Aspirations for the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988 and more recent accountability efforts for the central office indicate that the Chicago Public School (CPS) system needs a credible system for charting academic improvement. The annual systemwide reports of student test scores are crude and sometimes seriously biased indicators for making judgments about the productivity of individual schools. This report uses Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) scores for all students in grades 2 through 8 from 1987 to 1996, data that represent 5- or 6-year trends, depending on the school, for student learning under reform. The report, which initiates the "Examining Productivity" series, details a series of weaknesses in the current CPS testing and reporting system, and develops an alternative approach, a school academic productivity profile to summarize the changes that have occurred in a school. The core of this approach entails estimating the value that a school adds to the learning of students taught in this school. In this initial report, the productivity profile is developed for each school and used to summarize trends in reading and mathematics achievement. Subsequent reports will use the same data to examine the performance of schools that have been especially effective. The new approach creates a new test score metric that allows researchers to take into account the different content used in the various ITBS forms to better compare results across time. Content-referenced scales for reading and mathematics are developed. The productivity profile is built of two basic pieces of information for each grade: the input status for that grade and the learning gain recorded for each grade. This reflects the value added to the learning of the school's students. Some specific recommendations are made to continue the development of the new testing and reporting system. These are: (1) alignment with CPS learning goals; (2) score reporting on a content-referenced scale; (3) a stable measurement ruler for assessing academic progress; (4) an accountability focus on the school's value added to student learning; and (5) an inclusive orientation. An appendix discusses estimating trends in school productivity. Attachments include the reading and mathematics rulers. (Contains 23 figures and 17 references.) (SLD)