GPA objective on all supervisors and managers, principals, and teachers to support the annual ACT objective. We could catch any performance problem in any month without a surprise at year-end. The GPA objective must also be 10% higher than the prior year's actual GPA achieved. It is the schools that achieve the results in any school district. Yet we never had them operate under specific objectives and operating plans in the schools. The focus must be on them. All support must be focused on them, and they must operate under specific, measurable academic objectives for the school system's results to improve. Poorly performing organizations cannot recover without using "Management by Objectives (MBO).
    
    
    
    We need measurable MONTHLY objectives that are a key indicator of how our children are doing in every class, GPA (monthly) and ACT (yearly) based, in every classroom, school and school district and state, available to the public on the Internet. When the results are bad like ours, focusing the entire school district on academic achievement objectives is the only way to improve. What the school districts are doing is not learning how to improve education from the poor level we have. We think that the experimentation with untrained, inexperienced people in the school districts, and no tutorials from the state education department, it cannot be done. It is a most serious question as to how could such poor performance be allowed by the state for 20 years without a solution. Get rid of the 90% graduation goal. It shifts the necessity to improve to the last month of the school year, and too many people prefer to cheat to look better. Focusing on graduation invites cheating in the last moment, and it creates a big rush during the last month of the year to make more children's grades good enough to pass. Graduation rate with a low ACT score of 21, creates the wrong low-performance results, without improving the children's knowledge. As a result, we graduate 80% who are not even ACT Ready. ACT READINESS is a very low qualification, representing a 25% subject knowledge in 4 subjects only, and 80% cannot even meet that, and we graduate them?! THIS DESTRUCTIVE PRACTICE MUST BE DISCONTINUED.
    
    
    
    Children cannot learn in a boring classroom. I found in the USA and the high performing countries that the teachers' subject knowledge has to be at the Master's level and come from the top 10-30% of the Master's programs. Teacher candidates must have a high IQ, love their subject enough to keep on top of any new developments in that subject. Teachers can give examples about many different jobs within his/her subject. The teachers are so enthusiastic about the subject that the teacher's enthusiasm infects the students. The classes of this teacher are always fun for the students. The great majority of US teachers are not trained well enough, may not like their subjects and his/her classes are boring. The teacher training standards declined in the US. CONTINUING SUBJECT and teaching methodology education ARE VERY IMPORTANT FOR US TEACHERS.
    
    
    
    I attended 29 high school science and math classes. Children were bored in these classes. Such children will get conditioned to dislike the subject that way. The teachers did not love their subject and did not know the subject well enough. This is not the teachers' fault. It is a reflection on their training and certification standards. We must test teachers for a psychological match to the profession.
    
    
    
    We also need to change significantly the science and math courses in the high school curriculum. In preparation for the technological changes by 2023-2024 with cognitive AI-driven robots, space sciences, and nanotechnology, the curriculum on the high school level must include not just Biology, but also Chemistry, Physics, and Economics, plus Calculus and all its prerequisites. We graduate children who are poor readers and poor in basic math. That certainly limits their learning ability. The key to children doing much better is a better-educated teacher who loves the subject he/she is teaching and enjoys talking about the subject with the students with infectious enthusiasm. We used to have those subjects as prerequisites for graduation during the 1960s in quite a few states. Our curriculum is too weak today, and cognitive robotics with AI will replace jobs that do not require those subjects. The surviving jobs will be those with graduate-level science, mathematics, and economics training. Future jobs will be highly specialized in narrow areas of graduate degrees in those fields. That is why teachers need to be tested for personality compatibility with teaching and be educated further about the subject he/she is teaching.
    
    
    
    Management training is extremely important for principals, superintendents. It is extremely weak in education at all levels, and that is always a major reason for poor performance.
    
    
    
    
    One cannot argue with such poor results that our public education is good enough. It is terrible enough to make most of our children unemployable and getting worse. We will explain this in detail later. How can people who deliver such poor education to our children in most public schools at the highest cost in the world, lie and claim that "We provide excellence for our children"? No one can succeed unless they face the truth and speak the truth first.
    
    
    
    We believe that the most important thing any public school should do, is what the schools are claiming falsely: EXCELLENCE. What is EXCELLENCE?! It is a minimum average ACT score of 28 (indicates that 80% of our graduating students are ready and not just 20% in the graduating classes) because it represents 80% readiness of the students we graduate to be employable. Today, as the chart shows, about 80% of graduates are NOT ACT ready, a standard that guarantees unemployment today. If you agree, stand up and speak up if you want our schools to improve to ensure that your child will be able to get a job. Our taxes are paying the highest rate in the world per student, and the high percentage of graduates, who are not even ACT ready, is unacceptable.
    
    
    
    Excellent school performance is mandatory for a nation and its children to succeed in the future. Good workers do not stay in poorly performing organizations. EXCELLENT PERFORMANCE IN OUR SCHOOLS, AS WE DEFINED IT, IS BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB FOR ANY NATION, AND WE ARE NOT AN EXCEPTION.
    
    
    
    People may not be aware that our public education has been declining at a slow rate that the great majority of people will not notice. Such a development dumbs down the public. Older people can see this in young high school graduates. College professors and employers have been noticing this for more than a decade. It started in the late 1800s or before. Many people tend to blame "the front line troops," the teachers. It is not the teachers' or principals' fault. Teacher education also declined at the universities, but other majors did not. One wonders who arranged such a stupid move and why. New state superintendents of education come and go, and the reliable national tests show our test results not improving decade after decade. New governors appoint a new manager of the state department of education. The results just get worse. Neither of them knows what to do or are afraid of something if they change anything in education. Education-related organizations do not want any change. We went from the horse and buggy to the moon with many technological changes, but the education leadership changed little if anything. The governors either do not allow their selection for heading education to improve anything, or they both do not know how to improve education. BUT THEY BOTH PROMISE WHEN RUNNING FOR OFFICE, THAT THEY WILL IMPROVE EDUCATION. With many flags waving for up to three years, the new governor announces that "Fantastic news! We graduated 89% of our seniors in high school!!" He does not tell you that the department of education lowered the pass/fail percentage points in one or more subjects on the state tests from 60% good answers to 20% or less to show more students passing. What the governor does not tell you is that 80% of the children who graduated high school will not be able to learn any job, cannot read and write the script anymore, can read and write only block letters but not well, do not know basic math, and they cannot fill out job applications. If hired they have a bad attitude on the job, most likely because the school promised a good trade job after graduation, and the child does not understand what he has to do in the job because he/she was not educated well, and feels that no one likes him, and quits. The school told the parent that "God did not create all children for a college education, like your little Johnny. But he will learn a trade. He can become very good at it and make an excellent living with it!" Unfortunately, this is not true. The results are poor to date. The use of calculators and the dropping of music and art classes created disabilities in mental math, critical thinking, and decision-making. The education system is thinking of teaching critical thinking and decision making to children. Successful decision making requires knowledge of the problem area and related subjects where a decision is needed. They must be well understood by the child or adult. Otherwise they will make marginal-to-bad decisions all their lives.
    
    
    
    We see this shocking evidence of extremely poor education every month now. A few months ago, I paid $23.00 with a $50 bill. The cash registers did not work, and three cash register operators who were high school graduates could not figure out what change I should get back. This kind of disability is evidence of a much bigger disability than the simple math of subtracting 23 from 50. The brain is very efficient. The brain shares basic math functions by many other areas automatically in thinking and decision making. Cannot use the calculator for such brain functions. The thinking and decision making is poor as a result.
    
    
    
    The high school education of about 80% of the graduates decreased when the countries with whom we compete improved their education, and passed us by 2016 in mathematics. They passed us in general knowledge long before then. We did the opposite. We made our public education worse, year after year. We will explain it all below in this website, and we will also suggest what needs urgent improvement in the order of priority and why. We spend more money per student than any other country, except for four. We do not include all expenses under education expenses, such as huge mortgage expenses for school buildings, legal expenses for school-related lawsuits, and others. Other countries report ALL as education system-related expenses. If we included all, we would be THE HIGHEST SPENDER IN THE WORLD. More than 30 countries have better results than we do. We have more than 13,500 school districts in the USA. They are constantly asking for more money. We are already the highest spender in the world. But our results dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries. Giving more money would be a big mistake. The results are poor because we have been making huge mistakes in hiring at all levels. We are wasting huge amounts of dollars. We get enough money per student that is guaranteed regardless of how poorly our schools are educating our children. Strangely, the college education in teaching did decline as well. Why? Teaching-college students' training is not good enough. It is not their fault. Teachers' certification exists in every state. The certification should be ensuring that their training is more than enough. BUT IT IS ONLY A STAMP OF APPROVAL FOR THE LOW TEACHERS' COLLEGE TRAINING. Click above for more information. But other fields of study at the universities did not decline - and this is very strange.
    
