Standards for Our Schools: How to Set Them, Measure Them, and Reach Them

"A must read for those seeking high standards for all students. With unusual insight, the authors address the major issues, offering inspirational examples of schools that succeed." --Jerome T. Murphy, professor and dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education

This timely, tough-minded book shows how American public schools can be saved by instituting high standards for academic achievement. It explains not just what the standards movement is about and why it is important, but also what it will take to bring every student up to high standards, no matter where that student starts.

Tucker and Codding focus on empowering both students and adults by giving students the gift of high expectations and by giving school professionals the information, skills, authority and resources needed to do the job. They advocate building a standards-based instructional system, creating a results-oriented culture devoted to continuous improvement, and making the institution and the people in it accountable for reaching the goals set by the standards.

Marc S. Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and codirector of the New Standards Project, the nation's largest effort to create a system of performance standards for our schools. The creator of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and co-author of America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages, he also coauthored the prize-winning Thinking for a Living: Education and the Wealth of Nations.

Judy B. Codding is vice-president for programs at the National Center on Education and the Economy. A former teacher at the elementary, middle and high school levels, Codding has also been an award-winning principal of one of Los Angeles' toughest high schools as well as of some of the wealthiest schools in New York's Westchester county. She was one of four charter principals who participated in the creation of Theodore Sizer's Coalition of Essential Schools.