Macaroni and Cheese is NOT an Entree!: The Rants, Ruminations, and Reflections of a Frustrated Teacher

In Macaroni and Cheese is Not an Entrée, former high school teacher Chris Howard takes on the fad-happy, buzzword-driven "if it feels good, do it" mentality that inhibits serious attempts at problem-solving in the world of public education. Drawing on his seven years as a high school teacher, this collection of essays is a combination of thoughtful reflection, careful analysis, biting satire and angry rant. This book challenges the rationale for some of the leading initiatives in public education today, to include: early colleges, ninth grade academies, technology giveaways, behavior management schemes, and the Common Core. Also addressed within are professional concerns of teachers from why they got into the profession to why they get out (a list which includes stress, poor leadership, low morale, and a lack of meaningful incentives). Topics addressed include: • The importance of having teachers who care about education and are committed to the idea of being a teacher (Chapter 2) • A tendency to conflate "innovation” with “progress” (Chapter 3) • A variety of biases that inhibit decision-making while guaranteeing the success of everything undertaken (Chapter 4) • An overdependence on technology for instruction and a fallacious belief that this is indispensable to student learning (Chapter 5) • Ineffective systems for compensating, evaluating, developing, and promoting teachers (Chapter 6) • The continual reinvention of the practice of teaching and the forcing of these innovations on teachers via mandatory staff development (Chapter 7) • An indifference towards teacher morale, specifically low morale, and its negative effects (Chapter 8) • The devaluation of the high school diploma due to an obsession with increasing graduation rates (Chapter 9) Howard argues that problems in public education are made worse by the tendency to forgo conventional problem-solving in favor of what he calls “solution-based problem-solving,” which produces “distractions” that do little to solve the real problems facing public education. Instead, he emphasizes the need for honest brokers in education who will "ask the questions that no one wants to answer and answer the questions that no one asked."