num_pages: 160
description: No Child Left Behind and accountability programs generally operate via assessment-driven instruction causing a de-professionalization of teachers and a disengagement of students. Chris Gallagher offers us an instruction-driven assessment with teachers as the primary assessment instrument. It looks like a way to restore teachers as professionals and to restore students as engaged learners . . . and it looks doable.Gerald W. Bracey, author of Reading Educational How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered This is the most engaging, exciting, and useful book on assessment I have read in a long time. Chris Gallagher draws on the rich experiences of Nebraska educators to show why and how that states teachers are leading a profoundly important assessment revolution.Monty Neill, Executive Director, FairTest (National Center for Fair Open Testing) Reclaiming Assessment details a more humane, more educationally sound way to conduct assessments than what is called for in national and state test-based accountability policies. It examines how Nebraska rejected harmful, high-stakes testing in favor of teacher-designed assessments through a groundbreaking local-control assessment system. Presenting vital conceptual details and practical information for any state, district, or school committed to finding something better for their students than filling ovals, Chris Gallagher focuses in on what makes Nebraskas plan work and how it can transform and has transformed classrooms and policies. In particular he homes in on four key aspects of successful teacher-led In each instance, Gallagher combines lessons from Nebraskas school-improvement program with "portraits of practice," vignettes written by Nebraska educators that give a close-up look at how the states assessment system works, why it works, the settings in which its making a difference, and the leadership styles that match its goals best. Both a challenge to educators to take back assessment from politicized, top-level bureaucrats and a call to create a new agenda for contemporary education, Reclaiming Assessment is an ideal starting point for your efforts to return to student-centered, not test-centered assessment. Put your trust in educators abilities to observe and know their students, then read Reclaiming Assessment , adopt an assessment model thats already succeeding in hundreds of schools, and start improving how your students are assessed today.
language: English
title: Reclaiming Assessment: A Better Alternative to the Accountability Agenda
titlecomplete: Reclaiming Assessment: A Better Alternative to the Accountability Agenda
ratings_count: 6
publisher: Heinemann