ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the evidence-based interventions school counselors can implement to demonstrate accountability in promoting student academic strengths and strengths-enhancing academic environments. It provides several examples of the type of evidence-based, direct-service and systemic-level interventions that the strengths-based school counselor can employ or advocate in order to foster student academic development. The school counseling services that traditionally have impacted all students—class scheduling and placing students in academic/career tracks—have been viewed as primarily administrative tasks rather than developmental interventions. The pressures of the high-stakes testing environment in which school counselors are employed can easily result in equating academic development with academic achievement and, even more narrowly, to successful performance on standardized tests. The chapter considers the effects of comprehensive school reform initiatives. Comprehensive school reform represents the most overarching effort to improve academic performance through modifying the school as a system.
