In a reporting tour de force that made national headlines and The New York Times bestseller list, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America’s failure to educate its children—and points the way to reversing that failure. In a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America’s failure to educate its children—and points the way to reversing that failure. Brill not only takes us inside their roller-coaster battles, he also concludes with a surprising prescription for what it will take from both sides to put the American dream back in America’s schools.

How do some university presidents “lose their way,” and why are their consequential dismissals given so much media attention? Presidencies Derailed is the first book to explore in depth why university presidencies fail and how university and college leadership can forestall, if not prevent, future leadership failures. Former university president Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, along with professor Gerald B. Kauvar and former chancellor E. Grady Bogue, organize, classify, and explain patterns of leadership failures, drawing on firsthand testimonies from "derailed" university presidents, sixteen case studies in four sectors of higher education, and reviews of the scholarly literature on leadership failures in the public and private sectors.