School Reform From the Inside Out: Policy, Practice, and Performance

This is essential reading for any school leader, education reformer, policymaker, or citizen interested in the forces that promote school change. Giving test results to an incoherent, badly run school doesn't automatically make it a better school. The work of turning a school around entails improving the knowledge and skills of teachers-changing their knowledge of content and how to teach it-and helping them to understand where their students are in their academic development. Low-performing schools, and the people who work in them, don't know what to do. If they did, they would be doing it already. So writes Richard Elmore in Unwarranted Intrusion, an essay critiquing the accountability mandates and…