Raising the Standard: An Eight-Step Action Guide for Schools and Communities Doyle, Denis Philip and Pimentel, Susan

The book and its companion IBM- and Macintosh-compatible CD-ROM guide you through setting, testing, evaluating, and meeting high academic standards for your school or district. "Raising the Standard moves the debate from theory to practice. Based on hard-won experience in schools across the country, it is tough-minded, practical, and inspirational. And its emphasis on local control is unique, laying out a blueprint for change that any school district in America can adopt and adapt." David T. Kearns, Former Xerox chairman and CEO Deputy Secretary of Education "Must reading for teachers, principals, central office administrators, superintendents, school board members, or anyone else helping school districts become standards based. I wish it had been available when we began our standards work in Chicago." Patricia A. Harvey, Senior Fellow, National Center on Education and the Economy, former Chief Accountability Officer, Chicago Public Schools "An extraordinary toolkit that empowers communities to create enduring and meaningful school improvements. Written simply, powerfully, and directly." Sonia Hernandez, Deputy Superintendent, California Department of Education Is your school district looking for the way to turn its schools into high-performance learning communities? Would you like to raise the academic standards in your school or district? Doyle and Pimentel provide a straightforward, step-by-step action plan to help school leaders, community leaders, and parents put together a workable, standards-based system in their schools. Not theory - this book is about real, day-to-day practice. Find out how you can + Hold students to high academic standards + Prepare students for an increasingly dynamic, demanding workplace + Teach students how to make reasonable choices about their futures + Measure the progress of your students toward the standards + See your school or district climb state and national academic measurement charts The authors advocate involving your entire community in raising school standards. Hold town meetings. Lay out the facts. Frame the issues in the larger context of community concerns. Help parents, business people, and community leaders understand that raising the standards is their responsibility, too. Show the need for broad-based support and participation in order for real, substantive changes to occur. Raising the Standard is based on the premise that students must demonstrate mastery (what they know) and skills (what they can do) to pass to the next grade or to graduate. That′s the bottom line for students - and for schools and districts. The authors′ eight-step plan functions as a roadmap to guide you through the consequences of asking these three basic questions about your school or district: + Where are we now? + Where do we want to be? + How do we get there? The process is ongoing, so once you begin to ask these questions, you must keep asking them. In the context of the eight-step plan, each step (and each sub-step) your school or district takes will change the answers. The questions, however, remain the same. This book has two purposes: to offer you the plain facts about raising school standards and to make you realize that, yes, you can make a difference. Doyle and Pimentel remind you that "If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got." And if that isn′t what you want, you need to change it. And school change is what this book is about. Recommended system requirements: Macintosh: Macintosh with 7.0 or later or Power Macintosh, 8 MB of available RAM, System 7.1.2 or later, CD-ROM drive, 12.5 MB free hard disk space. Windows: Pentium processor-based PC, Windows 3.1, 95, or NT, 16 MB of RAM (24 for Windows NT), CD-ROM drive, 10 MB free hard disk space. For customer support or system requirements, contact Coalition for Goals 2000, Tel: 202-835-2000, Fax: 202-659-4494, or e-mail: connect@goalline.org

Denis P. Doyle is cofounder and Chief Academic Officer of SchoolNet.