The book is filled with extraordinary people taking extraordinary paths: a young woman who goes into teaching almost by accident, then becomes so talented and driven that fighting burnout becomes her biggest challenge; an antitrust lawyer who almost brought down Bill Gates's Microsoft and now forms a partnership with Bill and Melinda Gates to overhaul New York's schools; a naive Princeton student who launches an army of school reformers with her senior thesis; a California teachers' union lobbyist who becomes the mayor of Los Angeles and then the union's prime antagonist; a stubborn young teacher who, as a child growing up on Park Avenue, had been assumed to be learning disabled but ends up co-founding the nation's most successful charter schools; and an anguished national union leader who walks a tightrope between compromising enough to save her union and giving in so much that her members will throw her out.