A Public Appeal To The Board Of Education And The Superintendent

[Vic Spencer]

We have been presenting a mostly positive
picture of the state of education. For this reason, I would guess
especially the parents of kids in the lower 50% of performance are under
the impression that everything was and is fine with their children's
education.

We already have too many parents who believe that their children are pushed too much. One year ago at a Board of Education meeting in
Knoxville, TN, I heard a grandfather speak up saying that it is foolish to
have Algebra 1 required for graduation, because the kid will never use it
on the job. Therefore there may be many parents at the low end of student
performance who do not understand what the real situation is in a
competitive world, because no one is telling them. Not the press, not the
TV news, and most importantly, not the local school district Boards and
superintendents.

I understand fully that it is very difficult to say that while many other nations increased their requirements for high school graduation,
unfortunately we went in the opposite direction during the past three
decades (OECD-PISA tests, the international standard, shows USA high
school students 34th in math in 2008). Our universities however, remained
the best in the world. This trend increased the knowledge-gap between
those graduating from high school, and the knowledge required for our
children to do college level work. This gap in knowledge kept increasing
to the point where our children's performance resulted in less science and
engineering graduates from our universities. This trend reduced our
ability to compete with American products as we used to do, and it
increased the need of our population and American companies to purchase
imported products. Foreign company profits go back to the foreign
corporation. To make the problem worse, the knowledge we deliver today
with a high school graduate is also short of what employers need, who used
to be able to hire high school graduates. The general opinion of
employers is that our high school graduates can no longer communicate
properly in English or do basic math. I am sure that most of us
experienced this at the cash register. This means that the decades old
downward trend in American primary and secondary education, put all of us
into a dangerous situation, making our children's future unimaginably
difficult. For these reasons, we must turn around and increase our high
school diploma requirements with a great sense of urgency, with much
higher expectations by parents and teachers alike from our children and
students (The American Diploma Project - but nationally). Both parents
and teachers must work together with parents supporting the teachers 100%
in every case, in order to reverse this bad situation, and to save our
children's and nation's future.

We need a NATIONAL, STATE and LOCAL promotional program as soon as possible with such a message to reach every parent, so that we save our children's and
country's future. The American (TN) Diploma Project, is an excellent
start in that direction. It is only natural, for many parents to rise up
against the increased requirements, if we keep them with the old positive
thoughts about our education, and do not level with them about the reality
of the current situation.

One such announcement will not reach all parents and will not sink into those parents who hear it. This needs to be a four to six month
promotional program that educates even the lowest level in our population,
aimed at people not higher than those with an 8th grade education.

I believe that if we want to be successful as a nation, we must do even more in due time. Our competition is international, and they will not remain static. I have all the back up
information for my conclusions at a Web site I created at www.knoxedu.info
and I am trying my very best as a retired person to champion this cause.

We cannot do it without your dedicated help and ACTIONS in this area to inform the public.

[Heather Marshall]

Vic, Thanks so much for all of the time you put into this. Your research is excellent and your conclusions are right on. But I do have one smalll disagreement with what you say we must do: we must turn around and increase our high school diploma requirements with a great sense of urgency. I do not believe that we can just change things beginning with students in high school. By then it is way too late. We need to start the change immediately with all kindergarten classes!! It starts the first day then enter a public school! We need higher standards and expectations there...you cannot just pop this on kids when the get into the 9th grade...they will not get it, many of them will not positively respond...they will just keep doing things like they have been doing since kindergarten.

We have a long way to go....it is possible if our leaders start now by changing the way school is viewed by students, teachers, the community and parents! We can succeed in making our schools better in math and science!

[Vic Spencer]

I agree with you. Math and reading need major boosting in primary school, and Algebra 1 with Geometry will have to move to grade 8 minimum. Anything we can do before grade 1 will be helpful.

The urgency I see is the following. I have some old connections to a few Japanese high tech companies on the top of these companies. I looked at some robot specifications recently. What I read about will be here within 5-8 years, and it will be able to replace a good number of jobs that are education qualified only with a high school diploma, let alone those young people who do not finish high school. We really do not have much time to fool around. We will see developments coming on the scientific side in computation power per dollar, in artificial intelligence, in nanotechnology and a number of other fields that will alter the way we work, especially in the areas that are mostly labor-intensive with minimal education today.

These developments will place much more demand on more and more education to be delivered by the end of high school, and the necessity of a university degree, preferably in graduate school, with emphasis on science and engineering. We are talking about an 18-20 year education cycle, which means that we do not have time to fool around. We will simply see as much advancement in ten years, as we have had in 100 years. Just think back what kind of education was necessary 100 years ago. We will see a similar increase in required knowledge within ten years, as the increase we have seen during the past 100 years.

If anything, I am understating things a little.

[Jen Clemons]

I think part of the problem is the fact that the schools have not been blunt about the real meaning of test scores in Knox County or the state over the past years. Not many parents take the time to dig up the information either. If they really understood the NCLB, AYP scores they might be louder about change being needed. After attending a transfer meeting this year and getting a glowing report on the school scores, one thinks everything is o.k. But, when you find out that proficiency in a category might be 27% and your state had pretty weak standards, then you start to understand the urgency to increase our standards and push our students a little harder.
Schools should have given parents the details about test scores before they were on a transfer list. Maybe in the 2 years that transpires before a transfer is allowed for a high priority school, more parents would have been involved in facilitating a change!

[Vic Spencer]

Jen, absolutely. It is always a major problem in any organization if they have not done well for years, as in education not just in Knox County but country wide, and no one tells the shareholders the truth (the public in this case). In business that would not happen long, because the law mandates reporting details on performance. In education, there is no such thing. We are told how well everything is going, when management and the Board knows that it isn't going well at all. There is a word for that. The "L" word. If management and the Board says that they did think that all was going well, then there is a word for that also. The "S" word for stupid. WE can eliminate that possibility, because none of them are stupid, and in fact they have a lot of very smart people. That leaves not telling the public the truth. Why? There can be political pressure to make results look good, so that the public doesn't get mad, since they are funded with tax dollars.

Well, we just came to the end of that road because the question will surely arise about why we need to make our poor kids work harder? Unfortunately, there are not too many people out there with a back bone to explain the truth about what happened for decades, and the truth about what will happen to our children if they do not work a lot harder and learn a lot more. THAT is one sad but true situation.