Parents do, indeed, run the school system. It is not like when I was in school, and the teacher was respected. Look around as people complain about teachers. Teachers have a lot of pressures (No Child Left Behind, WKCE, administrators, parents, unruly kids...) and they are very rarely appreciated by these groups despite the fact that the teachers are responsible for giving these kids what they need to be successful. Did anyone ever think about how today's kids are the ones who will run this country. Maybe we won't ever get out of this recession.

wellsjasen – When I look in the mirror my college degree looks right back at me! The current book I am reading is very good. When I am finished with that one there is another one waiting to be read, but thanks for the suggestion.

justsome1here

Um schools do have parents. Schools are not buildings. Schools are not sports teams. Schools are run by parents. Go ask any teacher. Parents run to the administration to complain about anything and everything. They plead, beg, threaten and succeed at getting their failing children passing grades. I am very familiar with how schools are run. Yes they do have parents and they do have children . They employ everybody else in the school. Do you ever wonder why the high school football team is never cut when it comes to trimming the budget. Could it be the parents would have a melt down?Go look in a mirror. Then read a book.

Wonder what this will cost?

wellsjasen you are so arrogant. Why is everything always put on the parents? My parents have three children, all of us had different learning levels, grades, etc. My brother, has three children, all three again have different learning ability, grades, etc.
I'm a God fearing, proud to be a cheesehead, gun toting single mother with two associate degrees now going for my bachelors. I can both read and write.

I really never understood how the standardized tests were suppose to really tell how much a child learned or didn't learn. What factors affected the scores..did the child sleep well the night before? were they tired? hungry? not feeling well, etc.

Yeah, I'm sure the "new system" will be honest and fair, "and we'll never grow old and we'll never die..."

It will more likely be contrived to hide the results we do not like, and the causes we care not to admit or blame, or cannot fix (like bad genes, poor home environment, and incompetent parents). Everyone will undoubtedly be a winner, kind of like Special Olympics. Perhaps we can all be "rocket surgeons" yet!

No worry though -- there's always a "wealth" of entitlement programs for the growing tide of those who can't, don't or won't. Until we reach critical mass in terms of population distributions, of course. Then the seemingly bottomless pool of handouts and programs will start to run dry and society will have to GET REAL AGAIN.

It's about time.

wellsjasen, I have a college degree. I run multi-million dollar jobs(when there are any),and I enjoy nature with a gun in my hands. I also love watching Packer games, so I guess I'm a gun toting cheese head, Thank You.

wellsjasen – The sentence “Your posting is the true evidence that schools are failing but that is more a reflection on their parents than anything else.” implies that schools have parents. Whose reflection do you see in the mirror?

Meanwhile the rest of the world is passing us by.

are you listening

You don't seem capable of writing coherently. Did you not pass these exams either? I assume your some gun toting, god fearing, illiterate cheese head. Your posting is the true evidence that schools are failing but that is more a reflection on their parents than anything else. Everyday kids are moving on to become engineers, scientists, teachers, nurses, and doctors. Turn off the Charlie Syke's show and the Packer preseason game. Get up and look in the mirror. Then go thank your parents for failing you. They're right above the basement you inhabit.

Areyouevenlistening I must have missed the part in the article that stated they were making the tests easier.

When my Mom was in high school, many states had state-wide 'exams' (in N.Y., they were called "Regents Exams") that every student had to pass in specific subjects or they did not graduate. By the time I got to high school in N.Y., virtually all states had abandoned mandatory regents exams required for graduation (though you could opt to take the Regents Exam, and get a 'Regent's Diploma'--supposedly a better 'credential' than a local diploma). I remember my Bio teacher saying, 'for the regents exam, you need to know this, but in reality, they discoverd it's really something else.' So, for the test we had to know something obsolete. That's why I was shocked when education leaders across the country, along with political leaders of both parties, succumbed to the 'politics' of the resurgance of mandatory testing, because our then president told of how well it worked in Texas--another one of his lies. And so, thankfully, the pendulum has swung back to reality. I only hope our decision makers in the future have a greater helping of courage when this issue surfaces again.

Yeh why not, if they can't pass the present testing lets make them easier and give them a new name! We'll get these kids higher testing scores this way and maybe the government will give us some more money. Here's a thought~ test them on the movies they watch that have nothing to do with learning, the teachers here are looking for raises AGAIN and this hows here that our kids don't even learn enough in school to pass the present testing set forth by the state thats been in place since 1992 someone should be very imbarrassed!!!!

Great news! It's about time somebody figured that memorization and tests alone don't show how much kids have learned. Hopefully the new system really will be a broad spectrum of evaluation.