Gallery One · EW · I
Following the Evidence
How the investigation began.
Rooms in this gallery
- 01 How It Began
- 02 The Scorecard
- 03 Why These Three Schools
The Evidence Wing
Every school in this wing began where yours is standing.
Same pressures. Same constraints. A different result.
The Evidence Wing
How the Investigation Began
We did not begin with schools we already knew. We began with publicly available evidence.
First Investigative Leads
The Education Recovery Scorecard identified 108 districts making meaningful gains in reading and mathematics.
Those districts told us where to look.
They could not tell us why.
Six examples: District of Columbia Public Schools · Compton Unified · Cambridge Public Schools · Solon City Schools · Mobile County Schools · Jefferson County Public Schools
How did we choose where to investigate?
We could not visit 108 districts.
So we looked for something different: schools that had left enough evidence for someone else to follow the trail.
Not just improved results. Classrooms. Artifacts. Leadership decisions. Team structures. Teacher interviews. Public documents. Years of implementation.
That is how Heatly, Billings, and FASNY entered the investigation.
108 schools · 6 examples · 3 investigations
The three schools where we had unrestricted access to classrooms, artifacts, interviews, implementation, and years of evidence.
Curator's Note · Our Purpose
The schools that follow were not selected because they appear on the Scorecard. They were selected because they provide unusually rich public evidence about how improvement happens inside real schools.
Some are turnaround schools. Some are district-wide implementations. Some represent entirely different settings.
We did not begin by looking for schools that confirmed our beliefs. We followed the evidence and asked better questions.
The investigations that follow ask one question:
What keeps appearing wherever improvement is documented?