I suppose I'm as guilty as anyone of focusing on the problems in public education. So, just for a moment, let's put aside all the gloom and doom assessments and celebrate some of the success stories.

You think that large school districts can't produce excellent results? Then look at the Fairfax County (Va.) Public Schools, with 152,943 students, and the Montgomery County (Md.) Public Schools, with 130,720 students. Both districts earned Gold Medals in this year's Education Quotient(tm), putting them in the upper 17 percent of all districts nationwide. Two Gold Medal districts in Utah - Jordan and Davis - each have more than 60,000 students. In fact, 30 percent of all Gold Medal school districts had at least 10,000 students.

Thirteen school districts (out of nearly 2,500 nationwide) received a perfect score of 150 in the Graduate Outcome Index, which measures college board scores and graduation rates. The two largest of those districts are the Naperville (Ill.) District 203, in suburban Chicago, and the Blue Valley School District, in Johnson County (Kan.), a suburb of Kansas City. Both are school districts with just under 20,000 students that have graduation rates approaching 100 percent and college board scores 15-20 percent above the national average.

Something clearly is working in these districts.

Each of these high-achieving school districts serves relatively affluent communities, where the adult population is well educated and the average household incomes are well above the national average. Some, like Fairfax County and Montgomery County, invest a ton of money on their schools. Others, like the Jordan and Davis districts in Utah, spend less than the national average, while some, like Johnson County, spend way below the national average on their schools, despite the wealth in the community it serves.

Yet they all rank among the very best school districts in the country.

Clearly, money is very important to provide our children a quality education. Just as clearly, it is not the determining factor between success and failure.

Year after year, the results of our Education Quotient(tm) study show the same thing. The children in well-educated and affluent communities do much better than do the children in less well-educated and less affluent communities, even when per pupil expenditures are relatively equal among the two groups.

If higher incomes do not translate into higher per pupil expenditures, then why does one group clearly outperform the other? The answer, I firmly believe, rests with the parents.

Experience has taught my wife and me that the difference between our sons making straight A's, or making all C's and D's, is directly related to amount of time we spend hounding our kids unmercifully every evening to do their homework. We've got the old report cards and Iowa Basic Skills Test results to prove it.

I don't think my kids, who incidentally attend school in the Blue Valley District mentioned above, are any different from most other kids. Given a choice between doing homework or watching TV (or otherwise goofing off), homework would lose out every single time. Fortunately, my wife and I are bigger than they are, so we usually win out in the end.

That's because, as parents and as adults, we understand the importance of a good education. It's our job to impart that wisdom on to the next generation.