Education is Everybody's Business : A Wake-Up Call to Advocates of Educational Change

There is growing evidence that disappointment in public education and its traditional management system has created alternative education systems that are doing a better job of serving the diversities of the student population. The disenchantment of enlightened, serious educators with the prescriptive, bureaucratic nature of much of the educational administrative system has grown since the federal No Child Left Behind regulation. Excellent teachers and administrators have been lost to the system and there is increased sentiment for an updating of formal education. We seem to be at a time when public demand and action for educational change and updating is the only way reform can be accomplished. Here, Berenice Bleedorn provides a collection of twelve articles that are designed to remind the reader of the critical value of creative, critical, systemic, and futuristic thinking in an integrative, interactive global system in the process of radical change. All of our social and political institutions depend upon the capacity of both leadership and followership for complex, fair-minded thinking. The public and enlightened educators within the system need to be the catalyst for the necessary change. They need to understand that strategies and programs for effective learning for a diversity of students are available; that the impetus for such institutional change depends upon their initiative; and new directions need the powerful voice of the informed electorate when positive change is an imperative. This book will be useful to those seeking information for more effective operations and those committed to serving the learning needs of students.