If you have work at home job or home business, make sure you have plenty of time to get your daily tasks done there. Once again, knowing when you will be most productive will help you tremendously. Not all opportunities will give you flexibility to change your schedule to meet your preferences, so you may have to find ways to deal with work schedules that are not ideal. Businesses, too, have a way of eating into other plans, so keep a certain degree of flexibility in your daily schedule.

Everyone has things they do that just waste time. Know what you tend to do that is unproductive. This doesn’t mean skimping on personal time. However, if you get too interested in tiny details, perfecting things, and so forth, you can waste a lot of time better spent elsewhere. Being disorganized also wastes tremendous amounts of time. Write down important phone numbers, addresses and so forth where you WILL find them easily later.

Don’t forget to include everything that uses time in your day. Your children get out of school at a certain time, but how long does it take you to walk or drive there?

Make sure you aren’t spending an excessive amount of time doing activities such as watching television, surfing internet, checking email, gossiping with friends, and so forth. While these are certainly enjoyable activities, if they take up too much of your day you can feel frustrated while trying to get other, more important things done. Know how much time you can spend on these things. Can they be moved to less stressful times of day? A VCR or Tivo can make it very easy to switch time you watch your favorite television programs. The internet and email will be there when you have time. Friends will understand if you’re too busy for an involved conversation if you tell them so.

Much of time management is simply being aware of what you need and want to do and how much time you will need for it. It need not take much time at all out of your day to plan how best to use that day.

In Wisconsin, state legislators backed off plans to require high school graduation tests because of strong opposition by parents from affluent suburbs. One parent group calling itself “Advocates for Education” argued that high-stakes testing would not be fair to children and would hurt educational quality in schools.

Critics of graduation tests were worried that tests would put too much pressure on children. Suburban parents lobbied parent-teacher organizations, and state legislators eventually scrapped graduation test before a single high-school student had taken it.

Similarly, New York and Massachusetts officials yielded to pressure by parents to set low passing grades for their new graduation tests. In Virginia and Arizona, state boards of education have backed away from graduation tests that were too tough for even so-called better schools. Only 7 percent of schools in Virginia met new achievement standards, and 9 out of 10 sophomores in Arizona schools failed a new math test.

In New York City, school authorities estimated that over 30 percent of city’s 11th-graders would not be eligible to graduate if English language standard that will take effect next year was being applied today. Diane Ravitch of Brookings Institute in Washington is a longtime analyst of New York’s public-school system She estimated that in some neighborhoods, less than 5 percent of high-school seniors would qualify to graduate under new standards.

Parents, particularly those with younger children, should take heed. You don’t want to end up with high-school kids who may not graduate because they can’t pass new tests.

In Chapters 8, 9, and Resource section of "Public Schools, Public Menace," I explore how you can circumvent these serious problems by finding real education alternatives outside public schools.