    
    
    Our teachers are less educated than the teachers in the many countries that passed us. Our teachers come from the bottom 30% of university performance. Many left their originally selected major because it was too hard, and went into teaching because it is easier. I investigated and visited several countries that had much better results in education than we do. Teachers OR ASSISTANT TEACHERS who teach above fourth grade have both BS/BA and a Master's degree in the same subject they would teach. The best countries in education hire graduates from the top 10% of their Master's classes in some countries and not lower than the top 30% in others. They are matched psychologically to the teaching profession before acceptance into teaching. They are not put into a different subject class for which they were not educated to teach as we do. They become a senior teacher after 15 years of teaching under a senior teacher. Their teacher turnover is 1-3%. Ours is sky-high. Their results are far better than ours. But we must remember that not being as well educated is not the fault of the American teachers. Neither is the fact that teaching requires the right personality for which some countries test potential teachers for compatibility with the teaching profession. Neither is the fact that teaching needs continuing education because some subjects like the sciences and even mathematics can change as new technologies appear. That, in turn, changes the jobs of employers. High school graduates must be ready for what employers need. But these are not changes that those who want to go to a teachers' college can determine. But a university program could and should, but does not in the US. It is the job of the states' Department of Education to make changes that improve the delivery of the right education to teachers FIRST so that they can deliver to students at a level that the students enjoy, and employers need. Change teacher certification accordingly to ensure our children's employability. Every problem that we found with K-12 education during the past eight years is the work of the states' department of education, not the teachers and principals. And it makes our schools worse than our competitor nations' schools. Teachers cannot do anything about that. We will detail these below. We need to find out why the states are doing things that are producing bad results. Or why they are hanging on to 150-year-old practices that do not work today. Example: "Elected local school boards are the best choice to direct school districts' performance to get the best results." GOOD ENOUGH RESULTS UNTIL ABOUT 1890 BUT INDUSTRIAL AND SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENTS CHANGED THAT. THE NATION STARTED TO REQUIRE HIGH AND COMPETITIVE STANDARDS THAT YOU CANNOT ACHIEVE WITH LOCAL GUIDANCE, TO ENSURE A NATIONALLY COMPETITIVE EDUCATION SYSTEM. WHY IS IT THAT WE ARE THE ONLY NATION THAT COULD NOT FIGURE THIS OUT YET, BUT ALL OTHER NATIONS DID?! Since they are directly under the state's governor, the governors must be responsible.
    
    
    
    In the high-performing education countries, teachers have preparation time for their upcoming classes. They are not loaded with unnecessary paperwork and other duties that eliminate well-prepared teaching activities. American public education completely disregards the fact that for children or even adults, they will learn more if they become interested in the subject that the teacher teaches. The words I heard from students the most is that "spending 6-7 hours a day in school is boring". I attended several science and math classes in 17 school districts. OUR CLASSES ARE BORING, and our teachers are not treated well. Teaching requires a unique personality, a high IQ, and a high level of subject knowledge and excellent support. The result is bad. In many other countries, teachers are very well respected. Respect depends on the results. IT APPEARS THAT IN THE USA OUR LEADERS PURPOSEFULLY DUMB DOWN THE PUBLIC. OR THEY WERE FORCED TO DUMB THE EDUCATION DOWN. THAT IS A PATH TO NOTHING LIKE FREEDOM, BUT TO SLAVERY FOR THE PUBLIC. But..." Psst! It's a SECRET!" So what is the counter to that? It is not more dumbing down. It is an INTERNATIONALLY EXCELLENT EDUCATION FOR CHILDREN. THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY DEPENDS ON THEM. School slogans like "EXCELLENCE FOR ALL CHILDREN," in any form, is a BIG lie when the results are as bad as ours. Look at the ACT results. THEY ARE THE TRUTH. Learn what they mean. AND STAND UP FOR CHANGING THE BAD EDUCATION TO ONE OF THE BEST IN THE WORLD, WHATEVER THAT TAKES!
    
    
    
    The competing countries implemented such changes a few decades ago. We resist any change and any fixing of shortcomings within the education system. Politicians fear the education lobby having them voted out, so no laws get even proposed to improve the education results. Without it, our children will be unemployable. It appears that some people in power want us to fail by disabling our children's education. Even its management structure is such that it ensures failure. OR, they do not know what to do. All of this and more we will show below.
    
    
    
    The results are poor to date, and declined slowly for longer than five decades. The use of calculators and the dropping of music and art classes created serious disabilities in mental math and relational decisions. Lack of classical music and art studies resulted in insufficient neuronal brain interconnections that create decision making about problems and the inability to recognize patterns of activities that is an important function in decision making. The education system is thinking of teaching "critical thinking" and "decision making" to children. They seem to have no idea that such a skill requires significant knowledge of the problem area and related subjects that must be very well understood by the child or adult; otherwise, they will make bad decisions.
    
    
    
    The high school education-based knowledge of about 80% of the graduates decreased significantly, when the countries with whom we compete dramatically improved their education, and passed us by 2016 in mathematics. They passed us in general knowledge long before then. We did the opposite. We will explain it all on this website, and we will also suggest what needs urgent improvement in the order of priority and why. We spend as a nation more money per student than all other countries, except for four. More than 30 have better results than we do. We have more than 13,500 school districts in the USA. They are constantly asking for more money when we spend more than anyone else in the world per student. We get enough money per student that is guaranteed regardless of how poorly our schools are educating our children. Our teachers are blamed for our poor results. Strangely, the college education in teaching did decline. Why? The teaching college students assume, and rightfully so that they are trained well enough. But they are not, and that is not their fault. Teachers are certified in every state. The certification should be ensuring that their training is more than enough. But the teacher certification is way too low. The teachers are not trained well enough. It is not their fault. The teacher qualification and standards for the training and qualification are way too low. Click above for more information. But other fields of study did not decline at our universities - and this is very strange. Certification is on a very low level set to ensure any teacher's passing. Our teachers are less educated than the teachers in the countries that passed us. And this situation clearly shows that political management either has no idea about what to do or is afraid to do anything.
    
    
    
    I investigated and visited several countries whose education systems are the best. In those countries, teachers OR ASSISTANT TEACHERS who teach above fourth grade, have a BS/BA and a Master's degree, both in the subject, they would teach and graduated from the top ten percent of their classes in some countries and not lower than the top 30% in others. They are matched psychologically to the teaching profession before acceptance into teaching. They are not put into a different subject class to teach, like our teachers. They, who are so well educated, become a senior teacher after 15 years of teaching under a senior teacher. Their turnover is 1-3%. Ours is 16% (leaving the school they teach in, plus leaving the teaching profession). Their results are far better than ours. But we must remember that not being as well educated is not the fault of the American teachers. Neither is the fact that teaching requires an exceptional person for which some countries test potential teachers for acceptance into a teaching program. Neither is the fact that teaching needs continuing education because some subjects like the sciences and even mathematics can change as new technologies appear. That, in turn, changes employers' jobs, and high school graduates must be ready for what employers need. But these are not changes that those who want to go to a teachers' college can control. One would think that it is the job of the states' Department of Education to make changes that improve the delivery of internationally competitive education to teachers FIRST. Then they could deliver to students at a level that employers need and change teacher certification accordingly. It is a conflict of interest for the state education department to set its standards. The standards need to be set NATIONALLY AND NOT UNDER THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION IN THE STATE OR NATIONALLY TO AVOID CONFLICT OF INTEREST ISSUES. THERE IS NO REASON FOR DUPLICATING STAFF TO HAVE DIFFERENT STANDARDS IN CONNECTICUT VS. TENNESSEE. IF YOU THINK THAT THE STANDARDS SHOULD BE DIFFERENT PLEASE LET US KNOW WHY. THINGS THAT ARE MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE ARE NOT NECESSARILY BETTER.
    
    
    
    The responsibility and loyalty are to the employers WHO PROVIDE THE JOBS, whose needs the education department is to satisfy with the students. The student is the product of the school. The customers use a product, and the student product must work very well for the employers/"customers" to satisfy what THEY NEED. What we have in public education today is like the following example. Only one company designs and manufactures cars. They dominate the entire automobile market with standards defined by the same company. They are one of the most expensive cars in the world. 75-80% of the vehicles are delivered, but they break down within days. You paid for it in advance. The vehicles meet only the manufacturer's standards; you received it, you have no right to get your money back or to exchange the car. And there is NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO. THAT IS EXACTLY HOW PUBLIC EDUCATION WORKS TODAY. HOW CAN WE BE SO BLIND THAT WE JUST STAND THERE AND DECADE AFTER DECADE WE KEEP PAYING FOR SUCH CARS (=schools), AND THEY ARE GETTING WORSE AND WORSE!
    
    
    
    We found that during the past eight years, that the state departments of education created every single problem with K-12 education, not the teachers and principals. These make our schools worse than our competitor nations' education system. Teachers cannot do anything about that. We will detail these below. We have a good idea of why they are doing things that are producing bad results and why they are creating problems that weaken the jobs our teachers are doing. In high-performing countries, teachers are not loaded down with unnecessary paperwork and other duties that make their jobs more difficult. American public education completely disregards the fact that children or even adults will learn more if they become interested in the subject that the teacher teaches. The words I heard from students the most is that "spending 6-7 hours a day in school is boring". I attended several in 17 school districts. OUR CLASSES ARE BORING, and our teachers are not trained well enough and are not treated well enough. Teaching requires a unique outgoing personality, a high IQ, and Master's level subject knowledge and support that they receive. THEY ARE TESTED FOR AND MUST MEET SUCH CHARACTERISTICS AND REQUIREMENTS IN THE HIGH PERFORMING COUNTRIES. The competing countries implemented such changes a few decades ago. Unfortunately, we resist ANY change and ANY fixing of shortcomings within the education system, and politicians fear that the education lobby has them voted out, so no laws get even proposed that would improve/change the education system. Without it, the great majority of our children will be unemployable. Some people in power want us to fail by disabling our children's education, even with its failing education management structure. We will explain more below.
    
