The first thing to think about are your goals. What do you need to get done each day and what do you want to get done?

Many parents find it useful to have a calendar or day planner in a central place in their home. This allows everyone to see what is coming up next day, week, etc. You may instead prefer to keep your schedule on your computer. Don’t feel obligated to use system that works for your best friend, husband or anyone else. It needs to work for YOU. This only works if you are consistent about marking your schedule. If not, you will find this to be a very frustrating exercise. However, a good schedule can greatly simplify your planning for each day.

Be realistic about how much time it takes to get any school age children ready for school each day and get yourself and them out of bed appropriately. If you get up a bit earlier than children, you’ll have time to make them breakfast and lunches for school day. Alternatively, make lunches night before. A good breakfast can be very helpful to your child throughout day.

To do lists can be very helpful. You might keep a detailed one with everything you need to get done during day, from feeding baby to pickup up kids from school, or just a simple to do list with activities you do not do regularly listed.

Holding schools and teachers accountable, and expecting students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, sounds like a good idea. But this Act means that badly-taught students, victims of dumbed-down texts and bad teaching methods like new math and whole-language instruction, now have to pass difficult standardized tests they are not ready for.

As a result, millions of students may fail these tests, not because they are dumb, but because schools never taught them to read properly or solve a math problem without a calculator. Millions of high school students with low reading and math skills now risk not graduating from high school until they pass these tests.

It is important that parents know unvarnished truth about their children’s real academic abilities, but many parents are now frantic because they see their children’s failing grades on these new tests. As a result, they complain to school boards that they do not want their children taking these tests or not graduating from high school because of low test scores. To protect their children, many parents are now demanding dumbed-down tests to make sure that their kids graduate from high school and go to college.

The No Child Left Behind Act is now forcing many parents to condone schools that dumb-down their tests and standards, instead of blaming these schools for their children’s failure to learn. This is a typical unintended consequence of more government laws that try to fix problems that a government-controlled school system created in first place.