America's Choice School Design To Be Featured at Capitol Hill Event

A leading university research team will present a new study documenting the success of the America's Choice School Design, one of the nation's largest comprehensive school-improvement programs, at a luncheon forum at the Rayburn House Office Building on July 16, 2004.

The forum is sponsored by the American Youth Policy Forum, a non-profit organization dedicated to the dissemination of information about school reform. The event runs from 11:45 a.m. to 2 p.m. and includes lunch. To attend, please send your name, title, organization, phone number, and email address to the American Youth Policy Forum at aypf@aypf.org. The registration deadline is Tuesday, July 13. The America's Choice School Design was created in the 1990s by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), a Washington, DC-based non-profit organization and a leading advocate of standards-based school reform. It draws on the best educational practices in the United States and on extensive research by NCEE on the most effective education systems in Europe, Asia and Australasia.

The program features standards-based curricula aligned to instruction and assessments, research-based teaching strategies, intensive catch-up courses for struggling students, and extensive staff training and on-site technical assistance. Nearly 550 schools educating 350,000 students in 16 states used the America's Choice design in 2003-04. At the forum, Jonathan Supovitz, Senior Researcher at the University of Pennsylvania-based Consortium for Policy Research in Education, will discuss a new study of the America's Choice program in Rochester, New York, where Supovitz and his colleagues found that America's Choice students learned "significantly more" than their counterparts in non-America's Choice schools.

Marc Tucker, President of the National Center on Education and the Economy, and Judy Codding, Director of the America's Choice School Design, will discuss their approach to comprehensive school reform and explain how the America's Choice program works.