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Jocelyn Turner’s “Fighting the White Knight” Exposes a Wasteful Testing Frenzy That Traps Teachers and Abuses Demoralized Students. Her Refreshing Solutions Offer Hope.

Harry Johal

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Jocelyn Turner’s “Fighting the White Knight” Exposes a Wasteful Testing Frenzy That Traps Teachers and Abuses Demoralized Students. Her Refreshing Solutions Offer Hope.

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Northbrook, IL, April 10, 2023 –(CarryOnHarry.com)– Jocelyn Turner, a retired middle school and high school educator, provides a frontline perspective on the education landscape in her new book, “Fighting the White Knight: Saving Education from Misguided Testing, Inappropriate Standards, and Other Good Intentions.” Armed with an MA in Teaching Secondary Mathematics from National-Louis University, a Master of Business and Public Management from Rice University, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Puget Sound, Ms. Turner had hoped to instill the excitement of learning in her students, motivating them to process and organize facts, think critically, and solve problems. But while Ms. Turner loved teaching, time and again, she found government educational mandates did not merely fail to support learning, but instead shut it down completely.

Drawing on her years of teaching experiences, and firsthand accounts of how students were failed by faulty and arbitrary standards and the exploding number of tests resulting from those standards, Ms. Turner sets out to open the eyes of readers to the reasons why the American education system is failing countless students, especially those who require extra learning support. She provides examples showing how proposed solutions to close the achievement gap routinely accomplish the opposite, widening that gap instead.

In her final year of teaching, the author found that over one-fifth of her valuable instructional hours were lost to testing demands. Those demands were based on curricular goals that could not be accomplished without substantial remedial education – yet too little time had been budgeted to teach the material slated for that year. Almost no class time remained to fill-in missing knowledge from previous years.

After ten years as a teacher in four districts and an alternative high school under twelve revolving-door principals, primarily in financially- and academically-disadvantaged districts, she found that she had had enough. Despite her best efforts, government education mandates kept sabotaging the students they were intended to help. Students who had fallen behind kept falling further behind, often as a direct result of tests and other measures designed to document and treat their learning deficits.

“Since No Child Left Behind, US schools have been burying students in tests and then drawing often misguided conclusions–when sometimes the only conclusion anyone ought to draw is that student X obviously spent hours staring at a set of questions he or she did not understand and maybe could not even read,” writes Turner.

Published by Covenant Books of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, Jocelyn Turner’s new book also looks at the $1.6 trillion student debt crisis, a consequence of a single-minded, college-bound pipeline that fails to consider student interests and aptitudes; vocabulary deficits left to fester due to narrowly targeted curricula; and the sneaky gutting of elective, vocational, and gifted education.

Readers can purchase “Fighting the White Knight: Saving Education from Misguided Testing, Inappropriate Standards, and Other Good Intentions” at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Covenant Books is an international Christian owned and operated publishing house based in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. Covenant Books specializes in all genres of work which appeal to the Christian market. For additional information or media inquiries, contact Covenant Books at 843-507-8373.

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Books

Former Game Warden Turns Three Decades of Conservation Work into Florida Crime Novel

H Johal

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Former Game Warden Turns Three Decades of Conservation Work into Florida Crime Novel

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Rick Larnerd has published a new novel, "The Mystery of Gasparilla Bay," a crime story set on Florida’s Gulf Coast that pairs a present-day poaching case with the region’s pirate lore, according to the publisher’s announcement. The book is out now through Covenant Books, available in bookstores and through major online retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books.

At the story’s center is Andy Warden, an experienced Florida conservation officer who pursues Bart Thibodeaux, an alligator poacher, through Florida’s swamps and Gulf Coast backwaters. According to the publisher’s description, Thibodeaux’s crimes take a darker turn when he takes a vacationing mother and her two children hostage during a treasure hunt of their own — one tied to the buried fortune of nineteenth-century pirate Jose Gaspar, whose legend has long drawn treasure hunters to the area. The description frames the story as one built on the question of whether the woman he’s underestimated will turn the tables on him, and whether Warden can close the case before it’s too late.

Larnerd’s own background runs close to his protagonist’s. He spent thirty-one years in law enforcement, including service as a wildlife officer in both Pennsylvania and Tennessee, and eight years as police chief in his Tennessee hometown, according to the announcement. He also served as an active-duty infantryman in the military. The publisher’s materials describe that record as the basis for the procedural detail in the novel, particularly the conservation officer’s perspective on poaching and the backcountry terrain where it plays out.

"I wanted to blend the romance of pirate legend with the reality of modern-day conservation challenges," Larnerd said in the announcement, adding that the aim was a story that "keeps readers on the edge of their seats while honoring both history and the natural world."

"The Mystery of Gasparilla Bay" is published through Covenant Books. Larnerd has said on social media that the book has already drawn its first reader review, which he described as encouraging.

Studio CarryOnHarry is always interested in writers who put a working career on the page rather than research alone — a three-decade law enforcement record is the kind of detail that tends to show up in a book’s texture, not just its marketing copy.

Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.

Are you an author with a new release? We’re always looking for books to cover and authors to interview — tell us about yours here.

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Scottsdale Author Joe Reina’s New Novel Follows a Killer Who Gets Away With It

H Johal

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Scottsdale Author Joe Reina’s New Novel Follows a Killer Who Gets Away With It

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Joe Reina has published a new novel, "Shadows over Scottsdale: An Unsolved Murder Mystery," built around a scenario true-crime statistics make uncomfortably familiar: a man commits a devastating crime and simply disappears, leaving investigators and a grieving community with no resolution.

The book follows a character named Robert, who flees the country using forged documents and a cargo ship after an act of destruction that leaves behind, as the publisher describes it, charred remains and an unanswered investigation. The case goes cold. The novel, according to its publisher, is less concerned with the mechanics of the escape than with what happens afterward, to the people left waiting for answers that never come.

Reina, now retired in Scottsdale, spent decades in international business across apparel, footwear, and real estate, with extensive time in Europe and a particular connection to Italy that shaped two earlier books, "The Goat Sleeps in the Kitchen" and "A Love Affair in Tuscany." "Shadows over Scottsdale" marks a different direction, built instead around the real scale of unsolved homicide in the U.S. The publisher’s materials cite roughly 346,000 unsolved homicides since 1965, with more than a dozen occurring unresolved each day. Separate reporting on the book has cited a figure of about 7,778 murders in 2023 alone, which it similarly frames as more than a dozen a day going unresolved.

"Writing ‘Shadows over Scottsdale’ forced me to confront uncomfortable questions about justice itself," Reina said, according to the announcement. "Too many crimes go unsolved, too many families wait endlessly for answers. I wanted readers to understand that behind every cold case statistic is a real story, real suffering, and real questions that may never be answered."

The publisher positions the novel as an examination of institutional limits as much as a crime story: the toll of a case gone cold on the people who can’t move past it, and what it means for a community when accountability simply never arrives.

"Shadows over Scottsdale" is published by Covenant Books and is available in paperback and hardcover through the publisher’s website and major retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books.

Cold-case statistics tend to get cited and then forgotten. Studio CarryOnHarry is curious whether fiction built directly around that number does more to stick with a reader than the number alone ever does.

Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.

Are you an author with a new release? We’re always looking for books to cover and authors to interview — tell us about yours here.

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