"Class Warfare: Besieged Schools, Bewildered Parents, Betrayed Kids and the Attack on Excellence offers a firsthand account of the Great American Education War being waged from coast to coast, including the reading wars, math wars, testing wars and other schoolroom scuffles reported almost daily in the nation's media.". "A professor of political science who was honored as a distinguished teacher at his university, Martin Rochester became deeply involved in public education as a result of his own children's misadventures in the classroom. Like most parents, he wanted to make a difference. He first tried to contribute by becoming a dogged volunteer in his children's classrooms and his Parent-Teacher Organization. But what he found, in addition to overbearing administrators and overworked teachers, was a system that had contempt for the most fundamental elements of traditional schooling (ability-grouping, grades, homework, rigor, discipline, etc.), allowed nonacademic diversions to crowd out academic study, and exchanged a commitment to excellence for an obsession with "equity." Rochester gradually evolved from concerned parent to informed critic. As he relates in Class Warfare, he became a familiar presence to local school boards and to the state education bureaucracy as well, and was finally asked to testify before the Missouri legislature on what he had discovered."--BOOK JACKET.