Despite the fact that I rail about my kid's school a bunch, I should shut up. Really. We have it lucky. Yes, we chose the town we live in because it has a good school system (and chose the house because I can walk to the train station). Yes, we put our child in a daycare program that morphed into a Montessori preschool. Yes, we read to her every single night. I didn't really need to read Peg Tyre's The Good School; I'm already there.
Peg isn't preachy, she's not mired in rubrics and jargon. In a conversational and methodical way, she walks through many issues surrounding pre-K through high school education. She skewers standardized testing in a way that non-educators will understand. She advocates for recess, because it helps kids think better. She talks about class sizes, the importance of scientifically based reading instruction, and why good teachers matter. The book is laced with interviews with parents and educators, anecdotes about good and bad school situations, and plenty of hard evidence about best practices. At the end of most of the chapters is a list of "take aways" - bullet points summarizing the main ideas in the chapter. And the last section is a synopsis - what makes a good school and why there are no perfect schools.
If you're interested in reading it, I have that aforementioned copy to give away. Leave me a comment by day's end on Tuesday 10/11 and tell me how you think it could help you. I'll pick a name out of something hat-like and you'll get a copy anon. Oh, and make sure your email address is enabled in your profile OR in the comment.
Disclosure: Nope, no one paid me to tell you any of this. I did get a free copy of the book for my own use, because I offhandly mentioned to the publicist that I was reading a copy from the public library. By sending me a copy, he got the library copy back into circulation - that's a good thing, right? Should I also tell you that my husband went to elementary school AND college with Peg? That's probably irrelevant, and in no way influenced my opinion, but it is part of why the book was on my radar screen.
