America’s K-12 public schools are under attack by profiteers and politicians, often working together, to denigrate and destroy public schools in order to replace them with loosely regulated and poorly performing charter schools. They are taking millions of dollars out of classroom budgets and paying enormous management fees to their corporate management teams. But their greed doesn’t stop there. In the name of accountability, these corporate giants are testing our children instead of teaching them and reaping the huge profits for the testing companies. We don’t need to replace our public schools with charter schools. We need to take the valuable lessons learned from the best of the charter schools and implement those practices in our public schools. This book documents the need to fix our public schools and provides a proven model for transforming them.

This book has three recurring themes:
1. Education is not the total solution to anything, but it’s a part of the solution to everything.
2. Excellence is not enough unless it is equitably available to all students.
3. We have tried countless reforms and most of them had only a minor impact. It’s now time to implement a systemic national educational transformation.

Many books on education select and focus on a single topic and provide an in-depth analysis within that domain. They are written by social scientists or people with PhDs in education. As a result, they are usually focused on a specific silo of information. In education, the silos include curriculum, facilities, technology, pedagogy, professional development, instructional design, etc. Other books are written by journalists who take on the whole system with broad, sweeping generalizations. It reminds me of the old explanation of the difference between scientists and engineers.

“A scientist is a person who learns more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. An engineer is a person who learns less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything.”

I tend to take the engineering approach, and hopefully have stopped well short of knowing nothing. This book examines the broad spectrum of K-12 public education.

As you will see from reading this book, improving K-12 public education is the single most important issue this country faces. Most Americans who are not directly involved in education don’t have the luxury of being able to focus on the K-12 education issue. What I have tried to do in this book is provide an overview of the vast array of excellent work done by others that has contributed to my understanding of the issues and knit it all together with some thoughts of my own.

Readers of this book will gain a deep understanding of what is wrong with the present K-12 public education model and what is needed to transform it. Transforming K-12 education is an economic necessity. This is not new news. But, the fact that it is old news, and nothing has been done that has significantly improved the situation should be seen as a big RED FLAG!

Some education books appear to have a motive beyond improving education. They promote a particular point of view in support of a lightly veiled agenda. Some books promote a political agenda like bashing teachers’ unions, or a financial agenda like promoting charter schools and testing. This book promotes a solution to America’s poorly performing K-12 public education system using existing facilities, existing teachers, existing administrators, and is implementable within existing budgets using existing proven best practices. I am working with a group that has a proven solution that fits those criteria. All of the elements of the solution are proven best practices. We have selected a large portion of the student-centered and organizational best practices, integrated them into a solution and implemented it.