Here’s the problem: public schools are sometimes mediocre; children learnlittle; but parents don’t find out until it’s too late.

Question is, how can parents check on a school’s performance? How canthey know if children are falling behind schedule?

“What parents need,” according to Bruce Price, the founder of Improve-Education.org, “is simple benchmarks suggesting the subjects that childrenwould typically study in each grade. I’m talking about really simple rules ofthumb, comparable to ‘children usually walk by two and talk by three.’ Weneed the same sort of guidelines for each grade. It probably doesn’t matter ifthe child is a year ahead or behind. The big danger in that students slip sev-eral years behind. That’s what we absolutely need to stop.”

Improve-Education.org has just added “43: American Basic Curriculum,”which is intended to help parents monitor how their children are doing.

“The material is very brief,” Price points out. “It has to be. This is not a cur-riculum in the sense of listing everything a child studies. This material isdesigned to set brackets on where a child should be.”

For example, the entry for 2nd-grade math says in toto: “Count to 50; addand subtract 2-digit mumbers.” Point is, it’s easy for parents to assess theseskills. American Basic Curriculum (ABC) gives parents a little more insightand control.

An Easy Way For Parents ToMonitor How Well Their

Children Are Doing In School