No complaint left behind: an enterprising journalist finds fault in a rare educational success story.

• Author: Carey, Kevin
• Position: Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade - Book review

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Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade by Linda Perlstein Henry Holt and Company, 306 pp.

Of the roughly 170 public elementary schools in Maryland where more than 70 percent of students live in poverty, only three had better test scores last year than Tyler Heights Elementary. A K-5 school built near the low-income housing projects of Annapolis, Tyler more than doubled its pass rates on state reading and math tests in just three years, moving off the list of schools tagged as low-performing by the No Child Left Behind Act. Politicians, school officials, and newspapers like the Washington Post held up the school as a "crown jewel"--an example of how NCLB can help even the most disadvantaged children learn.

But Linda Perlstein is not convinced. A former Washington Post education reporter and author of a well-regarded book on middle school students, Perlstein spent the entire 2005-06 school year at Tyler Heights. In the resulting book, Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade, she argues that, despite the high scores and phenomenal efforts of principal Tina McKnight and her staff, Tyler doesn't represent all that's right about modern American education. Instead, she believes, it shows much of what's wrong.

Tested begins at the end of the previous school year, with McKnight, a veteran educator who pours boundless energy and determination into her job, anxiously awaiting the school's final test scores. They arrive, and they're incredible. Two years before, only 35 percent of third graders were "proficient" in reading. Now--90 percent! But as Tyler's teachers celebrate, they also realize that the scores are a mixed blessing. "They had exactly one year," writes Perlstein, "to prove that this was not a fluke."

This is the central drama of Tested, and the intense pressure to match those outsize scores bears down on nearly every action Tyler's faculty takes. As McKnight and her staff--all women, many with only a few years of classroom experience--struggle to adapt to each day's challenges, the oppressive scarcity of time is always on their minds. The March 2006 state test often feels only minutes away.

A clear, vivid writer who combines deep empathy for her subjects with a reporter's skepticism and eye for detail, Perlstein expertly shows just how complicated teaching really is. People often see elementary school through the lens of their childhood memories: a relaxed, simple time of playgrounds...