If I were in this situation I would advise everyone to STFU about where I'm going to live and send my kids to school. I fail to see how it is anyones business where he lives or where they go to school.

Why don't you visit Bluegrass before you pass judgment on it? There are student in portable buildings, kids eat lunch in a caferetia which is way too small to handle the number of students, the HVAC systems does not function properly. Many parents regularly buy dehumidifiers for their children’s classrooms to help control the mold and mild problem, and the list goes on and on.

I have a school age relative who has grown up in Belle Morris, Whittles, and now Fulton (as did I back in the Cretaceous Period). My 1st grader is going to Farragut Primary. Is there a difference? Absolutely. Are the facilities better in the Farragut Schools? Arguably, but their overcrowded condition probably offsets most any such advantages. Are the teachers better? More dedicated? More concerned? No. Emphatically, NO. Some of them have lower morale, beaten down by failing to reach promising young students, to instill in even some of their best and brightest a thirst for knowledge. But they get up every day and go to work and try their damnedest to teach their kids. I've met my young relative's teachers and, by and large, have come away no less impressed than I have with those I've met in Farragut (or Maryville or Oak Ridge or the U of T for that matter).

But yeah, there's a difference. I freely confess I'm happy my child is in Farragut Primary rather than Belle Morris. It's not the facility. It's not the teacher. It's the parental involvement. You can play any socio-economic card that suits your fancy, and there's likely some evidence to support you. But in the final analysis, whatever the underlying causes, the difference between our failing schools and our highest achieving ones comes back to rest on the parents' shoulders. NCLB can't save kids from indifferent parents or whole schools from the negative effects that go along with a high percentage of parents' indifferent to education. Magnet Schools, busing, school choice, incentive pay, more dollars for education, pre-K programs, 8+ programs... none of those things individually or collectively can overcome an attitude of indifference from a parent. But those are the things that governments can legislate and fund, so those are the things that are done.

Where Dr. McIntyre's kids go to school is of little interest to me - Blueegrass, Farragut, Belle Morris, Sarah Moore Greene, or even Webb. What interests me is whether or not his vision stops at the edge of school property - maybe with a polite invitation for parents to join in - or whether his vision will lead him out into the communities surrounding those failing schools and to actively try to rally those parents to the cause of educating their children. To reach a child, you must first reach a parent.

But in the final analysis, whatever the underlying causes, the difference between our failing schools and our highest achieving ones comes back to rest on the parents' shoulders. NCLB can't save kids from indifferent parents or whole schools from the negative effects that go along with a high percentage of parents' indifferent to education.

Amen.

Here is a challenge. Go to the Brian's Blog page and read his piece on the school superintendent and then the one where he freaks on Haslam. I counted over a dozen blatent errors that would fail tenth grade English. He does not understand plurals, possessives, sentences or any kind of punctuation. I bet the new guy freaked when he got that illiterate crap. He freaked because of the ignorant message and he freaked even more because this guy with a blog and a high school education, I guess, is such a poster child for ignorance. Good luck to the new guy, and live wherever you want. Brian's Blog. What a hoot.

See a bunch of energetic kids going to school in a portable trailer, goods schools with a tremendous amount of parental involvement tend to attract more students.

They're not paying him enough to live in Sequoyah Hills and can you imagine the uproar if he rolled his kids into that fantastic environment.

Education is a byproduct of choice. Chosing to better one's self by living in a neighborhood zoned for a solid elementary school should not be grounds for criticism at all.

Every neighborhood is zoned for Webb, Catholic, or CAK, so if you want to enroll your kids there, have at it, Mike Edward, chose to enroll his kids in private school and then rails on the importance of public education for "skills sets" for the new millenium? Wonder where that logic came from? Ragsdale?