No Child Left Alive was originally published as an e-book in July 2012.
The following description of the book comes from the website:
If the shooter doesn't get them, the system will. That proved to be the case for author Randy Turner, as the veteran teacher was fired from his teaching job in Joplin, Missouri, for writing this book. No Child Left Alive tells the story of one year at dysfunctional Franklin Heights High School, where the teachers battle administrators seeking to pad their resumes at the expense of the students' education and find themselves at the mercy of a criminal element that has been lured back into the school in a misguided effort to increase graduation rates.
At the center of the storm is Assistant Superintendent Abigail Saucier, who after being passed over for the top job after the death of the former superintendent (and Abigail's lover) is determined to make Franklin Heights a model of innovation through a series of new programs that confound and frustrate the faculty. Abigail also has to deal with a deadbeat husband, a promiscuous daughter, and a growing attraction to her daughter's boyfriend, drug-dealing gang leader Rico Salazar.
Opposing Abigail's plans to remake education at Franklin Heights is Teacher of the Year Walter Tollivar, who has his own problems- a crippling case of claustrophobia, and an attraction to a younger teacher, who five years earlier had been one of his students, and who is now so afraid of her own students that she has begun carrying a gun.
As the teachers battle to hold on to their sanity, a bullied student plans a revenge designed to make everyone forget Columbine.
No Child Left Alive is a satirical, yet frightening, view of education in Obama's America- a wasteland where test scores and statistics are everything, and teachers are cannon fodder for glory-hungry administrators and clueless politicians.
3 comments:
If a student wrote something -- even "satire" -- about a school shooting "designed to make everyone forget about Columbine," wouldn't he or she be expelled?
Being expelled might depend on if it were an actual threat depicting real students or just a fiction story. That's too vague a generalization to answer yes or no definitively about suspension.
Ideally, the student's teachers, counselors, and principals would be capable of making a sound and reasonable judgment based upon the context.
If the education professionals decided they just didn't like the child's attitude and invented suggestions of sexual impropriety in order to bolster their case, they would be abusing their power.
If the child was then expelled and certain people felled compelled to continue harassing the child via the internet after the fact, then those individuals would be the most childlike of all.
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