"It's Being Done": Academic Success in Unexpected Schools

The book, "It's Being Done", focuses on schools that are successful AND have high percentages of students with low incomes and students from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Success is judged based on both consistent high levels of test score performance, and by visits that suggest that these high test scores really do represent high levels of student skills. The bulk of the book is made up of profiles of individual schools based on test score data and Chenoweth's visits to each school and interviews with key stakeholders at the school.The author, Karin Chenoweth, is a former education writer for the Washington Post. She doesn't seem to really have an axe to grind. Compared to other books I have read about how to reform schools, she seems more focused on describing what is going on in these schools than in distorting reality to fit some ideological point.Many of the book's case studies of individual schools are available for free online, under "Success Stories" at [...] . However, the book adds some updates on how the schools have done since they were visited, and the last chapter has a very useful summation of what the authors feels the lessons are from these case studies.This final chapter of the book does an outstanding job in summarizing the commonalities among these successful schools. These successful schools differ greatly in size, the school calendar and schedule they follow, their use of technology, whether they have uniforms or not, whether they use prepackaged school reform models or not, the extent of parent and community involvement, and many other features. But they do have some commonalities, which, according to Chenoweth, include the following:1. Focus on making sure they really implement in a high quality way an alignment of teaching and the curriculum with high quality standards.2. Using both aggregate data and data on individual students.3. An openess to reexamining what they're doing.4. Produtive use of school time they have, and efforts to expand educational time.5. A focus on ensuring teacher quality.

This is a good read. It's not meant to be used as a stand-alone book for an aspiring education administrator but it has good ideas. If you're into statistics and applying correlations of highly effective practices with the outcomes of turn-around schools, then this might be the book for you. I'm especially in love with the list of key characteristics of turn-around schools at the end of the book. Still, I strongly believe that this is a book best used alongside other resources due to its mostly narrative nature.

Instead of the general assumption that nothing can break the achievement gap, or offering ideas about what "should", "could", "might", etc. work, this author explores schools that ARE breaking the achievement gap and figuring out what they do! So obvious! Yet so rare. There should be tons of books like this. Great resource.

Administrator for district that requested it says just what she needed, I did not read this one so have to go with her say. We are working to graduate our students from high school in 4 years not 6 and 7 as we have been doing with about 1/3 of each freshman class. We are 12 miles north of the Reynosa, Mexico border.

This is the first of three incredible books, which share careful research with clear documentation and accessible text. A wide variety of principals who have succeeded in challenging schools are presented, with their various backgrounds and strategies for working with students who have great needs for guidance.

I bought this book for a class, but it ended up being really interesting. I definitely recommend it for teachers and aspiring teachers.

The book was inspiring but I really wanted much more detail about HOW the featured schools were able to make their changes. I found another book much more helpful: Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov. It gave the specitics practices that I was looking for.

Great book looking at schools that have made lemon juice from some of the toughest common challenges facing our school systems.