"It was and is a socialized centrally managed affair in every state and district. Other countries abandoned this system several decades ago for a school optimized system, delegating all decisions practically to teachers, who are better paid than ours, achieve much higher results with about 90% job readiness. BUT...the cost per student is lower than ours. Why? Because we have enormous central management organizations with good ole boy networks, that cost a mint, and are more hindering than helping innovation in education. That's their comfort zone."

very good ideas. The question is how do we make it real? To me, education is impacting everything, and it is endangering our country seriously today, so that is my first target. I am 70, so it may be my last target. I spend a lot of time getting the message out with the suggestion to vote out any School Board member and any politician, who is not trying to solve it, we have done it.

The obstacles are plenty, mostly special interests. In our case in Knoxville, TN the press and media flat does not engage this subject and school failures. The press! And yes there is an entity who is the largest newspaper buyer and largest advertiser. I wonder if they are it, but I don't want to go there...yet.

the Charter School idea is not new. There were a good number of failures, but the percentage of successes are increasing. Much better than public schools, and many are absolutely fantastic. For example, Google the Harlem Success Academy http://www.harlemsuccess.org/ in probably the worst demographic area in the US. The results are absolutely mind boggling. That's what we need.

They offer an alternative for the parent at no cost. Traditional public schools need competition. Parental choice of school is vital. Competition is the great creator of quality.

If a Charter School is not producing great results, they fail. The child lost nothing. He can go to another school.

The quality of education has diminished over the years with the rise of standardized tests and the reliance on them. These took the place of the regular teaching programs. Most of my fellow teachers complained about having to teach to the tests. When I began teaching in the 60's, I was pretty much given freedom to teach the subjects of my certification. I used pre and post testing and learned about teaching individually, since I knew that no two kids were exactly alike. My students, many of whom had learning problems, learned the subject matter.

Since the dumbing-down of today's children and the unions protection of tenure and bad teachers, the children have paid the price. Federal and state dollars tied to test performance is phony and does nothing to increase the abilities of the students. What is needed is a system that educates all children well, not just those who can pass the tests.

One way to improve education for all children is through the use of distance education, where the best teachers can provide learning opportunities to large numbers of children and the classroom teachers can be assistants who help individual students and be the human support that our kids need. Those who achieve the status of an educators who have demonstrated their abilities to motivate and light the fire of learning should be paid the highest. Those who are able to work individually with students who may have learning problems should also be paid well. Those who merely assist by proctoring exams or keeping records of individual student scores could be paid accordingly. In other words, there are many different levels of teaching and those who are better at what they do should be certified and paid accordingly.

The school year is not long enough nor is the school day long enough in today's world. The day should be lengthened and the kids be given some down time to pursue individual interests, yet be in a safe and protected environment so their parents don't have to pay extra for child care. The vacation month could be staggered so that the schools are always open for those who need or want extra study time.

Bad teachers should be fired and good teachers rewarded. For every teacher fired, 3 administrators should be fired.

Children should go to school 5 days a week from Labor day to Memorial Day with a 2 week break at Christmas. No more pupil free days.

I found 95% of the causes of this dumbing down mostly management issues above schools, with some contribution by NCLB and other laws like you indicated. More than 200 teachers confide in me in confidence locally.

You have to qualify teaching to the test. No way it would be acceptable to not test kids at least per quarter against what they should have been taught. I found out that for quite a few years, in order to show better grades, teachers were mandated to do practice tests that were actually published for this purpose right before the real test. They are kept under considerable security. The practice test problems are virtually identical to the real test for grading, and the solutions are explained in class before the real test. Obviously that produces better grades, but not knowledge. In TN, the state test was based on such tests. As an example, an average school district score in math was 87%. BUT...the national test on exactly the same grade and subject showed it to be 21%. That is how parents were hoodwinked about how their hard-earned tax dollars were being used. At least I participated in changing that situation and a few other things that will help to improve this system everywhere. You may not have seen this happening in your school, but I found this practice very common in most states. That is what local teachers explained to me teaching to the test means, before I investigated it.

Teachers are so poorly treated here, that for the first time I see a good reason for a union that protects them against such treatment only.

But, we need performance reviews annually at every level, that is measurable with numbers, education achievement based, objective, no tenure at any level. We do not have that. Like you said poor teachers need to be in another job.

Boards and Central administrations are the biggest contributor to this problem. Management systems are antiquated at all levels, making accurate visibility of what is really happening impossible.

I agree with many things you are saying, but I think you should dig a little deeper beyond what you experience on the inside.

the Charter School idea is not new. There were a good number of failures, but the percentage of successes are increasing. Much better than public schools, and many are absolutely fantastic. For example, Google the Harlem Success Academy http://www.harlemsuccess.org/ in probably the worst demographic area in the US. The results are absolutely mind boggling. That's what we need.

They offer an alternative for the parent at no cost.

