Assessing the Progress of New American Schools: A Status Report - Tapa blanda

New American Schools (NAS), a private nonprofit corporation, began in 1991 to fund the development of designs aimed at transforming entire schools at the elementary and secondary levels, seeking to engage the nation's best educators, business people, and researchers in an effort to create, test, and foster the implementation of schoolwide designs that break the mold. The competition, development, and demonstration phases of this effort have been completed; the current scaling-up phase, with the goal of forming a critical mass of schools within partnering school districts, began in 1995. This report describes RAND's plan for collecting the data needed to address the overall questions posed for the effort: What were the NAS schools like before they implemented the designs? How have the designs and the assistance they provide evolved over time? Are the critical components of the NAS designs being implemented across a wide array of schools? Do the NAS designs extend beyond

Mark Berends is professor of sociology, director of the University of Notre Dame s Center for Research on Educational Opportunity, and director of the National Center on School Choice.