Choosing Excellence: Good Enough Schools Are Not Good Enough

How do you evaluate a school? Today parents and teachers lean on standardized test scores - along with image, rumor, and reputation - to make vital decisions. However, a single number is inevitably misleading. Author John Merrow, host of PBS's premier documentary series on youth and learning, The Merrow Report, delves into the problem of school evaluation. He shows that there are really only three kinds of schools: bad, good enough, and excellent. Good enough is the kind of school that most people settle for, schools people want to believe are okay. Each of the chapters in Choosing Excellence explores some aspect of schooling: safety, academics, values, technology, and so on. He spotlights excellent practices and strategies, concluding each chapter with a list of evidence for visitors to look for.

John Merrow is Executive Producer/Host and President of Learning Matters, Inc. a not-for-profit corporation that produces television and radio/web programs to train youth to create their own public service messages. He spent five years as education correspondent for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS and two years at The Learning Channel.