It's a crime, Carol Jago declares, to let any studentswhatever their native abilitiesdrift through the school year without effort, without growth, without goals. Each student is capable of achieving excellence. But it requires a nurturing, vigorous classroom environmentnot the glass ceilings set by even the best of standards-based instruction.

To help current and future high school English teachers create and maintain this kind of environment, Jago has created this groundbreaking book. Beyond Standards offers concrete ways to reconceive what it means to foster excellent performance in the classroom and vivid examples of student work that was motivated by the pursuit of excellence rather than by test scores. Packed with richly detailed classroom anecdotes, it explores the many ways teachers can select books, design lessons, and inspire discussions that can lead all their students to extraordinary achievements, both in the study of literature and in their writing assignments. Included are practical tips on everything from helping students self-edit their writing to tricking them into reading a lot more poetry.

Beyond Standards may be seen as a series of storiesor ethnographic studieson how to make the work of the high school English class humanly and genuinely important to students so that they will engage in literate activity with the same kind of attention and effort as real writers. Under such conditions, Jago asserts, students will learn more and produce more useful and impressive products than any standards document could possibly anticipate.
About the Author:

Carol Jago has taught English in middle and high school for 32 years and is associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA. She served as president of the National Council of Teachers of English and chair of the College Board's English Academic Advisory committee. Carol has published many books with Heinemann including With Rigor for All: Meeting Standards for Reading Literature; Papers, Papers, Papers; Classics in the Classroom; and Cohesive Writing: Why Concept Is Not Enough. She has also published books on contemporary multicultural authors for NCTE. Carol wrote an education column for the Los Angeles Times, and her essays continue to appear in educational journals and online forums. Carol edits California English the journal of the California Association of Teachers of English and worked on the planning committee for the 2009 National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) Reading Framework and the 2011 NAEP Writing Framework. She is a consulting author on the HMH Collections program. In 2015 Carol was awarded the International Literacy Association's Adolescent Literacy Thought Leader Award and in 2016 the CEL Exemplary Leadership Award. She has been named by the U.S. Department of Education to serve on the National Assessment Governing Board overseeing the NAEP assessments. She can be reached at cjago@caroljago.com or on Twitter @CarolJago . >> Listen to an interview with Carol Jago on Education Talk Radio - 2/23/2012 (34:20)