nerd teacher [books] reviewed Putting Teachers First by Brad Johnson
Expensive and low quality.
1 star
Two words really explain my feelings for this book: disappointed and frustrated. This book is expensive. It's particularly expensive because Routledge products are frequently priced higher due to being an "academic publisher" and being aimed at a specific demographic.
As a result, I would expect much higher quality, but this book? For €35, they didn't show any attempt at editing it. There were so frequently errors like "you family" or "make take" or "high0performing." It's beyond clear that Routledge didn't hire someone to even proofread the copy before they sent it to publishing, and that's just gross. It felt like a rip-off because of how often these errors occurred.
On top of the errors, I expected this book to deal a lot more with education than it did. While it's sometimes acceptable to pull examples for "good administration" or "good leadership" from other fields, it would be nice if Mr …
Two words really explain my feelings for this book: disappointed and frustrated. This book is expensive. It's particularly expensive because Routledge products are frequently priced higher due to being an "academic publisher" and being aimed at a specific demographic.
As a result, I would expect much higher quality, but this book? For €35, they didn't show any attempt at editing it. There were so frequently errors like "you family" or "make take" or "high0performing." It's beyond clear that Routledge didn't hire someone to even proofread the copy before they sent it to publishing, and that's just gross. It felt like a rip-off because of how often these errors occurred.
On top of the errors, I expected this book to deal a lot more with education than it did. While it's sometimes acceptable to pull examples for "good administration" or "good leadership" from other fields, it would be nice if Mr Johnson had made an effort to explore and research other schools that have good leadership. Interview teachers, interview administrators, interview students! A lot more work going into this would've made it a far better product. Most of the examples of "good leadership" in different contexts came from outside of education: the military, Apple, Stella Artois, sports teams, etc.
It's not that I don't want to take inspiration from outside education, but I want to see that educators and administrators have found a functioning system and see the examples of this.
It's also... not well researched, either. Where is all the research? Practical anecdotes are interesting, but I was expecting that this book could be useful for future administrators to better understand the environments in which they're working. The lack of research is, unfortunately, a major downside.
The most infuriating aspect of this book is that I could literally follow the author's Twitter account and get the exact same information, and that would be free and more concise.