Making Schools Work For Underachieving Minority Students

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Labeled A Nation at Risk, Americans are urgently seeking reform in their public school systems. While many promising programs are being developed, they have not yet been validated. The national conference Making Schools Work for Underachieving Minority Students shared the best of what is presently known and deliberated on the implications for research, policy, and practice.

Sponsored by CRESST (Center for Research on Evaluation Standards and Student Testing), The National Urban League, and the National Council of LaRaza, the conference was financed by the U.S. Department of Education. Closely following the structure of the conference, this volume's contributors examine education's current status.

They then investigate potentially promising approaches to specific problem areas. Contributors treat issues of evaluation and testing, and conclude by addressing the potential of collaborative efforts. Responding to a major challenge, community groups and organizations throughout the country are seeking answers to the problem of underachieving minority students.

This volume builds on these shared interests and is a first step toward an intervention process. Topics covered include: creating effective instructional programs; reducing the dropout rate; preparing students for secondary and postsecondary success; helping limited English proficient students; and improving teacher quality.

The volume's contributors hope to promote dialogue on promising practices, foster collaboration, identify critical R & D needs and collaborative arrangements, and identify testing and evaluation issues for subsequent inquiry. Review: ?A welcome addition to the new literature on the disadvantaged student, this volume derives from a national conference convened at UCLA in 1987.

Both in its organization and contents this book conveys a sense of the conference presentations. The editors have skillfully brought together a provocative mix of keynote addresses, panel presentations, informal interactions, and substantively argued position papers. These are arranged in five disparate but interrelated sections: Our National Dilemma, ' Promising Practices' Role of Testing & Evaluation in Improving Education for Under-Achieving Minority Students, ' Collaborative Arrangements, ' and Making Schools Work for Under-Achieving Minority Students.' As in all such collections, the results are mixed.

Of special note are Henry Levin's The Educationally Disadvantaged Are Still Among Us' and Barbara Sizemore's Effective Education for Underachieving African-Americans.'... Recommended for larger collections in education, upper-division undergraduate level and above.?-Choice