Excellence Without Excuses: A Music Teacher's Odyssey

How did a group of Washington, DC high school singers overcome the challenge of preparing and participating in a prestigious international classical music competition in Vienna, Austria? This memoir follows the life and 30-year DC Public Schools career of honored educator Joyce Garrett who founded the "Excellence Without Excuses" program, using choral music to teach the values of perseverance, self-discipline, teamwork, loyalty, high achievement, and higher education. This book chronicles how she inspired her students to reach beyond their immediate grasps, lead purposeful lives, and fulfill their dreams. Many students did not understand basic values like: dependability, punctuality, loyalty, self-control, and high achievement. If they made a commitment and ran into a problem, they would not re-group. Singers often gave up without considering Plan B or Plan C. Garrett used the after-school "Excellence Without Excuses" program as an incubator to provide an alternate environment to change the way her students experienced the world. By the mid 1990s, she recognized a shift in attitudes. Students began to see high achievement and going to college in a positive light. The transformation was happening before everyone's eyes. It seemed like a miracle!

Joyce Garrett is an honored music educator and choral director. During her 30-year teaching career at Eastern High School in Washington, DC, she received numerous notable awards, among them the Readers Digest "American Heroes in Education" and Washingtonian magazine's "Washingtonian of the Year." Her choir placed second in the prestigious "International Youth and Music Festival" in Vienna, Austria, which landed appearances at the White House, the Today Show (NBC), and CBS Sunday Morning. For 25 years, she served as Choral Master for two yearly TV specials, "The Kennedy Center Honors" (CBS) and "Christmas in Washington" (NBC/TNT).
Marion Woodfork Simmons is a family and community historian and the owner of Woodfork Genealogy LLC. She helps ordinary people preserve their history by transforming their memories, photographs, and memorabilia into local history books or memoirs. She became an author after noticing a scarcity of written information about the communities where her ancestors lived. Simmons has received several awards for preserving local history, including recognition from the Board of Supervisors of Caroline County, Virginia; Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS) Paul Edward Sluby; Sr. Meritorious Achievement; and the Annual Caroline Historical Society Award. When she's not writing, she gives presentations on researching, documenting, and preserving local history to genealogy and local history groups.