The School Solution: Getting Canada's Schools to Work for Your Children

Christine Linge is a past director of the Toronto & District Parent
Co-operative Preschool Corporation and a freelance writer.

The School Solution is a thorough description and balanced evaluation of
all aspects of Canada’s nursery, elementary, and secondary schools
that is supported by extensive research and has been written with wit
and feeling. While the book’s clever layout encourages its use as a
quick reference, the goal of “getting Canada’s school to work for
your children” is best achieved by reading every well-written word.

The opening chapters discuss subjects applicable to all grades: working
with teachers and principals; home and school partnership; choosing the
best school for your child’s particular needs. Chapters 6 to 12 deal
with specific grades in groupings of two or three years, focusing on
children’s developing needs and the changing curriculum.
Special-education and gifted programs are discussed in separate
chapters. The authors conclude with a look at “The Real Issues Our
Schools Face,” using their combined 50 years of teaching experience to
distil the critical issues from the stew of media-hyped crises.

Sidebars (which can be found on almost every page) serve either to
condense salient points for quick access or to supplement the text with
interesting statistics, converting the authors’ coherent educational
thesis, developed throughout the book, into a ready reference.

The authors also guide parents step by step through interviews with
teachers and administrators (an essential first step in achieving change
for your child, but one that many parents find distasteful), using their
experience to predict the path of the discourse and the points at which
parents must exercise caution or control.