| Fixing America's Broken Public Education cuts through the obfuscation and gobbledygook of the education establishment to provide mainstream America with a lively, realistic, thorough overview of America's public education -- its nature, its problems as a provider of education for the nation, the problems it creates for American society, both short term and long term, and how to solve those problems.
The book recognizes that the real, unstated first governmental entitlement is free public education for children, and that parents should be entitled -- through a free educational marketplace -- to choose the education they believe best reflects their own values and that will best equip each child for life. The book recognizes that the government possesses no inherent wisdom that invests it with the right to mandate the education children need -- showing that the emperor indeed has no clothes.
The book focuses on "essential education for the essential human being" and "stand-alone competence" -- to help each child to develop intellectually, artistically, emotionally and physically -- to be prepared to live in the twenty-first century with confidence and competence.
Fixing America 's Broken Public Education offers more than 40 practical solutions to the often unrecognized problems of American public education, including: the false industrial model of education; lack of collegial orientation; control of school boards by school administrators; degeneration of compassion into compassionism; guidance transformed into misguidance; the unintended cruelties of mainstreaming; apotheosis of the child; hollow goal setting; tyranny of expertise; empty certification; miseducation of teachers; faddism; distorted idealism; exaltation of methodology over content; the trap of abstractionism; double dipping; orientation towards public relations rather than education; the folly of ratings; commercialism; bloated bureaucracies; the unstated administration-union entente; the three paths to administration; inadequate attention to the education of non-college bound students; embracing of false solutions; a spectrum of fraud, some educational and some financial, some conscious and some unconscious. |