    
    
    Our future as a nation depends on our public education becoming one of the best in the world. We were there before 1970. But we dropped to the bottom of the industrialized countries. One cannot become good by constantly parroting to the world slogans like "We are the best in the world!" or "Excellence for all children!" because it is not true. The chart we have here shows Tennessee and the US with poor ACT results. However, there are a few states with good public education results such as Massachusetts and Connecticut. The national test shows poor results getting worse in public education. Unfortunately, most of our schools are not schools. They are "Failure Factories" that operate as a house of cards that are propped up by the state-law guaranteeing annual funding, regardless of performance. The teacher unions are wealthy enough to defeat any representative who proposed any action that would MAKE ANY CHANGE in schools. EXAMPLE: There are two high schools in a school district with almost all black students. Their performance is dismal. 97% OF THE CHILDREN THEY GRADUATE ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY, WHICH IS A VERY LOW STANDARD. THEY WILL BE UNEMPLOYABLE. WE WILL EXPLAIN "ACT READINESS" LATER. For more than the past twenty years, the school board allocated TWO TIMES THE MONEY THAT THE OTHER HIGH SCHOOLS GET PER STUDENT, BUT THEIR SCORES DID NOT IMPROVE IN 20 YEARS!! TWENTY YEARS!! How about tripling the money? Or quadrupling the money? I am sorry, but throwing more of the taxpayers' money as a solution to a significant problem is JUST STUPID. But that's what people do who have no idea how to solve a problem. It simply does not work!! It did not work for twenty years. YOU KNOW WHY? Because the money is going to the wrong people in the wrong places, for the wrong things, because they did not find the right problem to correct. The problem is that performance is bad in entire school districts, but the schools where black children are, are even worse. To stop this, the superintendent promoted the principal of one of these two worst schools to manage all schools in the school district because "he has good ideas." Nothing improved. What the people pay in hard-earned taxes is easy money for school district management. They cannot recognize management problems, so they throw money at it. But not for teachers, who work hard, poorly supported, with poor treatment. The teachers' unions focus only on pushing teachers to complain about money and more money. And no one is smart enough to say: "First you have to deliver better results because we are paying the highest rates per student in the world, and we get the lowest result for it in the industrialized countries AND THAT IS A BAD JOB BY YOUR CENTRAL MANAGEMENT!" Not just falsely claiming in our education districts in their slogans that "We provide excellent world-class education" or "excellence for all children" is untrue as the ACT scores have shown for 20 years. (03272020). Not a single political leader or state or federal lawmaker stood up to correct this damaging situation. The ACT results for 19 years show that our public education produced unacceptable results. Many other nations passed us. We lost several industries to other countries that improved their education. AND WE WILL NOT ONLY LOSE MORE, BUT WHEN 80% OF THE PARENTS DISCOVER IN A FEW YEARS THAT THEIR CHILDREN WERE "SO WELL EDUCATED" THAT THEY CANNOT GET ANY JOB, ESPECIALLY THE AFRICAN AMERICAN CHILDREN WHO ARE GRADUATED 95% UNPREPARED. NO ONE ACTING ON THIS HUGE PROBLEM THAT RISKS OUR COUNTRY'S FUTURE POINTS TO POLITICAL LEADERSHIP WHO DO NOT WANT TO BE MEASURED, DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH VERY FEW EXCEPTIONS, AND GOVERNORS DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO OR ARE AFRAID TO ACT. THERE IS NO COURAGE AND KNOWLEDGE TO TAKE ANY RISKS TO IMPROVE.
    
    
    
    Our shelves are full of products made in other countries. That is the result of poorly educated American high school graduates creating less competitive products as part of the workforce. Such a company will lose business to better educated foreign manufacturers. Because they can create better outcomes because they are better educated and learn faster. And we see too often that most of our high school graduates are poorly educated. Close to 80% of those who graduate from high school cannot read and perform basic math or basic mental math that should have been fixed by the end of fourth grade! They cannot read and write a script, but only with block letters. They cannot communicate properly. And in the last few years, they cannot even fill out a job application, because the fundamental subjects that our schools taught them, were not delivered well enough to excite the children's interest, without which learning cannot take place. This is not the teachers' fault, but their university education declined, and their morale is low because their work environment is problematic. We are one of the top spenders per student in the world. It is time to recognize that the problem of education management on the highest level, does not care enough or does not know how to improve our children's education. Isn't it fair to say that if they were interested, our children would be better educated?? It is time to make sure that education management from the very top on down is replaced with people who know what to do, make sure that our teachers' continuing education and support is excellent so that both teachers and students are happy. They want to do an outstanding job because they love the subjects presented. Such motivation is the secret to success in anything. IT CAN MAKE ANY SUBJECT SO INTERESTING THAT IT BECOMES ENJOYABLE LIKE PLAYING. In any job, we must learn to become better at teaching the children very well after what has been happening, or we as a country will be finished. It is extremely important for all of us to demand in the strongest possible way that American political leadership do exactly that.
    
    
    
    It is very important to understand that high schools are the most important pipeline that feed the workforce of all companies in all industries, all government activities, directly or through vocational schools, colleges and universities. It is a highly qualified workforce that can create the highest quality and most profitable products. A poor K-12 public education system, like we have, unfortunately, creates the opposite: failing of entire industries (all electronics, heavy machinery for manufacturing and construction, and others), that other competing countries take over. That also creates a loss of jobs, poor profitability, and dropping national income that necessitates borrowing huge amounts of money that creates the national debt. Education quality creates a very healthy economy with good living standards, OR poverty increasing, social problems, increasing crime, and worsening living standards. All of this is the result of the quality of public education. To be more specific, any training that is creating a foundation for subsequent more advanced training, such as an elementary school for the high schools, is even more important because if they educate our children well at the lower level, the more advanced training program in the the school will be easier to learn. Unfortunately, we do the opposite. Most of our children leave the eighth grade not reading well, and not knowing basic mathematics either and have a bad attitude. And no one seems to understand that a child's brain learns the quickest before six years of age, and after six years, it starts slowing, making learning harder each year, especially with the poor results WE have. For this reason, the most important time for easier learning is between 3 and 6 years of age. But our lawmakers do not feel that this is so. If you speak with a medical doctor called a neurologist, brain specialized, he/she will tell you the truth. We found the poor performance of public schools a long-standing major problem that is still unresolved in Tennessee and many other states, although it was noted in 1995 and before. Why? Because people at all levels of the education organization don't know such things to this day but think that it is a weakness if they admit not knowing something. They act as if they know everything because they won an election or because they were given the job. And "that surely means" they believe "that they can do the job." Also, instead of visiting the best IN THE WORLD to learn how they achieve great results or get some guidance from a pediatric neurologist about a child's brain development, they are guessing and making big mistakes. That major problem was and still is being created with poor reading and poor basic math performance, and ignoring the necessity of teaching music and art on the classic level that is also beneficial for brain development in several key areas. Our children are very important for parents and for our country to succeed. Elections on the school district level for school boards do not produce the right people. This situation went uncorrected for many decades to this date. More and more students were allowed to graduate from high school without being ready to learn any job. Allowing such fundamental problems to go unresolved is damaging to students when many other nations' schools have no problem doing it well. When a nation or state has very low school standards as we do, they are damaging the workforce and the country. THAT, MY FRIENDS, CAN DESTROY THE COUNTRY.
    
    
    
    Lenin, the creator of communism, often said that "If you repeat a lie a thousand times, the masses will accept it as the truth." That is how Disinformation Theory was formed and became the fundament of psychological warfare against masses of people. The Education community is using it because they have no idea what an excellent organization is and how to become one. When a school district in question claims, "Excellence for all children" in writing or another similar grandiose slogan, they know that they are poorly performing and you can bet that they are not what they claim. Why do we tolerate them to lie to the public at all levels about their own performance, and pay their huge expenses using the people's money to dumb down the people? Too many poor people believe it in the population, and their children are pushed deeper into poverty. And there is no governor or ANY politician who stands up and dares to act to eliminate such destructive behavior in our country.
    
    
    
    THE MOST EFFECTIVE TOOL TO FORCE IMPROVEMENT IS THE CREATION OF COMPETITION THAT OPERATES WITH THE CORRECTION AND BUILD IT TO 10% SHARE OF THE EDUCATION MARKET. BUT THEY HAVE TO BE EXCELLENT, BUILDING ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE TO 26 AVERAGE ACT.
    
    
    
    Having read many papers that our founding fathers wrote, none of them would just stand by like today's politicians, who do not care as they let this great country's education crumble. But their hand is always out for more money.
    
