This special issue provides diverse data sets on a school-improvement initiative in Memphis, Tennessee. The effort seems unusually promising because of top-down district support for eight separate site-based reform designs, planners' reliance on New American Schools and other familiar designs, long-term data-collection opportunities, accessible…

The Memphis Restructuring Initiative's first-year data-gathering efforts have yielded implications for policy and practice. This article discusses findings and implications in seven areas: opportunity to choose, goals and directions, professional development, "constructivist" teaching and learning, authentic assessment, disjunctures…