I spent nine years on the School Board in a large Southern California District (30,000 kids +) -- one which does not have much, if any, competition from private schools. But it, like every other public school district, faces a good deal of competition -- competition in the grand contest for public funding with other governmental/social concerns. In our time, the criminal justice system -- a broken system -- has diverted billions of dollars in California. Politicians are for education; but they are ecstatic about increasing policing, building jails, prosecuting cases, using all of our court system, and running a prison system which is completely ungovernable. All of this when public education, particularly in urban centers, is the only real hope for breaking cycles of poverty and crime. Schools are asked to solve all of the social problems of the children who come to them, and, although they cannot, they do a better job than any other governmental institution.

Public schools are the only hope for our Country's future -- yet it is clear that government at all levels does not grasp that simple fact. We have an Administration which insists that we must compete globally, and then, often enough, guts the only way we will be able to do so. No Child Left Behind seems to have been achieved, in part, by having No Child Moving Ahead. And the destructive power of trying to quantify progress with incessant testing, and then making the tests so "high stakes" for schools and teachers that there is no rational alternative but simply to teach testing skills, pretty much guarantees that the results will be mediocre at best. And these are tests which only demonstrate the lowest level of intellect, and omit any attention to the arts, or literature, or, essentially, any real thought or creativity.

Charter schools, at least lately, appear simply to be a new playground for educational hucksters and scam artists -- many of whom are simply walking away with a lot of public funding and cheating students and parents of the hope for real education. It would be great fun to set Sandra on them.

We need a clone of Ms. Loh on every campus of every elementary, middle, and high school in this country. And it wouldn't hurt to have more than a few in our legislatures!

There are a lot of things that ought to be tried.

I fully agree with the approach of getting back to the basics.

I don't believe in "social promotion" in return simply for attendance.

But I don't have much use for year-by-year grades, either, especially at the "elementary" level- "age 6- 1st grade", "age 7- 2nd grade", etc. That rigid, one-size-fits-all approach ignores the facts of the wide variations in human early developmental psychology. Some children are wired to learn the complexities of written language faster than others. That doesn't mean that those who are wired to learn at a later age are any less bright- but that's the way they typically get treated by the system.

The same is true of physical education classes that ignore the variations in human early developmental physiology. Some children are big, strong, and well-coordinated at an early age, others are not. That doesn't mean that the slower developers will never mature, or that their permanent physical inferiority is foreordained. But that's the message that those kids often get.

Because the rigid age-grade level stepladder more-or-less works for maybe 75-80% of the kids, it's an approach that continues to be taken for granted. But at the margins outside, it can make for disastrous early educational and social experiences. For that matter, it isn't healthy to be singled out for rewards for being precocious in the arena of learning skills, which can create resentments among ones schoolmates; or to be "big for one's age", which is often initially associated with an excess of energy that deserves a more appropriate outlet than the confines of a schoolroom at the youngest ages, and which is best balanced by the presence of slightly older schoolmates when the "early bloomers" do finally settle down enough to tend to some book learning.

But the status quo of strict age-grade levels actively militates against that flexibility and allowance for variation. For those who don't fit the prescribed mold, the resulting bad first impressions can be traumatic enough to turn into serious obstacles against a child improving in learning mental and/or physical skills.

And it's completely unnecessary, the result of a schooling approach that takes its cues from the factory production line.

What needs to happen is something like a return to the one-room schoolhouse, with a mix of ages, and the older children exercising their recently acquired mastery of learning skills by helping to mentor their younger peers. The illusion that sharing the exact same chronological age indicates some inflexible parity of peers needs to be discredited, once and for all. It's an artifical dividing frame that is antithetical to the way human children have traditionally socialized in communities.

Dissolve those artificial "grade 1-6" boundaries, and emphasize the idea that all children need to be literate and numerate by age 11 or 12. Don't obsess over where a child ranks in comparison to other kids the same age, beginning at age 5 or 6!

Most experts in linguistics agree that language fluency is pretty much picked up before age 12- so that's when reading and composition skills need to be emphasized. But it's very nearly a crime to rank a child as "slow" or "underperforming" if they aren't reading "at grade level" at age 6 or 7.

And teach phonics, for cryin' out loud!

Another approach I can recommend is that students be taught mathematics using basic AC/DC electronics kits. They can learn that they've gotten the right answers, literally "when the light comes on." If a kid can learn the color codings on resistors, they're on their way to figuring out exponents, for example.

After a while, even relatively young children can also be introduced to very sophisticated math concepts. I found this out myself as an adult student taking electronics courses- having previously been turned off by what I perceived as the needless abstraction of high-math concepts like "irrational numbers", I found that, lo and behold, that formerly arcane concept, "the square root of -1", was fundamental to the operation of nearly every electronic device more sophisticated than a flashlight. And almost before I realized it, I found myself doing trig problems and solving partial differential equations! I think the same is true for many people who "don't have a knack for math"- they've only been exposed to it in school as an abstract exercise, instead of as a practical skill. Yet, the real-world applications are made plain, math turns from being some boring brain strain offering little reward beyond a high-per cent test score and the approval of an instructor...into magic.

Why this is not done, I have no clue. This society can afford the kits. They're cheaper than those mystifyingly high-priced learning adis known as "textbooks."

At the more advanced stages of education, I'm also an advocate of putting the most academically inclined teenagers into community college courses, in preference to having them segregated into "elite" schools for "the gifted."