    
    
    Our success as a nation depends the most on how profitable and competitive our various industries are in the world market with their products and services against the top three most profitable and competitive foreign industries and corporations in the same or similar fields. But both profitability and competitiveness depend on how well trained our workforce is, and that training depends on how well our high schools trained their graduates compared to the best three nations in secondary school performance. During the last two decades, we found that our school systems have no idea how well our competition is doing. The high school output needs to be compared to the best countries in secondary education in the world. For high school entry, the preschools' and primary schools' output must deliver excellent performance, and they must not be deficient in any area like they are today in reading and basic mathematics. The quality of our high school graduates is the most important element in the “education chain” of high school - colleges - universities - graduate schools. If the high school graduates are poorly prepared as many are today, it brings down the entire education chain for them and the country (education chain: failing elementary education, results in more high school failures, which results in even more college failures, and less competence on the jobs one takes). And that makes or breaks the quality of our workforce in every industry. The picture on the left is very rare, but we are getting closer to it every year. In the last ten years I heard about the terrible physical treatment of teachers by students. I even heard of students throwing feces at the teacher after they went to the man's room during class to entertain their classmates. AND THE SCHOOL MANAGEMENT WAS WORRIED ABOUT LAWSUITS FROM THE PARENT. We cannot afford to be nice to children if their actions disturb entire classes or are hostile to teachers. The punishment has to be strong enough to discourage the offender and any other person from trying the same. A school cannot be all things to all people. And the school must be dedicated to education and protected from interference, do an outstanding job as their mission, or take corrective action. IF AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES ARE VERY WELL EDUCATED, they will be able to make our products and services more competitive and profitable. ON THE OTHER HAND...if our high schools' performance is worse than the other countries' high schools with which we compete everywhere, including in the USA, our poorly performing high schools weaken our workforces in every industry. Our products' and services' quality and profitability declines, we make less money. Our country's tax income declines. When that happens, we as a nation must borrow money. UNFORTUNATELY, THAT IS WHAT WE HAVE BEEN DOING FOR MANY DECADES. And that becomes the national debt. Our national debt is very high above 23 TRILLION DOLLARS as of March 2020. The total interest we have to pay on it within this amount is one-third of the total debt. VERY HIGH. We could use that money better today, than having to pay interest on the national debt. But here we are. We will have to pay off the loans. That means that we will have less money to spend. To have enough money, we have to become more competitive in products and services, which means that we must make our public education better, but the best. That means putting an end to the mediocrity in public education everywhere and in every single part of public education to restore and enhance all the corners that we have been cutting with people who did not even know the impact of the questionable decisions. And even that will not be enough. We also have to learn that tax dollars are a precious resource. But in education, we waste a lot of it without improving anything. We must learn in public education to plan the coming year to do the right things AND USE ZERO-BASED BUDGETING TO ENSURE THAT IT HAPPENS.
    
    
    
    We have a good idea why this happened. In many countries, certain things like education standards being centrally set for the curriculum, teacher selection, training and certification standards, national performance standards of schools in every subject that only go up based on what the international leaders in education, the nations whose products and services are beating our products and services, do. They are our competitors. One needs to do that centrally with the best people in the country and not based on political guidance. THE BEST AND SMARTEST PEOPLE IN THE COUNTRY MUST BE THE ONES TO SET STANDARDS IN EDUCATION FOR THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. IF YOU DO IT BY STATE IN 50 STATES WITH THOSE YOU CAN GET, WHO DON'T EVEN CONSIDER INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION, YOU WILL GET WORSE RESULTS AT A MUCH HIGHER EXPENSE BY DUPLICATING THE SAME FUNCTIONS IN EACH OF 50 STATES, DILUTED BY POLITICAL INTERFERENCE. 150 YEARS AGO, IN AN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY THE ONE ROOM, SINGLE TEACHER SCHOOLS DID THEIR OWN THING, AND IT WAS AN EFFECTIVE SYSTEM THEN. BUT BY WWI MANUFACTURING WENT INTO HIGH GEAR, AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES STARTED APPEARING AS WE WENT FROM THE HORSE AND BUGGY TO THE MOON IN A HUNDRED YEARS. THAT STARTED THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORE AND MORE SCIENCES, REQUIRING IMPORTANT SUBJECT BASED INCREASES IN PUBLIC EDUCATION. SO ALL STATES DELEGATED MUCH OF THE PUBLIC EDUCATION-RELATED DECISIONS TO 13,500 DIFFERENT SCHOOL DISTRICTS WITH INSUFFICIENT EXPERTISE ON THE SCHOOL DISTRICT LEVEL. BIG MISTAKE. OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION STARTED DECLINING.
    
    
    
    Example: The several Tennessee governors appoint the Tennessee state board of education members. Now, look at the ACT score chart. It is flat at best, in a very poor ACT READINESS are that reflects only 58% subject-knowledge. That is a very poor result. Now think about how important education results are. DID THE STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION IMPROVE THE ACT SCORES? DID THE GOVERNOR IMPROVE THE ACT SCORES? WHO BLOCKED THEM?
    
    
    
    Other nations improved their education systems with more expertise, improved teaching methodologies. The reason given for this was that delegating total education responsibilities to the states happened "because it was not in the US Constitution at the USA's formation and approved in 1789. Why was this a bad reason? Because the results are BAD. LOOK AT THE ACT SCORES! The US Constitution was amended as needed since then 27 times! The first ten amendments are known as the Bill of Rights. Then all states delegated all management and other decisions to the elected boards of local school districts. We have more than 13,500 school districts in the USA, all doing their own thing without centralized standards, and we hear even today from them, that we control education on the school district level because "THE BEST GUIDANCE FOR OUR SCHOOLS AND CHILDREN COME NOT FROM THE NATION CENTRALLY, BUT FROM THE ELECTED LOCAL SCHOOL BOARDS REPRESENTING THE LOCAL POPULATION". THAT REASONING IS FROM THE MID-1800s. It is difficult to understand why such a very limited decision still dominates US education with politicians in control who do not seem to understand that their actions are damaging our economy on a large scale. This idea worked well until about 1900, for more than a century. PLEASE CHANGE IT TO AN INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONAL GROUP OF RETIRED LARGE COMPANY CEOS WHOSE COMPANY IS INTERNATIONALLY SUCCESSFUL. AND RETIRED MATH AND SCIENCE GRADUATE SCHOOL FULL PROFESSORS TO CONTROL GRADING AND TESTING STANDARDS, TEACHER TRAINING STANDARDS, TEACHER SELECTION AND QUALIFICATION STANDARDS, K-12 CURRICULUM, TEACHING METHODOLOGIES, TEACHER COMPENSATION POLICIES, TEACHER PERFORMANCE EVALUATION STANDARDS NATIONALLY. The education results have been poor for 19 years or more under state political control, the entire nation's standards need to be raised in order to improve results. The standards need to be made by an independent highly educated group, and the states are to improve the education results under those standards.
    
    
    
    The small single-classroom school houses did a good job in mathematics and English focused on mostly agricultural production, and straightforward manufacturing. Please look at two 8th grade final exams more than 120 years ago: one is from 1895, and the other is from 1912. We are showing here how much tougher the 8th-grade education and tests were more than 120 years ago. Many of today's high school graduates could not pass these eighth-grade final tests. But then, something happened after WWI. We started advancing in more and more areas of sciences and mathematics, AND WE WENT FROM THE HORSE AND BUGGY TO THE MOON, AND THESE EFFORTS RESULTED IN MILLIONS OF NEW DISCOVERIES IN THOUSANDS OF NEW SCIENCES, ENGINEERING, MEDICINE AND WE COULD GO ON FOREVER. MANY OLD JOBS DISAPPEARED, BUT THE BIG CHANGES CREATED MORE NEW JOBS. EDUCATION HAD TO INCREASE FOR THE NEW JOBS AT ALL LEVELS, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL AND HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL, UNIVERSITY LEVEL, AND GRADUATE LEVEL LIKE DOCTORATE PERFORMANCE IN MOST FIELDS. AFTER WWII, EDUCATION ON THE ELEMENTARY AND HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL INCREASED ACCORDINGLY IN MANY COUNTRIES. BUT NOT IN THE USA. When hiring people within school districts or on the state level, those hiring have no idea how to check background and interview. In many cases, they think they know what the problem is, but have no idea within school districts what they need to change to get better results, and don't know what kind of talent they need to hire. BS is the rule of the day. Political control and political management influenced all of the education-related decisions more and more after WWI. Even after the millions of technological advances, we stayed with the old slogan of "The best decision can only come from the local population's elected school boards to improve education." This idea worked well in the agriculture-based economy of the 1800s, but not after WWI when we went from the horse and buggy to the moon, with incredible technological discoveries that are accelerating faster and faster as you are reading this report. But American public education put on the breaks with the old belief of the 1800s coupled with law-making politicians' power. Their fuel became the worshiping of money FROM LOBBYISTS. Lobbyists are generally retired Congress members, who changed from being paid off by lobbyists, to being lobbyists for more money. Not all of them, but enough in numbers to control Congress's decision-making for specific interest groups or industries. We are not a Democracy that we try to sell to other countries. Even the Greeks decided about two thousand years ago that democracy creates huge disorganization and conflicts followed by failure. BUT WE HAVE BEEN SELLING IT TO OTHER COUNTRIES, combined with creating incredible losses of our young people and leaving the country in an economic mess. In Japan and Germany, we stayed and helped to rebuild the countries. We benefitted economically by doing so. But most importantly, we created close friends and allies from two powerful enemies. But in many other cases, we left quickly after destroying the countries, without helping them to recover. Reminds one of Iraq, Afghanistan and others. We destroyed making any recovery for them impossible, whereas with Japan and Germany we helped them to rebuild and they became economically strong friends. When Russia went into Afghanistan and Iraq, we were dealing with literally selling "Democracy" promising the people that they will rule. I lived under communism who promised the same thing. But they destroyed the economy by mismanaging it, we lost everything, even bread and butter was rationed to one loaf and one stick for a large family per month, and the poverty became so bad that at night we could hear people being held up for the clothes that they were wearing. In Iraq, we sold the idea of democracy, organized voting, announced big awards like $6 million for high ranking former leaders, and the members of the public came to our soldiers asking what $6 million is in terms of number of cows or sheep that they can buy. Doesn't that tell you something about how well we understood the culture? We lost a large number of soldiers. We did not understand their value system, culture and thinking, and decades later we are still losing our young people there and we are dumping our dumping many millions of dollars into a black hole, when our national debt is rising to record heights because we are short on earnings at home. At the same time our public education is dropping like a stone although we are paying the and we are graduating 80% of the graduates whose lack of good education will not even qualify them for the lowest job. Not a problem! Our public education just lies to the public and broadcasts that "we provide world class education" to our children who cannot read, communicate and do basic math after graduating from high school.
    
