Achievement Now! How to Assure no Child is Left Behind. (Book Reviews).Numerous ideas for increasing student achievement Increasing Student Achievement: What State NAEP Test Scores Tell Us is a RAND study of educational reform in the United States. The League of Education Voters cites the study in support of its Initiative 728, which advocates reducing class size and increasing per-pupil , buttressed but·tress n. 1. A structure, usually brick or stone, built against a wall for support or reinforcement. 2. Something resembling a buttress, as: a. The flared base of certain tree trunks. b. by research and experience, are presented in this book by Donald J. Fielder, a former superintendent. Achievement Now! is based on the premise that the sole purpose of change in schools is to improve student learning. Fielder wants school districts to adopt a mission with a narrow focus that includes no activities that do not connect to the mission. He pushes accountability via evaluation from superintendents to support staff. He urges cooperative competition through schools of choice and magnets. But fully a third of his work focuses on increasing academic rigor rigor /rig·or/ (rig´er) [L.] chill; rigidity. rigor mor´tis the stiffening of a dead body accompanying depletion of adenosine triphosphate in the muscle fibers. . First he deals with increasing time on task, increasing student engagement, increasing the length of school day and year, requiring quality homework, establishing tutorial An instructional book or program that takes the user through a prescribed sequence of steps in order to learn a product. Contrast with documentation, which, although instructional, tends to group features and functions by category. See tutorials in this publication. programs and determining minimum time on core subjects. The second way to increase rigor is by tightening the curriculum. Fielder discusses introducing weighted grades, offering harder subjects earlier, eliminating grade inflation and increasing graduation requirements. Finally, he wants school leaders to modify or eliminate practices that he says tend to lower student achievement, such as whole language, the de-emphasis of basic math computation Computation is a general term for any type of information processing that can be represented mathematically. This includes phenomena ranging from simple calculations to human thinking. , multiple intelligences and the middle school philosophy. (Achievement Now! How to Assure No Child is Left Behind by Donald J. Fielder, Eye on Education, Larchmont, N.Y., 2003, 196 pp., $29.95 softcover soft·cov·er adj. Not bound between hard covers: softcover books; a softcover edition. ) |
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