This is a column on public education in general and is not meant as a reflection on any particular school or system. My wife, Janice, who is my editor-in-house, said this column was okay but not many would be interested in this topic. I think she is right, as usual.

I have a friend, slightly older than I, who told me that when he was a boy that he never told his parents when he got a spanking in school, for his father promised him another one when he got home, and he was as certain as the sun rises that his Father would deliver.

Contrastingly, when I was superintendent in Pendleton County, we had a first grader who questioned the ancestry of our principal and we had to hire a personal aide at $7,500 per school year to escort this hoodlum to prevent him from assaulting personnel or other students because he had been labeled “Learning challenged,” although he had enough sense to threaten us with his lawyer.

During this past winter, within one week, three female teachers, in separate instances, were indicted in the Tampa Public Schools for having sex with students, on and off campus, one as young as 15. Arriving back in Kentucky, I picked up the Lexington Herald-Leader and here was another one.

But, some defend this by saying, “Women have their rights, too!” But, I say, “Bull——; such simply shows how far we have slipped as a society!”

Montel Williams said on national television on Sunday, April 27 that 50% of the students in public high schools never graduate.

“Anecdotal,” some will criticize my remarks, but George Will writing in the Cincinnati Enquirer on April 24, 2008, in an article entitled, “Our schools slip ever further as we keep denying social issues,” He states that nationally 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children are born out of wedlock, a phenomenon that causes all kinds of problems for public schools.

Referring to the Coleman Report of 1966 which concluded that family influence had much greater impact on the quality of education than the amount of money spent, he claims that we have largely ignored this crucial finding, focusing instead on larger teacher salaries and smaller class sizes, National Education Association’s major planks toward improving quality.

He says that schools for decades have been treated as laboratories for social experiments such as trying to narrow the achievement gap between whites and blacks. Open classrooms, teachers as facilitators of learning, and multiculturalism are other fads promoted by NEA, as well as promotion of the gay agenda.

Now a study shows a majority of high school seniors cannot locate the Civil War in the proper half century. And many A students in high school have to take remedial classes if they opt to go to college.

He claims that the law, No Student Left Behind, got it backwards. The law should have set high achievement standards and left it up to local districts how best to achieve such, but instead, allowed states and local districts to rewrite the standards, resulting in a dumbing down of standards so they can more easily be met. Will closes by saying: a Nation at Risk? Now, more than ever!