About the Book
The Missing Heart: Chronicles of an Educator is a controversial story based on actual events experienced by the author, Teri Pinney, while she was an assistant principal in a public high school.
Pinney, an Asian American, went through a difficult childhood in Honolulu to eventually beat the odds and capture her lifelong dream of becoming an educator. After serving as a teacher for nineteen years, she successfully went on to achieve an administrative position within the confines of a closed-knit school district in Florida. As the years passed, however, she makes a stunning discovery which changes her life ambitions.
Following the wake of the federal government’s No Child Left Behind legislation, school districts have pressured school administrators to implement dogmatic practices in an effort to raise statewide standardized test scores. In many cases, personnel changes have been made to bring iron-fisted leadership into the high-risk schools. Caring teachers are pushed out, low-performing students unjustly categorized, and schools stigmatized with letter grades.
Narrating a mix of funny and insightful anecdotes, The Missing Heart: Chronicles of an Educator gives readers a glimpse of the inner workings of a public school system and one administrator’s growing skepticism, which made her take a well-publicized stand against it.