Tony Wagner - Making the Grade: Reinventing America's Schools

Making the Grade represents the beginning of an overdue public dialogue: How can today's schools - and schools of the future - respond to sweeping societal changes if they remain mired in an obsolete system.

What should all students know in the 21st century, and who should decide? What do good schools - where all children learn - look like, and how do they involve parents and motivate students and teachers to do their best? In this thorough and informative book, Wagner considers whether schools should teach values and what roles tests should play in the system. His surprising answers to these questions lay the groundwork for a strategy to reinvent the public school. The prototype he introduces, the "New Village School," is organized around "the 4C's": competency-based curriculum, core values, collaboration and community.

Wagner outlines ways that communities, government, teachers, parents, and students can begin a dialogue about how to enact meaningful school changes - reinventions that call for community involvement in setting educational standards and ensuring that all students are successful as citizens and productive workers.

Making the Grade not only represents an urgent call to action, but also offers a blueprint for communities to follow as they prepare to confront the difficult and complex issues of school improvement. With this important new contribution to our debate about public schools, Tony Wagner challenges each of us to help create the foundation for schools that work for all students.