Geoff Carter has been teaching high school English in Milwaukee Public Schools for nearly 30 years. Most of his students were and are considered at-risk, and he has strong opinions about the importance of public schools and about the dynamics that exist here among public, private, charter and voucher schools and their advocates.
Carter has written a fair amount on the subject on his Pen in Hand blog, but his latest writing takes the form of a novel - The P.S. Wars. The book envisions what happens when a private, for-profit charter company plans a hostile takeover of a fictional Milwaukee high school.
The novel was an opportunity to "give a window into what daily life inside a high school is like to people who haven't been there for thirty or forty years, or who have never set foot in a city high school," according to Carter. He joined Lake Effect's Bonnie North in the studio to explain more about his story and the messages it contains:
