More Than a Test Score: Strategies for Empowering At-risk Youth

More Than a Test Score is an exciting, accessible tool alive with useful innovations needing utilized in alternative education. Filled with lively examples, the book reveals the power of real options. Dr. Melinda Strickland provides a much needed treatment of real choices aimed at the educator who believes in being real. It is comprehensive, highly readable, and replete with useful examples. Dr. Strickland took the things that so many of us in education know intuitively and put them to pen and paper. It was such a huge help to have them articulated so well–it provided a deeper explanation of many of the things I have talked about with my colleagues in Georgia and throughout the United States.

The heart-beat of a successful alternative education program is an experienced, determined and tenacious caring adult that will continuously offer new directions for students. Dr. Strickland details a roadmap to exemplary outcomes through her lifelong pursuit of excellence in all areas. She clearly demonstrates that student lives are ‘More than a Test Score.’

This easy-to-read book focuses on how the overemphasis on high-stakes tests for difficult-to-teach students may be a threat to their futures. Strickland (principal, Floyd County Education Center) has spent decades working with students in alternative educational settings, and relates numerous specific strategies for making the best of bad situations. Not merely stressing ways to improve academic performance and hence achieve better test scores, Strickland provides ways to actively engage students and, in the process, make them better people. The book offers success stories as well as stories about attempts to work with students that resulted in less than satisfactory outcomes. The author does a good job of letting the reader know that one size does not fit all, and that what works in one situation will probably not be as useful in another. Ways to involve students in community service, increase attendance, become sensitive to the needs of families and caregivers, and basically ‘parent a wayward teenager’ are stressed. The book contains brief descriptions of some excellent ways to turn incorrigible youth back to the right path, and educators will be able to put these ideas into practice in quick order. Summing Up: Recommended.