How Michelle Obama's mum helped her to shine

Michelle Robinson was only 7 when she concluded there was something very wrong with her second-grade class at Bryn Mawr Elementary School. She had already quarrelled with her piano teacher for going too slowly. Her schoolteacher had a similar deficiency, though much worse.

Robinson grew up to become Michelle Obama. She recounts many world-shaking events in her just-published memoir, Becoming. But to me, her most intriguing revelation has nothing to do with global history. It is what happened when the working-class girl, long before she was famous, found herself in an urban classroom where no one was learning much.

Bryn Mawr was an average South Side Chicago school near the little rented apartment where the girl who would become first lady lived with her father, who worked at a city water treatment plant; her stay-at-home mother; and her older brother. Kindergarten and first grade had been fine, but the second-grade teacher was tolerating what Obama in her book called "a mayhem of unruly kids and flying erasers".

The teacher, she said, "couldn't figure out how to assert control" and "didn't seem to like children". She said "it wasn't clear that anyone was particularly bothered by the fact that the teacher was incompetent.

The students used it as an excuse to act out, and she seemed to think only the worse of us. In her eyes, we were a class of 'bad kids', though we had no guidance and no structure and had been sentenced to a grim, underlit room in the basement of the school. Every hour there felt hellish and long."

She lived close to the school and went home for lunch every day. Her mother, Marian Robinson, calmly listened to the girl's complaints. The book makes clear that Robinson and her husband, Fraser, were the key to their children's successes. The mother and father had dropped out of community college. They had little money. But their parenting skills were exceptional.

I have taken swipes before at the assumption that what are called "helicopter parents" — mothers and fathers very involved in their children's studies — are bad. What Robinson did to rescue her daughter from an educational dead end also contradicts that view. It shows that hovering parents, if sensitive and strategic, can be a godsend.

When her daughter complained about the teacher, Robinson just said, "Oh, really?" — never indulging the child's outrage but quietly taking action. "She went over to the school and began a weeks-long process of behind-the-scenes lobbying," Michelle Obama said. I now understand why the Obamas wanted this clever and diplomatic woman with them in the White House while their daughters were growing up.

Her mother's undercover campaign, Obama said, "led to me and a couple of other high-performing kids getting quietly pulled out of class, given a battery of tests, and about a week later reinstalled permanently into a bright and orderly third-grade class upstairs, governed by a smiling, no-nonsense teacher who knew her stuff."

Robinson had no money or degrees, but school officials were probably impressed that she and her husband had raised two smart, well-behaved students. She also had the wit to realise she couldn't get the teacher fired and couldn't rescue every student in the class.

She persuaded the school to do something she knew it could do without much fuss: let Michelle and a few others skip second grade.

According to Obama, Robinson then tried one more idea, quite audacious, to save other students.

"My mother, who is by nature wry and quiet but generally also the most forthright person in any room, made a point of seeking out the second grade teacher and telling her, as kindly as possible, that she had no business teaching and should be working as a drugstore cashier instead," Obama said. She did not say if that had any effect.

I think we should formally recognise such ingenious mums and dads. Perhaps a "Helicopter Parent of the Year" award? No, that might be misunderstood. "Resourceful Parent of the Year" would work. We can name the award after Marian Shields Robinson.

• Jay Mathews is an education columnist for the Washington Post