Dealing with low wage competition from overseas is not just "an" issue for our children's lives, it will turn out to be "the" issue, completely dwarfing all others. In this century, globalization, and its inevitable economic impact on jobs here at home, will be the fight of America's life. Author Richard Evans is an international business consultant, and a former elected member of a local school board in New Hampshire. In "Coloring Our Way to Calamity", he draws on his experiences in both fields to alert parents to the highly disadvantageous plight that many public school systems are quite content to impose upon their students. Tragically, at the very moment that the nation most needs to develop legions of skilled engineers to create and populate high value "knowledge" occupations, the response has been to commit the vast majority of fifty million school age children to classrooms that have a far lower expectation of academic performance than those of all of our industrial competitors. This fascinating and easy to read novel follows one mother in her efforts to shield her children from an uncertain future as she attempts to foster change in a local school system that is intensely reluctant even to recognize her concerns. Along the way, she learns about not only the political and legal structures that protect the public schools' unfortunate monopoly, but also about the trends in international commerce that render her quest so vital.
About the Author: Richard Evans is a partner in a management consulting company, a parent of two college students and, for the past fourteen years, an activist in the field of school reform. When his children first attended what was supposed to be a highly successful public school system in New Hampshire, he was horrified to find that the first grade curriculum consisted mainly of endless coloring and cut-and-paste. What little real academic work existed was usually sacrificed from the schedule if further attention with the hot glue gun was required to make the bunny ears look more appealing! Simultaneously, through his international consulting business, the author was becoming increasingly aware of the threat posed to the prosperity of his children's generation by the outsourcing of jobs to overseas manufacturers utilizing low cost labor. Mr. Evans recognized that trying to compete with the third world, in the type of production line manufacturing that had made America rich and powerful in the 20th century, would turn out to be futile in the 21st . He became convinced that only dramatically higher education levels in American schools, leading to new types of employment, could avert a creeping national economic disaster. He launched multiple attempts to allow parental program choice within the public system. At every turn the unholy alliance of teacher unions, administrators, and school board stepped in to stymie opportunities for parents to select more ambitious course material for students. He learned a fundamental truth of school reform: parents want the best for their children but they are scared, for a variety of reasons, of opening their mouths to get it - supporters of the status quo take the silence as approval. He became an author in order to try to dispel that fear by arming parents with the information that they need to stand up and be counted on behalf of their children. Richard Evans now advocates for the expanded use of school choice vouchers. He is a past winner of the "Better Government for New Hampshire" award presented by the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy.