Here are some reviews on amazon.com:
Mitzvah Dude writes: “Rabbi Nachum Shifren exposes the bureaucratic stagnation that plagues the Los Angeles Unified School District. He documents instances of racism towards him, threats of violence, and the extreme application of PC politics. What is sad is that we have lost a talented teacher that truly cares about his students and actually brought standards and discipline to inner city schools.”
Midwest Book Review writes: “We now live in a world of Columbine-style school violence, on-campus gang violence, racial and sexual violence, and student-on-teacher violence that has made our schools (especially the inner city schools) more like correctional institutions focused on physical misbehavior control than institutions dedicated to learning. “Kill Your Teacher” is not a how-to manual for abusing classroom instructors. It is a warning to us all that inept and corrupt school administration policies are exacerbating the risks to the safety and learning environment of teachers and there students. Rabbi Nachum Shifren writes with the special expertise and first-hand knowledge gained from having been a Los Angeles public school teacher teaching Spanish at many of the inner city school districts since 1991. Exposing what he has witnessed with over virulent Black/Hispanic and Black/Anglo racism in the student bodies of these schools, “Kill Your Teacher” is sobering reading and will prove to be a substantial contribution to the national dialogue currently underway concerning issues of safety, race relations, and moral clarity with the context of our public school systems and administrative policies.”
Lee Kaplan writes for FrontPageMag.com:
Being recognized as an Orthodox Jew also made Shifren a target. Some students made anti-Semitic remarks openly to him during class time — and the administration refused to apply any discipline. This culminated in one parent of a problem student complaining to the school district that Shifren was teaching Hebrew in his Spanish class. Whenever Shifren compared the names of parents who sent complaints about him, no matter how outlandish, they always matched those of the students who were repeatedly causing disciplinary problems. In each case, the usual evidence of lack of class participation, goofing off, or absence of homework was apparent.Shifren attributes a lot of these problems to what he calls a period of “pay back” by certain minorities who believe previous injustices excuse the need to learn. In their minds, students should be advanced to higher levels because they are oppressed — even if they are ill-equipped to survive in a competitive society. Shifren touchingly recounts how, while working at a prison ranch as a teacher years later, he was approached by one of his former students, who by that time was an inmate. The student literally began crying to the Rabbi about his circumstances because he was graduated without even having the ability to read or fill out a work application. In a more ominous tone, Shifren recounts how one student at his school was murdered for his tennis shoes and how his classroom of students expressed little remorse or objection to the killing. And the reaction of the school administration was little better to this general indifference.
Shifren writes of how he was deliberately ignored by his administrators in regards to his repeated requests for an American flag to be put in his classroom so that the pledge of allegiance could be recited. He also proposed to an administrator that December 7th, 1941 be marked as a day of remembrance for Pearl Harbor on the heels of month long celebrations for Cinco De Mayo and Martin Luther King’s birthday. But he he was informed that the day would not be earmarked because it might be “offensive to Asian students.”The last quarter of the book contains an account of a female colleague of Shifren’s, another teacher who was beaten down continually despite an honest desire to help her students. Many days she was forced to hold class outside on the grass or on the football bleachers because the school would not even provide her chairs for her students. She also recounts harrowing tales of lockdowns with SWAT teams on campus and administrators who were always curiously absent the days such developments occurred.This book is a powerful example of how the political correctness and reverse racism on our college campuses seep into other corridors of our educational system. College graduates become the very teachers and school administrators that Shifren describes in his book.Taxpayers, educators, concerned parents of children in high school and anyone concerned with the state of education in America should read Kill Your Teacher for insight about what is happening to our schools — and what we can expect from the next generations of students emerging from them.It isn’t a pretty picture.
