TRUSTING YOUR CHILD'S TEACHERS

A guide provides advice to parents who find themselves disagreeing with teachers.

Ryan, who holds a doctorate in education, is a mother of five public school kids and a teacher with over 30 years of experience in the classroom. In this book, she draws on her own long history in order to present her readers with tips and strategies designed to help their children get the most out of a public education. (The author specifies that she’s not really addressing the experiences of kids in private schools, and she includes a brief section on adults who return to their educations later in life.) She is a champion of the public school system, but she advises parents to be ever vigilant, “always on the lookout for teachers at every level who shortchange their students out of a proper education while managing to remain above scrutiny by school administrators and parents.” Since she and her husband and their kids have together encountered virtually every challenge and obstacle the public school system can offer, Ryan need look no further than their experiences to find fodder for her discussions of the shortcomings and bureaucracies readers can face. She dramatizes those situations using slightly depersonalized characters like “Secret Slacker Sam,” who only wants to get by day to day with the least effort; “Randall the Retaliator,” who keeps lists of policy enemies; and “Paula the Perfect Pro,” who knows the system and works it expertly. The author is a very engaging writer, but this tactic of grounding everything in her family’s experiences is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the approach gives everything a sense of immediacy, but on the other hand, some readers will feel it’s unhelpfully specific. Still, Ryan’s cleareyed passion more than compensates throughout, and her certainty about what makes a good teacher turns her experiences into passionately useful reading.

A testy and invaluable report from the public school front line.