    
    
    

    Please think about this situation. The great majority of our schools cannot teach reading and basic math by grade 5, and we graduate our children that way from high school, decade after decade. Does this make high school work easier or more difficult for the student? The teacher turnover rate is too high. Do the majority of quitting teachers leave their job because they like their boss and work and work environment? Schools have slogans like "Excellence for all children." That's fantastic because the parents do not have to worry about their children being employable. They KNOW THAT because the school told them. But the truth is that such things are symptoms of very poor education. Why do we tolerate such people in education? How can anyone be for excellent results in schools if we tolerate management or employees with ideas that create bad morale? How can we expect teachers or principals to do well if their working conditions are so bad that they leave the teaching profession?

    
    
    
    
    By WWII we were the only one of the industrialized nations who stayed with this old belief of "The best decision can only come from the local population's elected school boards to improve education," that held us back as others passed us. And note that politicians always propose something in the name of the people. Such as "The American people want XYZ that I am proposing." There exists a limit at which point we can drop down to the "level of cavemen," and lose everything with these old beliefs as we are getting dumbed down. We are only halfway there in 2020 - exactly. The closer we get to that point, the more difficult recovery will be. We are too close to that point beyond which recovery is impossible with a law making body of former lawyers mostly, who can argue for and be part of either side that pays more. This is not negative thinking. It is called trend extension in decision making. In this case, you look at a reliable measure of annual performance (ACT) trend for ten years minimum, compared to the trend of the annual performance of your top ten competitor countries in the same period - and it doesn't look good.
    
    
    
    The philosophy born 200 years ago, about managing education is exactly the same today: "The best decision can only come from the local population's elected school boards to improve education," is the most damaging to our future success. Why? Because it applies to all planning if any, all management of execution to non-existing measurable objective, and totally lacking any management know how to change the way the organization works, without which the results cannot change. The truth is that we are not going to get smarter ELECTED school board members in ANY OF THE 13,500 - 14,000 school districts, with their incredible duplication of people and expenses, and the education results that will make almost all of our children jobless! You simply cannot get well enough educated school board MAJORITY by electing them, who are experienced enough to make equally good decisions today, that is competitive with the best nations in education. Our children's highest success or dismal failure in school depends on how well our schools educate them. BUT more importantly, OUR COUNTRY's ECONOMY depends totally on our children's education today. Having elected school boards during the last 100 years is one of several reasons why our public education is dropping like a stone. But we found ten other actions that ensure failure, performed by the state education departments with the governor's blessing - everywhere. Also, the elected local school boards duplicate functions where decision making SHOULD BE uniform for the nation, and it is duplicating staff in more than 13,500 school districts, with good people who do not have the right education and experience for decisions that vary among them. This is almost like 13,500 blindfolded people getting into their cars, but have absolutely no idea about where to go - but even if they did, there is no way they can succeed. You do not need any more proof than the poor ACT records for decades, which are among the worst in the industrialized countries. The state education departments and the governors and lawmakers are not brave enough to stand up to the education lobby. No laws were proposed that would require changes within the educational organizations. Why not? The poor results are created within those organizations with the "help" of education lobbyists, who could vote out any politician whose proposal they do not like. This is a classic, lousy management structure that can only go down, where the education organization is poorly performing, obviously because of poor, insufficiently educated self-serving decisions. Such decisions must be made centrally as in every country, except in ours, with the best people we can find, with this central decision-making group's responsibility to set standards IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST! The education organizations MUST be implemented with excellent people: the nationally centralized INDEPENDENT management group directs in objectives and monthly operating plans within each school. In many other countries figured this out by WWII, WHY COULDN'T WE? We are spending a fortune on duplicating people in every state AND EVERY SCHOOL DISTRICT BOOSTING THE SIZE OF CENTRAL MANAGEMENT, without knowing what they are to do and how to do it. This just makes every school district worse. There are standards for the size of central management organizations, and if they grow beyond it, bad things happen with performance. Operating with silly unmeasurable objectives backed by a very low-performance target like ACT 21 creates a multitude of problems that also drop performance. We do not seem to have the management experience to know anything to create good results from the top down. Worst of all, most people in the education communities' management think that they know enough because they were hired. No person in any school district wants to visit school systems that perform better, and they do not want to learn anything to create better results, BECAUSE THEY THINK THAT SUCH VISITS WOULD INDICATE THAT THEY DON'T KNOW ENOUGH TO DO THEIR JOBS WELL. Morale is bad and justified. The results could not be worse. The structured satisfaction surveys that the states use are not a good choice because the outcome is limited to fixed questions and answers. Such tests can steer the result to a conclusion like "we need more money." When morale is terrible or unknown, one needs an open-ended analysis where the employee guides the test. Such highly secure online tests are available. The responsibility for bad results rests with governors, the state education organization without exception, most superintendents, but we are not including principals and teachers, who are trying hard without much help from above.
    
    
    
    School boards started gathering a bad reputation by the late 1800's. Relying on the important decision's of standards, curriculum, and elected school board members having the highest authority for decisions, when they know far less about education than an assistant teacher. With majority voting decisions within a school board, they were not experienced in management and weak in subject knowledge. Also weak in determining if we need to improve and by how much per subject, or in teacher training, or interviewing people to be the new superintendent. But to give such authority by law to such a group shows not enough skill from a governor on down to change with the times. So, American education became the most expensive per student and dropped like a stone to the bottom of industrialized countries. Not being able to improve teaching but making teachers' jobs more difficult, not being able to hire good superintendents whose future depended on the elected board, who do not know how bad the performance is, and have no idea how to fix it other than throwing money at any problem. You see, having a boss who is totally unqualified will not be able to attract good experienced management talent who can improve things. The board members are good people who want to do good, but the majority of an elected board is not trained and experienced well enough to direct even a 50 person organization, let alone one that has 100-10,000 employees. With political influence without "measurable academic achievement objectives" in every school with a national test and not a state test, it is not the path to success. Having untrained, inexperienced people for the jobs to prepare our children for building a better tomorrow, is not the path to success. The qualifications, standards and objectives within education must be centralized with the best highly educated and experienced people who are independent of public education. The education of our children cannot be based on those organizations who could not deliver better results for decades, and presented to the public a much better picture than reality was. They lied to the public, "purposefully misleading the public, who pay for it all." It could be fraudulent action that needs to be investigated. And to prove our point, look at the evidence presented below, and after you do, YOU DECIDE what you want for your children, grandchildren and your country. But you have to focus on ACT score results. The ACT score shows what the child learned from grade one to twelve.
    
    
    
    

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

    
    
    
    

    
    
    
    
    A VERY IMPORTANT POINT: We, and probably every country can have emergencies that take more money to survive, at a time when we are disabled to make more money. It could be an infectious disease for which no defense exists when it breaks out. It could be a natural disaster that comes as a surprise, like a major earthquake or volcanic eruption, that is not predictable. Or it could be believable, but we dismiss its possibility. Like a bloody revolt when tens of millions of people can no longer get a job because their educators did not teach the information that they needed for employment. We must realize that to have a safety net, we are dependent on the quality of our public education. Unfortunately if a school does not have well-trained teachers whose personality is matched well to teaching, the classrooms will be boring. It is impossible to learn in a boring classroom. Especially if they did not teach you to read and do basic mathematics well. We set the wrong standards, with 13,500 school districts' elected boards making practically all decisions. For well enough educated children, we would need a much better trained and managed public school system that is competitive with the countries that have the three best education systems in the world. One that operates with the right objectives and follows an annual operating plan with monthly GPA objectives that are 10% higher than the prior years' actual performance. We must understand that people who worked in a poorly performing organization view their performance as normal. They resist change and do not want objectives, or to be measured, and view anything above 2-3% improvement in performance as an impossibility. Look at the chart covering twenty years of ACT performance. Very poor performance. We never managed to increase the performance. Schools never operated under a performance objective with monthly operating plans focusing them on what they must accomplish. School employees just came to work, doing things the same way as they did a hundred years ago. When you do not change the way you work, you will keep getting the same results. That is why the ACT performance does not improve, just stays in a poor performance area.
    
    
    
    Charter schools are a different version of public schools. They are also USA public schools. Traditional public schools like to publicize "facts" like charter schools are not better; they are taking money away from your children's public schools. All of which is "true" (wink, wink). Please understand that when the truth is bad, the offending people have to make up "facts," they lie, and they DO NOT WANT TO CHANGE. VERY UNPROFESSIONAL. As a result, they are destroying the employability of most of today's children. So what do you have to do to look better? You follow uncle VLADIMIR LENIN'S ADVICE, WHO SAID MANY TIMES THAT "IF YOU LIE TO THE PUBLIC A THOUSAND TIMES, THEY WILL ACCEPT IT AS THE TRUTH." And disinformation theory was born. Charter schools have an appointed board of business leaders and members of the local public school management and teachers - UNFORTUNATELY. The traditional public schools have an elected board of local people AND PAY THEM in most cases. To win a school board election, it will cost about $15,000 in advertising. To win a governorship, you need about $10 million. In one case, a governor candidate spent $3 million to get elected. His opponent spent $15 million and won. AND INTO POLITICAL OBLIGATIONS WE GO IF YOU DONATED ENOUGH TO THE CANDIDATE. HOW GOOD THE CANDIDATES ARE, DOES NOT MATTER. All of them promise to fix education when running for office. AND NONE OF THEM DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. Please do not object. Just look at 20 years of ACT scores and the fact that about 80% we graduate are not even ACT READY - and that is a very low measure of knowledge compared to what employers needed. The traditional public school board member gets $25,000 per year, as an example in Knoxville, TN, for at least four years, and there are no term limits. Naturally, the school board member does not care about the money (wink, wink), and will understand what they have to do to improve the already "excellent" performance of the school system (wink, wink, wink!) by screaming "We need more money!!!". The prerequisite is a high school diploma, and the candidate does not know anything about education and how to improve it. Look at the comparison of charter vs. traditional public school performance right here. The charter schools get less money than the traditional low-performing public schools do. Black student performance is generally very low, with 94% not even ACT Ready. I heard all kinds of ideas about why. I decided to find one that accepts only poor, black, inner-city children. A charter school started in 2006 in Harlem, called Success Academy Schools. Today they have 46 schools and a waiting list of 19,000 families. Their results are excellent, and they passed almost all private schools. I visited them, but I could not convince any school districts to visit and learn. NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON VISITED THEM FROM TRADITIONAL PUBLIC SCHOOL MANAGEMENT. They even put their curriculum and teaching methodology on the Internet free for any school. There are too many people in most traditional public schools, who are a taco short on the combination plate. IT IS RECOGNIZED THAT THEY ARE DOING A POOR JOB THAT DAMAGES THE CHILDREN "THEY EDUCATE POORLY." THE HUMAN IGNORANCE AND BIG EGOS MOSTLY BY PEOPLE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION WHO REFUSE TO LEARN AND DID NOT KNOW ENOUGH WHEN THEY STARTED, TRYING TO HIDE BAD PERFORMANCE THAT IS NOTICED BY MORE AND MORE PEOPLE IN PUBLIC. WHY IS IT THAT BOTH PARTIES AND ALL GOVERNORS TOTALLY AVOIDED MAKING CHANGES IN PUBLIC EDUCATION THAT WOULD INCREASE ACT AND SAT PERFORMANCE TO INTERNATIONALLY COMPETITIVE LEVELS?
    
    
    
    We would like to explain something very basic about debt and excessive spending in general. If you must pay for something right now, but you do not have the money, you can borrow that money. But the amount you must pay back will be higher. The difference is called "interest." In the future, you will end up with less money, because you will have to keep paying interest on the money you borrowed ages ago. That's not a good thing. How big or small is the total interest due? Is it insignificant? When I found out, I was shocked. Our national debt is $23.6 TRILLION dollars on March 24, 2020. The total interest is one third of the national debt at $8 trillion dollars! the covid-19 virus problem will increase it more rapidly because we had insufficient money in reserve. and that is a big problem. Our big problem is our poor elementary and high school performance that has been weakening the workforce in all industries and that reduced national income, resulting in this situation. What will we do if a hurricane hits the east coast or a volcanic eruption or a big earthquake hits us? All of them are high probability events for the USA. High school education must be increased asap to a national average 27 ACT, because the current low performance in both primary and secondary education, with 3 out of 4 graduates not even meeting the low "ACT Readiness" standard, has been weakening our national workforce for several decades.

    
    
    
    
    OUR HARD_EARNED TAXES PAID THE HIGHEST RATES PER STUDENT IN THE WORLD BUT DROPPED OUR CHILDREN'S EDUCATION TO THE BOTTOM OF THE INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES. It would be reasonable if governors could explain why they did this, and what their plan is to raise our MINIMUM high school ACT readiness to 80% of the graduating classes. ACT Readiness means that the graduating high school student passed only four subjects with an ACT score between 18 and 23, which is at or below 58% product knowledge in a test. To make it worse, 76-84% of our graduating children ARE NOT EVEN ACT READY, meaning they don't even know 58% in four subjects only! The ACT scores show reliably every year what our children learned by grade twelve. The state test results are dumbed down regularly by the state education departments under the governor, to have grades that LOOK BETTER. They drop the pass/fail points from 60% right answers to as low as below 30% good answers each year for one or more subjects. That produces higher grades with less knowledge. A few years ago, our children had to pass ALL, repeat ALL, high school courses in 4-5 years of high school, with above 60% correct answers (D score), and a couple of decades before that, the pass/fail point was at 70% correct answers. We dropped it to make it easier to get good grades with the child learning less. With many more actions/methods/practices, public high school graduates' knowledge is not what employers need. The public pays the highest rates in the world per student per year via taxes. Simultaneously, we do not show significant expenses such as the legal expenses relating to education and the high mortgage expenses for school buildings under education expense reports. The public schools purposefully chose not to improve their poor results and purposefully under-educated the children, both their own and all children, because we are a democracy after all.
    These actions, and lack of other actions to improve, already start smelling as if one was on a safari in Kenya, but having to walk behind a big elephant that drops 75 lb bombs that do not smell like roses. I submit that the twenty-year ACT chart shows results of a school district, the state of Tennessee, and the USA, with all of it in a poor performance area and the scores almost overlap. There are no central standards in the US on the same level everywhere in the country, as those in the three best countries in education.
    
    Why is it better to duplicate staff in each of 50 states, and some in each of 13,500 school districts to duplicate standards that need to be competitive internationally? WHY DO WE NEED DIFFERENT CURRICULA WITHIN THE USA? HOW DOES THAT HELP TO PRODUCE CHILDREN WHO ARE EMPLOYABLE? HOW ABOUT GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS AT A VERY LOW LEVEL? I MET THREE HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES (VERIFIED), PAID A $23.00 CHARGE WITH A $50 BILL, SIMILAR NUMBERS IN TWO MORE WHO COULD NOT FIGURE OUT WHAT CHANGE TO GIVE ME. I HEARD ABOUT JOB INTERVIEWS WHERE THEY GAVE A RECTANGULAR PIECE OF PLYWOOD PLUS PENCIL AND RULER DURING THE JOB INTERVIEW TO A HIGH SCHOOL GRAD, ASKING HIM TO DRAW A RECTANGLE FROM ANY CORNER THAT IS THREE AND A HALF BY FIVE AND THREE QUARTER INCHES, WE LEFT HIM, CAME BACK IN 30 MINUTES AND HE COULD NOT EVEN START. SHOULD EVEN ONE CHILD LIKE THIS BE ALLOWED TO GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL?!
    
    
    
    We graduate children such that more than 80% of them do not even meet a meager four-subject standard called "ACT READINESS." Most other countries centrally decide and control all important decisions, and such countries do well. It is easier to get high-level talent for national decisions, and eliminating duplication of such people saves a lot of money.
    The teachers' unions are very vocal about not changing things like: Education is best controlled on the state level only. Or: "We believe that the best education results are created only under the direction of the of the locally elected school boards." Absolutely makes no sense. This is the way education was managed during the 1800s in an agriculture-based economy. Most people were farmers in any village. They knew very well what their children needed to learn, and the little schools did a great job. Old 8th-grade final tests that I examined from that period, most of today's high school graduates could not pass! We fell behind substantially in Math, English, and Reading under the Public Education's guidance.
    
