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) Reclaiming Assessment details a more humane, more educationally sound way to conduct assessments than what is called for in national and state test-based accountability policies. It examines how Nebraska rejected harmful, high-stakes testing in favor of teacher-designed assessments through a groundbreaking local-control assessment system. Presenting vital conceptual details and practical information for any state, district, or school committed to finding something better for their students than filling ovals, Chris Gallagher focuses in on what makes Nebraska's plan work and how it can transform and has transformed classrooms and policies. In particular he homes in on four key aspects of successful teacher-led assessment: 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 school-community projects. In each instance, Gallagher combines lessons from Nebraska's school-improvement program with "portraits of practice," vignettes written by Nebraska educators that give a close-up look at how the state's assessment system works, why it works, the settings in which it's making a difference, and the leadership styles that match its goals best. 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.

Reclaiming the Teaching Profession gives educators (especially teachers and future teachers) and their allies a clear overview of the massive effort to dismantle public education in the United States, which includes a direct attack on teachers. The book details, and provides a systematic critique of, the shaky assumptions at the foundation of the market-based reform initiatives that dominate the contemporary education scene. It names and exposes the motives and methods of the powerful philanthropists, politicians, business moguls, and education entrepreneurs who are behind the reform movement. It provides counter narratives that public school advocates can use to talk back to those who would destroy the teaching profession and public education. It includes examples of successful acts of resistance and identifies resources for challenging reformers’ taken for granted primacy in the education debate. It concludes with strategies educators can use to “speak truth to power,” reclaim their professional status, and reshape the education landscape in ways that serve all of America’s children and preserve our democracy.

The environmental legacy of past industrial and agricultural development can simultaneously pose serious threats to human health and impede reuse of contaminated land. The urban landscape around the world is littered with sites contaminated with a variety of toxins produced by past use. Both public and private sector actors are often reluctant to make significant investments in properties that simultaneously pose significant potential human health issues, and may demand complex and very expensive cleanups. The chapters in this volume recognize that land and water contamination are now almost universally acknowledged to be key social, economic, and political issues. How multiple societies have attempted to craft and implement public policy to deal with these issues provides the central focus of the book. The volume is unique in that it provides a global comparative perspective on brownfield policy and examples of its use in a variety of countries.

Includes decisions in the Irish courts, 1876-June 1886, and Indian appeals, 1876-1877.

Legislation, Technology and Practice of Mine Land Reclamation contains the proceedings of the Beijing International Symposium on Land Reclamation and Ecological Restoration (LRER 2014, Beijing, China, 16-19 October 2014). The contributions cover a wide range of topics: - Monitoring, prediction and assessment of environmental damage in mining areas - Subsidence land reclamation and ecological restoration - Soil, vegetation and biological diversity - Mining methods and measures for minimization of land and environmental damage - Solid wastes and AMD treatment - Contaminated land remediation - Land reclamation and ecological restoration policies and management - Surface mined land reclamation and ecological restoration - Case study on mining reclamation and ecological restoration Legislation, Technology and Practice of Mine Land Reclamation will be of interest to engineers, scientists, consultants, government officials and students involved in environmental engineering, soil science, ecology, forestry, mining, and land reclamation and ecological restoration in mining areas.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education offers global, comprehensive, and critical perspectives on a wide range of conceptual and practical issues in music education assessment, evaluation, and feedback as these apply to various forms of music education within schools and communities. The central aims of this Handbook focus on broadening and deepening readers' understandings of and critical thinking about the problems, opportunities, spaces and places, concepts, and practical strategies that music educators and community music facilitators employ, develop, and deploy to improve various aspects of music teaching and learning around the world.