Linda Perlstein

Balanced and clear-headed investigation of the effects of No Child Left Behind Act on one public school in Anne Arundel Co., MD. Written by a former Washington Post journalist who imbedded in the school for a year, the book is incredibly readable, sometimes funny, sometimes heart-breaking. Great book because it leaves the rhetoric and politics behind to focus on the lives of real teachers and children. Read it and make up your own mind about No Child Left Behind -- surely a piece of show more legislation that has had a huge impact on the lives of many poor and disadvantaged students. You can decide if the impact is for good or bad.....if you are interested in kids and education I highly recommend this. show less

A journalist follows several suburband Maryland middle schoolers during the course of the 2001-02 school year. This highly readable documentary account details these students' conversations, motives or lack of, frustrations, changing friendships, dreams and relations with their parents and families. The author also ties in their actions and thought processes to the dramatic physical, emotional and brain changes that go on during this period of life. It helps explain why teens this age are show more the way they are. Author mentions that the emotional part of the brain is fully developed rather that the logical, organizational part so any family troubles may keep students from focusing their logical side on their studies. Empathetic presentation. show less

Will our school do well this year on the state-mandated tests? That question seems to dominate every decision made in every school in our country these days. Perlstein visits a typical disadvantaged school to take a close look at testing and the day-to-day events in a school that lead up to testing. It is not a happy picture. All the fun activities of school---projects, experiments, student group interaction, even recess---are sacrified at the altar of testing preparation. For this school, show more the sacrifice pays off; the school does well on the tests. But an observer must ask, At what cost? show less

Anecdotal portraits of several middle schoolers, so this could seem pretty useless--but it's a broad cross-section of kids that are profiled with all their middle-school dramas, and it's not hard to extrapolate behavior patterns. I don't know that this gives me a lot of insight for working with teens, but it's interesting nonetheless to get a glimpse of what middle-school lives are like--and not just the life I had.