MS. MOFFETT'S FIRST YEAR: Becoming a Teacher in America

When schools chancellor Harold Levy challenged his fellow New Yorkers to "Take [their] next business trip on a big yellow bus" by becoming teachers in the public schools, Donna Moffett, a hardworking legal secretary looking for a way to make a difference, was one of the first to sign on. This unforgettable account of her first year as a first-grade teacher in an underperforming Brooklyn school brings Moffett, her students and her struggles to life. Goodnough's even-handed examination reaches beyond Room 218 in Flatbush's P.S. 92, however: some of the book's most striking pages cover the inspired but hasty inception of the New York City Teaching Fellows program, designed in the spring of 2000 to recruit professionals from other careers to work in the city's most troubled schools. After intense but unavoidably inadequate training in that program, Moffett is given her own classroom full of frustrating, endearing six-year-olds—sullen Curtis, unresponsive Melissa—and charged with teaching them to read, do math and simply behave. With a keen journalist's eye, Goodnough, a former New York Times education reporter who originally wrote about Moffett for the Metro section (she's now the paper's Miami bureau chief), follows Moffett as she copes with difficult students, ineffective standardized curricula, passive parents, a resentful administration and a host of other problems. This is no Dangerous Minds : the story Goodnough tells is far too complicated for a happy ending, though Moffett does experience success. Rather, it stands as a vital portrait of a dedicated, imperfect woman struggling in an inefficient and underfunded system. Agent, David McCormick . (Sept.)