I'm starting this blog to focus on resources to help parents, teachers, principals (aka head teachers, those responsible for sharing best practices to other teachers) and students. To I'll refer back to my post at http://fremontrealestate.blogspot.com/2006/09/increasing-your-homes-value.html regarding the monetary reason every neighbor regardless of whether they have a kid in the associated school, should volunteer in some fashion to help improve the API score of kids in their neighborhood. Volunteering could mean participating in tutoring programs, asking kids how they are doing in school (taking an interest, will encourage them to take an interest), please remember getting a perfect API score, only means you are proficient at the basics, hardly a genius. So don't feel you are putting pressure on kids to be familiar with the basics. You can also volunteer by gathering info and spreading it. Please post innovative approaches to learning material or incentive parents, teachers and pupils. If you find proactive exams send me the links. Just like any exam, the more practice exams you take of it, the better you will score on the actual exam. President Bush's brother is trying to market something for $3800 a pop to help kids score better on standardized tests (http://www.pamspaulding.com/weblog/2005/01/no-child-left-behind-bush-family), which is deservedly getting a lot of bad press, because the president's brother is trying to make money of one of Bush's signature legislations. Actually haven't seen any review of how good his system is. However, if the game manufacturers got into the education game on the cover of creating home equity - that might be interesting.