Sleuths Seek Secrets of High-Flying Schools

Belleville, Ill.

The interviewers pepper the teachers with questions: To what do they attribute their school’s level of success? How do teachers know exactly what is to be learned in their grades and subjects? What’s their involvement in curriculum development? How does the school provide instructional support for teachers?

Like sleuths searching for clues, the interviewers are trying to ferret out why the two junior high schools—Central and West—here in this city of some 42,000 people outperform others with similar student populations across Illinois, and how those practices might be spread.

Over the past decade, an explosion of data on student performance has generated increasing attempts to identify what have been dubbed high-flying schools and learn from them. Just this spring, a free Web site, launched by the New York City-based Standard & Poor’s, began providing a tool that enables users to identify schools that do better than others with similar demographics. ( "Online Tools for Sizing Up Schools Debut," ...