A Teacher's Odyssey Through the Incompetence of American Public Education

This work is an exposé of the failure of American public education and a plan for its regeneration. Informed Americans clearly recognize that their nation's educational system has failed. They do not understand the extent or the depth of this failure, nor do they understand its precise causes . . . Highly publicized, but generally ill-conceived, government corrective programs have produced little positive effect. Some schools may have improved, but neither the nation as a whole, nor...
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This work is an exposé of the failure of American public education and a plan for its regeneration. Informed Americans clearly recognize that their nation's educational system has failed. They do not understand the extent or the depth of this failure, nor do they understand its precise causes . . . Highly publicized, but generally ill-conceived, government corrective programs have produced little positive effect. Some schools may have improved, but neither the nation as a whole, nor any state or major city has succeeded in reversing the spiral of failure.

The reason why no curatives have worked is that their proponents have misidentified the etiology of the disease. The medicine is aimed always at healing the wrong ailments . . .The precise cause for America's educational failure is the ingrained systemic incompetence of its administrative leadership on almost all levels and the counterproductive, destructive, regulations under which teachers are required to work. In education, leadership is everything, just as it is in business and in war. Successfully change the management of education and success will follow. Unless one has spent three or more decades as a classroom teacher, as I have, and has witnessed the insidious and inexorable reductions in academic and behavioral standards required of our students by our educational leaders (while the latter propagandized that they were accomplishing exactly the opposite results), one cannot truly understand the problem . . .

The current management of education . . . is absolutely incapable of reforming itself. To depend for a miraculous regeneration on the part of the very institutions and people responsible for creating over decades the disastrous state of American education is a vain hope indeed . . .

A number of editors of this manuscript, people outside of education, asked in astonishment, especially after reading its later chapters, Can things like you describe really be happening in schools? Some of these people had children attending the very schools I had portrayed, yet they had no idea how administrators and school boards had betrayed their children. All the events I recount herein are true . . .

. . . I will provide solutions that are simple, that are achievable, and that, best of all, require not a single dollar of increased taxation. This plan sounds like a panacea and, in fact, it is. It will work. The only requirements Americans need to turn their educational system into the best in the world (instead of merely the most expensive) are, first, to understand the causes of their country's past failure and, second, to have the will to execute some simple changes.