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Assessing What Really Matters in Schools: Creating Hope for the Future

By Ronald J. Newell and Mark J. Van Ryzin
Foreword by Debbie Meier

“To achieve authentic academic success for more students, we need schools that are developed around adolescent needs and interests in belonging, being competent, and being responsibly free. Here is such a powerful, insightful perspective.”—Walter Enloe, profesor of human studies at the Hamline University School of Education in Minnesota

Since the 1960s, efforts to reform education–including various curricular changes, reading approaches, teacher preparation, money for the disadvantaged, and different instructional approaches–have failed to bring about true systemic change because the reforms fail to deal with a different definition of learning.

The Hope Study was created to discover whether a radically different learning environment would achieve different outcomes.

In detailing the outcome of the Hope Study, Assessing What Really Matters in Schools gives hope to innovative and progressive schools, to new and different accountability systems, while changing the conversation from an achievement discourse to a human development discourse.

Ronald J. Newell serves as the Learning Program and Evaluation Director for EdVisions Schools.

Mark J. Van Ryzin is Research Assistant at the Institute for Child Development at the University of Minnesota.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• What Is Learning
• Schools of Hope
• The Research
• A Good Stage/Environment Fit for Adolescents
• Results of the Study
• Why EdVisions Schools Obtain Positive Results
• Using the Hope Study for School Improvement
• Afterword: Rigor Redefined

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