The Brown Center Report on American Education provides an accurate, nonpartisan, data-driven account of American elementary and secondary education. Its purpose is four-fold: to determine the direction of achievement in U.S. public schools; to gauge the significance of changes; to uncover the policies and practices influencing the direction of student achievement; and finally, to figure out whether the public is getting the full story on student learning. This year’s report tackles perennial questions of how to interpret trends in test scores, the distribution of achievement, school turnarounds, and charter schools. It examines national test data going back to 1971 from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, compares the 1989 and 2009 test scores of more than 1,000 schools, and compares the test scores of conversion charter schools from 1986 to those from 2008.

An overarching theme of this year’s report is that events in the field of education are not always as they appear to be—and especially so with test scores. Whether commentators perpetrating myths of international testing, states winning races while evidencing only mediocre progress, or an eighth grade test dominated by content below the eighth grade, the story is rarely as simple as it appears on first blush. This report digs beneath the surface and uncover some of the complexities of these important issues.

Additive Schooling in Subtractive Times documents the unusually successful efforts of one New York City high school to educate Dominican immigrant youth, at a time when Latino immigrants constitute a growing and vulnerable population in the nation’s secondary schools. Based on four and a half years of qualitative research, the book examines the schooling of teens in the Dominican Republic, the social and linguistic challenges the immigrant teens face in Washington Heights, and how Gregorio Luperón High School works with the community to respond to those challenges. The staff at Luperón see their students as emergent bilinguals and adhere to a culturally and linguistically additive approach. After offering a history of the school’s formation, the authors detail the ways in which federal No Child Left Behind policies, New York State accountability measures, and New York City’s educational reforms under Mayor Bloomberg have complicated the school’s efforts. The book then describes the dynamic bilingual pedagogical approach adopted within the school to help students develop academic Spanish and English. Focusing on the lives of twenty immigrant youth, Bartlett and García also show that, although the school achieves high completion rates, the graduating students nevertheless face difficult postsecondary educational and work environments that too often consign them to the ranks of the working poor.

Addressing the issues of educational equity and social class diversity, Donna Marie San Antonio documents the challenges adolescents face when making the transition from elementary school to middle school. The book explores the values, resources, and ways of interacting that students from diverse economic backgrounds bring from their families and communities, and how they are enabled or discouraged from integrating these assets in their new school environment.

Analyzing Syntax and Semantics features the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) approach. This method uses student performance objectives, practice, feedback, individualization of pace, and repeatable testing as instructional strategies.