Coloring Our Way to Calamity — Richard Paul Evans

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.