In September 2008, The Council of the Great City Schools received a $3.7 million grant award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) for the project Improving Standards and Data Use in the Great City Schools. The project entailed 36 months of intensive and focused research and dissemination designed to answer key questions about state standards and key levers of instructional change inside schools and classrooms. This work is organized around two distinct—but mutually supportive—strands.

Strand 1, NAEP Frameworks and Trends, was designed to investigate urban school achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and examine alignment between NAEP frameworks and relevant state standards in urban districts participating in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA). The study also examines factors shaping urban NAEP results, including family, school, and economic variables; and studied the instructional programs in a subset of participating districts to determine why some districts show faster gains than others.  This work is now completed and is posted on the Council’s website.

Strand 2, Data Use for Instructional Improvement, focuses on interim assessments and data systems, and the effects of innovative uses of data on the academic progress of urban school students. This strand surveyed the field of urban school assessments and the research literature relating to benchmark tests to determine “best practices” in how data are used to inform instruction and target resources. This work focuses, in particular, on the nature and manner in which interim assessments are being used and strategies for using them to refine and improve instruction. The project also aims to produce rigorous quantitative evidence regarding the relationship between student outcomes and specific  school and classroom practices with respect to the use of data —a result well beyond that which currently exists in the field.  This work will be completed and posted on the Council’s website in January/February, 2012.