Ultimately, this will be the benchmark for all educational innovation. We need ideas and examples that can surpass this standard. The alternative is a breakdown of public education as confidence in its ability to produce results wanes. Part of the answer lies in improving schools' capacity to harness this growing and more sophisticated collection of data. Schools that lack the ability to analyze their own results, that rely on outside third parties to inform them about what is working and what is not, will always be at a disadvantage.
Data can drive a school to make important and evolutionary changes.
This has been the experience of the design teams that developed the eight New American Schools designs. As they have worked with a growing number of schools, the design teams have improved their comprehensive models to get better results. In the same way that a software developer has successive versions of the same product, schoolwide models can change to enhance what they offer. Judging them today based on research that is several years old may be as shortsighted as judging Windows NT based on the crashes of Windows 2.0. The consequences of accountability are much more immediate than those provided by snapshots from research.