Description

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A TEACHER'S STORY OF FEAR AND LOATHING IN AMERICAN EDUCATION TODAY. Calling on policy, research, humor and a generous serving of snark, in this cutting edge story irreverent Laurel M. Sturt pulls no punches detailing her bizarre life in the trenches teaching in a high-needs elementary school in the Bronx. With the Alice in Wonderland backdrop of teaching in a school strangled by poverty, No Child Left Behind's "accountability," and Michael Bloomberg's micromanagement, Sturt trains an unflinching eye on the crisis confronting today's educators, delivering a scathing indictment of pretentious education reform driven by a mercenary agenda to privatize a system worth billions. The author charges educators and parents to unite and organize at the grassroots level to fight for this civil rights issue of our time--the right to a decent education--coalescing around proven non-negotiables such as sufficient funding, universal pre-kindergarten, a rich curriculum free from high stakes testing, and the socioeconomic integration of schools. By refusing an apartheid in which the one percent and the ninety-nine percent receive vastly different educations, community by community we can drive back the privatizers, restoring the "public" to a system committed to all.

About the Author

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A long-time social activist, in 2002 Laurel M. Sturt left a career in fashion design to become an elementary school teacher in a poor neighborhood of the Bronx. Sturt is a graduate of the Madeira School and received her Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Vassar College. Subsequently she received an Associate degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology in Design and Illustration, as well as a Master of Arts in Education from City College, New York. Sturt has a son, with whom she lives in Manhattan. Davonte's Inferno is her first book.