We have moved into an era where "everyone is a winner." Every child is capable of being the next Brett Favre or Albert Einstein. Every student is capable of going to college and being a well paid lawyer or doctor who enhances life for the rest of us. That is malarky. A few kids will go on to acheive that level of success. The rest will fall significantly short of that mark - anywhere from being someone of some importance to being a janitor. Parents and society need to realize that not everyone is capable of greatness on a grand level. However, everyone has talents and skills and is capable of maximizing them and being great at what they are able to be great at.

Schools are unique in that they are cold reflections of what is going on in society. If you want to change society all you have to do is affect public schools. We have transformed into a society of do whatever feels good, everyone is a winner, effort (not results) should determine the volume of the reward - and there always must be awards. Kids do not misbehave anymore. They just aren't on the right psychotropic drug and the teacher is just incompetent.

Anytime there is a problem the blame is always placed at the bottom of the food chain. Teachers are at the end of a very long food chain that starts with the president. Perhaps where we have gone wrong is to allow politicians, instead of educators, to run education. Perhaps we should have some qualifications for being on a school board, since, in many states, school boards ultimately control what happens in a school (they have the power to hire and fire superintendents). I have seen school board members under the age of 20 who spoke absolutely no English. Is this the type of person who should be deciding what your child learns in the class? They aren't even old enough to have a beer and regret the fact that they just voted to change the curriculum for the fourth time in three years.

Perhaps, if we truly have a problem with our public education system, we need to look in the mirror and contemplate the monster we have created as a society.

"Parents and society need to realize that not everyone is capable of greatness on a grand level."

Of course the reigning delusion, promoted by the educational romantics, says otherwise.

"Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement.

"No one disputes the empirical predictiveness of tests of intellectual ability—IQ tests—for large groups. If a classroom of first-graders is given a full-scale IQ test that requires no literacy and no mathematics, the correlation of those scores with scores on reading and math tests at age seventeen is going to be high. Such correlations will be equally high whether the class consists of rich children or poor, black or white, male or female. They will be high no matter how hard the teachers have worked. Scores on tests of reading and math track with intellectual ability, no matter what.

". . . a massive body of evidence says that reading and mathematics achievement have strong ties to underlying intellectual ability, that we do not know how to change intellectual ability after children reach school, and that the quality of schooling within the normal range of schools does not have much effect on student achievement. To put it another way, we have every reason to think—and already did when the No Child Left Behind Act was passed—that the notion of making all children proficient in math and reading is ridiculous. Such a feat is not possible even for an experimental school with unlimited funding, let alone for public schools operating in the real world. By NAEP’s definition of proficiency, we probably cannot make even half of the students proficient.

"[E]ducational romanticism asks too much from students at the bottom of the intellectual pile, asks the wrong things from those in the middle, and asks too little from those at the top. It short-changes all of them."

These are the facts the vast majority of us don't want to face.