This "excellent" and "invaluable" account of one new teacher's experience in a Brooklyn elementary school classroom illuminates the complex dilemmas currently confounding American public education ( The Washington Post ) In the summer of 2000, Donna Moffett, a forty-five-year-old legal secretary, answered an ad for the New York City Teaching Fellows program, which sought to recruit "talented professionals" from other fields to teach in some of the city's worst schools. Seven weeks later she was in a first-grade classroom at P.S. 92 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, almost completely unprepared for what she was about to face. Abby Goodnough, then a New York Times education reporter, followed Moffett through her first year as a teacher, and wrote an award-winning series of front-page articles that galvanized discussion nationwide. Ms. Moffett's First Year is the expansion of that series into a riveting book that explores the gulf between rhetoric and reality in today's urban schools. This is a provocative, often heartbreaking portrait of the inadequacy of good intentions and of the challenges of educating poor and immigrant populations. It is a story that anyone who cares about this country's children should know.