Two- and three-year achievement results from the Memphis Restructuring Initiative

The purpose of this study was to analyze student achievement data from the first 3 years of the Memphis Restructuring Initiative (MRI). The MRI represents one of the first efforts by an urban school district to move past traditional "top-down versus bottom-up" reform debates by providing systemic support for "outside-in/inside-out" implementation and local co-construction of externally-developed reform designs in schools. Analyses of academic achievement focus on a state-of-the-art measure of "value added" assessments. At the end of 3 years the reforming schools had produced generally positive gains relative to locally matched control schools. Those results varied somewhat by reform type and by level of poverty in the communities being served. Based on the research methods used and the results, implications for future research and practice in educational reform are discussed.