A major objective of this three year national Emergency School Aid Act (ESAA) study was to evaluate the impact of ESAA programs by comparing schools that received ESAA funds with those that did not. Student growth in reading and mathematics were compared. To identify what kinds of schools (what allocations of resources, and what types of instructional programs and practices) most increased students' achievement in reading and mathematics was a major objective of the evaluation. In addition, three supplemental tasks were performed as part of this evaluation. One of these was a restandardization of the California Achievement Tests to make the scores of low achieving students more interpretable. The second task was the development of percentile norms, using groups of ESAA students as the normative populations, to provide baseline data for assessing the performance of other disadvantaged groups. A third set of analyses arose from a more general concern with evaluating academic growth. Here growth estimates based on cross sectional data were compared with longitudinal estimates of academic growth. This paper presents the evaluation findings concerning the impact of ESAA including the relational analyses dealing with school success and the analyses of academic achievement of disadvantaged students. (Author/AM)