The Kids are Smart Enough, So What’s the Problem?

A Businessman’s Perspective on Educational Reform and the Teacher Crisis.

Dr. Richard W. Garrett

Richard Garrett is a trained industrial engineer with a BS and MS from Purdue University, and a PHD in operations research from Northwestern University. After 27 years with the Eli Lily and Company, Garrett has dedicated his time and energy to studying the U.S. public education system.

Data shows that classrooms throughout the nation suffer from a small percentage of misbehaving students, resulting in lost classroom time and demoralized educators who are perpetually blamed for student’s bad performance.

In his first book, the Kids Are Smart Enough, So What’s the Problem?, Garrett shines a light on the issues plaguing the United State education system. The root cause of these misbehaving children is not a lack of intellectual ability, but rather a lack of character and the solution lies in listening to teachers, learning from data while taking a more business approach to the problems, and uncovering the root causes in each school system.

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Critical Analysis

Reshaping the Broken Education System

Dick’s book, The Kids Are Smart Enough, So What’s the Problem?, traces his growing concerns about problems in public elementary education. Those concerns led to extensive research from a business executive’s perspective, applying systems analysis skills from his background in engineering. Our interview probed not only the findings from that research, but even more current knowledge of education reform efforts which Dick continues to harvest and share. He has created an online gallery of videos for the general public, explicating what he has learned about educational-outcome statistics and various efforts to improve the outcomes. Listen Now!

That’s So Second Millennium PodcastPaul and Bill

Reviews

This excellent short book documents the politically difficult problem in US education that 23% of children undermine the effective education of the other 77% of students by their disruptive behavior that interferes with teaching the majority of children. The disruptive minority also play a role in teacher burnout. Most school districts do not deal with, and may not even be aware of, this pervasive major school problem. The author documents that poverty and race are not determinants of this issue, and charter schools are not the solution, but parochial schools’ teaching and discipline methods may be a solution. Several very different solutions that are working in some schools around the country are described. The author has done an excellent job identifying a major problem in US education and points to several potential solutions. If you care about education, you should read this book.

William Brandt

I have taught middle school and high school for 17 years and can attest that Dick Garrett has written a book that explains the core problems of education exactly. Dr. Garrett understands that teachers are at the bottom of a heavy hierarchy “…their profession is one of the most unempowered professions in America…” (p.77) and that “Administrators often speak for teachers but seldom speak to them” (p.21).

Dr. Garrett states that teachers want to teach, but often find that the entire educational system works against them. One of the major symptoms of the overall problem has to do with disruptive students. The educational system simply does not know what do with them, and disempowered teachers cannot always balance a classroom when even a single student decides to disrupt lessons. This is an important book, well-researched, and should have an effect on educational policy discussions.

Chris Edwards, Ed.DHigh school teacher and author of “Self-Taught, Moving from a Seat-Time Model to a Mastery-Learning Model"

The Kids are Smart Enough, So What’s the Problem?

Dr. Richard W. Garrett

Critical Analysis

Reshaping the Broken Education System

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