    
    
    We have been competing with many nations' products worldwide. Our education management and governors do not appreciate how we compare to the top ten nations in the world in education. Some governors may not fully understand that high school graduates feed all of our industries' workforce directly or through our universities. The poorly educated high school output degrades American products' product and service quality so that our sales in competition with the better-educated nations will sell less than the competition. At a lower margin that reduces our national income, that is part of our already huge national debt of $30 trillion by the end of 2020. The total interest due by the end of 2020 will be slightly over 9.5 Trillion dollars! Interestingly our spending per student is the highest in the world per student. The law guarantees at least the same amount of money to public school districts, as they spent the prior year - REGARDLESS OF THE RESULTS! So we are the highest spender in education, and we have the worst education results among all the industrialized countries. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? THAT MEANS THAT A GOOD PART OF THE EDUCATION MONEY THAT WE SPEND IS NOT BEING SPENT ON IMPROVING OUR DETERIORATED PUBLIC EDUCATION! IT IS SO BAD THAT ABOUT 80% OF THOSE CHILDREN WE GRADUATE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO QUALIFY FOR LEGAL JOBS. THEY WILL BE EXTREMELY UNDEREDUCATED, THEY WILL BE HUNGRY, AND THEY WILL BE MAKING BABIES, BUT NOT TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEM. OUR SCHOOLS ARE BLAMING THE RAPID RISE OF OUR POVERTY IN THE USA. HOWEVER, GUESS WHAT THE TRUTH IS! IT IS OUR MISMANAGED PUBLIC EDUCATION THAT IS CREATING THE FASTEST GROWTH IN POVERTY IN THE WORLD. Guess how much interest we have to pay on the $30 Trillion National debt? Almost 10 Trillion dollars! It is a huge problem. The much bigger problem is that we graduate much more poorly educated high school graduates for the national workforce than MANY OTHER NATIONS do.
    
    
    
    We went from the horse and buggy to the moon in 120 years. We had an agricultural economy during the 1800s. Education was based mostly on the one-room school with one teacher then, and local school board, with the idea that the local school board was the best advisor for what we should teach our farmers' children to have successful farms in the town. Before we landed on the moon, a huge change has taken place. We changed from an agricultural economy to a very complex manufacturing and service economy. As a result, we ended up competing worldwide with thousands of different products and services, increasing competition with different nations and thousands of different sciences and engineering solutions. However, we stayed with the local school board idea "because it is the local citizens who are the best in guiding what the local children should learn." BIG MISTAKE. Today, more than 13,500 different school districts whose elected local board is the advisor to the local schools on standards, financial decisions. They knew nothing about the competition of education systems and employers' needs, domestically or internationally. How can a group of people be so blind that they do not realize that the state standards for teacher selection, training, certification, the ACT standard achievement, and student ACT graduation standards must also be the same IN EVERY STATE? It is the same with ACT readiness at 80% instead of the poor 16-25%, which makes our children unemployable with the ACT 21 objective that we could not reach for the past 15 years. Why? Because of the poor job that our schools are doing, who are still living in the 1800s. Life is not always peaches and cream. But politicians from the governor on down, do not have the know-how or courage to solve the education problems.
    
    
    
    The current public education performance can only bring an economic failure in the USA. Many problems produce bad results that one cannot be flexible, especially with a partner that has produced bad results for decades. We claim but do not deliver excellence. No one can produce excellence without measuring performance. That is the same as driving blind on the interstate. The result is a failure. Both Republican and Democrat organizations failed with public education. Thus, we would suggest establishing an independent group of former corporate executives, since the schools' products, the students, depend on having a job. An organization independent of politics and education management that knows what our children need must be the decision-maker about objectives to be used for improving education, graduation standards that must deliver at least 80% readiness of high school graduates at an average ACT score 27. The education system is responsible for progress to deliver these standards. Unfortunately, the past 20 years clearly show that public education management cannot deliver what today's employers need. There are only about 5% of our schools who can.
    
    
    
    The elected school board made sense when we had an agricultural economy during the 1800s. The local community's school board was the best to oversee how well the local school must operate to produce children with the right education for the local community. But we went from the horse and buggy to the moon since then, and there are thousands of different companies in hundreds of industries, a huge increase in sophistication. Every school district must produce well enough educated graduates for the entire country. I am sorry, but we need more experienced and educated people to direct education than what we have with locally elected boards. Curriculum and graduation standards must also be set along with teacher training curriculum at teacher colleges such that our schools are competitive in every US state with the three best nations in education in the world. We are extremely weak in this area. Duplication of talent for every school district is impossible to find at the right skill level and is unnecessary. Our quality of high school education must be the same nationwide. IS THIS WHY WE PAY MANY MILLIONS EACH YEAR TO DUPLICATE DECISION-MAKING AUTHORITY WITH PEOPLE WHO HAVE CREATED THE POOREST RESULTS DURING THE LAST 20 YEARS IN PUBLIC EDUCATION? SHOULD NOT WE MAKE ALL IMPORTANT DECISIONS IN ONE PLACE NATIONALLY WITH THE BEST PEOPLE WE CAN FIND INSTEAD OF WASTING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN DUPLICATION FOR INFERIOR RESULTS?
    
    
    
    ACT College and Career Readiness (ACT CCR and STEM ACT CCR) need to be understood very clearly. Even college graduates misunderstand it. But most school board members and even superintendents are not familiar with its details, its meaning and its consequences.
    
    
    
    We would like to remind the readers that not too long ago, a passing grade in any high school subject had to contain 60% correct answers in the tests to earn a passing grade. A passing grade WAS NOT considered a good grade unless it had 80% or more correct answers in the tests. But this is not the essential point. What is even more important is that back then, one could graduate from high school ONLY with a diploma if one passed all four years of all high school subjects at 60% correct answers or higher. Today, 80% or more of the high school graduates are not even ACT READY, which means that they could be below 25% subject knowledge. We found that no other country graduated high school children so poorly prepared as we did. We did this because the subject knowledge of at least, repeat AT LEAST 90% of high school graduates would have been FAILING BECAUSE THEIR SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN 60% MINIMUM ON ALL FOUR YEARS OF HIGH SCHOOL SUBJECTS, AND THAT MEANS A HIGHER THAN 90% FAILURE RATE. AND THEN THE SCHOOL SYSTEMS IN EVERY STATE PUSHED FOR A 90% GRADUATION RATE, WHICH MEANS NOTHING BECAUSE THE SUBJECT TESTING WAS CHANGED TO LOWER THE PASSING POINTS TO 20-25% TO PASS MANY CHILDREN WHO WOULD HAVE FAILED UNDER ANY SYSTEM THAT COULD BE INTERNATIONALLY COMPETITIVE. WHO DID THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENTS OF ALL STATES HELPED?? NOT THE PARENTS. AND NOT THE CHILDREN. THEY HOODWINKED THE CHILDREN AND PARENTS, PROMISING THAT "GOD DID NOT CREATE ALL CHILDREN FOR COLLEGE, BUT YOUR CHILD WILL BE FINE WITH LEARNING A TRADE WELL, AND HE WILL DO FINE!"
    
    
    
    Teaching is a very unique job in that successful teaching requires That is absolutely not true. Not the teachers' fault, but they are not matched to the profession, the American teacher training is not good enough on the subject training, much more knowledge is badly needed, and this makes the classes very boring. Our teachers typically come from the bottom third of their university classes. Many could not complete their original major, and transfer to teaching because it is easier. Trade jobs are disappearing to robots. Robots can deliver the finished product faster, lower cost, and higher quality than a human can. The exception is unique products that are specially tailored to one person. This is a small and shrinking market, require the best in the trade to work it, no training available because it would require decades of experience. IT IS AMAZING THAT THE PUBLIC PAYS THE HIGHEST RATES PER CHILD IN EDUCATION, AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE LESS EDUCATED POOR PUBLIC, BY LYING TO THEM ABOUT SOMETHING THAT THE PEOPLE IN EDUCATION JUST MAKE UP. TODAY IN 2020, THEY EDUCATE CHILDREN WITH ONLY 20-30% SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE IN ONLY FOUR SUBJECTS, WHEN 10-12 YEARS AGO A GRADUATING HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT EXCEEDED 60% SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE IN ALL HIGH SCHOOL COURSES. A MORE DETAILED EXPLANATION IS PROVIDED BELOW.
    
    
    
    Looking at the ACT scores and ACT readiness percentages above and the low ACT benchmark scores in the table above indicate that the student is only 25% prepared in the top four Benchmark subjects to be passing with one exception: English. For that subject, the benchmark score is 18, representing only 10% readiness only, meaning 10% good answers in a test. But the US education system chose this benchmark for English.
    
    
    
    "ACT READINESS" is a meager target for public education, and it will not get any student into a position of remaining employable longer than a few years unless the student graduates with an average ACT score at 27 minimum today in 2020. The reason for this is that the countries with which we compete to achieve a satisfactory national income have a better-trained workforce than we have due to our long-declining high school education. Those countries graduate from high school with average performance in the ACT 29-34 range, depending on the country. The reason for this is that the success of all industries in any country depends on the training level of workforces in those industries, which depends on the education level of high school graduates.
    
    
    
    What has been very disturbing during the last ten years is the discovery that our department of education in each state is not doing anything about the deterioration of our public education. I wrote to the governor seven times in eight years about what we observed. Not one response to my questions from anyone. Then I wrote to the next governor four times, and again not one response from anyone. The things that should be done very well were not done well. And the bad things that should not be done were done - very well. It appears to this day that most are done purposefully to ensure poor results.
    