Traditional public schools need competition. Parental choice of school is vital. Competition is the great creator of quality.

If a Charter School is not producing great results, they fail. The child lost nothing. He can go to another school.

Traditional public schools are a monopoly doing a poor job that has been failing the entire nation. There are exceptions among them, between 5 and 10%, but extremely few produce as a good a result as our International competition who are eating our lunch because of it. Maybe 5 in the nation? That's all. I did a very thorough job investigating this subject, and would be happy to answer any questions.

Denise you need to investigate all your assertions above. They are simply uninvestigated thoughts, and this is a vitally important subject.

Home schooling produces a better ACT outcome than public schools. Evidence shows that 10-30 class size makes no difference in performance. For facts you can go to http://www.usaedustat.com , my Web site.

Charter schools "They are just much better at supplanting their dogma in more insidious ways". Give me some facts, because I have not seen anything like that anywhere. "Charter schools, often by design, attract the fringes of students who have difficulty with more traditional education". Not true. State governments restrict them to low performing areas like some inner cities. They are a government sanctioned form of a public school by the way. Did you know that?

Japan does not teach to the test as I explained it. The university model brought down into high schools is a great idea. That's why our universities are among the best in the world, and HS are 34th. However, the best performer in the world has been Finland for a decade. They were one of the worst 35 years ago. Why don't you just look at some small examples of how they are doing it. It is always better and faster to apply the methodology from the best in the world, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.

http://www.edu.fi/etusivu This site may come up in Finnish but Google can provide a perfect translation of the entire content.

http://www.openeducation.net/2008/03/10/several-lessons-to-be-learned-from-the-finnish-school-system/

http://in-global-context.blogspot.com/2007/09/finlands-education-noteworthy.html

James W all good ideas. The question is what we are going to do about it. To be successful, we have to focus on one or two things like a laser, get it to the point of implementation.

For me, the two most important elements are:

http://www.japantoday.com/category/commentary/view/japan-and-its-standardized-test-based-education-system

I have friends from Japan and Taiwan who educated me on the differences between our system and theirs. Pretty much, they engage in rigorous test-taking because how you score depends on if you go on to say Tokyo University or vocation school. The problem with this approach, as we can see with NCLB, is that teaching to the test excludes teaching for critical thinking. The article, in a more pointed and sarcastic manner, points to this weakness.

This model works for them as evidenced by the fact that Japan is the #2 or #3 economy in the world, depending on which indicators you're looking at.

I suspect that the reason the rigorous-testing model doesn't work here is b/c of outside school influences: single-parent households, high numbers of students where English is a second language, high rates of poverty among urban child populations, poor diets which are highly-influential in one's ability to learn, and so on...none of which Japan or Taiwan suffers from in their homogeneous populations.

One thing is for sure. Without a good education, we will produce jobless people in a much higher percentage than before. Kids who are not well educated today will be the losers, along with the entire country. The problem is that bad.

I hear increasingly from many employers that "Today's high school grads cannot communicate well enough in English and cannot even do basic math, whereas high school grads 5 yrs ago could and we could teach them. We cannot even teach them today."

We are actually losing to other countries the ability of creating jobs. I know of several companies that decided to go to other countries for this reason, not labor cost. The labor cost is an old story. The Japanese industry controls industrial robotics. It beats low labor cost now, and has done that for a number of years. We graduate too many dummies, and the No Child Behind Law is a major contributor. It diverts resources for education into areas, where you cannot and will not see better performance.

I saw an extreme example of this. A child with a severe learning disability could not go beyond 1st grade. He was very hostile with anyone. Soon he grew into a 300 lb boy, requiring 3 strong teachers in a private classroom and a private bus for travel where the 3 teachers had to accompany him. I know the lead instructor. They were beaten up every day in the bus by this kid. The average cost per child in our schools here is about $9000. This kid cost more than $200K a year until age 22. And for what?

By the way, I noted a Japanese observer of the United States remarking, "Your country has the most amazing workforce I've ever seen. And the worst management." My own experience corroborates this. I mean heck, here we are the great melting pot of the planet.. why are our human resources so mismanaged? You'd think out of our diversity we'd outshine the other gene pools.

Those OECD -PISA tests, Vic, are still testing at a language based level. I've got a notion that this does not provide an adequate metric for performance in the future into which we are plummeting. Language skills are of course crucial if we want to hang on to the lessons of the past. But those particular skills are not, any more, always so necessary in order to derive a useful result. You might notice the complex tasks you can accomplish clicking on an icon in a graphic interface.

you are totally correct. The proof is that we are the 4th largest spender in education, delivering the 34th result in math. Also in my experience and I am 70, I am yet to see a problem that will be solved with more money. So one always checks management basics, standard ratios, controls being up-to-date and management skills at all layers of management, along with measurable goals past year with actual achievement and measurable goals YTD and current YTD actual achievement.