If you’re looking for a riveting book about education that reads like a novel and speaks with fire in the belly about the gross injustice in our education system for children disenfranchised by poverty and/or race, I highly recommend the 354 page-turner by Susan Eaton, The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial.

This extraordinarily well-written story is penned by award-winning journalist, Eaton, whose work has appeared in the Nation, the Hartford Courant, and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine.  She is the former assistant director of the project on school desegregation at Harvard, where she received her doctorate.

The Children in Room E4 tells the true story of the famous Sheff trial in Connecticut through the eyes of heroic and real classroom teachers and students and families caught in the trap of institutional insensitivity and a judical system protecting the privileged class in America. It is hard to read this book without a sense of growing outrage. If you teach in a school like the ones Eaton knows so well, you wonder where we might turn next as our pusuit of justice is trumped by state educational mandates that declare our schools underperforming while keeping the resources from us that could make it possible to renew our schools.

Susan Eaton’s reporting is heart-wrenching and compelling, full of truth telling that is hard to swallow and leaves any teacher who reads her work wanting to send a copy to a state representative or senator. Not a bad idea, come to think of it.

Have you read this book?  What did you think?  Click the “Comment” link below to add your thoughts.