The Perfect Score by Rob Buyea

The kids in a 6th grade class get a teacher who was asked to come out of retirement for the year. Mrs. Wood is a great teacher and has a no nonsense approach and knows how to manage a classroom. She also excels at the daily read aloud time and it becomes the highlight of the day for some of the students.  Meanwhile the statewide testing focus causes her administration to ask her to start practice test sessions early in the school year and require cutting out non essentials such as birthday parties, read alouds, and even some recess time. The students feel the pressure from their own lives and school and when the time comes to take the test, team up and devise a plan to cheat in order to all get perfect scores.  This results in some consequences they hadn't planned on. 

The author, Rob Buyea, used to teach fourth grade and so I expect that his realistic stories about school will be described correctly.  His experience with testing is not like my school.  All our tests are done on the computer and not paper and pencil.  And even when it was with paper and pencil, none of the tests were exactly in the same order. It would have been impossible to cheat the way the ids in this story do. Our students don't receive results of their tests until way into  the summer. The results don't have as much impact on them. It does however impact the teacher, and the report card of the school. 

Buyea uses the multiple points of view in his previous books and does the same in this book as well. Each student has some issue in their own life which shades how well they are doing in school. From no time to study because of sports, bullying, dyslexia, to always wanting to perform perfectly.  The consequences for each student helps family and school understand more about the difficulties the students are dealing with at school and home. 

This is a fun and fast read. You have to keep the characters straight but it is pretty easy if you remember to read the chapter headings. I give this book a 3 out of 4 rating. It is a 4.7 reading level.

• Print Length: 351 pages
• Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers (October 3, 2017)