Reclaiming Assessment: A Better Alternative to the Accountability Agenda

• Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools
• High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning: The Real Crisis in Education (Critical Education Policy and Politics)
• Reading Against Democracy: The Broken Promises of Reading Instruction
• (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment
• The Testing Trap: How State Writing Assessments Control Learning (Language and Literacy Series (Teachers College Pr))

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 alternative: 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 Research: 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 state's teachers are leading a profoundly important assessment revolution.
- Monty Neill, Executive Director, FairTest (National Center for Fair & Open Testing)

• engaging teachers by reinvesting them with classroom- and curricular-level decision-making power
• engaging students through meaningful classroom assessment
• engaging colleagues through a new, energizing model of professional development
• engaging parents and other community members through schoolcommunity projects.

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 that's already succeeding in hundreds of schools, and start improving how your students are assessed today.