BOOK REVIEW M. Fullan, P. Hill and C. Crevola, Breakthrough Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2006 Patricia M. Cooper Published online: 3 May 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007 Breakthrough is one of those rare educational titles on school reform without a subtitle. It bespeaks a confidence worth noting. The school reform model of Michael Fullan, Peter Hill, and Carmel Crevola targets academic achievement. They aspire to nothing less than a 90% success rate in school systems worldwide. As if this were not bold enough, they bet their potential miracle on the one thing that has eluded the long reach of school reform since John Dewey: the public school teacher. To this end, Breakthrough is a fascinating book. At a little more than one hundred pages, it gets straight to the point. The problem with school reform in the last two decades or so, according to the authors, is that it failed to impact daily instruction in any meaningful way. The authors do not dismiss the value of the standards-based movement or neglect the calls for external accountability. They support many new content norms and practices, as suggested in their discussion of early literacy. But they take aim at the fact that none of these or other worthwhile efforts goes far enough to change how and what teachers actually do on a day to day basis. As evidence, they offer a study by the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform (2005), which looked at case studies of reform efforts in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Seattle. The study suggested that all three failed to improve achievement system wide because none tied reforms to changes in instruction. This is where the ‘‘Breakthrough system’’ enters the picture. Its keystone is the formative assessment of individual children’s per- formance in daily lessons. Yes, daily lessons! The authors are not daunted by the prospect of asking millions of teachers to change their teaching habits. They tackle the issue head on throughout the book. For this reason alone, Breakthrough deserves plaudits. The question of whether Fullan, Hill, and Crevola’s plan can succeed, however, depends on teachers’ responses to what they must give up in exchange. Teaching, in the Breakthrough context, is merely what teachers do. It offers little internal accountability because responsibility for outcomes is taken out of the teachers’ P. M. Cooper (&) Department of Teaching and Learning, Steinhardt School of Education, East Building, 2nd floor, 239 Greene Street, New York, NY 1003, USA e-mail: pmc7@nyu.edu 123 J Educ Change (2007) 8:275–277 DOI 10.1007/s10833-007-9035-9