    
    
    In the last few years, 74% of public schools graduates nationally, and 85% of those graduated in the state of Tennessee and other states are not even ACT Ready. This is accomplished with a method called "cut scores," done by the state education departments, who describe this method as a beneficial alignment of student performance in order to raise the ACT scores. Then they present a fairly complex looking mathematical manipulation and changing of the pass/fail percentages in one or more subjects to achieve the desired outcome in graduates.
    
    
    
    The pass/fail percentage went from 60% to 25% or less below, but we kept graduating 80-85%. Did the students’ knowledge go up or down during this period? IT DROPPED LIKE A STONE.
    
    
    
    The departments of education require elected boards to set objectives. But they don't know what kind of objectives work or not, and they also don't know that a written operating plan is a necessity without which no improvement is possible. And that makes the great majority of our high school graduates unemployable even for minimum wage jobs.
    
    
    
    We are one of the five highest spenders in the world per student. even in Tennessee, where we do not show within the school district's expenses, the education-related mortgage expenses that are high, legal expenses and God only knows what else. Countries like Finland are delivering their fabulous education results at a level that is above average ACT-30-equivalent, and they do it at lower cost than we do per student when their cost of living is higher than ours. Their teaching methodology is so good that it eliminates the necessity for testing until the middle of high school. But their testing is tougher once they start doing it. They not only grade tests based on correct answers like we do, but they also score the method that the student uses to decide what the right answer is. Finally, at the end of high school, every student must take a matriculation exam in Finland and some other countries as well. That is a test that covers all high school subjects.
    
    

    • We do not have a "subject-knowledge maintenance" program covering every school year, and our students retain only 25-30% of the previous year's subject knowledge, let alone all high school years' subjects.
    
    
    
    • We are approximately 100 years behind the high performing nations in teaching methodologies, management, student-teacher relationships. We do not match teacher candidates to the teaching profession before selection for admission to teacher training. Teacher education declined to a poor level, yet we pushed out the older teachers who were better trained, and the new young teachers' turnover rate became very high.
    
    
    
    • Curriculum, knowledge level in mathematics, sciences, reading and language studies, teacher training, management training are poor. They all have a management structure that makes it impossible to improve and lacking proper objectives and operating plans for improvement.
    
    
    
    • School boards have no idea how to background check, interview, and hire the right talent for any job, and for this reason, they hire superintendents who were unsuccessful and never bothered to learn how to manage a school district's specific average ACT score's growth. In our world, anything can happen. For example, if one wants to see a school district fail, and if one doesn't mind controlling an elected board who have no idea how to approve a superintendent candidate, support the hiring for one who will not be able to do a good job. In such a situation, you may think that this person definitely knows better than we do, so he must be right. Just accept the decision as bad. "Look always at what happened, and if it is bad to the extreme, you have "fly in the ointment" who has significant influence. As I see quite a few things that would result in a significant failure, ACT and SAT are national tests that consistently and accurately measure graduating students' knowledge. ON THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION LEVEL, THE STATE TEST PASS/FAIL POINTS ARE REDUCED SELECTIVELY BY SUBJECT IN ORDER TO SHOW HIGHER GRADES FOR THE DECLINING EDUCATION THEY PROVIDE. The pass/fail point can be reduced as much as from 60% good answers on a test to below 30% good answers, GRADUATING MANY CHILDREN WHO WOULD OTHERWISE FAIL. There are no central country-wide standards in the USA for objectives, graduation, performance measurements such that it actually damages public schools' graduates. But there are other things from the start: "Divide and Conquer" is a military strategy that was used for more than two thousand years.
    
    
    About 35-40 years ago the failing score meant that one had 70% or less correct answers on a test. To graduate from high school, one had to pass all courses in four years at 70% good answers. Ten years later, the pass/fail point was lowered to 60% or less per subject. Today we measure the end of high school readiness level of graduates with five benchmark tests in the above table. Every test that ACT does is measured by a 1-36 scoring range that is not linear. For example, a 15 ACT score is about the same as only 0-2% good answers on our typical tests. ACT readiness benchmarks correspond to only 10-25% good answers on tests, and 76-84% of the children we graduate from high school with a diploma are not even ACT ready. That means that 4 out of 5 children who graduated from high school in a state like Tennessee had only 5% good answers or less on his tests and graduated from high school. Under these conditions, almost all the children who graduate from high school are so poorly educated that the outcome will be joblessness for almost all of them and disastrous for our country, children and grandchildren.
    
    
    
    To better see how far we fell behind in public education, please look at two 8th grade final exams more than 100 years ago: one is from 1895, and the other is from 1912. We are showing how much tougher the 8th-grade education and tests were more than 120 years ago. It appears that we did not improve public education enough compared to the technological advancement of employers.
    
    
    
    WHAT IS LEARNING, NEURONAL INTERCONNECTIONS, IN WHAT FUNCTIONS AT WHAT AGE? VERY IMPORTANT: There is an optimal period in a person’s age for learning. After 18-20 years of age it will take longer and harder to learn the same thing after 20. The biggest mistake we make is not making use of the 3-6-year-old children's fast learning. A close second is teaching "reading" or "basic mathematics" very poorly. Also not teaching cursive writing (pattern analysis), art, and classical music (decision making). Allowing calculator use instead learning multiplication and division tables, or doing math calculations long hand damaged functions like pattern recognition, critical thinking, mental mathematics, and decision making. We leave developmental gaps in the brain, the extent of which we don't know yet except for the above, but it is significant. Talk to a neurologist if in doubt. People at the highest levels in education made some very foolish decisions over the years or were convinced or forced to do such damaging things TO MAKE SCHOOL EASIER FOR CHILDREN. THEY ARE STILL MAKING SUCH POOR DECISIONS, THOSE WHO PRODUCED THE TERRIBLE RESULTS OF THE OPINION: THE ONLY ONES WITH THE EXPERTISE TO FIX THE RESULTS. AND WE HEARD THAT STORY FOR DECADES WITH POOR RESULTS. If we need to make important decisions about a problem like should we teach art and music in school, we must learn and understand several other related subjects. For example, why learn music? Read about the many important benefits for school results and life when learning music early as part of the curriculum. Why include art in the curriculum's early years? Read about why art is needed in the curriculum. Much better student training is needed in Reading, English, math, and other areas, but the results indicate teacher subject training needs to become much better. As a general fact, US teacher training at our colleges and universities is a problem that reduces the effective delivery of any subject, and it poorly prepares our children. This is not the teachers' fault. It is the result of poor teacher training at our colleges and universities and the teachers' low-expectation certification. We found it interesting that while the teacher training became much weaker, other university departments remained high quality. That certainly raises an interesting question, but we found many such questions that target and weaken public education. And why learn such fundamental subjects in preschool to 5th grade? Because the human brain's ability to learn is the quickest between birth and 6 YEARS OF AGE, SLIGHTLY DECLINING BUT STILL FAST, MAKING LEARNING A LITTLE MORE DIFFICULT AS THE YEARS INCREASE. But there is also some indication of benefit to the child's brain if classical composers (such as Beethoven's and Mozart's music increases concentration and reduces stress in children from birth) are played for them. It appears to improve learning compared to those who were not exposed to such music. The young brain develops its areas in order of specific developmental priorities. For example, "vision" first, then "hearing" second, overlapping and so on. As learning starts slowing, by age 15-18, learning starts becoming more difficult. We will cover more about this further on. We just wanted to show that critical thinking involves the knowledge of the other fields, sometimes many, and it is more important to know other related subjects well instead of teaching critical thinking. Critical thinking is a very important skill in order to make good decisions, but it cannot exist without understanding THE other subjects as well that are related to the problem that one needs to solve. But there are subjects that can relate to most if not all problem solving, like reading and math, the subjects we learn in high school, that we are not teaching well. Our education system is talking about teaching critical thinking in high school. We disagree. One has to teach a lot more with much better results first. AND THEN, CRITICAL THINKING EMERGES AUTOMATICALLY UNDER NORMAL DECISION MAKING. The use of calculators in school or at home, not teaching music and art appreciation, creates insufficient neuronal interconnections in the brain's areas that handle critical thinking and decision making. In addition, one has to be well enough trained in mathematics the subject where the problem is that requires a decision, and related subjects in order fo have good enough critical thinking and decision making. Our public education has not been good enough for decades to create a large enough group of decision-makers.
    
    
    
    Testing for teacher vocational preference is VERY important. It is very important to understand that neither the parent nor the teachers can force a child to learn. Learning will happen only if the child is excited about the interesting way the teacher presents the subject with infectious enthusiasm so that the child becomes very interested and WANTS TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE SUBJECT. That depends on the teachers' personality, level of teacher's subject knowledge (Master's degree), love of the subject the teacher teaches, a desire and decision to learn always how to produce better results, and the classroom environment's friendliness. Artificial intelligence will enable robots to become outstanding teachers by matching the teaching methodology to the psychological vocational preference of the child in an optimum way. Vocational preference based on parental or friends' influence, or books or movies are false. The human brain completes the vocational preference development in the brain by age 22, and it does not change for life. So any vocational testing should be done after age 22. All such robots could "learn" anything new in a few seconds with a simple downloaded update. Our schools' poor performance accelerates such developments, which will be available by 2023-2024, enormously accelerating home learning, coupled with very secure testing. The lab portion of science courses can be simulated perfectly as part of the course.
    
    
    
    
    
    

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