How It's Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools

by Karin Chenoweth, Pedro A. Noguera (Foreword)

How It’s Being Done offers much-needed help to educators, providing detailed accounts of the ways in which unexpected schools—those with high-poverty and high-minority student populations—have dramatically boosted student achievement.How It’s Being Done builds on Karin Chenoweth’s widely hailed earlier volume, “It’s Being Done,” providing specific information about how such schools have exceeded expectations and met with unprecedented levels of success.

Genres: Education, Teaching

232 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

It starts to tell the same story over and over.. and the recaps the common threads in the final chapter... and then explains each thread again... with some of the very same examples. REad one or two schools... read the final chapter.. you are done!

[Eunhae Han · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish it did a deep analysis of more schools, but great on giving perspective on what works and doesn't work in urban schools. Key take away is there is no one size fit all magic formula to annihilate the achievement gap but depending on context and a whole lot of factors, it can be done!

[Garrett Zecker · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book by Chenoweth as she navigates several US schools where students have made dramatic transformations for a variety of reasons. The most interesting thing about this book is perhaps that it is published by Harvard Education Press and has been hailed as a revolutionary study of some specifically successful schools – but the book mainly focuses on very specific anecdotal evidence of fifteen schools where things are going well. Most notable about the book is that – and I repeat myself – this is a mainly anecdotal study on very specific schools that are doing well because of some interventions by administration to make sure the students do well. Anecdotal does not make it evidence of anything, and I think it is curious that it is being marketed as an academic publication and published by HEP... I am not undercutting Chenoweth's extensive work, storytelling, interviewing, and first person observations, but what I really took away from all of this is that that is precisely what that is – factual, but only in very specific situations.

Now, not taking that into consideration, I really enjoyed this book and seeing how many school districts around the country have been able to come together to make some specific changes that have had such expansive positive impact on student achievement in their buildings. It seems that the whole quantitative measure of success for a district seems to hinge on a variety of situations that make the schools that are implementing a variety of successful strategies, but likely work as an economic, cultural, social, ethnic, and geographic biome that is not directly translatable to other schools. As a matter of fact, the entire opening introduction focuses on Massachusetts and what they are doing well and why it is working – but I am not sure that that analysis is entirely true, but only works on average with the state as a whole using a publicly funded, original assessment tool. As they switch to PARCC and the entire system is changed (well, if that happens) to a private institution that will receive millions of dollars of state funding for some arbitrary test that everyone adds value to, I do wonder what this will look like in its immediate implementation... If it is not arbitrary and truly standardized, we should see the same numbers, right?

Meanwhile there are probably many low-income, depressed areas of Massachusetts that look just like the states that are mostly low-income and depressed, and that takes all of those elements that make up the biome and really throws it out the window because it is the same and it is meeting the criteria at a different volume. This makes the Massachusetts statements largely moot considering that the statistics are the exact same, save for the fact that we have less of that happening per capita than other states. This is the problem with anecdotal evidence – it is only fact as far as the anecdote takes us.

The thing that is unfortunate about the whole book, though, is that it is entirely a story. It is a well told story about schools that have done some great things – and these things can be identified into some very specific things that schools can do to increase achievement. It is also A truth, not THE truth. This editorial from Huff Post Politics actually sums it up nicely, considering that there are some specific things the schools are doing well, but measuring that success is by far a great deal more difficult than just taking a standardized test in a poor town that seems to be segregated form a great deal of the major problems that bigger cities with the same issues face: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-...

While I liked this book, I guess my point is that there is a lot missing from the information presented, not just about the schools presented, but also about the problems in education on a more macro scale. Furthermore, there is really nothing that someone reading this book should be taking as the end all be all strategy for turning their school around. Most of the successes that are here are very specific to the schools that are presented, and only a fraction of the many, many problems in low income and urban populations could be solved using similar tactics to these. It is almost like, rather than an instruction or technical manual on how to turn schools around, this would have better been written and marketed as a narrative.

[Patrick Quirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful real world examples of the level to which our education system can perform. The "wheel" of teacher collaboration, a laserlike focus on what we want kids to learn, formative assessment to see if they learned it, data-driven instruction, and personal relationship building seems to have strong evidence that the balanced combination can result in nearly all students meeting or exceeding today's standards.

[William Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great education book you will not find in the syllabus of your education course. This follow up to It's being done is far more exciting because it shows what's really going on out there in great schools. The writing itself is better too. I look forward to reading the third book Getting it done (2011).

[Marianne Kearney-brown]

She tracks down schools with good test scores that should not have good test score, becasue of povery or whatever. And you see WHY school have good test scores when they shouldn't--leaderhsip, respect for teachers, respect for students, an expectation that everyone will succeed...

[Cari · Rating 4 out of 5]

She kind of hammers home the importance of strong state standards to the point where it feels repetitive but the lessons in these profiles are smart and, I hate to say it, obvious but ones that educators should take to heart.