Many people believe that education is a key to solving societal problems. The correlation between educational achievement and economic growth, improvements in health and agriculture, and even the elimination of poverty is widely recognized. In the past, educational reformers have attempted to address these issues by increasing academic standards and curricula and introducing high-stakes testing. However, the impact of these policies remains controversial, and many scholars are skeptical that they have had a substantial effect on student achievement.

One area in which research has produced a clearer picture of the impact of education reforms is school choice. GSE doctoral students Lisa Overbey, Minju Choi, Heitor Santos, and Jieun Song have been central in collecting data on the effects of education reforms in a variety of settings around the world. They have built a large, publicly available database of these reforms and established an approach to code them in ways that will allow future researchers to better understand what works where and how it might work differently in different contexts.

The early 1980s saw the release of the National Commission on Excellence in Education report, A Nation at Risk, focusing public attention on what it perceived to be a crisis of low expectations, mediocre teaching practices and menacing foreign competition. The result was a wave of education reforms that included raising standards, instituting higher stakes testing and demanding more rigorous teacher preparation. These reforms placed the burden of accountability squarely on local school systems that, they hoped, would finally be forced to put kids first rather than follow the lead of adult interest groups, especially teachers’ unions. Unfortunately, this version of reform proved to be a failure.