At the request of the State of Pennsylvania, the School District of Philadelphia, in the summer of 2002, asked three for-profit firms to assume responsibility for 30 of its lowest-performing schools and it asked four nonprofit managers to assume the management of 16 other low-performing schools. A difference-in-differences analysis is used to…

Through a synthesis of test publisher norms and national longitudinal datasets, this study provides new national norms of academic growth in K-12 reading and math that can be used to reinterpret conventional effect sizes in time units. We propose d' a time-indexed effect size metric to estimate how long it would take for an "untreated"…

This report examines urban student achievement using the SAT-9, the most commonly used standardized assessment among the major cities. The study, conducted in collaboration with the test's creator, Harcourt Educational Measurement, highlights student achievement in Great City Schools (GCS) and describes how urban students perform on traditional…