About The Book
“Without education, you’re not going anywhere in this world.” Malcolm X
In the last decade alone and since the Columbine High School shooting there have been more than fifty school shootings across our nation. Public education has been in crisis far longer than most recognize. Successive generations of Americans have endured this continuing and pervasive crisis in student achievement which is culminating in unrealized potential and unbridled violence. Charting the Course puts in plain words how this crisis has left the U.S. vulnerable to social instability. Unchecked it will continue to yield escalating crime, violence, increasing poverty, incarceration, and economic volatility in a global community that is more directly competitive than ever.
You’ve heard it all before: local, state, and federal governmental reports drone on about plummeting standardized testing scores and the awful condition of public schools. Graduating seniors are not prepared for college; they cannot read, write or compute basic math problems. Physical facilities are crumbling. School days and school years are being shortened. After decades of federal reports, increased regulation and oversight, school teachers are still not: paid enough, adequately trained, have the right credentials, demonstrating accountability, or getting the job done. Schools are lacking in racial and economic equality. Charting the Course circumspectly examines and addresses each of these issues and offers solutions to empower communities to affordably raise the bar of educational attainment in all schools.
Newspapers and journals regularly feature news exposés on the deplorable state of public education: Students are cheating. No Child Left Behind isn’t working. The federal government blames the States; State governments blame Federal intervention. Families with school age children are increasingly isolated. New hybrid reforms known as ‘school choice’ began implementation 20 years ago and have since mushroomed. Yet little has changed in terms of student achievement. Parents are home schooling out of shear frustration. Schools are closing. Business leaders regularly call for higher educational attainment in the workforce. Everyone talks about education, yet America just can’t seem to deliver it. What does it take to achieve competency in public education? When will we realize true, sustained and widespread student achievement? Other nations are achieving. Why can’t we?
Charting the Course addresses these and other key questions its core audience is eager to have answered including:
- Why American schools have failed to educate and prepare students for more than 50 years
- How public schools are organized and who really controls them
- The truth behind unequal opportunity based upon race, ethnicity or socioeconomics in public education
- The significance of the role public education plays in our public square
- Ways student achievement can excel in any community- even impoverished and minority communities
- How to navigate bureaucratic hierarchy to positively transform public schools.
Charting the Course strives to retool perceptions about the public school system. It offers historical perspective beginning with our nation’s founding ‘forethoughts’ on public education and leads the reader forward through the 19th and 20th centuries to reframe the questions our society has about public education today. Charting the Course is a thoughtful yet comprehensive look at public schools. The book offers fiscal and comparative analysis at the same time that it explores both external and internal influences to identify core problems and finally proposes solutions which are financially viable, socially innovative, comprehensive in application, and sustainable in a manner that is rather elegant given its utter simplicity. Charting the Course empowers the community yet preserves and sustains the entirety be it one school, one district, one state, or one nation.