Education Policy Commons^™

Does Whole-School Reform Boost Student Performance? The Case Of New York City, Robert Bifulco, William Duncombe, John Yinger

Center for Policy Research

Thousands of schools around the country have implemented whole-school reform programs to boost student performance. This paper uses quasi-experimental methods to estimate the impact of whole-school reform on students' reading performance in New York City, where various reform programs were adopted in dozens of troubled elementary schools in the mid-1990s. This paper complements studies based on random assignment by examining a broad-based reform effort and explicitly accounting for implementation quality. Two popular reform programs--the School Development and Success for All--do not significantly increase reading scores but might have if they had been fully implemented. The More Effective Schools program does …