Speaker Biography:

Journalist Ron Berler has spent much of his career reporting on youth issues. For more than two years, he wrote a weekly column on the subject for the Chicago Tribune. His article in the New York Times Magazine about the growing epidemic of serious arm injuries among teenage baseball pitchers helped convince Little League Baseball to tighten its pitch-count rules. During his tenure as Editor-in-Chief of NBA Inside Stuff, a pro basketball magazine for teens, the magazine won a Parents’ Choice Gold Award seal of excellence. His work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Wired, Men’s Journal and Outside, among other publications.

Berler’s latest book, RAISING THE CURVE: A Year Inside One of America’s 45,000* Failing Public Schools (Berkley Books, a Penguin Random House imprint), tells the story of two fifth-grade girls – best friends but very different types of students – their teacher, the school’s literacy specialist and the principal, and the daily struggles each faces dealing with the pressures brought about by No Child Left Behind.  Education reform expert Diane Ravitch wrote of it, “It is popular treatments like Berler’s that will help the American public understand that public education is not ‘broken,’ but federal education policy is broken and should be completely scrapped and rewritten to address real problems.”

Berler addresses three main education issues in his speaking engagements:

• first, the frighteningly remedial level at which so many poor rural and urban students enter kindergarten, and the concurrent need for quality preschool education;
• second, a call for a national discussion on the necessity of increased parental involvement in our children’s education; and
• third, the damage that constant standardized testing does not just to students, but to the morale of teachers and administrators. It is, in fact, a key reason why educators sour on their profession.

He proposes not a silver bullet solution, but a complex, interwoven plan to repair our education crisis.