Politicians decide what the kids should know.

When I started teaching 15 years ago, the harderst math in 5th grade was fractions with unlike denominators.

We expected the kids to be able to write a decent summary, understand the concept of plot, setting, genre and theme. And we still had kids not able to do these things.

Some idiot somewhere decided that if the standards were higher, the scores would go up. They don't understand that there are developmental levels in children and not all kids reach those levels at the same time.

V.