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In the summer of 2000, Donna Moffett changed professions. Responding to a New York Board of Education ad, this middle-aged legal secretary became a teacher. Education reporter Abby Goodnough followed Moffett through her first year as a teacher and wrote a front-page New York Times series about her experiences. The articles registered the gulf between "no child left behind" rhetoric and the harsh realities of the inner-city classroom. Miss Moffett's First Year is an expansion of that award-winning series. This book is neither a made-for-Hollywood feel-good story about "one teacher making a difference" nor a reductive, rhetorical indictment of the public education system. Instead, it is a complex, provocative document about battles won, lost, and abandoned.

Publishers Weekly

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.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Written by a former education reporter for the New York Times, this book is somewhat misleadingly subtitled, as it is less about how the vast majority of people enter the teaching profession than about the tribulations of an exceptional woman taking part in a deeply flawed "alternative" route. Ms. Moffett will remind readers of many past first-year teachers, including Jonathan Kozol (whose real-life experience was recounted in Death at an Early Age) and Richard Dadier (whose fictional The Blackboard Jungle is recalled more than once here). Unfortunately, her story lacks the immediacy of memoirs recounted in the first person. Goodnough uses Moffett's story to level familiar criticisms against the bureaucracy of the New York City schools, the intellectual quality of students found in traditional teacher education programs, the relevance of teacher education in general, and the "curriculum wars" that hold teachers hostage to various forms of programmed instruction. In the end, though, Ms. Moffett's story has been told many times before, while the potentially more relevant story of the "teaching fellows" program of which she was a part remains largely untold. Recommended for all libraries as likely to be popular, this is still old wine in a new bottle and provides little new insight either to practitioners or scholars.-Scott Walter, Univ. of Kansas, Lawrence Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

What People Are Saying

The politics of public education are often maddening, but always important. One of the virtues of this book is that it makes them both comprehensible and interesting, by making them a part of the setting for a tale that can never grow old: the story of an idealistic teacher laboring through her first year in the classroom. It is a moving story - heartbreaking, infuriating, delightful. I came away grateful for Ms. Moffett, all the more because of her inevitable false steps and travail. This book is an engrossing antidote to all the current sloganeering and special pleading that infect national discourse on education.
—author of Among Schoolchildren and Mountains Beyond Mountains