This report describes how five states -- Alabama, Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee and Texas -- made exceptional progress in student achievement during the first decade of the 21st century. State leaders in these states all realized early in the decade that they had a problem they wanted to address. They established a "plan" at the state…

For nearly a decade, the demand for better education data has reverberated across the nation, fueled in part by concerns that the information used in education decision-making is incomplete and, in some cases, inaccurate. In response, millions of federal and state dollars have been invested over the last few years to design and build state-of…