Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids was published by Blue Rider Press in 2016. Baker spent twenty-eight days as a substitute teacher in Maine public schools — elementary, middle, and high school — and recorded everything. The 700-page result is organized by day, each chapter covering one substitute assignment: the lesson plans left by absent teachers (often inadequate), the behavior management challenges (constant), the bureaucratic systems (baffling), and the students themselves (funny, bored, struggling, occasionally brilliant).
Baker’s method is pure observation: he records dialogue, describes classroom layouts, notes what students are wearing and eating, and resists interpretation. The accumulation of detail produces its own argument — that American public education is a system designed to warehouse children rather than educate them, staffed by overworked teachers whose absence is filled by untrained strangers following incomprehensible instructions.
The book is Baker’s longest and his most politically radical in its implications: not through argument but through sheer documentary weight, it demonstrates that the educational system fails children not through malice but through structural incoherence. Teachers are heroes; the system they work within is broken; and substitute teaching reveals the breakage with particular clarity because the substitute has no context, no relationships, no continuity.
Collecting Substitute
First edition (Blue Rider Press, New York, 2016): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Very good/very good: $8–$15
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation.
Inside the Classroom
Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids (2016) is Baker’s non-fiction account of twenty-eight days spent as a substitute teacher in Maine public schools. Baker brings his characteristic attentiveness to the chaos of the American classroom: the bureaucracy, the testing regime, the exhausted teachers, and the students themselves — bored, funny, struggling, and occasionally brilliant. The book is over 700 pages of granular observation that amounts to a devastating critique of contemporary American education.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this an education reform book? Not explicitly — Baker rarely argues a thesis. Instead, he shows what a school day actually looks and feels like, in such detail that the reader can draw conclusions. The accumulation of mundane frustrations and small kindnesses tells its own story.