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Book Review

Former Public School Teacher Reveals the “Nightmare That is Public Education”

By: David Deschesne

Dr. Renato C. Nicolai, Ed.D, who prefers to be addressed as “Dr. Nick,” is a retired school teacher and principal with thirty-eight years of experience in the California public school system. He has taught 6th through 12th grade and was both an elementary and middle school principal during his career.

Dr. Nick has recently published a book entitled The Nightmare That is Public Education (2007 iUniverse) which exposes the alarming deficiencies in today’s public school system from his own perspective within that system.

“Public education is a nightmare,” exclaims Dr. Nick. “Incompetence and mediocrity haunt public middle schools, junior high schools and high schools. Teachers waste valuable classroom instructional time every day, and their teaching methods are grossly ineffective. Knowledge of subject matter is alarmingly inadequate. Parents don’t really know what happens in public school classrooms. They have been hoodwinked by educators to believe that their children are receiving a good education, but they aren’t as substantiated by international assessments.”

He does, however, credit the many hard-working teachers who truly do love their job and teach effectively within a system designed to discourage them.

Chapters 1 through 6 of Nightmare highlight problems extant in public schools across the country, then Dr. Nick offers practical, common sense solutions every teacher should become familiar with.

Most college teaching courses don’t train teachers how to teach, merely what to teach. This book functions as a textbook for teaching and is a must-read for anyone considering a career as a teacher, as well as those already in the field.

Dr. Nick starts off by describing the sense of mediocrity in the higher grades compared to lower grades. “Public school elementary teachers, especially those who teach kindergarten through 5th grade, are, by far, better teachers than their counterparts at the middle school, junior high school, and high school,” writes Dr. Nick in his opening chapter. “The reason is they possess the qualities associated with an excellent teacher to a greater degree than their upper-grade colleagues.”

He describes how teachers in upper grades have fallen into a rut where they merely “dispense” information, rather than enthusiastically teach it. Also, lower grading thresholds and secular-progressive ideologies allow students a “passing” grade who otherwise may not have earned it.

Social engineering by a predominantly left-leaning teacher pool is highlighted in Chapter 7, where he states; “Public schools are havens for liberal thought and practice. Secondary teachers are generally far left, left, or left-leaning. So, although they don’t openly teach [their] ideas, they use their influence and the subjects they teach to promote a good feeling toward these points of view. In other words, many teachers, especially at the high school level, are biased toward the secular-progressive way of thinking and express their feelings and opinions in their teaching.”

He describes the tactics; “In English, history, science, math, music, art, and other subjects, teachers easily show their bias toward many of these concepts in subtle yet effective ways. In English, for example, teachers at every grade level use sentences to demonstrate correct syntax and to teach vocabulary. Sometimes these sentences come from textbooks and other teaching materials, but many times they are composed by the teacher in advance of the lesson or extemporaneously during the course of the class. Writing impromptu sentences like these and preparing example sentences in advance offer the teacher of English the opportunity to slant the content of the sentences toward the secular-progressive point of view during the course of teaching.” (op cit., p. 157)

Dr. Nick also describes how History and Social Studies teachers can easily skew the curriculum to favor their point of view and how Science and Biology teachers may favor their ideologies by spending more time on a discussion of the theory of evolution over Creationism.

He warns us that students may not be able to resist this advanced form of brainwashing, “In a very real sense, teachers at the 6th through 12th grades teach to a captive audience, and this audience is composed of children whose ages range from eleven to eighteen. Most of these children are susceptible to the ideas presented by teachers and don’t possess the knowledge, experience, and sophistication to know better or challenge an idea which is totally biased or opinionated. Even those students who recognize the inappropriateness of a topic, and the fact that the teacher is expounding on it from a subjective point of view, will think twice before challenging the idea or the teacher.” (op cit. pp. 144-145)

The latter part of the book covers the “nightmares” of public education and attributes it to the entrenched teacher’s unions and their feelings of invincibility.

Dr. Nick shows how so-called “In Service Days” are for the most part, a complete waste of time and how teacher evaluations are rendered ineffective due to the tradition of not criticizing “professionals” within public schools.

While it has a negative title, the overall theme of the book is positive and is nearly seventy-five percent is solution-based.

Drawing from his years of experience as a teacher and principal, Dr. Nick offers practical, common sense solutions to a whole host of problems teachers encounter with their students and school administration on a daily basis. He even has a chapter written for the substitute teacher, as well.

While he taught for many years at public schools, Dr. Nick received a Catholic, parochial education from kindergarten through college, where he attended the University of San Francisco. “Although I never attended a public school, I gave nearly forty years of service to public school children and parents. This is what I wanted to do. I felt called to teach as a vocation. I never even considered making money for the sake of money - never did, never will. I really wanted to help kids learn.

The Nightmare That is Public Education is available at www.iuniverse.com , www.amazon.com , Barnes and Noble, Borders and all major and independent book stores. This book is a must-read for parents, teachers and school administrators if they care to identify the inadequacies of teachers in public school and wish to work toward viable solutions.

His website is: www.drnickweb.com