Culturally enriching field trips matter. They produce significant benefits for students on a variety of educational outcomes that schools and communities care about. This experiment on the effects of field trips to see live theater demonstrates that seeing plays is an effective way to teach academic content; increases student tolerance by…

This article contributes to the body of knowledge on teacher evaluation systems by examining the actual design and performance of new teacher-evaluation systems in four school districts that are at the forefront of the effort to evaluate teachers meaningfully. The authors find first that the ratings assigned teachers by the districts'…

Since their start in Houston in 1994, KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools have been the most celebrated of the No Excuses schools. Employing strict discipline, an extended school day and year, and carefully selected teachers, No Excuses schools move disadvantaged students who start behind their peers academically up to and above…

State education agencies and school districts are increasingly using measures based on student test-score growth in their systems for evaluating school and teacher performance. In many cases, these systems inform high-stakes decisions such as which schools to close and which teachers to retain. Performance metrics tied directly to student…

While heads were spinning, policy watchers seemed genuinely perplexed by New York City's Mayor de Blasio's education opinions. De Blasio opposed many of Bloomberg's reform efforts despite the achievement gains realized by the nation's largest school district during the last 12 years. Yet on close reading, de Blasio's…

When former U.S. congressman and Obama administration chief of staff Rahm Emanuel marched triumphantly into the Chicago mayor's office in 2011, he promised to revamp Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in ways that had barely been contemplated in 16 years of mayoral control over the city's sprawling public-school system. This article discusses…

This study takes advantage of the unexpected announcement of the Kalamazoo Promise to study its effects on student achievement and behavior in high school. The Kalamazoo Promise provides college scholarships to graduates of Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS), a midsized urban school district in Michigan that is racially and economically diverse.…

Between 1970 and 2000, the U.S. high-school graduation stagnated while in many other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries it rose markedly. By 2000, the high school graduation rate in the United States ranked 13th among the 19 OECD countries for which comparable data are available. Evidence from two independent…

It is widely believed that a good principal is the key to a successful school. No Child Left Behind encouraged the replacement of the principal in persistently low-performing schools, and the Obama administration has made this a requirement for schools undergoing federally funded turnarounds. This study provides new evidence on the importance of…

In a report issued in 2010, the authors found only 6 percent of U.S. students performing at the advanced level in mathematics, a percentage lower than those attained by 30 other countries. And the problem is not limited to top-performing students. In 2011, they showed that just 32 percent of 8th graders in the United States were proficient in…

In the largest study of instructional practice ever undertaken, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project is searching for tools to save the world from perfunctory teacher evaluations. The first report (released in December 2010) described the potential usefulness of student surveys for providing feedback…

Among the 50 states, Florida's gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) between 1992 and 2011 ranked second only to Maryland's. Florida's progress has been particularly impressive in the early grades. In 1998, Florida scored about one grade level below the national average on the 4th-grade NAEP reading test, but it was…

The modernization of teacher evaluation systems, an increasingly common component of school reform efforts, promises to reveal new, systematic information about the performance of individual classroom teachers. Yet while states and districts race to design new systems, most discussion of how the information might be used has focused on traditional…

In February 2012, the "New York Times" took the unusual step of publishing performance ratings for nearly 18,000 New York City teachers based on their students' test-score gains, commonly called value-added (VA) measures. This action, which followed a similar release of ratings in Los Angeles last year, drew new attention to the growing use of VA…

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public schools bear little resemblance to the disintegrating system that was further undone by the catastrophic flood. Two-thirds of city schools in 2004 were rated "Academically Unacceptable" under Louisiana's accountability standards; in 2010, about 4 in 10 rate that designation, and the…