Jocelyn Turner’s "Fighting the White Knight" Exposes a Wasteful Testing Frenzy That Traps Teachers and Abuses Demoralized Students. Her Refreshing Solutions Offer Hope.

Northbrook, IL, April 10, 2023 --(PR.com)-- Jocelyn Turner, a retired middle school and high school educator, provides a frontline perspective on the education landscape in her new book, “Fighting the White Knight: Saving Education from Misguided Testing, Inappropriate Standards, and Other Good Intentions.” Armed with an MA in Teaching Secondary Mathematics from National-Louis University, a Master of Business and Public Management from Rice University, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Puget Sound, Ms. Turner had hoped to instill the excitement of learning in her students, motivating them to process and organize facts, think critically, and solve problems. But while Ms. Turner loved teaching, time and again, she found government educational mandates did not merely fail to support learning, but instead shut it down completely.

Drawing on her years of teaching experiences, and firsthand accounts of how students were failed by faulty and arbitrary standards and the exploding number of tests resulting from those standards, Ms. Turner sets out to open the eyes of readers to the reasons why the American education system is failing countless students, especially those who require extra learning support. She provides examples showing how proposed solutions to close the achievement gap routinely accomplish the opposite, widening that gap instead.

In her final year of teaching, the author found that over one-fifth of her valuable instructional hours were lost to testing demands. Those demands were based on curricular goals that could not be accomplished without substantial remedial education – yet too little time had been budgeted to teach the material slated for that year. Almost no class time remained to fill-in missing knowledge from previous years.

After ten years as a teacher in four districts and an alternative high school under twelve revolving-door principals, primarily in financially- and academically-disadvantaged districts, she found that she had had enough. Despite her best efforts, government education mandates kept sabotaging the students they were intended to help. Students who had fallen behind kept falling further behind, often as a direct result of tests and other measures designed to document and treat their learning deficits.

“Since No Child Left Behind, US schools have been burying students in tests and then drawing often misguided conclusions--when sometimes the only conclusion anyone ought to draw is that student X obviously spent hours staring at a set of questions he or she did not understand and maybe could not even read,” writes Turner.

Published by Covenant Books of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, Jocelyn Turner’s new book also looks at the $1.6 trillion student debt crisis, a consequence of a single-minded, college-bound pipeline that fails to consider student interests and aptitudes; vocabulary deficits left to fester due to narrowly targeted curricula; and the sneaky gutting of elective, vocational, and gifted education.

Readers can purchase “Fighting the White Knight: Saving Education from Misguided Testing, Inappropriate Standards, and Other Good Intentions” at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Covenant Books is an international Christian owned and operated publishing house based in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. Covenant Books specializes in all genres of work which appeal to the Christian market. For additional information or media inquiries, contact Covenant Books at 843-507-8373.