comments I have known and loved

Parents should have an outside assessment of their children. This should be voluntary for all parents to have their child independently tested. They would find out that the state assessments are often times flawed and their child is not proficient. This would help parents see the truth and in turn put pressure on the school to improve.

Anne Marie


I'm for national standards but only if they are standards based on Core Knowledge, Singapore Math and Direct Instruction. [ed.: hear! hear!]

Ari Haviv

We need national mathematics standards focused on CONTENT, not any specific program.

The abundance of mediocre programs, along with all of the time and money wasted on implementation, has crippled our elementary and middle school math instruction.

Investing more money on "professional development" will yield nothing. We must focus on the content first. It doesn't matter how wonderful the teaching methodology if content nonexistent.

Read the National Mathematics Panel Report.

First things first :D

concerned [ed.: I think I know this person!]

I noted that the representatives of neither candidate had anything to say about whether individual public schools should be autonomous. The empirical evidence clearly indicates that children acquire more academic skills and knowledge when such schools are self-directed.

Patrick Groff

Americans should be concerned that neither party has a serious policy with regard to education. When candidates discuss school reform, they forget about fiscal accountability. If the concern is with standards they won't respond to questions about curriculum.

Americans are sadly misinformed. The Singapore Ministry of Education developed standards and a created a curriculum that did what was promised. It was a curriculum written in English for children who's primary language was not English. Comparisons between Singapore and the US are striking. If the United States adopted Singapore standards there would be no need for standardized testing.

With a strong academic curriculum, more students would graduate from high school and be prepared for college and work. It costs Americans about $6 billion per year for every 10,000 high school dropouts. The past 10 years have been especially devastating for children as I've seen communities become increasingly resegregated. In this inflationary economy, our government is trading our children's futures by making school less efficient.

Nothing is lost by adopting the world’s best curriculum. Our great leaders should at least give communities a choice by putting Singapore on the state's list of adoptable curriculum. Eventually, the pain of not taking that risk will be greater than the reward for accepting it. We are running out of time.

Al Rode

The Singapore project is interesting and effective in a centrally-controlled educational system. The US is a long ways from agreeing that central control is a good idea. With others on this topic, I'd hope that Sens. McCain and Obama can come up with a serious solution for the conflict between federal and state/local governance of education that was started by Goals 2000 and really made worse by NCLB. [ed.: is this the case? What do people think? I haven't been able to form a solid opinion, although I tend to think this Commenter is right....] If educational content is truly a national issue, and if current NGO-type resources (like ASCD) are not up to the task of guaranteeing the content base for (e.g.) a high school diploma, then the whole US plan needs a shakeup and that will take leadership in the White House.

Terry