A Teacher's Cry: Expose the Truth about Education Today

by Lewis W. Diuguid

The book is an examination of education from the inside. It is rooted in a four-year project in which I returned to high school and wrote about 100 columns published in The Kansas City Star from... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1581125194
• ISBN13: 9781581125191
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Universal Publishers
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

For those concerned with the state of education today

Lewis W. Diuguid, Kansas City Star columnist, editorial board member, and vice president for community resources, cares about people. He's a good friend - of young people, LGBT people, and public education. Diuguid's writings encourage us to see what it's like to be left out of the mainstream and to experience people and institutions still clinging to, while denying, racism, heterosexism, and inhumanity. Readers for whom the shoe apparently fits often pummel him in response. His insightful book reports from the inside. Diuguid follows a Kansas City, Kansas high school class from its freshman year to graduation. Sitting for hours in classes, he opens up the classroom, its teachers, and its students to cut through the usual claptrap about "problems" with our schools. As his columns points out, politicians miss the mark when they try to fix things. Conservatives' long-term goal is actually to substitute private, profit-oriented schools run by desperate corporations. The media repeat ad nauseum politicians' superficial and barnstorming analyses of our public schools. "Bogus education reform," Bush's unfunded mandate mislabeled "No Child Left Behind," demands more school testing. It flounders on the failing punishment-oriented nature of most right-wing solutions. Blaming teachers and unions for problems is standard right-wing strategy. In reality, local school boards often consist of people who lack qualifications for educational decision-making except that they're parents (which requires no knowledge, training, or experience). Using typical Bush administration defamation of anyone who questions its agenda, Secretary of Education Rod Paige last year slandered one of the few hopes for maintaining professionalism and standards, by labeling the National Education Association a "terrorist organization." "Teachers feel that isolation, "Diuguid writes, "as they are bullied by students, bullied by parents, bullied by administrators, and bullied by federal, state and local governments in being required to do more while given no funding or extra help to accomplish each new impossible task." We put teachers, he observes, "in impossible situations and then we blame them for being there." Our consumer-oriented media create a climate opposed to education. Young people are conditioned, a teacher observes, to "think action all the time. They think the only means of function is motion." So, students aren't use to sitting calmly and quietly, listening, thinking, and learning. Parents seldom help, but they blame the schools. A recent Wall Street Journal headline exposes a suburban response: "When High Schools Try Getting Tough, Parents Fight Back." Get tough on other people's kids, but don't fail mine. "Simply put," Diuguid notes, "the dysfunctional virus in families has bled into schools." For some the home is so chaotic, unstable, or pressured that kids can't think. They're too busy thinking about what's going on at home. As a college professor for 30 year