Garrett's book, The Kids are Smart Enough, So What's the Problem?, is a businessman's perspective on educational reform and the teacher crisis in America. Published by Rowman & Littlefield in December 2017, the book shows how struggling students can be reached and teachers encouraged.

 

"There is a national crisis in education, and it’s not the highly debated philosophical discussions or heated political arguments we are used to hearing," said Garrett. "Survey data establishes the fact that classrooms throughout the nation suffer from the presence of a small percentage of misbehaving students. Teachers are ill equipped to deal with these disruptive students, resulting in lost classroom time and demoralized educators who are perpetually blamed for the students' bad performance. The root cause of these misbehaving children is not a lack of intellectual ability, but a lack of character and grit; the important non-cognitive skills required for success in life."

 

"My training in IE has a lot to do with the existence of this book," Garrett said. "It is the inculcated passion for time that made this book work. It is my passion for the management of time and the resulting efficiency, inefficiency in this case, that makes the story. In my opinion, looking at education the way we did in this book could open up new areas for IE in education."

 

BIO

Garrett is a trained industrial engineer who earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees from Purdue IE, and his PhD in operations research from Northwestern University.

 

More info: "Alum writes book about American education crisis", Purdue IE News, Jan. 24, 2019