Changing the School Learning Environment: Where Do We Stand after Decades of Reform?
The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 (the latest revision of ESEA) has led to strong pressure from the states on local public schools to improve their standardized test scores. The present emphasis is prompted by a desire of politicians and policy makers for a rigid accountability: to have current test score information on the comparative status of schools. It has little to do with school improvement and, regrettably, nothing to do with helping individual students to learn.
The
NCLB is certainly nothing like an earlier renewal program initiated by
the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) between
1969 and 1974 called the Model Schools Project (MSP). The MSP represented
the culmination of that era’s seminal thinking on school renewal.
It proposed a comprehensive model of school restructuring that was adopted
by thousands of junior and senior high schools throughout the United States
and Canada. After the MSP formally ended, the
Learning Environments Consortium International (LEC) continued the project’s
impetus for school renewal. LEC Forum authors have recently published
a new book on the Model Schools Project and its impact on American and
Canadian education.
Changing the School Learning Environment: Where Do We Stand after Decades of Reform? examines the key MSP concepts and what has happened to them during the past thirty years, answering the question of whether the concepts have survived as initially conceived, evolved into something else meaningful for contemporary schools, or failed, as have so many other innovations. The book surveys the best educational school-renewal practices stemming from the MSP and discusses how those practices are being used today.
For orders and information please contact the publisher, ScarecrowEducation. The book may be ordered online at a 15% discount; click on the link below to go to the Scarecrow website.
http://www.scarecroweducation.com/ISBN/978-1-57886-118-7
Scarecrow Education
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200
Lanham, Maryland 20706
Phone: 1-800-462-6420 • Fax: 717-794-3803