First, I never have believed a single test given on a single day should define our students, teachers or schools. As the author points out there are other skills and motivations that make people successful in college as important life.

Yet, as the Chinese would say– this is focusing on the sesame seed and losing sight of the Watermelon. Uses whatever statistics you want and we have far too many high school drop outs in MI, too many kids not prepared for college and too many who drop out once admitted. This does not bode well for our collective future.

Much of the focus has been on the Michigan, brain drain– kids with college degrees leaving the state. Perhaps our greater challenge is the kids who are not educated that are staying behind. This is not a foundation on which Michigan can be rebuilt– let alone reinvented.

We are living in a hyper-competitive, disruptive, transformational, technology driven, knowledge global economy are our students– is our state ready? Sadly, the answer is no.

Arguing about 16-20% of kids college ready based on the ACT is not the point. We are focused on the sesame seed and not the watermelon.

Our goal as a state— should be to Make Michigan the brain bank of the world where everyone comes for deposits and withdraws— we are not that state today.

There is to much focus on protecting the status quo. We have to change the focus from: power, control, politics and adult needs to one where the focus is on change, innovation, teachers, learning and students.

Having recently returned from China– be assured they and other advancing states and nations are not slowing down while we get our act together.

Where is the shared vision and common agenda to pull together and having us row in the same direction. to reach a better future–together?

Leadership that uses an ACT score to map the future of education is ignorant and deadly dangerous.

A score on a single paper and pencil test of questionable value (do some homework – http://www.alfiekohn.org) is not a measure to be used for drawing conclusions about anything.

When operating out of ignorance and listening to the pronouncements of pundits that apparently don’t read very broadly and have forgotten how to listen and observe you poison the well, in this case the public education well which has, since its establishment, educated increasing numbers of children with an increasing quantity of top down requirements, during a major cultural shift from labor to knowledge work, during a time of major technological change and exponential increase in knowledge all the while putting up with a system of education that is a mass production sorting machine and, over time, producing graduates that have steadily increased their store of knowledge.

And the BS about not being college ready. Gee the pundits said that very same thing in the 1940s – and look at what the very publicly funded GI Bill did to increase the number of college grads.