As I reported earlier, No Child Left Alive, a novel about one year in a dysfunctional public high school, was termed "obscene" by the Joplin R-8 Administration, which claimed I had assigned my students to download and discuss it (though as far as I can tell, they have yet to find one student who downloaded, discussed it, or even knew about it, until the charges were brought against me).
Some have speculated the Joplin administrators were more concerned about some of the things that were done by school administrators in the book. I will leave that for the readers to decide.
The book will be available online in a few days from Amazon.com and its own page on the CreateSpace website. It won't be long after that before it is available on other internet sites, including Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million.
It should be in Joplin by the end of the month or early July and a signing will be scheduled around the middle of July.
The description of the book, which will be featured on the Amazon and CreateSpace as is follows:
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.
The book will have a new cover, designed by Cody Dyer. The rest of the book's design is being handled by David Hoover, who did Scars from the Tornado, Spirit of Hope, and the cover for 5:41: Stories from the Joplin Tornado.
1 comment:
call the store
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