Tested An American School Struggles to Make the Grade

"The pressure is on at schools across America: No Child Left Behind and other reforms have created a new vision of education emphasizing measurable progress for every student, every school, every year. Schools are expected to behave like businesses and are judged almost solely on the bottom line: test scores. To meet these expectations, educators give struggling students more attention than ever-not just teaching children but in many ways raising them." "To discover whether this approach is producing better students, Linda Perlstein immersed herself in Tyler Heights Elementary School, once deemed a chaotic failure but now held up as an example of reform done right. Perlstein explores the rewards and costs of that transformation, through the experiences of the people who lived it. Teachers follow rigid guides not just about what to teach but how. Third graders meditate to activate their brains before exams and perfect the "brief constructed response" to essay questions, but they never write a story or put on a skit. The tireless enthusiasm of the principal - by turns a CEO, therapist, data analyst, and PR agent - is tinged with private feelings of ambivalence about the changes she must manage and intensifying anxiety as test day approaches." "Tested provides the first intimate view of how new policies clash with human realities in the world of America's schools."--BOOK JACKET.Perlstein, Linda is the author of 'Tested An American School Struggles to Make the Grade', published 2007 under ISBN 9780805080827 and ISBN 0805080821.