“Identifying and understanding effective high school practices” by Stacey A. Rutledge and Marisa Cannata is a comparison of strong and weak high schools in the same district. The article compares two large school districts of similar demographics, financial resources, programmatic initiatives, and bureaucratic structures, one in Broward County Florida and the other in Fort Worth, Texas. An intensive yearlong study was conducted using on site visitations, intensive interviews, class observations and shadowing students for a full day. Using value-added methodology Rutledge and Cannata identified 8 high schools, four in each district that had higher or lower levels of academic growth on state assessments for three consecutive years and higher
