Parents of young children do not have the luxury of waiting for professional educators to agree on what to do about reading failure. They need to use the time from birth to age five to prepare their children for reading success.

The present system of placing everything from curriculum to lunchroom management under one supervisor is outdated and inefficient. The job of “principal” is too big for one person.

Language is the vehicle of education and the transmission of culture. Teachers especially need to value their native language and its literature. It is not enough to be a math teacher or P.E. teacher. All teachers must be English teachers.

K-6 teachers have a far greater influence on the future of their pupils than do high school teachers. They can mean the difference between success or failure in the upper grades. They deserve the best possible teacher preparation.

Professional educators in control of teacher preparation concern themselves more with theory than with the practical considerations of teaching real children in real school settings. A first step in meaningful education reform would be to break the stranglehold of university education departments.

Millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs go unfilled for lack of qualified applicants. Children acquire an adult work ethic by suffering consequences for not working as well as they can while they are in school.

It's time for parents and students to stop viewing high school as an extension of childhood. As college becomes unaffordable to more and more young people, better use needs to be made of tax-supported educational opportunities.

Supporters of school vouchers and charter schools claim they have the interest of all children at heart, but funneling tax money away from the public schools can only lead to the destruction of an adequate education for the majority of American children.

The Khan Academy is an online tutorial resource featuring more than 3,000 short video lessons that children can play again and again until the concept is learned. Its focus is math and science.

Efforts to improve the academic quality of U.S. public schools continue to fail because legislation that ties everything to standardized test scores and makes scapegoats of teachers is totally out of touch with the reality of U.S. culture.