Class Warfare—Focus on "Good" Students Is Ruining Schools

With budget cuts looming every year, administrators and union leaders find themselves in a never-ending game of promoting how good their school is and why cuts budget will derail their ongoing success. The vehicle they choose for this ongoing self-promotion is what William Fibkins calls the dazzle approach, which focuses only on good news. Overtime administrators and staff often come to believe the positive reviews of the good news process and overlook or abandon those students who are a don t make good news but instead act out, fail, cause trouble and give the school a bad name. These are the bad news kids, and their lives are not newsworthy. This book is about the unintended consequences that can occur when the "good news process becomes heavily embedded in school life -- a process that creates two different worlds in a school community that often prides itself on fostering unity and belonging. The school media promotions may say All is well here, but this positive spin belies the divisions that breeds isolation, and estrangement for some students, the bad news" kids.

William L. Fibkins is an author and consultant. He focuses on reforming education by retraining and mentoring teachers, counselors, and administrators in order to meet the needs of today’s teenagers. Doing so by establishing a “circle of wellness” in our secondary schools that creates many open doors of help for every member of the school community headed towards the margins of school life.