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Suffer the Children: A Novel A First-Time School Superintendent in a Small New England Town
by Richard Francis
347 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #05-1723; ISBN 1-4120-6812-6; US$25.99, C$29.89, EUR21.35, £14.94
The crackpots, cads and carpetbaggers control the public school system in Castlbury, Connecticut, where a novice school superintendent takes on the inbred, petty politics rampant in a small New England town.
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About the Book About the Author Excerpts Catalogue Information
About the Book
The position of public school superintendent is often cited as one of the most challenging jobs in America today. Once you have read Suffer the Children: A Novel you may wish to cross off one channel from your chart of career choices.
This satirical glimpse of a first-time, one-time school superintendent in a small New England town lays bare the conflicts and contradictions which thwart progress at every level. In the classroom, the "ten percent rule" applies: master teachers are at work, but often amid appalling incompetence. In the administrative bureaucracy facade and bluster commonly replace high principles. Boards of Education are refuges for cranks and ideologues. School budgets become political footballs and educators the objects of scorn.
Follow Superintendent Maureen Morrison's initiation into Castlebury, Connecticut, from the hiring gauntlet through the shredded files and by self-serving subordinates into the Club of superintendents' conventions and the crucible of town hall manipulations. Learn how the vulnerable New England Town Meeting can be subverted by cynical elites, leaving the tradition of grass-roots democracy apathetic and paralyzed. Smile at the never-forgotten vendettas, the petty chicaneries and the inbred meanness, until you remember that the children must suffer at the outcomes, but you still cannot suppress a rueful laugh.
Castlebury is the microcosm of public education riddled with political infighting, which reveals but does not resolve the central dilemma of American public education: everyone favors top-quality education; we just don't want to pay for it.
About the Author
Richard Francis, Ph.D., has taught in the public school system for nearly forty years. He holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities and the University of Connecticut. Among the many grants he has written and received are two Fulbright-Hays Fellowships, five National Endowment for the Humanities awards and numerous programs for international education. He has published several articles and edited a journal calling for educational reform.
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