Beautifully written, attentive to nuance, and deeply knowledgeable, this book sets a very high standard for teachers. Experienced as a teacher, parent, researcher, and influential scholar and theorist of education, Lawrence-Lightfoot sought out, interviewed, and observed teachers (all women) who were particularly strong at negotiating the family-school boundary. She focused most intently on parent-teacher conferences, which she refers to as a microcosm that reveals the macrocosmic effects of institutional and cultural forces.

As a retired teacher of many years' experience with parent teacher conferences on both sides of the fence, I read the book with increasing gloom. The author, to counteract the effect of a literature that focuses on the deficiencies of teachers, chose to seek out and focus on teachers who are not typical because of the outstanding efficacy of their communication with parents. And as I read the accounts of these wonderful people, who devoted tremendous effort, time, emotional availability, and wisdom to their efforts, I remembered how I felt just before I retired. I had gotten really good at multitasking, but I was still working many more hours and months than my apparent schedule. I was exhausted. And anxious. All the time.

I sat on both sides of many parent-teacher conferences myself. I was pretty good at it. I was a lifelong member of the community where my school was situated, and a graduate of similar schools. I had a Ph.D. in education and a strong reputation. I knew the limits of schooling's scope, from both sides of the fence, and I was good at making parents feel safe and able, often, to hear what their children's experience of school was like during the day. But by the end of the parent conference day, I was always exhausted and emotionally wrung out.

As Lawrence-Lightfoot says, "There is something peculiarly American about the extraordinary aspirations that we citizens--whether rich or poor--have for our schools." We believe that schools can fix every social ill, provide opportunity for every child, remediate every wrong, and do it on the backs of saintly, devoted, highly professional idealized teachers. We are therefore endlessly being disappointed, and blaming it on teachers whom we increasingly treat like unskilled workers.

The book is worth reading, for the light it casts on the tensions and boundaries between the role of teacher and the role of parent and for the good advice and excellent examples it provides. But I am troubled by the implicit message it gives, in spite of itself (Lawrence-Lightfoot does say she believes schools should back off from many of their loftier claims to provide achievement) that teachers must shoulder even more responsibility. Teachers are not--and should not be--saints or nuns. And school, for all our fervent hopes, is rarely a site of transformational redemption for our students. We all do the best we can most of the time; some of the time we don't; and things happen. Life is uncomfortable. And if we insist, as Lawrence-Lightfoot points out repeatedly, on re-fighting our own childhood traumas and failures through our children and our students on the battlefield of school, we aren't doing our kids any favors. ( )