Districts Take Performance Strategies Partway

A study of 28 urban districts identified as front-runners in “performance-driven practices,” which are designed to focus their school systems more squarely on student achievement, concludes that even those sites still have quite a way to go.

“Not a single school system studied fully embodied all of the attributes of a performance-driven organization, although some are further along than others,” says the report, prepared for the San Francisco-based NewSchools Venture Fund, a philanthropy that raises capital to support innovations in education. The report was released May 5 at the fund’s annual conference in Redwood City, Calif.

“Districts are at different stages in different areas,” said Lisa Petrides, the president of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, the nonprofit research group in Half Moon Bay, Calif., that conducted the study. “There’s...