Instead of working to fix the problem, the nation's failing schools are directly impacting the dark side of America's socioeconomic landscape, perpetuating an army of hopeless dropouts feeding the need for more crime control, judicial services, and prison costs, says Armand A. Fusco, Ed.D.

Currently, the nation churns out 7,200 dropouts per school day. Meanwhile, 80 percent of today's prison inmates are school dropouts.

"A figure like that should shock everybody," says this former Branford superintendent of schools and author of School Pushouts: A Plague of Hopelessness Perpetrated by Zombie Schools (2012).

Armand began teaching in 1958, becoming the Hadley, Massachusetts, superintendent of schools in 1971. He was Branford's school chief from 1985 through his retirement in 1992.

He spent five years researching this book, which devotes an entire chapter to Connecticut's failings and notes neighboring Massachusetts' success.

"When I started this, I didn't know Connecticut was that bad," he says.

Connecticut doesn't use National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing, but, if it did, our success rate would be about half of what's reported, he says. For example, Connecticut's approximate 80 percent math success rate, if measured by NAEP standards, drops to some 40 percent.

Beyond that, "national standards aren't high to begin with," says Armand. By global standards, America ranks in the lower third.

In a recent interview with The Sound, Armand also took aim at state and local fixes he says won't work. They include full-day kindergarten and increased pre-K, Connecticut's 2012 Education Reform Bill (enacted July 2012), and Common Core State Standards, which schools must meet to continue to qualify for future state and federal funding (beginning 2014-'15).

"There's a preconceived notion, what I call the reform express train," says Armand.

To begin with, all-day pre-K and kindergarten is a "farce."

"You see in all the papers it has a lasting impact, but there is not a single study beyond

grade 3. Everybody believes it's going to help with achievement. It doesn't," he says, adding those who don't have it will "catch up" by 3rd grade.

In fact, 3rd grade is the pivotal point to turn around future dropouts, but assistance instead focuses on grades 9 to 12, says Armand. The fundamental stumbling block? Literacy. Further complicating the matter: pushing out academic time for "social engineering" instruction, on topics from obesity to "putting on a condom in kindergarten," he says.

The 3rd-grade literacy milestone is well-known, Armand adds, noting, "Texas is one of half a dozen states which can predict, from grade 3, the number of cells prisons will need to have in 10 years."

In Connecticut, failing inner-city districts produce roughly a 50 percent drop-out rate among male black students with "Hispanics a little better," says Armand. And yet, within the Education Reform Bill, "not one word pertains to dropouts.

"The legislation calls for fixing up to 25 failing schools, [but] when you read the language, it says no district could have fixed more than two schools. If you have 10, why not fix all of them? And nowhere in the language is how you fix them," he says. "Principals are programmed for failure."

The legislation's call to form networks to support failing schools is "the blind leading the blind," he adds.

The reform pumps up college readiness, also at the heart of Common Core State Standards. Pointing to the legislation's edict that Connecticut's Education Commissioner will ensure all students will be reading by 3rd grade, Armand asks what "Houdini act" will ensure that.

Do today's students even need to be saddled by college debt to succeed? Armand says not. Recent U.S. Labor Department statistics show 30 percent of jobs require "some or all college" while the remaining 70 percent represents "a lot of jobs which pay very well without a college degree," he says.

One of his sons, a police detective sergeant, has enjoyed a very successful career without a college degree, Armand notes.

While his book is now finished, issues he's found within this state have spurred Armand into continuing research published in a monthly manuscript, Connecticut Condition of Education and the Reform Agenda. He offers the updates, via free email downloads, to all interested readers.

Armand Fusco's new book, School Pushouts: A Plague of Hopelessness Perpetrated by Zombie Schools, is available at www.amazon.com or by contacting him at fusco.a@comcast.net, where readers may also contact Fusco to request copies of his monthly manuscript. Fusco also wrote School Corruption: Betrayal of Children and the Public Trust (2005), leading to two works authored for the Yankee Institute, which are available as free downloads from www.yankeeinstitute.org: Stopping School Corruption: A Manual for Taxpayers (2006) and How to Reduce Property Taxes with Citizen Audit Committees (2009).