Read Dan Brown’s book, The Great Expectations School, for a moving account of why we may be entering an era of temp teachers.

A powerful, heart-breaking story that challenges our image of inner-city schools and the children who populate them. Important and moving, The Great Expectations School grabs your attention from the first page and refuses to let go.

A moving and heart-wrenching month-by-month look at a first year teacher's struggles and triumphs . . . The book reads like a documentary film. You can picture the people and the setting so clearly, it’s as if you are watching the book instead of reading it. . . . Compelling . . . Worth reading, for sure.

Brown is likely to become a key player in the push for educational policy changes. . . . An honest account of the disturbing problems in what Brown calls the “racial ghetto.”

Brown paints a sorry picture of what NCLB is foisting upon this school.

An appealing and sympathetic figure with a seemingly genuine talent for teaching . . . Heartwarming.

A chilling portrait of a dysfunctional inner city public school, The Great Expectations School is a riveting human drama full of heroes and villains, humor and tragedy. Brown is an exciting new talent and his writing is so clear and suspenseful that the pages turn themselves. I couldn’t put this book down.

By turns humorous and haunting, Dan Brown’s chronicle of his year spent teaching in an underprivileged elementary school in the Bronx takes the reader on both a compelling and illuminating journey through the American public education system. Unlike many other books on the topic, however, Brown’s is not a dry litany of all that is wrong with that system, but rather highlights the personal success-stories—the dedicated teachers, the kids overcoming massive odds—he encountered along the way. One

Dan Brown’s heartfelt account of the thrills and frustrations of a first-year teacher grips like a novel. A must-read for anyone who has dreamed of a job that makes a difference.

A poignant portrait painted with skill . . . Read it and weep—and wonder no more about the human dimensions of the achievement gap.

Brown has written a compelling and engaging story full of the joys, sorrows, absurdities, terrors and treasures of becoming a teacher.

A New York University film graduate full of hope, spirit, and good intentions tells a gripping tale of his first year teaching in the New York Public School system. Full of funny, painful, and illuminating stories covering the children at risk, Byzantine rubrics of bulletin board display, and a night socializing with his tattooed administrators, it is a must read for anyone interested in reforming our schools.

Powerful and moving . . . Dan Brown has a story that we need to hear—and respond to.

Brown makes one thing painfully clear: teacher quality matters. . . . Good teachers are the linchpin to solid reform. Too often, poor schools become dumping grounds for green teachers, and children are the ones who pay the price.

A hell of a writer . . . A wallopingly good book.

Touching.

Brown zooms in on New York City as a laboratory for education reform [and] provides useful insight into the effect of reform on individual classrooms and especially into why many young, bright people choose to depart from teaching almost as soon as they begin.

A compelling diary of his year as a newbie teaching a troublesome class of inner-city fourth graders. With introspection and good humor, Brown tells the lively and often appalling story of how an NYU film school grad comes face to face with a group of students from a dirt-poor Bronx neighborhood. . . . The greatest strength of his book is its vivid depiction of just how hard first-year teaching is. . . . Heartening.

Like Bel Kaufman’s comedic year-in-the-life-of-a-new-teacher novel Up the Down Staircase . . . In The Great Expectations School, we see that good teachers are the linchpin to solid reform.

A behind-the-scenes peek at one man’s experience teaching in a city public school.

Highly recommended, especially for teacher education students . . . His call to action and outrage over No Child Left Behind should be a call to arms for the next generation. . . . Kudos to Dan Brown.

If you really want to know the negative impact of sending underprepared teachers into high needs school read Dan Brown’s fascinating account of his experiences in New York City. The Great Expectations School slashes some ice-cold reality on usual policy pabulum that comes from inside-the-Beltway.

Invaluable to anyone who wants an understanding of what public schools are like today, especially schools in high poverty areas, and how federal policy affects teaching and learning . . . Brown heroically manages to reclaim his classroom, relying mostly on his own tenacity and grit, but also on effective and meaningful instruction that keeps students engaged. . . . Brown precisely identifies the problem with No Child Left Behind. . . . A terrific read . . . Like a good novel, there are heroes

For a troubling sense of what it is like to face a contemporary classroom for the first time, turn to The Great Expectations School. . . . By the end of Brown’s story, it has achieved a Hollywood-worthy arc.

Brown reveals more to us about public education than do either [Alec] Klein [in A Class Apart] or one of America’s more admirable school administrators, Rudy Crew, in his book, Only Connect. . . . Brown’s persistence in the face of hopelessness earned him a range of experiences that allowed him to become a clear-eyed and trustworthy guide to the inescapable everyday social problems with which so many public school children live. If we want to ameliorate some of these problems we need to know what we’re dealing with and acknowledge the impact of poverty on students. We also need to try to keep bright young people like Brown teaching in our public schools.

The Great Expectations School is making waves in teaching circles.

The book showcases more than the problems with unsupportive administrators. The real drama is the students themselves and the gap between the amount of resources and assistance the mostly-impoverished children need and what is available at the school. . . . The Great Expectations School fills in the details and the daily struggles that graphically explain why about 40 percent of new teachers leave the city's public schools within three years. But it also explains why the majority stays.

Legislators and teachers could gain marked insight into what is needed by reading an excellent book titled, The Great Expectations School by Dan Brown. Anyone wondering what it is like to teach in particularly needy areas should read this book. . . . It is a primer on what parents should be doing or how miserably they are failing their children at home, and it is also a testament to all that teachers need to balance and consider. It should also show outsiders what a day in a rough classroom is really like.